This time last week I was two movies into the triple feature I teased the last time we met. While I can’t say I was overly impressed by Gangster Squad, both Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained made their respective cases as qualified Best Picture nominees. Of the two, Zero Dark‘s unrelenting final act not only made it my top pick of the day but also provided some of the most sustained tension I can remember experiencing in a movie theater. Having now seen it for myself, I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with those who have voiced their disbelief at Kathryn Bigelow‘s Best Director Oscar snub.

Zero Dark Thirty praise aside, on tap in this week’s Top 5 are The Last Stand interviews with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Johnny Knoxville, and more, a live-action remake of Toy Story, a new trailer for Primer writer/director/star/almost literally everything else Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color, Mama interviews with Guillermo del Toro and more, and all of our Sundance 2013 coverage to date. For your reading pleasure, a recap and link to each awaits after the jump.

From executive producer Guillermo del Toro and director Andy Muschietti comes the haunting supernatural thriller Mama, about two little girls who disappeared into the woods after their parents were killed, only to be rescued five years later.  As they begin a new life with their Uncle Lucas (Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain), the couple begins to question how they could have survived all those years alone.  For more on the film, here are four clips.

At the film’s press day, Guillermo del Toro and Andy Muschietti talked about the choices that were made in the way the movie was shot, working with young actors in a film with darker subject matter, balancing reality and supernatural, and whether there was ever any resistance from the studio to the film’s ending.  Del Toro also talked about what attracts him to ghost stories, the type of ghost story that Crimson Peak (which he’ll direct) will be, whether 48 fps was ever part of the discussions he had with Peter Jackson when he was going to direct The Hobbit, and how he decides which projects to produce versus which projects to direct.  Check out what he had to say after the jump, and be aware that there are some slight spoilers.

Having scared up substantial interest with their short film Mama, Andrés and Barbara Muschietti have managed to expand the horror story into an even scarier full-fledged feature.  The picture centers on two young sisters (Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse) who are discovered alive and well in the woods after disappearing five years earlier.  When their uncle (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) bring the girls home to raise, they discover that something else has traveled home with them.  For more on the film, here are four clips.

During a recent video interview, the Muschietti siblings talked about the process of taking the core concept of the Mama short and developing it into a feature-length film, drawing inspiration from nature in its most brutal and most loving aspects (including the essential concept of imprinting in young animals and children) and revealed that the eventual Blu-ray could have up to forty minutes of deleted scenes.  Hit the jump to watch our video interview with the Muschiettis for Mama, opening January 18th.