“So much about this movie and its characters should be annoying, but the sensory disorientation climaxes in a freakout that wipes all troubles away, as well as anything else in your head.” (The Village Voice)

“…without a doubt one of the most intriguing and well-crafted low-budget horror films in recent memory.” (Fangoria)

“It’s akin to an acid trip, actually. Take a hit right as the movie starts up, and chances are as soon as the acid kicks in, the movie starts twisting at the same time.” (DreadCentral.com)

“I Can See You heralds a splendid new filmmaker with one eye on genre mechanics, one eye on avant-garde conceits and a third eye for transcendental weirdness.” (The New York Times) READ MORE

Janus Films, the distributor of high-brow and classic arthouse films such as Rashomon, Rules of the Game, and Pierrot le fou, has struck out in an entirely unexpected direction by picking up the rights to a very bizarre and overlooked Japanese horror film by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Originally released over thirty years ago, Hausu (aka: House) is currently making the rounds again, nation-wide, at very select theaters. This movie about a young girl who takes some friends with her to her grandmother’s house out in the country, only to discover it’s haunted and ready to eat some victims. The film is – to use the words of film critic J. Seaver – “batshit crazy from start to finish.”   READ MORE

As TCM winds down a month featuring one of the greatest character actors who ever stole a picture, (Claude Rains, the September Star of the Month),  my appetite for  character actors in the spotlight has been whetted. Partly in response to repeated requests from those interested readers who frequent these pages, I thought a deserving glimpse of more supporting players might enliven the month of October. Each week this month, I’ll focus one of those actors who may not have been the stars of the show, but whose work invariably stood out from the crowd of “5000 others”. This week, I thought I’d tip my hat toward at least one of the gifted Russian émigrés who trained at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Maria Ouspenskaya, whose talent came out of that creative seedbed for some of the finest actors and boldest hams, stands out among them, despite being under five feet tall. Many of her colleagues lent their credibility and indelible gifts to Hollywood, but she may be the most readily identifiable of the bunch. While hightailing it away from the Cossacks, the Whites, the Reds, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and the fascists who made life a bit too “interesting” in the first half of the 20th century from Siberia to the shores of Ellis Island, several of these actors found a pretty fair living in Hollywood, among them Akim Tamiroff, Olga Baclanova, Vladimir Sokoloff, Leonid Kinskey and Konstantin Shayne. They may never have felt completely at home in what sometimes seemed the Babylonian splendor of “barbaric” American culture in the studio era. Cut off from their cultural roots and often having lost their families and nearly their lives during the revolutionary times they lived in, these actors often proved their strength of character and professional versatility when asked to play characters of almost every class and ethnicity in American movies.

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Last week I talked about the exceptional Red Riding trilogy the debuted at the 36th annual Telluride Film Festival. Now that the festival can be seen receding in my rear view mirror, it’s time to reflect on some of the other films that were also screened there. Let’s start with The Road.  READ MORE

Steven Soderbergh’s baseball statistics movie Moneyball was shelved by Sony a few weeks back, mere days before shooting was to begin. Budgeted at $57 million and with Brad Pitt slated as the lead, its abandonment seemed to signal that mid-range, artistically ambitious projects will suffer the most in the current financial crisis. As ace Variety blogger Anne Thompson has noted, “Hollywood is moving in two simultaneous directions: behemoth event pics, and smaller personal films — with little middle ground.” One would expect that along with Soderbergh, Michael Mann and David Fincher will find it increasingly difficult to get their visions onto the screen. This is lamentable, regardless of your opinion of the filmmakers (I’m partial to Fincher, but an admirer of all), who each bring an ambitious pop sensibility to the screen. But what of the genre directors? These mid to low-budgeted spectacles (the Transporters, House Bunnies, and Hangovers) will always be cranked out, and will generally be profitable. If nothing else, the espousers of the auteur theory taught us to ignore the boundary between “high” and “low” art, to scavenge in every nook and cranny of the American cinema for possible artistry.

The Independent’s Kaleem Aftab expands Thompson’s reasoned analysis into a confusing screed about the lack of “great American directors”, and he ignores genre films as well. Below the fold I offer a list of my favorite contemporary genre operators, a group of under-the-radar auteurs and purveyors of quality pulp. First though, I have to take Aftab to task. Aside from the fact that he lists 20 or so “great” directors in his own piece, he clearly has no idea what an “auteur” is. His definition: “a director whose films had to be watched no matter what they were about or who was in them.” He goes on to say that after the auteur theory hit, “Suddenly, it was the director rather than the producer, the studio or the lead actor who became the star.” Aside from the fact that this is blatantly false (only Hitchcock could be considered a “star”, everyone else the New Wavers or Sarris championed were anonymous genre operators: Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller), it never discusses the films themselves, only their popularity.

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It’s Father’s Day today – so I’d like to thank my dad for all he did to contribute to my warped cinematic sensibilities. He didn’t know it at the time, but some of the films he took me to as a kid had a profound experience on me. Four immediately come to mind. READ MORE

I’ll follow up Jeff’s post on faces with one that says “let’s bandage ‘em up!” (It certainly sounds better to say that than “in your face!” – Especially if the face in question just got melted or has otherwise disappeared.) READ MORE

I finally got a chance to see the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2008), directed by Tomas Alfredson and based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Several people told me they thought it was the best film of 2008. High praise that makes me think of my own favorites for the year, films like WALL-E, The Edge of Heaven, Tropic Thunder, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Persepolis, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Wrestler, Gomorrah, and Man on Wire. But after seeing Let the Right One In I have to concur with my friends; this film about a harassed 12-year-old boy who develops a crush on a strange “girl” gets top-shelf honors. READ MORE