With the giddily foul-mouthed, riotously entertaining, and aptly titled Kick-Ass poised to finally unleash its geeky fury at multiplexes around the world next week, distributors have done the sensible thing: They've gotten out of the way. And that means no real big titles coming this week or next, but there are a quartet of very worthy limited releases about to arrive. Two hit this week, two hit next, and here's the skinny on all of them.
Alexandre Franchi's The Wild Hunt
One of the big buzz films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, The Wild Hunt is an expectation-defying trip through the world of large scale LARPing. That'd be Live Action Role Play, for the uninitiated, the practice of dressing up in medieval costumes and acting out fantasy role play games en masse. Think D&D, but geekier.
Starting off in a "man, these guys are goofy" sort of way, The Wild Hunt eventually turns deadly serious and Franchi's ability to navigate its many moods and tones were the calling cards of a pretty exceptional experience. This one would eventually go on to be named one of Canada's Top Ten films of the year.
Conor McPherson's The Eclipse
A ghost story for people who think they don't like ghost stories but do, really, Conor McPherson's The Eclipse is one of those 'tweeners that drive marketers absolutely mad. Too much of a drama to sell as a horror film, focused more on character than scares and therefore impossible to sell as a horror film, there's just no quick and easy hook for this one.
That is, of course, unless you happen to consider stellar writing and performances a hook.
Ciarin Hinds stars as a school teacher raising his two young kids alone since his wife died a couple years earlier. Plagued by strange sounds and happenings in his home he has slowly become convinced that he is being haunted but can tell nobody until a beautiful author (High Fidelity's Iben Hjejle) of books about the supernatural comes to town for a literary festival. Great performances and mood make this one - a ghost story completely unconcerned with the teen audience these things are normally pitched too - something special.
Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
It's taken a long time to get here but Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of the hit crime novel by Stieg Larsson finally arrives on Canadian screens next week. The books and the films based on them are already massive, massive hits all around the globe -- the final film of the trilogy releases internationally right about now -- with English speaking Canada and the US being among the very last territories to finally get the chance to see them.
Revolving around a disgraced reporter and the misanthropic young woman who joins him, this is a high end, glossy, mystery thriller of the highest order. Though it is arguably a bit too beholden to the source material -- and runs about twenty minutes longer than it needs to as a result -- this is smartly put together and impeccably crafted stuff. The entire cast is stellar and aforementioned sociopath Lisbeth Salander is one of the more striking characters to hit the screen in a good while. Perfect? No, but it's dead simple to see why this has been such a big hit everywhere it has played.
Nash Edgerton's The Square
You may not know the name of Nash Edgerton but I can virtually guarantee that you've seen the work not only of Nash, but also his brother Joel. One of Australia's most in-demand stunt men, Edgerton has had an integral - and largely uncredited - role in all the big films shot in Australia over the past many years. The Matrix, Star Wars, Superman Returns, Edgerton is in all of them. But beyond being crazy enough to throw himself off buildings for a living Edgerton is also a very gifted director and one of the co-founders of the Blue Tongue film collective, a group that produced this year's Sundance winner Animal Kingdom.
Edgerton's feature directorial debut, The Square, stars his brother Joel -- Uncle Ben in the Star Wars prequels, soon to be seen as the lead in The Thing prequel -- in a twisty thriller that takes the same basic premise of Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. In short, otherwise 'good' people discover a big bag of illicit funds and decide to take them for themselves, regardless of the consequences, which pushes the story out into some unexpected directions.
Again, this is just smart stuff, well crafted, and produced with no concern whatsoever with drawing thirteen year olds into the theatre. This means it will disappear from those screens quickly, so get there while you've got the chance. For a taste of what Edgerton is capable of, check out his short film Spider here.