“George Lucas said the most useful thing to me as I was about to do Body Heat. I said ‘George, I don’t know that much about the technical stuff.’ And keep in mind that George is Mr. Technology, right? He said ‘Making movies has nothing to do with the technical stuff. It has everything to do with what kind of person you are.’ It was the most important thing anyone ever said to me about directing. I had a lot of confidence in the sort of person I was. I knew the kind of stories I wanted to tell. I knew the kind of atmosphere I wanted to create on my set. I knew the kind of life I wanted to live and how I wanted my work to embody that life, so the fact that I didn’t know anything technically didn’t really matter.” Lawrence Kasdan interviewed by Alex Simon for Venice Magazine, September 2001

Body Heat (1981)
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
Written by Lawrence Kasdan
Produced by Fred T. Gallo
113 minutes

To call Body Heat the greatest dirty movie ever mounted by Hollywood wouldn’t be giving Lawrence Kasdan enough credit for the agility in which story, character, dialogue, mood and mystery come together in his directorial debut, along with some of the most combustive sex ever thrown down on film. Instead of feeling like a relic of what filmmakers were getting past the MPAA at the time, this is one movie whose temperature rises with each viewing. As the Florida town of Miranda Beach melts under a heatwave, attorney Ned Racine (William Hurt) divides his time between bedding nurses or meter maids and defending penny ante crooks in Okeelanta County Court. Entertained by Racine’s tales of wanton sexual lust, Assistant County Prosecutor Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) and Detective Oscar Grace (J.A. Preston) are also aware of Racine’s desire for a score that will satisfy his financial needs.

Cooling off on the Miranda Beach boardwalk, Racine’s dick leads him after a stunning blonde in a white blouse named Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Matty maintains that she’s married, but rather than discourage Ned’s come-ons, hints that she’s game for more than talk. Ned tracks Matty down to a bar in the waterfront town of Pinehaven and his scruffy charms win him an invitation back to Matty’s home to “see” her wind chimes. Needing more than just garden decor, Ned smashes into Matty’s home and the couple plunge into an explosive affair. Seeing how miserable Matty is married to real estate investor Edmund Walker (Richard Crenna), Ned works out a scheme to make Edmund’s murder look like a botched arson, ignoring the advice of a grateful client, rock ‘n roll arsonist Teddy Lewis (Mickey Rourke). Sure enough, the more Ned learns about Matty Walker, the more it seems she’s setting him up.

With his original screenplays The Bodyguard and Continental Divide finding buyers and George Lucas hiring him to write Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, Lawrence Kasdan was red hot when he began turning down work in 1979. Alan Ladd Jr., president of Twentieth Century Fox, inquired why and Kasdan answered that he wanted to write and direct his own films, specifically, a film noir of his generation. When Ladd left the studio to form his own company and Fox’s new regime put Body Heat into turnaround, the mogul invited Kasdan to make his directorial debut for The Ladd Company if he found a “sponsor” who could give the project some leverage. The first time director approached Lucas, who balked at putting the Lucasfilm label on a movie titled Body Heat, but as de facto executive producer, promised Ladd he would cover any budget overruns out of his own pocket.

What makes Body Heat so hot and bothered isn’t sex, but foreplay. Kasdan puts us in a novel location, builds mood and reveals the desires of his characters with dashes of wit and kinkiness before we get to watch anyone fuck. Instead of using sex to intensify the story, the story intensifies the sex. Plucked off the soap opera The Doctors by casting director Wally Nicita for her film debut, Kathleen Turner embodies a woman any man might contemplate committing murder to possess. Turner handles the vulnerability and the gentle cunning of Matty Walker with as much gusto as she does the sexuality. Kasdan’s flawless script builds mystique by leaving Matty’s true nature ambiguous until the final shot. While we can see the end coming, Ned never does, which makes it feel surprising. Equally mesmerizing are the amiable sleaze summoned by William Hurt, the electricity of Mickey Rourke (in his breakout role) and an elegant noir musical score by John Barry.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 8,664 users: 71% for Body Heat

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“The best thing about Red Dragon (Universal), the second adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel, is that it reminds you how scary and seminal the first adaptation — Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986) — was. This new movie, directed by Brett Ratner, recycles the same narrative, many of the same lines, and even some of the same camera set-ups, but it stubbornly refuses to haunt … you could be watching a plodding, Hollywood-studio remake of some idiosyncratic foreign classic: The beats are the same, but the eerie vibe has been lost in translation.” David Edelstein reviews Red Dragon for Slate Magazine, October 2002

Manhunter (1986)
Directed by Michael Mann
Screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
Produced by Richard Roth
121 minutes (theatrical version)/ 124 minutes (director’s cut)

For those who’ve feasted on almost every variation of the psycho killer genre — particularly through TV forensics shows, with their nice and tidy finishes in under an hour — this special category of crime thriller begins and ends with filmmaker Michael Mann’s fervent and nearly flawless adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1981 bestseller Red Dragon. The tightly wound source material launched a franchise and still endures as the ultimate dance between predator and prey, yet the original film version has precision moves and timing all its own. FBI Special Agent Will Graham (William Petersen) is semi-retired and living in Marathon, Florida with his wife Molly (Kim Greist) and 11-year-old son Kevin (David Seaman) when his boss Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) visits the beach with a plea for help.

Graham’s dark talent lies in his ability to enter the mind of a killer and think as they think. To track down a sociopath who’s slain two families — earning the nickname “Tooth Fairy” for the post-mortem bite marks he’s left on the women — Graham reaches out to Dr. Hannibal Lektor (Brian Cox), a homicidal psychiatrist who Graham almost died bringing to justice. A note recovered in Lektor’s cell indicates the doctor is in communication with Tooth Fairy through coded ads placed in a tabloid. A gambit to lure Tooth Fairy to Graham using sleazy journalist Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang) backfires when the killer makes a date with Freddy instead. Revealed to be a gargantuan, socially awkward lab tech named Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), “Tooth Fairy” is drawn out of his shell by a blind co-worker (Joan Allen) who threatens to become Dollarhyde’s next victim.

Film rights to Red Dragon were snared by producer Dino De Laurentiis and after David Lynch tangled with the material — which he found too violent for his taste — Michael Mann was approached. The executive producer of TV’s new sensation Miami Vice, Mann had corresponded with convict Dennis Wayne Wallace for a penal script he’d since abandoned. Using an FBI agent to descend into the psychology of a criminal opened a door Mann had been looking for into that world. To play Will Graham, the director held out for William Petersen, who Mann had auditioned for the role that went to Jim Belushi in Thief. In a battle over the film’s title, Mann was overruled by De Laurentiis, who felt Red Dragon was too similar to his maligned cop thriller Year of the Dragon. Released in late summer with scant marketing support, Manhunter was dismissed by many critics. At the time, audiences ignored it as well.

What Michael Mann brings to the Hannibal Lechter game — a pastime revisited by Jonathan Demme, Ridley Scott, Brett Ratner and Peter Webber with diminishing attention — is a relentless pace and brooding chill that evokes Thomas Harris’ page turner, even if much of the author’s backstory is left in the dugout. Instead of focusing on the peccadilloes of the prey, Harris created a hunter whose skills set is far more compelling. Mann knows that guy well. The scenes between Will Graham and his family have an emotional purity, even with the starkest of dialogue, while close attention is paid to the psychologists, cryptologists and ballistics experts working together toward a common goal. Collaborating with casting director Bonnie Timmermann and composer Michel Rubini, Mann was restricted in budget and in time, but in spite of them, perhaps because of them, cranked out the definitive thriller of its class.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 48,623 users: 70% for Manhunter

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“Talking about it was so important to that film. I think some people could despise it. If you don’t like the story or what it’s saying, then you just end up hating everything. It’s not a movie for everybody. Some people really dug it. Others thought it was disgusting and sick. And, of course, it is but it has two sides. You have to have the contrasts. Films should have power. The power of good and the power of darkness, so you can get some thrills and shake things up a bit. If you back off from that stuff, you’re shooting right down into lukewarm junk.” David Lynch interviewed by Chris Rodley for Lynch on Lynch

Blue Velvet (1986)
Directed by David Lynch
Written by David Lynch
Produced by Fred Caruso
120 minutes

Taken at face value, Blue Velvet is the most primal tribute to Alfred Hitchcock to be conjured by another director outside of Alfred Hitchcock. Shadow of a Doubt found diabolism under the eaves in a small town, Rear Window warned voyeurs against peeping through the blinds of their neighbors and Blue Velvet hands out literature with a similar message, complete with a portrait of evil more unsettling than Psycho. If David Lynch had been satisfied making a thriller about other thrillers, his fourth motion picture would have still been one of the decade’s most powerful. Kyle MacLachlan (in his second film role after debuting as The Chosen One in Lynch’s unwieldily adaptation of Dune) plays Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student who returns to his “woodsy” hometown of Lumberton after his father suffers a terrifying stroke.

Strolling home, Jeffrey discovers a human ear in a field. The police detective on the case stays mum on who belongs to the ear, but his teenaged daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) is game to let Jeffrey in on what she’s heard through the walls, specifically, the name of a singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey’s thirst for “knowledge and experience” leads him to Dorothy’s apartment on the dark side of town. He’s forced to take cover in a closet and see what should have been left unseen: an amyl nitrate inhaling psychopath named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) has kidnapped Dorothy’s son and husband, clipping off her spouse’s ear to keep the songstress dependent on him. Jeffrey is repulsed by and attracted to his subject and it takes more than a hell ride with Frank and his crew for him to put Dorothy Vallens out of mind.

David Lynch grew up in Spokane and began noodling on Blue Velvet as early as 1973, starting with Bobby Vinton’s haunting version of the melody, some suburban mise-en-scène and Lynch’s obsession with sneaking into a girl’s room at night, where a mystery might be revealed while he watched her. The script frightened Warner Bros. and perplexed Lynch, specifically, how it should end. He accepted an offer to adapt and direct Dune for Dino De Laurentiis and though the results didn’t live up to expectations, De Laurentiis rolled the dice on Lynch again and his gamble paid off. The National Society of Film Critics voted Blue Velvet the Best Picture of 1986, but with Children of a Lesser God, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Mission, Platoon and A Room with a View vying for Best Picture, Blue Velvet was left in the dark at the Oscars.

With the eerie steadiness of a planchette being nudged across a ouija board, the mastery of Blue Velvet is how it drifts away from safety and discovers perversity lurking under what passes for normal in the suburbs. In terms of visual composition, this is watercolor come to life. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes immerses the film in electric blues, verdant greens and nightmare black. Even with extras who look like they were stolen from a circus, there’s not a bad performance in the picture; Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper have never been stronger, with Hopper cracking the screen with white trash intensity. In the daylight scenes, Lynch lets his infectious sense of humor come out to play. After dark, he forces viewers to question the foundation of evil. Angelo Badalamenti composed the lush orchestral score.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 67,823 users: 88% for Blue Velvet

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“The companies, the majors, were afraid of it. They felt that it’s a downer, that the main character is going to be not very likable. And they also were suspicious about the genre, because they kept saying that the murder mystery plot isn’t very strong, which they were right about! They really wanted a murder mystery. Finally they said yes. Then they regretted it, I’m sure. And now they are glad.” — Ivan Passer interviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum in New York, July 1981

Cutter’s Way (1981)
Directed by Ivan Passer
Screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, based on the novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg
Produced by Paul R. Gurian
105 minutes

Coloring outside the lines of its literary source material as much as a movie adaptation needs to, Cutter’s Way is a damn near perfect picture of character, atmosphere and idiosyncrasy. This is a rare film that feels like it leapt to screen from the Smith Corona of a 20th century novelist without any artificial sweeteners; you can smell the cigarette smoke dangling in the air. Firmly in the Han Solo stage of his career, Jeff Bridges stars as Richard Bone, a fop who divides his time between boinking housewives, pimping sailboats in Santa Barbara and shirking responsibility at large. His best friends are a one-eyed, one-legged, one-man wrecking ball named Alex Cutter (John Heard) and his wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), whose sultry bloom is beginning to peel behind alcohol and her marriage to Cutter, a Vietnam vet.

Returning from a session with his latest paramour (Nina van Pallandt), Bone abandons his piece of shit Austin Healey in an alley. There, he encounters a man dumping a woman’s body in a trash can. When Bone tries to intercede, he’s nearly run over. Selling his alibi to the police, Bone is introduced to Valerie Duran (Ann Dusenberry), the spunky sister of the murder victim who asks Bone to help her nab the killer. He prefers to celebrate Old Spanish Days with Cutter and Mo, but while watching a parade, identifies the killer as J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott), an oil company tycoon who owns Santa Barbara. Refusing to suffer the indignity of another fat cat buying his way out of a crime, Cutter hatches a scheme to nail Cord. Bone resists getting involved until his fatalistic friend leaves him no choice.

No fan of the mystery genre per se, Newton Thornburg published his fourth novel Cutter and Bone in 1976 to raves and respectable enough sales for Paul R. Gurian to option the film rights. Screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin was hired to adapt a screenplay and the project was set up at EMI, where it may have been hoped that The Deer Hunter had wet the public’s appetite for Vietnam themed movies. Director Robert Mulligan was attached and Dustin Hoffman pursued to play Alex Cutter. When Hoffman dissipated, Mulligan moved on. Gurian ultimately turned to Ivan Passer, a Czech filmmaker whose 1965 debut feature Intimate Lighting may have impressed the producer with its nonjudgmental look at human nature. When Jeff Bridges agreed to play Bone, United Artists stepped in to bankroll the quirky, character driven lark.

Management upheaval at United Artists during the fiasco of Heaven’s Gate (in addition to contemptible reviews in the New York Times and New Yorker) prompted the studio to orphan Cutter and Bone in March 1981 after one week in limited release. A flurry of ecstatic reviews and film festival awards forced UA to reconsider and six months later, the film was rereleased under a new title: Cutter’s Way. It remained enough of a marketing enigma to stay off VHS until 1991 and DVD until 2001. Meandering and moody, Cutter’s Way doesn’t have the payoffs of a popcorn thriller. As a sensual rendering of three souls, their environment and their personal aberrations, the film is exhilarating. Cast and performed to perfection, cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth lit the picture like some dingy beer hall of dream while Jack Nitzsche composed the bewitching musical score.

“I’ve always have been saying and have been saying for years that the position of the camera is as important as what you’re photographing. A dirty word to me is ‘coverage’. You know, ‘two shot’. ‘Over the shoulder’. It’s stuff you see all the time and it just drives me crazy because this to me is not directing. You have to think about where the camera is in relation to the material.” — Brian DePalma interviewed by Noah Baumbach in New York, October 2010

Blow Out (1981)
Directed by Brian DePalma
Written by Brian DePalma
Produced by George Litto
107 minutes

While cameras didn’t roll until the 1980s, Blow Out is the most deviously engineered political thriller of the 1970s. Veering down an alley familiar to anyone who’s poured over the Kennedy assassination or the Watergate cover-up, it’s also a love letter from a filmmaker to the nuts and bolts of his beloved craft. John Travolta (much closer in age to Tony Manero than whatever growed up moron he played in the Look Who’s Talking comedies) delivers just the right combination of geeky obsession and downtrodden sleaze as a B-movie sound man who records what he believes to be an assassination on audio tape. Quentin Tarantino was such a huge fan of Blow Out (placing it at one time among his three favorite movies of all time) that Travolta was likely cast in Pulp Fiction as a result of his performance here.

Travolta plays Jack Terry, a man whose love of electronics and the solitary hours tinkering over a work bench have led him to a shit job recording and mixing sound effects for a Philadelphia based producer of slasher movies. Sent back to the field when his employer (Peter Boyden) demands new effects for their latest picture Coed Frenzy, Terry is on Wissahickon Creek Bridge when he witnesses a Buick plunge into the water. He rescues the passenger — a daffy blonde named Sally (Nancy Allen) — but later discovers the stiff behind the wheel was Governor McRyan, the presumed frontrunner of the next presidential race. Terry’s ear and his tape enable him to reconstruct the blowout, which he believes was no accident. Meanwhile, the assassin (John Lithgow) comes out of the shadows to clip the loose threads left dangling from his crime.

The inspiration to use a sound man as protagonist came to Brian DePalma while he was mixing his previous thriller Dressed to Kill with sound editor Dan Sable. The idea of demonstrating to an audience how sound and images were synched together in an editing room and how that process might reveal a murder quickly obsessed DePalma as well. Filmways put up financing and permitted DePalma to shoot the picture in Philadelphia, where the filmmaker and his agent/producer George Litto had both grown up (the bridge spanning Wissahickon Creek had been a lovers lane when DePalma was a teenager). The film’s stark tone and jarring, unexpected climax may have given critics and audiences a cold shoulder. When Blow Out opened July 1981 in the United States, the press agreed it was a flop.

Viewed under the ever present magnifying glass that sweeps over the film, neither Travolta or Allen come across as very compelling human beings. The characters act and speak within the confines of a trade paperback plot, but the appeal of Blow Out is the doomed nature of their relationship and the technical virtuosity wielded to express it. DePalma’s passion for the possibilities of filmmaking and its limitations are potent, while watching Travolta splice together a snuff film from scratch is intoxicating as well. Blow Out starts strong, wanders around in a stupor a bit before delivering a knockout ending. As a bonus, Dennis Franz appears in the first of many Dennis Franz roles — as a private dick without a single redeeming quality — while cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond collaborated with DePalma on the film’s intricate, spellbinding look.

Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Tokyo, Japan.

Paprika (2006)
Directed by Satoshi Kon
Screenplay by Seishi Minakami & Satoshi Kon, based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Produced by Jungo Maruta, Masao Takiyama
90 minutes

While Christopher Nolan took nine years to crack his script for Inception, a detective thriller unshackled by the limitations of live action explored the dream world with far less gravity and much more verve. Written by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika was first published as a serial in the Japanese edition of women’s magazine Marie Claire in 1991. With interest from several filmmakers over the years, it was animator Satoshi Kon who impressed the author most. Kon was already a fan of the novel and counting Tsutsui as an influence, had considered adapting Paprika as a follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1998 debut feature Perfect Blue. Kon was finishing his commitment to Madhouse Ltd for the 13-episode TV series Paranoia Agent in 2004 when he learned that the Tokyo based animation studio was searching for its next project. He pitched them Paprika.

With a budget and schedule roughly that of Kon’s third film Tokyo Godfathers ($2.7 million USD), Paprika was completed in time for the 2006 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion. In a genre that usually takes either a compass pencil to map out or multiple viewings to get straight, Paprika is drawn with soft focus and a straight arrow, injecting soulful characterization and a narrative economy more congruent to an American cops ‘n robbers thriller than Japanese anime. Its dynamic protagonist — a psychotherapist who leads a double life as a “dream detective” — not only has the ability to leap into paintings or billboards within the dreams of her patients, but duels with her own doppelgänger, each unsure who is directing the other. Its fantasy sequences blow the hinges off anything seen in a live action movie: enigmatic and whimsical, like a dream.

Detective Kogawa Toshimi (Akio Ôtsuka) scans the crowd of a circus for a suspect but soon finds himself being chased through scenes from adventure, espionage and romantic comedy movies. Guiding the cinema loving cop through this territory is enigmatic 18-year-old Paprika (Megumi Hayashibara), a “dream detective” that his college pal Dr. Shima (Katsunosuke Hori) introduced Kogawa to for help with a recurring nightmare in which the cop investigates his own murder. In the waking world, Paprika is known as Dr. Chiba Atsuko (also Megumi Hayashibara), 29-year-old therapist at the Foundation For Psychiatric Research. Chiba’s colleague — an overweight genius named Dr. Tokita Kohsaku (Tôru Furuya) — has invented a device known as the DC Mini, which allows users to share dreams and can treat mental illness by redirecting bioelectric current through the brain.

When three DC Mini devices are stolen and Dr. Shima nearly kills himself when a dream is planted into his subconscious, the dream program is shut down by the Chairman (Toru Emori), who remains wary of technology being used to manipulate the sanctity of the mind. Assisted by able-bodied researcher Osanai Morio (Kôichi Yamadera), Chiba and Tokita track down a lab assistant believed responsible for the theft and attempted murder. The thief has the ability to jump into the dreams of anyone with prolonged exposure to the DC Mini, like Dr. Chiba. Soon, psychiatric patients and the public are endangered by a collective dream in which a fanciful “parade of everything under the sun” pulls dreamers into a malaise in which they are unable to recover. Dr. Chiba/Paprika enters the dream world to find a cure.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 10,055 users: 87% for Paprika

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 81 for Paprika

What do you say?

As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

The Orphanage (2007)
Directed by J.A. Bayona
Written by Sergio G. Sánchez
Produced by Joaquín Padró, Mar Targarona, Álvaro Augustín, Guillermo del Toro
105 minutes

To call The Orphanage a Steven Spielberg ghost story is actually more of a compliment to Mr. Spielberg than to the Spaniards who crafted one of the most thrilling explorations of the afterlife in many years. Sergio G. Sánchez had Peter Pan and The Turn of the Screw in mind when he finished a draft of The Orphanage in 1998. Hoping he might direct it, Sánchez set out to prove himself behind the camera with a 17-minute short, which caught the eye of director J.A. Bayona at a film festival. Asking Sánchez if he had written anything else, the director took The Orphanage to Barcelona based producers Joaquín Padró & Mar Targarona, whose company Rodar y Rodar had employed Bayona in his commercial career. Another call was put in to Guillermo del Toro, who Bayona had met at the 1992 Sitges Fantastic Cinema Festival when del Toro was screening his debut feature Cronos.

With the name “Guillermo del Toro” above the title, Rodar y Rodar was able to raise $4 million in financing, partnering with commercial network Telecinco for Bayona to make his feature film debut. The result became the highest grossing Spanish language film in Spain’s history and was named their entry in the 2008 Academy Awards.  The Orphanage is a jewel among junk in the fantasy and horror genres. Instead of showcasing special effects, the sophistication of old-fashioned storytelling is what shines through here. Sánchez’s intricate puzzle box of a script taps into our mutual fear and our fascination of the unknown, grounded by Belén Rueda playing a modern day Mrs. Darling haunted by the disappearance of children who’ve been taken away to Neverland. In his first feature outing, Bayona juggles magic, fright and melodrama to beautiful and remarkable effect.

7-year-old Simón (Roger Príncep) wakes in the night crying for his mother Laura (Belén Rueda). An only child, Simón both entertains and scares himself with a rich fantasy life that includes a couple of invisible friends. Newly arrived in the 19^th century mansion where she was raised when the house was an orphanage, Laura takes a break preparing an open house for her own orphanage with husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) to accompany her son to the seashore. After exploring a cave, Simón asks permission to invite home a boy he claims he met in there. Laura receives a visit from an old social worker (Montserrat Carulla) inquiring about Simón, who has not yet been told he is adopted and is receiving treatment for HIV. Waken in the night by strange noises in the garage, Laura finds the social worker snooping around and chases her away.

Simón introduces his mother to a game his invisible friends have invented: hiding something of value and replacing it with clues that lead back to the missing object. Pressed by Laura to stop lying, Simón reveals that it’s his parents who have been lying to him; his new friend Tomás told him so. During the open house, a strange child wearing a sack over his head and the name “Tomás” sewn on his shirt locks Laura in a bathroom. By the time she’s rescued, Simón has vanished. The state has no record of the social worker Laura reported in her home and the police have no clues in the disappearance of her son. Convinced Simón still in the house and that his “friends” know where, Laura invites a medium (Geraldine Chaplin) and a team of parapsychologists to help, fracturing her marriage, but revealing a secret about the Good Shepherd Orphanage and the fate of her son.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 38,413 users: 85% for The Orphanage

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 74 for The Orphanage

What do you say?

As days get shorter, nights get longer and All Hallow’s Eve beckons, I can say that I won’t be wandering the streets dressed as Chewbacca begging for candy. What I can’t say is whether or not at my age, horror movies still have any surprises left in them. In the search for originality, it’d be a good idea to start anywhere but Hollywood. For the month of October, I take a trip around the globe to see what’s scaring some of my favorite countries these days.

Left Bank (2008)
Directed by Pieter Van Hees
Written by Pieter Van Hees & Dimitri Karakatsanis
Produced by Bert Hamelinck, Kato Maes, Frank Van Passel
102 minutes

Cut with the same psychological straight razor that splices the great films of Roman Polanski, Left Bank unsettles like only the most powerful thrillers can. After directing several short films in Belgium, Pieter Van Hees was looking to break into features with a project called Dirty Mind, a thriller that had morphed into a social satire. Waiting for financing to fall into place, Van Hees started work on a story “that creeps up in the head of a confused young woman struggling with her relationship.” Having lived briefly on the left bank of Antwerp, Van Hees huddled with writing partner Dimitri Karakatsanis and wrote a script. Brussels-based Caviar Films — producers of commercials, music videos and feature films — had worked previously with Van Hees and raising a budget of €700,000, were prepared to put Left Bank into production ahead of Dirty Mind.

Left Bank is one of those movies that leaves a mark, not with excessive gore or sadism, but overwhelming atmosphere and characters suffering afflictions of modern living that seem almost too real. Its potent blend of sex and mystery gives the film far more weight than what usually plays in American theaters. Left Bank picks up where Rosemary’s Baby and Blue Velvet left off, with an exceptional cast, highly effective sound montage and a disquieting musical score composed by electronic group Eavesdropper and featuring cellist Simon Lenski. While Van Hees and director of photography Nicolas Karakatsanis took visual cues from movies as disparate as The Shining, The Thin Red Line and The Yards, the film swims the same currents as The Ring or Dark Water, driven not by a boogeyman but a spiritual dread that creeps in from every direction.

22-year-old Belgian sprinter Marie (Eline Kuppens) is in training for the European Championships when she meets a car salesman and recreational archer named Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts). Going out on a date, they return to his apartment on the left bank of the Scheldt River in Antwerp and make impassioned love on the floor. Tearing the cartilage in her knee during a run, Marie moves in with Bobby for some peace and quiet while she recuperates. Her new neighbor Veerle (Sara De Bosschere) notifies Marie that the apartment’s previous tenant Hella Govaerts (Ruth Becquart) mysteriously disappeared. When an envelope arrives for the missing woman with information about the black mud the building was built on, Marie telephones Hella’s boyfriend Dirk (Tom De Wispelaere), who instructs Marie to throw the package away.

During a visit from Marie’s mother (Sien Eggers), Dirk arrives to share research his girlfriend was working on before she disappeared. During The Middle Ages, the left bank was reserved for outcasts: witches, criminal gangs, plague sufferers. The locals believed they lived near a black hole that descended into the underworld. Marie’s mother agrees that she has always felt a negative energy here and urges her daughter to come home. Conducting her own research, Marie discovers a link between a pit in the left bank with the pagan festival of Samhain on All Saint’s Day. As her health deteriorates and her athletic career is jeopardized, Marie confides to Bobby that she wishes she could just start over again. Her mother becomes convinced that an underground stream runs beneath the basement.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 254 users: 46% for Left Bank

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

Kimberly Lindbergs raves about Left Bank on her superlative B-movie blog Cinebeats.

Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

Knife in the Water (1962)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Jerzy Skolimowski, story by Jakub Goldberg & Roman Polanski
Produced by Stanislaw Zylewicz
94 minutes

The biggest surprise in Knife in the Water is that the filmmaking is so in tune that the script doesn’t need surprises to hold our attention. Five years of study at the Polish Film School in Lodz led Roman Polanski to the idea for a feature length thriller to take place in a confined space, though the backdrop he selected was the Mazury lake district he’d camped and sailed. Receiving a go-ahead from “Kamera” Productions — a state owned film company in Poland — Polanski and his friends Jakub Goldberg and Jerzy Skolimowski finished a script in the summer of 1959. Skolimowski had hit upon the idea for the action to span a 24-hour period. Rejected by the Ministry of Culture on the grounds that the script had no social value, Polanski was given a year to resubmit it. By the spring of 1961, a loosening of Soviet control in the arts permitted Knife in the Water to move forward with Polanski directing.

Opening March 1962, Polish critics slammed Knife in the Water. Premier Wladyslaw Gomulka denounced it as a film that “displayed the kind of thinking for which there is no place anywhere in the Communist world.” But when it was shown at the Venice Film Festival in August, word of mouth began to build. The film arrived in the United States in October 1963 for the first New York Film Festival. A critical sensation, it even picked up an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. Knife in the Water is an antidote to contemporary thrillers stocked with psychos or dead bodies. The subtle power games between the characters build to an inevitable clash while the nautical atmosphere and attractive actors keeps the picture exciting throughout. Krzysztof Komeda composed an elegant jazz musical score that is perfect for the film’s cool decadence.

The married couple of Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) and Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) take a Sunday drive in the countryside. Affluent enough to own a car but just barely able to conceal their contempt for each other, the afternoon suddenly becomes more exciting for the pair when a 19-year-old boy (Zygmunt Malanowicz) hitchhiking in the middle of the road is almost mowed down by Andrzej. The couple gives the kid a ride to a marina, where they plan to take their sailboat out for a day and night on the lake. Seeking to flex his superiority, Andrzej invites the kid to come with them. A drifter more accustomed to the woods than the water, the boy receives training in basic seamanship from Andrzej, a sportswriter and former sailor. Krystyna seems to enjoy the presence of the younger specimen, who reveals a switchblade knife in his possession.

Sensitive to being bossed around and dominated by Andrzej, the boy guts the afternoon out, perhaps due to his attraction for Andrzej’s wife, a skilled bosun in her own right. While husband and wife cavort in the lake — leaving the boy alone on the boat when he claims he can’t swim — the wind suddenly picks up and it’s Krystyna who climbs back into the boat and gets it under control. On their way back to dry land to drop their passenger off, Andrzej runs aground and when it begins to storm, the three of them take shelter for the night below deck. Krystyna and the boy wake early and feeling threatened by the attention she’s given him, Andrzej throws the knife overboard and in the tussle that follows, makes the boy disappear below the waves as well. The couple is forced to then decide what to do.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average 1,989 users: 85% for Knife In the Water

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

The Ninth Gate (1999)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Enrique Urbizu and John Brownjohn & Roman Polanski, based on the novel El Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Produced by Roman Polanski
133 minutes

Every filmmaker can be excused for making a terrible movie or two. For Roman Polanski, one of those excuses is titled The Ninth Gate. Nine days before photography was set to begin in July 1996 on a black comedy titled The Double, John Travolta dropped out of the dual lead role over creative differences with Polanski. Steve Martin agreed to step in, but the project was scrubbed by Mandalay Pictures before shooting could start. Desperate to get his next film going, Polanski turned to a script adapted by Enrique Urbizu from Arturo Perez-Reverte’s intricately plotted supernatural mystery El Club Dumas. Working with John Brownjohn over the course of the next year, Polanski dumped Perez-Reverte’s subplot about a lost chapter of The Three Musketeers and focusing on more commercial elements, arrived on the title The Ninth Gate.

A Spanish-French co-production financed by Artisan Entertainment at $38 million, The Ninth Gate alternates between a nap and a kind of stupor. Resembling a detective mystery, what’s most mysterious is the lack of clarity over the most basic details, like whether the girl is real or a figment of the protagonist’s imagination. The effect is less artistic and seems more like sloppy filmmaking. Costumed in glasses, goatee and combed back hair in an effort to look adult, Johnny Depp is miscast as a slick book dealer. The talents of cinematographer Darius Khondji (City of Lost Children, Seven) are wasted on a film that looks flat and disinterested throughout. Polanski just never gets anything in tune, settling on bouncy musical cues that recall Elmer Bernstein’s score for Ghostbusters without anything remotely amusing happening on screen.

In present day New York, rare book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) swindles a four-volume set of Don Quixote printed in 1780 from the family of a dying collector. A wealthy client named Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) — whose collection is devoted to the subject of the devil — hires Corso to appraise his latest acquisition, Aristide Torchia’s 17^th century work The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, which contains engravings Torchia is said to have adapted from the Delomelanicon, a mythical book penned by Lucifer himself. Only two other copies of The Nine Gates exist and Balkan suspects his may be a forgery. After stashing the Torchia with his partner Bernie (James Russo), Corso is visited by Liana Tefler (Lena Olin), widow of the book’s previous owner. Seeking it back, she seduces and attacks Corso, then apparently ransacks his partner’s store and kills him.

Arriving in Toledo, Spain, Corso visits bookbinding Ceniza brothers (José López Rodero in a dual role) who reveal that three of the Torchia’s engravings bear the cryptic initials “LCF”. With a mystery girl (Emmanuelle Seigner) following him, Corso seeks out the owners of the other two books: Victor Fargas (Jack Taylor) in Sintra, Portugal and Baroness Kessler (Barbara Jefford) in Paris, both of whom are killed in rapid succession. Studying their copies of The Nine Gates, Corso notices variations in their “LCF” engravings, illustrations of castle keeps, gateways and keys. He concludes that all three books are genuine and Balkan believes that when the nine “LCF” engravings are reunited, the prince of darkness will be revealed to him. Liana Tefler and her bodyguard manage to steal one of the books, which Corso’s mystery girl appears eager to help him get back.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 52,840 users: 60% for The Ninth Gate

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 44 for The Ninth Gate

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