DIRECTED BY: Rian Johnson
FEATURING: Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi
PLOT: Bloom is the passive brother floating in the wake of his older sibling Stephen, a
Dostoevsky among con-men, who devises one last elaborate grift to rip-off a pretty, rich and very eccentric widow.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Quirky, not weird. For the [...]
“You been exploding frogs again?”–Ruth Dove
DIRECTED BY: Philip Ridley
FEATURING: Jeremy Cooper, Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan
PLOT: Over-imaginative young Seth, growing up in post-World War II rural USA, comes to believe that his widowed neighbor is actually a vampire. After his father dies in unexpected fashion, the older brother he adores returns from his military tour of the Pacific. [...]
“[Producer] Jeremy [Thomas] knew [raising money to make Tideland] would be difficult, particularly because the film is very, very weird.”–Terry Gilliam
DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam
FEATURING: Jodelle Ferland, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges
PLOT: Jeliza-Rose is a nine year old girl with an active imagination who is being raised by a pair of junkies. When her father spirits her [...]
“Something weird is going on here. What is it about us? Even in ‘Nam it was always weird. Are we all crazy or something?” –line in original screenplay to Jacob’s Ladder
DIRECTED BY: Adrian Lyne
FEATURING: Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello
PLOT: Jacob Singer (nicknamed ”Professor” by his army buddies due to his glasses and Ph.D.) is wounded in Vietnam [...]
“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
–Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (quote originally intended to introduce Archangel)
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin
FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Kathy Marykuca
PLOT: In 1919, one-legged Canadian airman Lt. John Boles finds his way to the Russian port of Archangel in the endless [...]
DIRECTED BY: Wes Craven
FEATURING: Bill Pullman, Zakes Mokae
PLOT: An anthropologist travels to Haiti in search of the legendary “zombie
drug” and gets mixed up in voodoo and third world politics.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There are three or four vivid hallucination/dream sequences in The Serpent and the Rainbow that are unique visual treats. (The most unusual and striking [...]
PLOT: Young-goon, a young woman who believes herself to be a cyborg, and is institutionalized after a gruesome and nearly fatal attempt to recharge her batteries. Among the characters she meets in the mental hospital is Il-soon, a kleptomaniac who steals not only small items, but entire character traits from the other patients. Young-goon enlists Il-soon’s aid to help her [...]
DIRECTED BY: Larry Fessenden
FEATURING: Larry Fessenden, Meredith Snaider
PLOT: Slacker and (barely) functional alcoholic Sam—still smarting from the
recent loss of his father and separation from his live-in girlfriend—finds his health growing worse and worse as he gets more and more involved with a mysterious beautiful woman he meets at a Greenwich Avenue Halloween party.
WHY IT [...]
“Je me suis drapé dans ma conception du fantastique, et ce n’est pas celle de tout le monde.” – Christophe Gans
DIRECTED BY: Christophe Gans
FEATURING: Radha Mitchell, Laurie Holden, Jodelle Ferland
PLOT: After her adopted daughter’s sleepwalking problem turns hazardous, her concerned mother decides to investigate the name of the town that she mutters in her narcoleptic [...]
