I told you a couple weeks ago how THINKFilm had picked up the gritty prison thriller The Escapist, and how the film, which stars Brian Cox, was the last thing I saw at Sundance this year. Well, I actually had a double helping of Cox that January night, because right before The Escapist I watched Red, another film boasting a terrific Cox performance -- and now it's headed for theaters, too.

Via The Hollywood Reporter we learn that Magnolia has picked up Red, with plans to release it late this summer. The film (which I reviewed here) is a thriller along the lines of Death Wish, only instead of avenging his wife's murder, the Cox character is going after the punks who killed his dog. (Do not mess with a man's dog!)

I couldn't get to any of the press screenings for Man on Wire, so I decided to get on a Rush Ticket line and (gasp!) actually pay to get into a public screening. I was third on line, and I thought I was in good shape. I mean, it was 4:45 on a Tuesday; who was going to see a documentary about the guy who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers almost thirty-five years ago?

Turns out that people in New York aren't as busy as you think, since the screening was packed to capacity. But they were in for a good show, as this documentary combined archival footage, interviews, and appropriately cheesy reenactments to tell the story of how in 1974, Philippe Petit, a French juggler and tightrope walker, managed to sneak a crew and a bunch of equipment to the top of the World Trade Center, extend a tightrope between towers, and walk across without a net.

The vampire movie has been pretty much done to "death" by this point, right? Even the good vampire flicks are sort of treading over familiar ground, yes? Longtime fans of the undead bloodsuckers have more or less accepted that the sub-genre has become a fairly anemic wasteland, true? Normally I'd have to reluctantly agree with those assertions, but fortunately I caught a really excellent Swedish film this morning called Let the Right One In. Not only does this fantastic little import add a lot of new color to the "vampire flick," but it also turns out to be one of the strangest, stickiest, and (yes) sweetest horror movies I've seen in ten years.

Oskar is a lonely 12-year-old Swedish kid who gets picked on by bullies at school, but when a strange new girl moves in to the apartment next door, the pre-teens strike up a warm little friendship. Ah, there's one big problem though: Newcomer Eli (pronounced Ellie) only looks like a 12-year-old girl, when in fact she's a vampire of indeterminate age. Eli lives with what horror fans know as a "familiar," a guy who will go out and get his charge some plasma when it's needed -- which of course is pretty often. Eli does all she can to keep her vampirism a secret from her new boyfriend, but the closer they get -- the stickier things become. (And while there's just a bit more to the plot, I'm ending my synopsis right there. Wouldn't want to chance spoiling anything.)

Vadim Perelman -- whose second feature, The Life Before Her Eyes, opened last weekend -- is "the kind of guy who would've flourished in the indie drama-happy '90's," writes Steve Zeitchik for The Hollywood Reporter. "Now he's caught between the prestige world and the indie one." Zeitchik is referring to the fact that both of Perelman's films have been small, niche-oriented releases, even though they've included movie stars (House of Sand and Fog starred Ben Kingsley).

Zeitchik thinks that Life is "representative of the cold climate for indie drama, even the more ambitious kind," explaining why it was released in-house through Magnolia Pictures rather than getting a deal with a larger distributor. I have a lot of admiration for Perelman after witnessing the devastating climax of House, and Life suggests that he prefers to stick with downbeat narratives. Movies with depressing narratives are never alluring to distributors, and even those bold enough to pick up such titles have a hard time getting them out there. Consider Warner Independent Picture's low key release of David Gordon Green's brilliant-but-depressing Snow Angels earlier this year.

The Life Before Her Eyes, the latest film by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), opened this weekend in limited release. In part as a response to the negative reviews by a number of critics, Perelman said recently in an interview that he's decided that it's better for audiences to know the ending going in (I did confirm with Perelman that he actually said this, because I was rather surprised that he would). And while I understand Perelman's desire to counter the critical response to the film in this way, I decided to take a look at what the negative reviews actually say.

First, I'm going to largely ignore the reviews (good and bad) that came out of the Toronto International Film Festival last year, because the cut of the film in theaters now is different. So let's look at what critics have to say about the current cut. Let's look at one titled (ever so objectively) "Hollywood and the War on Women", by Prairie Miller over on News Blaze. Miller starts her "review" of the film with a five-paragraph rant that tries to tie films about the Iraq war into a perceived "war against women" in Hollywood, going so far as to make the accusation that this war is fueled, in part, by male directors and producers whose coffers are being drained by alimony and child support payments. Uh, what?

It's been five years since Vadim Perelman's critically acclaimed feature debut with House of Sand and Fog. Now the director is back with his newest film, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri. The film is about Diana, whose life starts to crumble as the 15th anniversary of the school shooting she survived nears; it flashes back and forth between older Diana (Thurman) and the younger Diana (Wood) and her best friend Maureen (Amurri) in the weeks leading up to the tragic event. Cinematical sat down with Perelman and Amurri at AFI Dallas to talk about the film, which opens in limited release this weekend.

Cinematical: Eva, can you talk about the challenges of playing this role, which is much more of "nice girl" than you've played in your previous films?

Eva Amurri: The earlier roles I'd had just happened to be more bad girls. This is the first role I'd had where the role was basically all good, this very pure, selfless girl. What's funny is that Vadim really cast us against type – in real life, I'm much more the "bad" girl, while Evan is the serious "good" girl. I was a little worried about it, but I trusted Vadim, and he did a great job guiding us through it. It was an interesting exercise.

(Editor's note: This review originally ran during AFI Dallas. It's being rerun this weekend in conjunction with the film's release.)

I loved House of Sand and Fog, and I've been waiting five long years to see what director Vadim Perelman would come up with next. His latest effort, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri, is a lovely, nuanced film packed with imagery, and bracketed by an intriguing storyline. The film revolves around Diana, played as a teenager by Wood and an adult by Thurman; the younger Diana was a survivor of a high school shooting, as as the 15-year anniversary of the tragic event nears, the older Diana begins to unravel.

Perelman is not a director who hand-feeds his audience easy answers. With House of Sand and Fog he made heavy use of its moody, gray and brown pallette to set a dark and unsettling mood. With The Life Before Her Eyes, he turns to brilliantly saturated hues of flowers and water to create a sublime tone that evokes what's going on with Diana. The perfect life with professor husband Paul (Brett Cullen) and daughter Emma (Gabrielle Brennan) that she's worked so hard to create is a fairy tale fantasy built on an unstable foundation of unresolved guilt, and we know from the first frames that, hard as she works to sustain it, it's as fragile as the petals of the flowers that embower her garden.

I loved House of Sand and Fog, and I've been waiting five long years to see what director Vadim Perelman would come up with next. His latest effort, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri, is a lovely, nuanced film packed with imagery, and bracketed by an intriguing storyline. The film revolves around Diana, played as a teenager by Wood and an adult by Thurman; the younger Diana was a survivor of a high school shooting, as as the 15-year anniversary of the tragic event nears, the older Diana begins to unravel.

Perelman is not a director who hand-feeds his audience easy answers. With House of Sand and Fog he made heavy use of its moody, gray and brown pallette to set a dark and unsettling mood. With The Life Before Her Eyes, he turns to brilliantly saturated hues of flowers and water to create a sublime tone that evokes what's going on with Diana. The perfect life with professor husband Paul (Brett Cullen) and daughter Emma (Gabrielle Brennan) that she's worked so hard to create is a fairy tale fantasy built on an unstable foundation of unresolved guilt, and we know from the first frames that, hard as she works to sustain it, it's as fragile as the petals of the flowers that embower her garden.

Nearly a year after its international premiere at Cannes, My Brother is an Only Child (ThinkFilm) opened at the top of the indie weekend box office returns, according to Box Office Mojo. Playing at just one theater in Manhattan, the film grossed $10,500. My Brother "follows two brothers through years of Italian history, with their personal and political travails echoing down the years," Cinematical's James Rocchi wrote last year. "Even with it's merits as a light-but-sentimental story of family in 1960's Italy, it also reminded me of the soaring, sweeping, astonishing La Meglio Gioventù (The Best of Youth) -- and wound up completely winning me over." The film will roll out to other cities over the next three weeks, per the distributor's web site.

Immigration family tale Under the Same Moon (Fox Searchlight / The Weinstein Co.) continues to perform well, earning $5,771 per screen as it expanded to 390 theaters in its second week. Leonard Klady at Movie City News commented that the film is "playing in a mix of Hispanic, art and mainstream locations but with rare exception is working best in the former venues." Also in its second week, Love Songs (IFC), Christophe Honoré's French-language modern musical, held onto most of its audience, averaging $6,800 at two Manhattan theaters.

The big story of the weekend was the success enjoyed by Under the Same Moon (Fox Searchlight / The Weinstein Co.), which earned $8,910 per screen playing on 266 screens, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Our own Jette Kernion described it as "essentially an old-fashioned family melodrama." She pointed out that the film has an "overt agenda" in its message about U.S. undocumented workers, but concluded: "Despite its flaws, Under the Same Moon is an entertaining film that knows how to charm an audience."

Playing at one theater in New York and one in Los Angeles, Planet B-Boy (Elephant Eye Films) made $14,500 per screen, giving it the highest per-screen average. Benson Lee directed the documentary, "which weaves the stories of numerous crews from 18 nations vying in the Battle of the Year championship in Braunschweig, Germany," in the words of Ed Gonzalez in The Village Voice. "What most sticks is Planet B-Boy's aesthetic, which feels jocked from the school of Michael Moore."

We have a new set of stills for you from the upcoming film The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood. The film, directed by Vadim Perelman and based on the best-selling novel by Laura Kasischke, is a dramatic thriller about Diana (Thurman), a suburban wife and mother who begins to question her seemingly perfect life--and perhaps her sanity--on the fifteenth anniversary of a tragic high school shooting that took the life of her best friend.

The film flashes back-and-forth between the younger Diana (played by Wood) and her best friend Maureen (played by Eva Amurri, daughter of Susan Sarandon), and the older Diana, who is haunted by the increasingly strained relationship she had with Maureen as day of the school shooting approached. As older Diana's life begins to unravel and younger Diana gets closer and closer to the fatal day, a deeper mystery slowly unravels.

You can see more stills from the film in the gallery below. The film is set to open in limited release on April 18.

"Do you have the crazy?" is one of the tag-lines for the Magnolia-released indie horror flick The Signal. And it sure seems like one Orange County theater-goer had a small dose of the crazy when he (somewhat randomly) stabbed two people -- and he didn't even wait for the movie to end!

According to MSNBC, "one man suffered a stab wound to the arm, which punctured into his chest and was taken to UCI Medical Center in Orange. The other man was also stabbed in the arm ... Both are expected to survive ... The attacker, who is believed to have been kicked out of the theater earlier, escaped." The story also involves a mysterious bag of "illegal substances," so let's not get all knee-jerk and blame the movie for the violence.

Seems that the stabber got away, but police are following up on a few leads. I was going to get in touch with one of the Signal-makers and ask them for a reaction, but that seemed a little silly. Does anyone want people getting STABBED while their movie plays? I think not.

Magnet Releasing, the genre arm of distributor Magnolia Pictures, has been busy adding to their slate. Earlier this month, Scott Weinberg reported their acquisition of Donkey Punch, a UK thriller involving "sea-bound debauchery that goes horribly wrong." More recently, Jette Kernion told us they had picked up Special, a movie "about a guy [Michael Rapaport] whose antidepressant makes him think he's a superhero."

Now indieWIRE is reporting that the label has secured North American rights to Let the Right One In, described as "romantic horror ... based on a best-selling novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist about a lonely twelve year-old boy and his friendship with a young girl, who appears to be a vampire." I wonder if he suspected anything when he tried to kiss her and she sprouted fangs? Or when her mother kept on telling him, "Don't come over until after nightfall!" Pure speculation on my part, of course. Tomas Alfredson directed; he previously made Four Shades of Brown, a comedy/drama that I found exhausting, so this looks like a good change of pace.

The film has played a couple of European festivals and was picked up by Magnet out of the European Film Market. It's due for release in its native Sweden in April and has already received good reviews (Variety, Twitch). I love the variety of films that Magnet Releasing has acquired so far, in addition to those noted above: titles from France (Eden Log), Spain (Timecrimes), Japan (Big Man Japan), and Chile (Kiltro, Mirageman). We'll keep an eye out for a release date for Let the Right One In.

(Dan Bush, AJ Bowen, Jacob Gentry, David Bruckner)

The very best part of my job (aside from all the sex with actresses, I mean) is when I get to see a small horror flick early and then spend 14 months reminding the genre fans that, yes, it's still on the way. (Like that freaky French one about the terrorized preggo woman. It's coming, trust me!) It was about 14 months ago when I first saw (and really enjoyed) an Atlanta-made indie genre flick called The Signal -- and then I ran into the Signal gang again a few months later at SXSW. The film was received quite enthusiastically at both festivals.

Directors Jacob Gentry, David Bruckner and Dan Bush were in Philadelphia recently as part of a promotional tour for the film. Along with head baddie AJ Bowen, I took the guys to have their very first Philly Cheese Steak, and then we headed back to the theater for a Q & A session with the audience -- but not before we stopped at the Philadelphia Art Museum and the knucklehead quartet did their Rocky Balboa sprint up the steps. (See photo!)

So yeah: I liked the flick long before I liked all the goofballs who made the movie, so I thought it would be nice to offer a quick little reminder: Magnolia Pictures is releasing The Signal tomorrow (at these theaters), so if you're a serious horror fan who likes to whine and moan at all the studio-backed PG-13 horror crap that hits the screens every month ... here's your chance to support a smaller flick. You'll have a good time and you'll feel good about it, too.

With Academy Award insanity upon us, it's a good week to catch up with several highly-acclaimed films that display the true independent spirit. Moolaadé was the last film completed by African master filmmaker Ousmane Sembene. Roger Ebert felt it was the best picture he saw at Cannes in 2004 and programmed it for his Overlooked Film Festival last year, where our own Kim Voynar caught a screening and said it was "perhaps one of of the most socially relevant films of the decade." The DVD from New Yorker Films was originally scheduled for release in December, but was delayed until this week. The two-disk edition includes a "making of" feature, a portrait of the filmmaker, interviews, a 16-page booklet, and more.

A very different type of music documentary, Kurt Cobain: About a Son, also premieres on DVD today, which makes me happy because I've heard so many good things about it but haven't had an opportunity to see it. A. J. Schnack constructed his film based on 25 hours of audio interviews with the late musician. You can read more about the release at Schnack's blog, All these wonderful things. The DVD from Shout! Factory includes selected scene commentary, a "making of" feature, and more from the Cobain interviews.