This is turning into one long tease. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane debuted to generally good reaction at the Toronto film festival nearly two years ago. (James Rocchi called it "the best modern slasher flick since Scream.") Senator Entertainment picked up distribution rights after The Weinstein Co. / Dimension unexpectedly dumped it shortly before its scheduled release one year ago. Since then, we've been waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting.

In the meantime, director Jonathan Levine moved on to his next film, the well-received The Wackness, and Senator Entertainment surprised us by releasing ... a new poster. (OK, we take what we can get.) At some point they also made a new trailer, which you can view at the trailer website for Fantasia, Montreal's amazingly awesome genre festival. They have a good write-up on the film, too, and you'll see James' review quoted on the page. (Sorry, you've already missed the two screenings there.)

The Senator trailer doesn't look markedly different from The Weinstein Co. trailer, but, to its credit, it spells out even less than the previous one. The most irritating thing is probably where it promises to be out "This Spring." The poster promises "This Summer." Is that "This Year"? We do know that UK film lovers can buy it on DVD in just a few days; I'm not holding my breath much longer for this one.

[Thanks to Bloody Disgusting.]

I had never heard of Jacques Mesrine before today, but I should have. Take a look at this Wikipedia entry, which matter-of-factly details the dozens of murders, bank robberies and prison escapes pulled off by the legendary French criminal over a 20-year "career." The best part is that he once fled from a sentencing hearing by taking the judge hostage. How can that possibly work?

Anyway, the story's obviously well-known in France, and it has finally made its way to the screen in a two-part biopic called Public Enemy No. 1, starring (who else?) Vincent Cassel as Mesrine. Budgeted at $80 million, it's one of the biggest French productions ever. At least the first of the films is slated to get an October release in France, and the American rights have gone to Senator Entertainment -- the distributor that helped bury All the Boys Love Mandy Lane after the Weinsteins dumped it. Its president promises to do better with Public Enemy, hoping to have the first film in American theaters by the end of the year. He compares it to GoodFellas and Scarface. Honestly, though, Mesrine sounds like more of a badass than Tony Montana.

The movies were directed by Jean-François Richet, who made the not-terrible American remake of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 a couple of years back. They co-star Gerard Depardieu and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly's Mathieu Amalric (who will also be seen in Quantum of Solace). Oh, and Ludivigne Sagnier, whom I just saw in the very good Love Songs.

There is a very short list of filmmakers who are so perfectly in tune with my sensibilities, so completely on my wavelength, that each of their projects threatens to collapse my critical faculties and reduce me to a drooling, adoring mess. One such person is little-known Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, whose enigmatic sci-fi mind-blowers Cube and Cypher were about as far up my alley as you could go before it starts to hurt. (I haven't seen Nothing yet, but I will soon.) So I've been hungrily devouring every morsel of information about his upcoming Splice, which is about a pair of scientists (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) who discover a way to create new kinds of creatures in the lab by splicing DNA, and then go and introduce human genes into the experiment. My squeamishness about genetic horrors (no joke: I consider Cronenberg's The Fly to be the scariest movie I've ever seen) and my affinity for Natali's approach makes me think this one could really do a number on me.