Imagine Spider-Man murdering a young boy. The Rebel isn't a revisionist superhero movie, but it does star Johnny Nguyen, who was the masked stunt double for Spider-Man and Green Goblin in two of Sam Raimi's web-spinning adventures. Here Nguyen plays Cuong, an enforcer for the French exploiters in 1920s Vietnam. Anti-colonial protests have been gaining force and exerting pressure upon the ruling French, and Cuong is expected to help put them down. Caught up in his violent duties, Cuong kills a boy almost without realizing what he's done. He feels instant, piercing regret, as though the guilt for all his sins has come crashing down upon him. His remorse becomes a galvanizing force that pushes him to stop shedding the blood of his own people.

To begin, he tries to help a young rebel escape torture and certain death. The beautiful Thuy (Veronica Ngo, AKA Ngo Thanh Van) is important to both sides: her father is leader of the anti-government movement. She is understandably wary about Cuong's true intentions. Just as he's making headway in convincing her of his sincerity, his cynical, ambitious overlord Sy (Dustin Nguyen, of 21 Jump Street fame, who's never been better) appears. Sy is less interested in Cuong's allegiance than in the possibility that he can lead him to Thuy's father.

While the story is riddled with contrivances and genre conventions, the action sequences set the film apart. Johnny Nguyen is flat-out amazing in his grace and control, while Dustin Nguyen more than holds his own in close-quarters fighting. Floating like a butterfly but stinging like a bee, Veronica Ngo, a dancer/model/singer/actress, looks extremely convincing as she fiercely defends her friends and her honor. Oh, and she's a babe and a half.

Pencils down, foreigners! Wednesday was the deadline to submit a film to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for consideration in the Best Foreign-Language Film award at the Oscars, and 51 countries came up with something. Nations with particularly active film industries, such as Spain, France, and Italy, submit something pretty much every year; at the other end of the spectrum, there's the Middle Eastern nation of Jordan, which submitted a film (Captain Abu Raed) this year for the very first time.

If you're not familiar with the system, it works like this. (You can read the whole set of rules at the Academy's site.) Every country is allowed to submit only one film, and the Academy basically leaves it up to the individual nations to determine how that entry is chosen. The film need not have played in the U.S. yet (they usually have not, in fact), but it must have played theatrically for at least a week in its country of origin. It doesn't matter what language it's in, either, as long as it ain't English. Last year, Australia's submission was in Chinese. (For reals!)

The Academy's committee for this award sorts through the submissions and eventually narrows the field down to a nine-film shortlist. From that list, the five official Oscar nominees are chosen, and then of course there's one winner, which is usually about the Nazis.

Wikipedia has a complete list of this year's submissions, but I'll hit some of the highlights for you after the jump.

Was it the controversy over the title? Or the controversy over the bloody tampon scene? Either way, Alan Ball's Towelhead finished the weekend with the best per-screen average of all films, earning $13,250 at four engagements in New York and Los Angeles, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Neither this flick, first unveiled at Toronto last year, nor Ball's recent return to HBO, Southern Gothic vampire drama True Blood, have drawn unanimous critical praise, but specialty audiences still seem interested in whatever the American Beauty scribe / Six Feet Under creator is doing.

Speaking of directors with a strong following, Takeshi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django expanded to Los Angeles and maintained a healthy $4,200 per-screen average in its third week of release. Also in its third week, comedy I Served the King of England expanded into 37 locations but hasn't picked up much steam ($2,262 per screen), while steady earners Tell No One ($2,263 per screen; 11th week), Frozen River ($2,011 per screen; 7th week), Elegy ($1,948 per screen; 6th week), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona ($1,724; 5th week) all saw somewhat predictable declines in business. After all, sex and thrills only go so far among indie filmgoers.

Our criteria for inclusion in the Indie Weekend Box Office report hinges on the distributor, so here's another shout out to the #1 overall earner, Burn After Reading, from Focus Features. Likewise, soon-to-shutter Picturehouse released Diane English's The Women on the largest number of of screens they've ever handled -- 2,962 -- resulting in a per-screen average of $3,405. The picture earned more than $10 million total.

There are indie filmmakers who try to work in the realm of small character dramas and succeed only in making myopic films that feel inert and meaningless; there are those who attempt to stand out from the pack by writing scripts replete with quirky story lines and witty dialogue, only to end up with a mundane mess; and then there are a few who manage to achieve, through a combination of richly drawn, yet simple stories and excellent cinematography, a level of filmmaking that inspires without overwhelming, impresses without overreaching. Ramin Bahrani falls firmly in the latter camp, and with his latest film, Goodbye Solo, the director builds on the excellence of his previous work with a finely drawn tale of a cabdriver and the fare who changes his life.

Bahrani starts with an intriguing premise: Solo, a cab driver (Souléymane Sy Savané) picks up a routine fare, only to find his life turned upside down when the man he picks up asks him to take him to the remote mountaintop location of Blowing Rock in two weeks, where he plans to jump to his death. Solo's troubled by both the plans of his fare, William (Red West) to end his life, and the implications to himself of being a party to the man's suicide; he decides to befriend the older man in an attempt to persuade him to change his plans. This is the simple set-up for the film, and it's all Bahrani needs to make a thoughtful, compelling film that explores the relationship between these two vastly different men and the way they're changed by the friendship they form.

Today I leave Toronto to head home to Seattle, leaving James Rocchi behind to see the fest through to its exhausting end. It's been a decent fest overall, not great but good. I saw a several films I enjoyed here, including Burn After Reading, Goodbye Solo, and 35 Rhums, as well as a couple of fun midnight picks with JCVD and Detroit Metal City.

I missed being able to see a lot of films I really wanted to see, due to schedule conflicts and the lack of a cloning machine at our hotel that would allow me to be multiple places at once (or at least, the ability to see far enough into the future to foresee which of two films screening opposite each other will be wretched).

It seems that lots and lots of people who attend this fest (I'm talking normal people, not those of us crazy or masochistic enough to work in any aspect of the film business) want very, very much to attend the big parties, and seem to think if they can't get in, they're missing something fun or perhaps even life-altering. There's always a gaggle of scantily clad girls and hipsters hovering around the entrance of these events, hoping to finagle a way to crash the party.

Do I smell like Toronto? That's because I just got back from the film festival they have up there, and the scent of independent film still lingers. (It smells like Patricia Clarkson.) So I am very much in the mood for this week's edition of the Indie Spotlight, which is all about what's opening beyond the multiplexes this weekend!

Six flicks hit the big screen today: Flow: For Love of Water, Forgiveness, Greetings from the Shore, Moving Midway, Proud American, and Towelhead. Here's the scoop on each of them.
Towelhead
What it is: A dark comedy from Six Feet Under creator (and American Beauty writer) Alan Ball, based on Alicia Erian's novel about an adolescent Arab-American girl living in Texas during the first Gulf War.
What they're saying: Cinematical liked it when it premiered at Toronto last year under the title Nothing Is Private. At Rotten Tomatoes, the critics are split 50/50 as I write this, some applauding its audacity and wit, others calling it reprehensible. (Personally, I'm in the first camp.)
Where it's playing: New York City (Angelika Film Center, AMC Loews Lincoln Square), Los Angeles (ArcLight Hollywood, The Landmark), and Garland, Texas (Walnut Theaters). I assume the random Texas location is because the film was shot there? Maybe?
More info: The official site has a list of when the film opens in other cities. It's rolling out pretty heavily in the next few weeks, so people outside of New York, L.A., and Garland will be able to see it soon.

The Coen Brothers are smart. While the critical community has been arguing about the merits of Burn After Reading, which opens wide tomorrow, Joel and Ethan are already knee deep in their next production. A Serious Man started filming in their home state of Minnesota on Monday.

The project was announced in the spring of 2007, just before No Country for Old Men debuted at Cannes. Last month we learned that relatively little-known Michael Stuhlberg and Richard Kind had been cast in the lead roles in the black comedy set in 1967, with Stuhlberg playing a professor whose wife is leaving him, and Kind playing his sofa sleeping brother. While Christopher expressed his hope that Frances McDormand would be playing the wife, that role has gone to Sari Wagner (identified as Sari Lennick by IMDb), one of a trio of seriously unknown Minnesota actors cast in the film, according to an official statement released by Focus Features. The statement also says that the wife has fallen for one of her husband's "more pompous colleagues," who will be played by Fred Melamed.

The other two Minnesota thespians are Aaron Wolf and Jessica McManus, who will be Kind's son ("a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school") and daughter ("filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job"), respectively. I think it's refreshing that the Coens have chosen to go with actors who don't have any previous, sometimes distracting baggage.

As to Burn After Reading, I agree with the quite positive views of Kim and James; I think it's a frequently hilarious and surprisingly insightful "must see." If you still need convincing, listen to the Coens talk about it over at Moviefone. Here's hoping A Serious Man will provoke the same type of response next year.

I can't imagine a more apt title for Lovely, Still than the one it has. This sweet, surprising story about romance between senior citizens is uncommonly lovely, and a serene stillness rests over most of it. Of course, the title works the other way, too: The process of falling in love is lovely, still, even after all these years.

It is Christmastime in an unnamed snowy town, and Robert Malone (Martin Landau) is a lonely old man. He lives by himself in a house that he has occupied for 48 years, a house with minimal furniture and no pictures on the walls. The only gift under his Christmas tree is one he wrapped himself, addressed to himself. He works part-time as a bagger at a grocery store, where the doofy, over-eager manager, Mike (Adam Scott), wants him to invest in the publication of a homemade book of Christmas recipes.

Across the street, a widow named Mary (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter Alex (Elizabeth Banks) have just moved in. Mary, seemingly smitten upon first laying eyes on the old man, invites Robert to dinner. Delighted by his sudden great fortune, Robert seeks dating advice from everyone he encounters the following day. Has he never even been on a date? Or has it just been too long since the last time?

Soon the two are dating, with Mary taking charge and Robert awestruck by her attention. He cannot believe that love has finally found him, so late in life. For the first time, he will have someone to spend Christmas with.

The Secret Life of Bees, adapted and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from the best-selling book by Sue Monk Kidd, weaves racism and the civil rights movement around the story of Lily (Dakota Fanning), a young white girl taken in by three African-American sisters when she runs away from her controlling, emotionless father. It's a role that's in some ways reminiscent of the character Fanning played in Hounddog, a film that was critically panned and rather controversial for having a scene in which Fanning's character was raped.

This time around, there's no such awkward controversy; The Secret Life of Bees is a sweet, mostly charming coming-of-age tale that, while it doesn't particularly break any new ground with regards to the filmmaking, does an able enough job of adapting a bestselling book of the "women's bookclub" variety for the screen. Here's the basic story: Lily is haunted by the death of her mother; now, on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, she's had enough of her father, T-Ray (Paul Bettany), and starts to fight back against him.

When their maid, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), is accosted by a pack of angry white men on the way to registering to vote -- and ends up arrested herself for her trouble -- Lily decides that it's time for both her and Rosaleen to escape. She has a vague idea about where to go -- Tiburon, South Carolina -- based only on the name of a town written on one of the few possessions she has of her mother's, and a label from a honey jar.

If you're like me, stuck at home, reading about all the great films playing in Toronto, and wondering, "When can I actually get to see the darn things?," I have some good news. Two "big buzz" titles have been acquired for distribution: Steven Soderbergh's Che, starring Benecio del Toro in the title role, has been nabbed by IFC Films (not Mark Cuban) for North America, and Summit Entertainment has secured US rights to Katheryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, featuring Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes.

IFC will release Che for a one-week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December, according to an official statement received by Cinematical. It will then open in January via the company's "IFC in Theaters" platform, which means it will be available in select theaters and "on demand" through cable and satellite systems the same day. Ever since Che's world premiere at Cannes in May (where James Rocchi reviewed it), there has been speculation about how the film would be presented. Che is comprised of two stand alone parts -- The Argentine and Guerilla -- and the total running time is more than four hours. Now we know we'll some of us will be able to see the whole thing at one time. *

There's a familiarity to Pride and Glory that, depending on your perspective, could be either horrendously tiresome or part of the charm. By all accounts it's a middling film, an overwrought and occasionally laughable corrupt cop drama that you've seen countless times. But for me, going back to this world of divided loyalties, broken oaths, outraged good guys, and "we protect our own" machismo was like settling into a comfortable recliner. An extremely comfortable one, actually: Pride and Glory is moody, attractive and well-acted. I think director Gavin O'Connor intended it to be grim and upsetting, but at best it's pulpy entertainment, a highly watchable series of well-worn, well-executed clichés.

The closest recent analogue to Pride and Glory is probably James Gray's far superior We Own the Night. There, too, father and son cops wrestle with their commitments to each other, their families, themselves, and the often abstract notion of being policemen. In O'Connor's film, these themes play out along thoroughly conventional lines. Edward Norton and Noah Emmerich play brothers; Emmerich's Francis is a respected commanding officer, while Norton's Ray, despite his talent and promise, has relegated himself to Missing Persons after an initially-unspecified Traumatic Incident some years back. Their Dad, Francis Sr. (Jon Voight), is an experienced careerist who has worked his way up through the ranks. When a failed drug bust results in the shooting death of four officers, Ray brings himself out of self-imposed semi-retirement to investigate – but his sleuthing leads him to a corrupt cabal that may include his brother and longtime family friend Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell).

While the husband and wife team of Kieran and Michele Mulroney wait for their Justice League script to finally make it to the big screen, the duo won't be sitting around idly. Instead, they will make their feature directing debut with an indie movie titled Paper Man, which they also wrote together. According to Variety, the film is a "coming-of-middle-age comedy" about a friendship between a failed author and a teenager, and the project was developed through the Sundance Institute's screenwriters and directors labs. Jeff Daniels, who did his best work recently as a successful novelist in The Squid and the Whale, has been cast as the author. The teenager part has apparently not been filled, but Daniels will be joined in the film by Ryan Reynolds and Lisa Kudrow in unspecified roles.

With a November 12 start date, we'll probably be seeing this before we see Justice League, even though Paper Man probably won't reach theaters until 2010, following a premiere at Sundance that year. Of course, we can at least hope Variety doesn't have the full plot details, and Paper Man is actually a supehero movie, too. Perhaps either the author or the teen has the power to take on the characteristics of paper (he'd always win in a fight against rock-like individuals such as The Thing, but lose to Scissors Man), hence the superhero-like title. Unfortunately, there's more likelihood that the teen is a gifted writer and Daniels becomes his mentor, Finding Forrester style.

Obscenity! The '50s! Legal drama! Book-length poems! OK, that last one is part of what distinguishes the upcoming Howl, in which James Franco will star as legendary beatnik writer Allen Ginsberg. The film revolves around the court trial that took place after Howl was published in 1956 -- and promptly banned for obscenity. Mary-Louise Parker, Paul Rudd, Jeff Daniels, David Straithairn, and Alan Alda have just been added to the cast, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

All will play fictional versions of real-life characters. On the side of the prosecution (boo! hiss!), indie darling / TV star Parker will play radio personality Gail Potter, the reliably venal Daniels will embody Professor David Kirk, and the firm and steady Staithairn will be prosecuting attorney Ralph McIntosh. In behalf of the defense (yay! cheer!), Paul Rudd will play literary critic (?!) Luther Nichols. Calm and fair as always, I'm sure, Alda will play Judge Clayton Horn.

Documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman will make their narrative debut and the film is all theirs: they are writing, producing, and directing. Epstein made the terrific doc The Times of Harvey Milk and the pair made Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. Gus van Sant is serving as executive producer, and Coen crony Carter Burwell is set to provide an original score. I hope that Epstein and Friedman can pull off the transition to narrative film and give us an incendiary picture; the elements are all in place, and the time is right.

Here's a movie that deals with death and grief without hysterics, dramatic speeches or showy, Oscar-grubbing performances. Michael Winterbottom's Genova has a logline that sounds maudlin and turgid – after she inadvertently causes a car accident that kills her mother, a young girl starts seeing mom's ghost – but the movie turns out to be understated, down-to-earth, quietly sad. This is Winterbottom's most intimate film since 9 Songs, and one of the highlights of his career.

Genova has the wherewithal to show its characters dealing with loss in ways that aren't inherently cinematic. It would have been very striking, for example, to have the newly motherless children – the teenage Kelly (Willa Holland) and the preteen Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) – scream, rage at the world, and slam doors in the face of their well-intentioned father Joe (Colin Firth) before concluding that Family Sticks Together. And in a film like this, I would have guessed that Joe would spiral into an alcoholic depression, or perhaps start a tumultuous, guilt-ridden affair with the old college friend (Catherine Keener) who comes back into his life.

Those are the arcs I would have expected to see. But though a couple doors do get slammed, Winterbottom's characters aren't here to amuse us or push our buttons. Their reactions to the tragedy and their ways of adjusting to a new life in the titular city all paint a much more nuanced picture – and the effect is more heartbreaking than any number of manipulative stunts could have achieved.

Under the direction of exec Joe Drake, Lionsgate Films has pretty much walked away from the type of movies that made its name -- as exemplified by their dumping of the Clive Barker adapatation Midnight Meat Train, and sending an audience friendly movie like Dance of the Dead (that most of us at Cinematical just happen to love) straight to DVD. Now Peter Block, the company's former head of acquisitions and co-productions and a veteran producer whose three dozen credits include the aforementioned Midnight Meat Train, has launched a new company to try and fill the gap, according to Variety.

The company, named A Bigger Boat in honor of what Roy Scheider said in Jaws, will begin by making two to three modestly-budgeted (between $10 million and $25 million) genre films per year. Block is currently in the "formative stages" of building the company's initial slate of productions, but Variety says it will "likely" include an unidentified thriller directed by John Carpenter and Dark Corners, a thriller based on a script by E.L. Katz. Katz was one of the writers and producers of last year's Pop Skull.

A Bigger Boat has a co-financing and distribution deal with Overture Films covering North America and another with Alliance Films for the UK, Spain, Italy, and Scandanavia. Block has also made deals with partners, including GreeneStreet Films, for production and other business affairs. All we need now are the movies -- how about some straight ahead, adult-oriented horror, Mr. Block?