Director Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In has been the talk of the film-festival circuit for months—the “Swedish vampire movie” that has transfixed audiences with its keenly attenuated evocation of adolescent loneliness and budding first love in the apartment blocks of suburban Stockholm, framed around a latter-day reinvention of the vampire myth. Its two central characters, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and his counterpart Eli (Lina Leandersson), both played by remarkable young actors in their first movie, are a bullied and alienated 12-year-old boy and the mysterious dark-haired girl who only …

When previews of American Teen were screened on large overhead monitors in a giant sports bar during a party at this year’s South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, the smartly edited montage of life in a Midwestern high school looked like a teaser for a new cable network series. One of the documentary’s selling points is its professional slickness, achieved on a remarkably slight $5 million budget, which adroitly packages a year’s worth of fly-on-the-laptop peeking into adolescent drama as if such raw, emotional, self-lacerating stuff was a …

December 7, 2007
“Industrial Light and Magic” takes on a whole other level of meaning in David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature. “Eraserhead” was ushered into an unsuspecting world during the same season as “Star Wars” and, in its infinitely perverse manner, was just as much a mythic fable destined to infiltrate pop culture and generate a cult audience of repeat viewers.
Part of the appeal was the film’s disturbing Freudian imagery and deadpan bleak mise-en-scène: It was like watching Todd Browning’s “Freaks” directed by Samuel Beckett, a bad acid …