Films will show up after intermission

This is no time to panic. I am talking to myself as much as to you, dear reader, for I’ve just come back into my office from a full week off to find I have no clear idea of what I’m going to put in this week’s Moviestyle section. For a while, it looked like the only new film opening in the state this week would be a horror film called The Devil Inside that’s being released through Paramount’s specialty (lowbudget) marque Insurge. It’s about an Italian woman who performs “unauthorized exorcisms” and it was filmed in Romania. Infer what you will from that scant information. It’s one of those movies that the studio has decided not to screen for critics, which is probably for the good. Critics tend to receive movies like this as an occasion either to snark or to establish themselves as outliers by overpraising vividly realized mediocrity.

I’m not sure there’s any real reason to run a review of a movie like this. I think its fans will find it and figure out pretty quickly where it belongs in the pantheon of the subgenre. And fortunately for us, Focus Features pushed the wide release date of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy up a week. And I’ve found a couple of interesting wire service features that will work nicely. There will be no blank pages in this newspaper.

So much for my panic; now on to yours. Relax. Whatever critically lauded or much-buzzed-about film you want to see will probably show up at a theater relatively near you in a matter of weeks. Really. You have not missed them. (Unless you’re looking for

The Rum Diary. That’s been here and gone. But there’s always home video.)

But the end-of-the-year prestige movies — movies like Shame, The Iron Lady, Extremely Loud and Incred-

ibly Close, Pariah, Weekend, We Need to Talk About Kevin, et al. — they’re on their way. Though a certain demand for these movies has been created — we’ve seen trailers and TV ads and read about these films — not many people have actually had the chance to see them yet. Two of the movies that made my 2011 Top 10 list — The Artist and A Separation

have yet to make it to Arkansas theaters.

Not a day goes by that I don’t get a call or an e-mail from someone desperate to know “if” a given film is coming to town. The answer is almost always “yes.” Thanks to Matt Smith’s Market Street Cinema, nearly every foreign and independent film that generates any sort of award season buzz (and a lot that never do) will eventually have a theatrical opening in Little Rock.

I try to steer clear of writing about the business part of show business, because I think there’s generally enough — and maybe too much — attention paid to box- office numbers and production budgets. But I’d write more about the vagaries of film distribution if I understood that black science better; all I really know is that there’s a formula for how many screens a given population can support, and the presence of Market Street essentially bequeaths us five more screens than the central Arkansas market might otherwise support. (I do not understand why Northwest Arkansas — especially Fayetteville, with all its students and professors — does not have at least a one- or twoscreen arthouse. Maybe there’s simply no one brave or stupid enough to take on the project.)

But my point is that almost all of the movies you’ve been hearing about will be here.

A lot of the movies readers seem most anxious about now really haven’t played many places yet, maybe a couple of theaters in New York and Los Angeles. My current information is that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will open in Arkansas on Jan. 20.

History indicates that it could be a while before some of the foreign films show up. Two of the best films technically released in 2010, Of Gods and Men and Incendies, didn’t appear in Arkansas until, respectively, April and June of last year (which explains why they ended up on some critics’ 2011 Top 10 lists). Certified Copy, which was released in Europe in 2010, made my 2011 Top 10 list.

I start every year preloaded with movies. I saw more than 100 between the beginning of November and Dec. 18 — not counting the 54 short films I watched (some more than once) as a juror for the Los Angeles- based box[ur]shorts film festival. Now suddenly I seem to have a lot of free time.

I’m not complaining. I’ll be busy again soon enough.

We’ll have the usual Oscar season ambiguity. Some of the movies I’ve already seen I’ll have to watch again before I review them. For instance, Shame didn’t impress me so much the first time through; I want to give it a second chance before I write about it. And there are others for which I’ve already got reviews sitting on ice. (That’s the nature of the business. I wrote film reviews for Spectrum Weekly before I joined this newspaper in February 1993 — it was June before Spectrum finally exhausted the supply of reviews I’d left them.)

So relax, take a deep breath. Enjoy the lull. Like everything else, it won’t last. E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Mysterious, faux “found footage” images like this one are being used to promote Paramount’s microbudget horror film The Devil Inside, which wasn’t screened in advance for critics.

This spooky ooky image is from The Devil Inside, which wasn’t screened in advance for critics.