The closing picture of the St. Lawrence International Film Festival was G.J. Echternkamp’s Frank and Cindy; and it may have one of the more unusual pre-production tales to come out of Hollywood in recent history.

As I sat in the dark theatre waiting for the projector to light up the New York State premiere of The Break-In, a Swedish film written and directed by Marcus Ovnell, I had two things running through my mind . . . and both related to my high hopes for the film. The first was that I had attended a panel discussion featuring Ovnell and Nathan Jacobs (writer/director of Killing Poe) on the continuing influence of Edgar Allen Poe on the world of film. The panel provided a nuanced discussion on the two movies (while also making sure to provide no spoilers of the upcoming showing of either film) and being that I am a gargantuan Poe fan, this had me enthused for the premiere. The second was that I have yet to see a poor film or television show come out of Scandinavia over the past several years (whether it is the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, Jo Nesbo’s Headhunters or television series such as Wallander and Borgen, to name of few).

Sometimes the opening credits of a film can signal the type of experience you are in for and this is clearly the case with Gary Gardner’s The Nymphets. The credits are large, bold and frantically paced, which, along with the similarly themed musical score, highlights that we are in for quite the ride.

Matt Herron’s Audition is an exciting and original quasi-documentary that fuses together footage from an audition process where fifty couples (yes, that’s one hundred actors) vie for the final position of being the leading man and woman in a movie; the footage the couples film are then taken and spliced together to form the narrative movie they are auditioning for.

There has long been a history of films that deal with isolation and seclusion – some being big budget blockbusters while others are low-budget flicks. Movies such as The Shining, Cabin Fever and The Thing each created a sense of impending dread by using these two themes effectively. The low budget Canadian film Black Mountain Side continues the tradition.

It is not often that I am able to review a movie that claims to be an Irish Shakespearian Western, but that is simply, or perhaps complexly, what Patrick Ryan’s feature film directorial debut Darkness on the Edge of Town is.