Iron Man opens this week, and thus the summer movie season has officially arrived. I love a good summer movie as much a the next guy, but this morning I found myself looking back at some of the little films that cropped up during the summer; some of them managed to get a "summer" feel on a much lower budget and without all the advertisement and hype. My absolute favorite summer art house movie has to be Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1999). I saw it three times that summer, and each time I clutched my seat, my heart pounding. I was amazed at how brilliantly Tywker had mapped out his three possible storylines and how lovely the small, quiet interludes were. I loved Franka Potente, and I loved his throbbing score, which practically entered into your bloodstream and pumped up your adrenaline by hand. Every color, movement and cut was designed for maximum effect (I've always been puzzled how Tykwer's movies since have seemed so long and sluggish.)

Also that same summer, John Sayles delivered his baffling adventure/suspense film Limbo, which had several people trapped on an island awaiting rescue and stalked by bad guys. The ending had everybody in an uproar and caused the film to die a quick death. The summer before that one, Darren Aronofsky's debut feature Pi gave me a good dose of sci-fi thrills, as well as a few head-scratching puzzles (which were actually real). 2000 was a particularly bad summer, but John Waters' Cecil B. DeMented provided a mischievous little oasis in the middle of it all. In that film, renegade filmmakers kidnap a Hollywood starlet and force her to be in their indie production; each team member has a tattoo of a maverick filmmaker's name. (I've often wondered which filmmaker's name I would pick for a tattoo? Maybe David Cronenberg...)

I have to admit, I wasn't crazy about this idea when they first announced it -- basically, a take on The Six Million Dollar Man, except the government only throws a measly $40,000 into this experiment. Great. Will Ferrell, Jack Black -- throw one of them in there, and it's just another doofy spring comedy. But now that The Hollywood Reporter tells us Terry Zwigoff will be directing, my anticipation meter just shot up. Zwigoff doesn't take on just any project; he's not one of those directors who's shoveling out a film every year. I guess you could say he's somewhat of an odd fellow, but I've loved each and every one of his films for different reasons. They're all slightly off, slightly warped -- each finding its own cult audience over time, with one (Bad Santa) hitting the right chords with more of the mainstream crowd, yet even that film could be deemed "out there."

But the news gets even better -- apparently Zwigoff, aside from directing the flick, will help re-write the script alongside his Ghost World partner Dan Clowes (both were nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for their work on that film's script). For those that adored Ghost World (and I know there's a ton of you out there), this is probably wonderful news -- even if it does sound like an odd project for the duo to take on. As I alluded to before, The $40,000 Man centers on an astronaut who's injured in a horrific crash and then re-built by the government on a shoe-string budget of $40,000. Zwigoff last helmed Art School Confidential, which I remember starting out as this goofy, mainstream teen comedy before turning into something completely different. One thing's for sure here -- however you think this film is going to end up, it will most likely go in the exact opposite direction. And I cannot wait.

Before I landed the stable, glamorous and lucrative job of film critic, I lived in a small town (population about 4500) with two movie screens (the theater expanded to a whopping five screens in the spring of 1985). As of the fall of 1984, I was already a movie nut. Over the course of the year, my parents drove me to see Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Starman and Dune. But it was in December that I saw the light. On their TV show, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert counted down their lists of the ten best films of 1984, which contained many titles that I hadn't seen and many others I hadn't heard of: Once Upon a Time in America, Amadeus, The Cotton Club; Paris, Texas; Love Streams, Stranger than Paradise, Secret Honor, This Is Spinal Tap, The Killing Fields, Choose Me, Entre Nous, A Passage to India, Micki & Maude, The Natural, and -- oddly -- Purple Rain. I scribbled down the titles and spent the next several months hunting for them on video, feverishly watching them on my family's primitive, but then brand-new, VCR.

Nowadays, with the Internet and all, people can look up dozens (hundreds?) of ten-best lists, and unless you have a favorite critic, the result is going to be more or less a consensus of all those lists. Sadly, that generally singles out the lowest common denominator choices, the films that have been specifically created, screened and promoted as award contenders. (In other words, the films that wound up on Richard Roeper's list.)

Between the hoards of self-conscious message movies and piles of garbage that didn't screen for the press, I saw, about two dozen films in 2006 that showed any kind of cinematic artistry. The movies that made my top ten list are movies that don't hand over any easy answers and have thus largely gone ignored this year. Moreover, these were films that used the form in a visual way, rather than simply unfolding a story on film like a big book-on-tape. The cinema isn't dead; it's just hiding...

I should note that my two favorite movies this year, Terrence Malick's The New World and Claire Denis' The Intruder officially count as 2005 movies, even though they opened in most theaters in 2006. So, with a broken heart, I leave them off the list. I also want to include a caveat that the year's most anticipated movie, David Lynch's Inland Empire, has only opened in New York and Los Angeles. No press screenings or screener DVDs have been available in any other city, so I have not been able to see it.

1. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
One of the world's greatest filmmakers has been working for over twenty years. Yet only two of his films have received U.S. distribution. Each starred the beautiful Shu Qi (known in this country for her role in The Transporter) and each lasted about a week in theaters. Three Times, a triptych about two lovers in the 1960s, the 1920s and the present day, isn't one of Hou's very best films, but the first segment alone -- set in the Vietnam era -- is arguably his most heartbreakingly lovely achievement. It towers over everything else released this year.

Here are today's newest looks at upcoming comic book movies. Surprise, surprise, it includes some new X-Men photos (although amazingly, there are no new Pictures of Steel today).

• Dark Horizons brings us a solid collection of new X-Men photos, the most interesting of them being a look at Colossus- although I might be biased, as Piotr has long been a favorite character of mine. Aside from that, there as several shots of X-men standing around the Professor in his wheelchair, a picture of Beast in a suit, and a picture of Wolverine getting some action (not the fighting kind of action).
• Coming Soon has a trailer of the new Art School Confidential film adaptation from the people who brought us Ghost World.
• This one is not so much an image as an annoucement of an annoucement of a soon to be coming image. JoBlo is reporting that the first teaser for Spider-Man 3 could be as little as six months away- and attached to Talladega Nights.

Talk about getting mileage out of a metaphor. On our Sundance video podcast, James Rocchi cracked that last year's Sundance hit Saw reminded him of David Fincher's Seven ... as performed by the Max Fischer Players, the grade school company spearheaded by the protagonist of Rushmore. I tried to come up with my own analogy to bring to the table, in discussing Art School Confidential, Terry Zwigoffs latest collaboration with Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, but James' framework just seemed so very apt. So, in 25 words or less: Art School Confidential is exactly what would happen if the Max Fischer Players tackled Heathers. In other words, it's a stilted satire of teenage passion and apathy, sex and death and crime. And like a classic Max Fischer production (if such a thing exists), it's so concerned with aping style that it never bothers to consider its characters as people.

Following in the success of their previous joint effort, the Academy Award nominated Ghost World, the creative team of director Terry Zwigoff and comics creator Daniel Clowes have reunited to bring us Art School Confidential, a movie based on the comic story of the same name. The flick sounds great so far, and you can now check out the official word at their newly launched website. ASC tells the story of a talented young artist who hopes to become the next big thing, but is disappointed when he arrives at a high profile art school only to find it populated by sensationalists and hacks. His talent is ignored and derided by the modern pseudo-artist scene.

I think Clowes' work is fantastic, and I was pleased with Zwigoff's film adaptation of Ghost World, so I'm certainly looking forward to ASC. And having Steve Buscemi in your cast list never hurts, as far as I am concerned. Also – is it just me, or is Ethan Suplee looking noticably trimmer in his post Titans years?