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...)

In the spirit of the season and goodwill and whatnot, I thought I'd forgo griping about the sorry state of things this week and instead send out some love to the downtrodden, the small films of 2007 that were somehow overlooked, underrated or outright ignored in some way. Let's start with the Russian film The Italian, released in January, which caused critics to dredge up the word "Dickensian" for the first time in a while. But for all that it was a surprising, deeply-felt story of an orphan who escapes the orphanage to find his birth-parents.

Kino released the documentary Romantico in January as well, and they're apparently counting it as a 2007 release. I wrote a few weeks back about the documentary format; there's certainly a place for journalism and reporting, but the very best documentaries, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that capture the details of life, like Crumb, Hoop Dreams and To Be and to Have. Romantico is one of those. It tells the story of a mariachi illegally based in San Francisco who decides to go back to Mexico to see his family, even though he risks never being able to return (of course, his income in the States is much higher than in Mexico). Romantico will most certainly be overlooked in any discussion of 2007's documentaries, but it's worth seeking out on DVD.

Johnny To's Exiled grabbed me from its very first musical cue. The twang of a Spaghetti Western guitar reverberates, echoing through the empty streets outside a small home in Macau. Men with murder in mind have come to call on an old colleague. You just know that bullets will fly and blood will flow. As Scott Weinberg wrote, it's a "fast-paced and surprisingly amusing piece from a stunningly prolific Hong Kong moviemaker who really knows his genre stuff." The DVD hits shelves this week from Magnolia, with "making of" and "behind the scenes" features.

The great Bruce Lee made only a few films as an adult before his untimely and way too early death. His first celluloid outings came when he was just a sapling. The Kid features 10-year-old Lee as an orphan who is taken under the wings of a petty thief. A kindly factory owner, played by Lee's real-life father, tries to help him onto the path of the straight and narrow. Peter Nepstad of The Illuminated Lantern (a wonderful site) called it "a great example of early Cantonese cinema, a showcase of a little boy who grows up to become a huge star ... a movie not to be missed." The DVD comes courtesy of Cinema Epoch, though no feature details have surfaced.

Long before Samuel L. Jackson had his fateful encounter with hundreds of slithering reptiles, The Killer Snakes were crawling around cinemas. John Charles of Hong Kong Digital (another great site) described this 1974 Shaw Brothers production as an "incredibly sordid HK thriller [that] mixes gruesome horror, perverse sex, and animal cruelty into a most unsavory brew. ... Even almost 30 years after it was produced, this remains one potent and disturbing little picture." (He wrote his review of the Region 3 DVD several years ago.) Perhaps needless to say, no CGI was used. The newly-released Region 1 DVD from Image Entertainment contains a stills gallery and a collection of Shaw Brothers trailers.

The October 1 deadline looms large, and the countries that have not yet submitted their candidates for the Best Foreign Language Film category at next year's Oscars are hurrying to do so. Three nations announced their choices over the weekend: Hong Kong, Estonia, and Macedonia.

Hong Kong's pick is Exiled, from the much-buzzed-about action director Johnnie To (whose Triad Election played in a few U.S. cities earlier this year). It's an underworld crime caper full of shooting and double-crosses and associated mayhem. Not typical Oscar fare, maybe -- but then again, The Departed won Best Picture this year. Scott Weinberg reviewed Exiled mostly favorably at the Philadelphia Film Festival in April.

Two Hong Kong films have earned nominations in this category before -- Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine -- but the country has no wins so far.

Estonia chose The Class, a disturbing drama about high school students who takes revenge against bullies. Directed by Ilmar Raag, the film has played at film festivals in Cannes, Karlovy Vary, and Copenhagen. This is only the fifth time Estonia has submitted a film for Oscar consideration; before 1991, the country was part of the Soviet Union.

Macedonia's candidate is Milcho Manchevski's Shadows, a drama about a doctor whose life changes after he survives what should have been a fatal car accident. Macedonia -- which you'll find wedged between Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece -- broke off from Yugoslavia in 1991. This is the country's sixth Oscar submission since then.

Major players such as Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and China haven't announced their submissions yet, so watch for that news in the next few days.

Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours is back on the charts this week, playing on one lone screen, in Denver, according to my information. Among its other qualities and achievements, it marks the fourth collaboration of director Oliveira and actor Michel Piccoli (a fifth, a short segment in an anthology film, appeared earlier this year). At 81, Piccoli is practically a living legend, having worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, Mario Bava, and many other greats. He also appears in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 Le Doulos, currently re-released on 2 screens. It's a delicate relationship between director and actor; Piccoli and Oliveira seem to be developing a comfortable working relationship in which each brings out the best in the other. This has happened relatively few times over the past century. When it happens, it can be very exciting, but when a director and an actor don't click, everything can fall to pieces.

Milos Forman has coaxed and guided some great performances over the years, notably Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus and Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. But he has rarely been praised for directing women, as evidenced by his awkward handling of Natalie Portman in the awful Goya's Ghosts (37 screens). The movie earned advance attention for its nude/sex scene, but will probably be remembered for fitting Portman with a set of humorously bad fake teeth and for her self-consciously dazed walk, newly released from prison, through a chaotic town square. Forman may be to blame, but Portman is out there, on the screen, all alone and in front of everyone.

With many taking full advantage of the long holiday weekend, myself included, the box office numbers tumbled in a bit later than usual, but it appears that Spanish-language thriller Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón won on a per-screen basis with an average of $6,090 at 340 locations, based on estimates by Leonard Klady of Movie City News. That put it #2 overall in per-screen averages behind Rob Zombie's Halloween. In Ladrón, two thieves resolve to steal the fortune of an man who's built his empire by selling useless health aids to poor people via infomercials. The official site has the fake infomercials plus Spanish and English language versions of the trailer.

Death at a Funeral is holding up nicely, averaging $5,260 on 264 screens for distributor MGM. Directed by Frank Oz, the dark ensemble comedy declined just 2% while adding three screens in its third week of release. Also in its third week out, the superb doc The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters increased its take by 27.3%, according to Box Office Mojo, adding seven screens and averaging $4,571. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg gave each film a positive review, and word of mouth must be good.

Other debuting specialty titles included John August's The Nines, which drew an extremely healthy $14,650 each at the two screens where it was booked. (Our own Ryan Stewart really liked it too.) On its sole screen, Indian drama Vanaja made $10,500, which should be considered a triumph in view of it subject matter and lack of stars. (Read Christopher Campbell's positive review to see why: I've seen it and I agree completely.) Johnny To's Exiled finally made its theatrical premiere. I loved this terrific, tangy, self-aware, modern Hong Kong Western -- Scott Weinberg liked it, though not as much as me -- so I wish it made more than $9,550 in two engagements so far.

Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs dropped an astounding 81.4% in its second week, taking in just $1,100 for a total of $14,200 so far. Good thing the budget was low. You'd have to think that all the press on so-called "mumblecore" films in general would help, but perhaps the audience is more limited than expected or hoped.

Exiled is a movie that demands you pay very close attention for the first fifteen minutes, because the flick doesn't stop to deliver big blocks of exposition or early character development. We open with a half-dozen gun-wielding men. We don't know the good guys from the bad guys or why they're all wielding those guns. An elaborately hectic gun battle breaks out ... and then the surviving combatants drop their weapons and begin renovating an apartment. Yes, seriously. Don't mistake Johnny To's Exiled for a convoluted or indecipherable affair, though; it's actually quite a simple little story -- but the veteran filmmaker seems to be having some fun by dropping us into the mix without a map and commanding us to keep up.

It's a pretty engrossing first act, I can tell you that much, and if the rest of Exiled doesn't quite live up to its early promise, there's still more than enough mayhem to keep the gangster fans entertained. Plus it kind of turns into a western in Act III, which I found bizarre but also quite entertaining. The meat of the story is fairly basic: A bunch of childhood friends, now on opposite sides of warring families, must band together to avoid a common enemy. Picture The Dirty (Half) Dozen of Asian mafioso types, and that's pretty much Exiled to a tee. It's a fast-paced and surprisingly amusing piece from a stunningly prolific Hong Kong moviemaker who really knows his genre stuff.

Hot off its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Magnolia Pictures has nabbed the English-language rights to Johnny To's action thriller, Exiled. As part of a three-way pact (with Optimum Releasing for UK rights and Madman Entertainment for rights in Australia and New Zealand), pic marks the second acquisition for the three companies, after teaming up to snag The Host this past May at Cannes, where Magnolia also picked up the genre title Severance.

Set in Hong Kong's underworld and modeled after To's 1999 hit The Mission, Exiled packed its cast with folks like Roy Cheung, Francis Ng, Anthony Wong and Simon Yam. Says Magnolia's President Eamonn Bowles, "A lot of people thinking that the Hong Kong gangster film ran its course in the nineties are going to be pleasantly surprised by the freshness and innovation of Exiled. Now comes the more (or less) important question: How long before an American filmmaker decides to orchestrate a remake?