Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski’s new English language film The Mill and the Cross is a fascinating exercise in form and artistic experimentation. The film itself is a project brought forth by a dialogue between various art forms. It’s based on Michael Francis Gibson’s book of the same name and focuses on the lives of the many characters depicted in Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous work The Way to Calvary (1564), a painting that features literally hundreds of individuals and a crucifixion allegory to boot. It seems almost natural that such a film would arise from the meeting of artistic minds across centuries, using a relatively new art form to give temporality and space to another. And Majewski’s film, like any considerable work of visual art, has striking visuals and composition, not so much enlivening the everyday tasks of the characters in this painting with “realism” but depicting it through the opportunities of artistic representation. Thus, The Mill and the Cross is a fully aware and intentionally engaged with artifice and its process. Why then, is its very artificiality so off-putting?

After seeing Rutger Hauer in Hobo With a Shotgun, there’s no doubt that he’ll be a complete badass as Van Helsing for Dracula 3D. After all, Van Helsing is effectively a drifter with a 19th century shotgun. How will he stack up against Peter Cushing, Christopher Plummer and, gulp, Hugh Jackman? There’s no telling, but with horror icon Dario Argento at the helm, the movie will at least promise to be absurd and full of the red stuff. These first shots from the film show off just a little blood, a lot of Hauer, and more proof that Argento is unafraid to make a maiden go bottomless in a barn. Here are 6 of the many, many images over at the film’s official website.

To do a B-movie right, to straddle without crossing the precarious line between hilarity and stupidity, is no small feat. Jason Eisener achieves it with Hobo with a Shotgun, which reaches heights of comic literal-mindedness that the comparatively mild Snakes on a Plane could not. This is, yes, a movie about a hobo with a shotgun, but it’s also an inspired parody of the post-apocalyptic whack-a-mole revenge flick, a film with stronger than expected acting and an ideal dose of energized mania. The immortal Rutger Hauer stars as the titular hobo, who rides the rails into a lawless town populated by seething, ranting maniacs of all stripes. The debauchery is too much to handle – the hobo’s first day in, he’s greeted by a man filming bum fights and an extended set piece in which resident super villain The Drake (Brian Downey) beheads his brother in full view of the public, after which his scantily clad mistress gyrates and devours the fountain of blood. The baddie and his sons (Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith), nightmarish versions of ’80s Tom Cruise, exert a stranglehold over this decaying, crime-ridden megalopolis, where plumes of smoke pour over the streets and gritty, yellowed industrial building mix with seedy punk-populated arcades.

The first teaser trailer for Hobo With a Shotgun (that wasn’t the first trailer that the movie was based on), featured a lot of the candy-colored ultra violence that the kids crave these days. Basically, it was awesome. This trailer is awesome in an altogether different way – the way that sees Rutger Hauer soliloquizing in front of a room full of newborns, telling them they’ll grow up to be prostitutes, pimps and pushers. It’s dramatic, deep, and it leads into just a glimpse of the insanity that follows.

Hobo with a Shotgun is a gritty, nasty, depraved movie that no parent should let their child watch…and I loved every goddamn minute of it. It’s rare that we film journos are given the opportunity to be reduced to slimy, foul-mouthed 12-year-olds within the safe confines of a movie theater, but I’ll be a tiny little bastard if this film didn’t turn me into…a tiny little bastard. Its brazen conceit and relentless insanity touched upon all the things that pint-sized Brian loved about watching movies. But, as Attack the Block taught us, it’s not simply enough to compile the various pieces of genre films in a room together and expect them to play nice. And while Hobo with a Shotgun isn’t aiming for the same socially relevant subtext and deeper meaning of Attack the Block, within the rules it establishes from the onset, it shoots for the same high score in excellence. Scratch the surface of Hobo with a Shotgun, divorce yourself from the wickedly indecent content, and you will find a damn fine film that excels on almost every technical and artistic level. I am incredibly impressed with Jason Eisener as a director. There is a certain expectation with which one enters a film knowing that it began life as a trailer created to win a contest. But Eisener goes to such great lengths to tell his story in a way that is both stylishly entertaining and visually interesting that it’s hard not to be taken in by it. [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Do you even need to read the rest of this post to get more excited? As we all know, Dario Argento is prepping Dracula 3D to shoot this Spring, and according to Twitch (via Italian media), Rutger Hauer will be moving on from playing a Hobo wielding a two-barreled firearm to Van Helsing – the iconic vampire killer. Hopefully a two-barreled crossbow will be involved. This is just one more step in Hauer’s Rourke-like return to prominence. Although he didn’t land hard with an Oscar nomination, he’s in his Sin City phase (which oddly enough didn’t come when he was in Sin City). He’s got five total films set to come out this year, a few more indies on the docket, and if he can land a high profile dramatic gig, we could see him acting crazy on an awards dais as early as 2012. Hope spring eternal. The idea of Hauer as Van Helsing is inspired. He’s grizzled yet refined in that way only European actors can manage. He also does wonderful, unspeakable things in Hobo With a Shotgun, so the violence he could perpetrate against those damned bloodsuckers might almost make up for Dracula III: The Legacy. Where, of course, he was on the other end of the stake.

The first trailer for Hobo With a Shotgun was, of course, technically a fake trailer. With the first trailer that actually corresponds to a movie coming out, it looks like director Jason Eisener wanted us to see the deeply human side of the hobo. This is perfect for Rutger Hauer, the unnerving master of all things uncomfortable. The look that he gives in this is the human equivalent of chugging a big gulp of curdled milk. Just for fun, we’re putting the trailers up side by side for a comparison. Both battle for bloody supremacy, but only one of them is doing it for the kids.* *Trailers not suitable for children.

It hasn’t even been a week since we reported that Rutger Hauer was going to star in Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun. We’ve already got some teaser footage from the Nova Scotia set.

It is always wonderful to see an enterprising filmmaker go from shorts to feature films, especially if their shorts are among the best of what we’ve seen in recent years. Such is the case with Canadian filmmaker Jason Eisener, whose shorts Hobo with a Shotgun.

You may remember a little soccer movie called ‘Goal’ from 2005. It made a big splash, and now it is getting a sequel. And we’ve got some exclusive new images from said sequel.