Director Guy Maddin has been making Canadian cinema excitingly weird for several decades now. His latest feature, The Green Fog, screens a few more times this week at Gene Siskel Film Center, and his 1990 feature Archangel screens next Monday as part of the Doc Films series “Beyond Hollywood North: Contemporary Canadian Voices and Visions.” Following are five more films spanning Maddin’s career; also be sure to check out Jonathan Rosenbaum’s long review of Maddin’s great 2000 short The Heart of the World.
Brand Upon the Brain! In Guy Maddin’s latest piece of deranged heterosexual camp (2006), a housepainter named Guy Maddin comes home after 30 years to fulfill his dying mother’s request that he repaint the lighthouse where she used to run a sinister orphanage and all the kids had mysterious holes in their heads. Additional intrigues involve a teenage sleuth who poses as her own brother. Narrated by Isabella Rossellini and enhanced by Jason Staczek’s superb score, this is characteristically intense and, unlike most of Maddin’s silent-movie models, frenetically edited. 95 min. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
