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As theaters tentatively start to reopen around the U.S. without the usual glut of studio product to fill their screens, there’s an opportunity for filmmakers who previously might not have edged their way very deeply into U.S. cinemas to find a wider audience. That’s particularly true of Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald, whose fantasy crime comedy “Dreamland” is being released by Uncork’d Entertainment and Dark Star Pictures on June 5, day and date with VOD.

McDonald, known for films like “Roadkill,” “Hard Core Logo” and “Pontypool,” which mash up humor with adventure, music or horror — and sometimes all of these — felt that for “Dreamland,” he needed to venture outside the familiar environs of Canada to find the right locale to bring the story to life. The movie, which reunites the director with “Pontypool” novelist and screenwriter Tony Burgess, follows a hitman tasked with obtaining the pinkie finger of...

The Beast in the Jungle

Dutch director Clara van Gool tackles the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle, adapting the text as a dance-based romantic melodrama, stretching the narrative from its 19th century setting to the present. Produced by Hanneke Niens and Hans de Wolf of KeyFilm, with co-production credit for Bady Minck and Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu of Amour Fou Luxembourg, the film is lensed by Richard Van Oosterhout and stars South African choreographer/dancer Dane Jeremy Hurst and Irish dancer Sarah Reynolds. Clara van Gool won an Emmy Award for performing arts for 1996’s Enter Achilles.…...

Is Paul Verhoeven cinema’s most successful mimic? When he went to Hollywood for 1987’s RoboCop, the Dutch director integrated himself so well in his host culture that 1995’s showbiz melodrama Showgirls is still taken by many as foolhardy trash rather than a corrosive critique so intimate with its subject as to appear nearly—or in fact be—indistinguishable. After a return to his home country to make Black Book, one of the 2000s best thrillers and most devilishly twisted recreations of World War 2, and an experiment with a crowd-sourced screenplay in the unusual 2012 short feature Tricked, Verhoeven has changed host bodies yet again, this time to French cinema. Therefore, of course, he mimics the most perfect of French films: a thriller focused on sexual politics and starring Isabelle Huppert.The premise of Elle, adapted from from Philippe Djian's book Oh..., has a horrible come-on: from the director of Basic Instinct,...