7 movies we're really looking forward to seeing at UWM Union Theatre this fall

Last week UWM Union Theatre announced its fall 2010 program, and as always, The A.V. Club wasted no time making a list of must-see flicks playing at the city’s most adventurous movie theater. Before Union Theatre opens its upcoming season with Where The Wild Things Are Aug. 27, check out our list of seven movies we’re most looking forward to.

Nosferatu The Vampyre (Sept. 3-5)
A remake of/homage to the F.W. Murnau classic of the same title, Nosferatu nicely blends director Werner Herzog's sensibility with that of its inspiration. Klaus Kinski steps in for Max Schreck as the ghoulish Count Dracula, who journeys, although it's never clear why, from Transylvania to the German hometown of Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani. Kinski takes the wide-eyed, lonely maniacism of Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, another excellent pairing with Herzog, to its logical extreme, making for one of the most demented, creepy vampire portrayals of a genre that's had its share of them.

Trash Humpers (Sept. 10-12)
Though just 78 minutes, the latest from Harmony Korine might feel like the longest film of 2010, following the misadventures of three trash (and tree and fire hydrant) humpers in geriatric masks who look like crippled castaways from The Hills Have Eyes. Captured via surveillance-quality videos that look like unearthed ’80s home movies, they do the sort of things that Korine characters tend to do: smash stuff, tap dance on broken glass, and launch into inane ramblings that speak to the “American Nightmare.”

Ran (Sept. 25-26, 28)
A decade—and arguably an entire career—in the making, Akira Kurosawa's last great masterpiece, 1985's Ran ("chaos"), is one of the rare spectacles that's more than mere spectacle, a prismatic work containing riches beyond its justly celebrated battle sequences. With 1957's Throne Of Blood, his seminal Macbeth adaptation, Kurosawa proved himself capable of transposing Shakespeare to feudal Japan while seamlessly incorporating Noh and Kabuki traditions. Ditto Ran, which tweaks some of King Lear's plot elements to suit the sprawl of 16th-century clan wars, but still captures its essence with magnificent clarity and, at times, breathtaking visual poetry.

Everyone Else (Oct. 15-17)
In her extraordinary 2003 debut, The Forest For The Trees, German director Maren Ade charted the emotional breakdown of an idealistic young teacher who leaves her provincial home for the city, but isn’t socially equipped for the transition. The idea of “fitting in” is embedded in the title of Ade’s equally sharp, uncompromising follow-up film Everyone Else, about a couple struggling for self-definition against bourgeois norms. Other than their looks, enhanced by the lovely backdrop of a working vacation in Sardinia, there’s nothing remotely ingratiating about the couple (or the movie), but plenty of truths to be gleaned from their relationship.

The Killer Inside Me (Oct. 15017)
Casey Affleck has become a specialist at a particular character type: the soft-spoken gentleman whose dark and/or unsteady side works against his boyish good looks. In Michael Winterbottom and John Curran’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s pulp classic The Killer Inside Me, Affleck plays a small-town Texas lawman who believes in politeness and neighborliness, and loves how adherence to those values helps people keep their secrets. And as it happens, Affleck has some wicked secrets himself. He likes to play the rube just to get under people’s skin, beating women arouses him, and if he sees an opportunity to kill a person, he takes it.

The Warriors (Oct. 15-16)
A moody, eccentric take on the classic Homeric premise of a hero's journey home, Walter Hill’s The Warriors opens with delegates from all the New York City street gangs summoned to a single place for a speech by a messianic leader. Shortly after the speaker calls for the gangs to unite to terrorize the populace, he's shot by crazed hoodlum David Patrick Kelly, who immediately fingers the Coney Island gang The Warriors for the crime. With all the city's gangs after them, plus the police, the accused street toughs have to negotiate the subway system and enemy turf, where thugs like the Baseball Furies and the lesbian Lizzies await them. One of the few tailor-made cult movies that deserves its cult, The Warriors has a rich pulpy atmosphere that seems sprung from a lurid comic book.

The Human Centipede (Dec. 3-4)
Here’s the plot of the outrageous horror film The Human Centipede, for those who haven’t been paying attention to Internet memes this year: In Germany, a mad scientist (the wonderfully named Dieter Laser) decides to construct a human centipede. How does that work? He kidnaps three tourists (two American women and a man from Japan), and via an intricately described surgical process, stitches them together mouth-to-anus to form one long, continuous organism. Ta-da.