Sal

While it may seem impossible that James Franco has already directed another movie—even given Franco’s prolificacy and standards for deeming something a finished work of art—there’s an explanation for that. His “latest” movie, Sal, was actually completed in 2010, but it’s only now making its way to VOD and select theaters after a couple of festival screenings. Also, it was shot on basically no budget in just nine days, and it’s loosely related to Rebel Without A Cause—the 1955 film James Dean made as the first phase in Franco’s lifelong art project—so it’s possible most of those nine days were just spent, say, taking grainy Polaroids of prostitutes. They certainly weren’t spent on the sets: Most of Franco’s look at the last day in actor Sal Mineo’s life is in extreme close-up (not unlike Franco’s life), with Franco keeping a tight focus on the mundane details of Mineo’s final hours that, conveniently, also crops out any visible clues that this definitely isn’t 1976. Franco himself only appears briefly, as, fittingly, a very narrow look at the back of James Franco’s head.