Let’s start with something everyone likes: free films! Yes, the U of T’s Cinema Studies Student Union has revealed the new Free Friday Films line-up, starting tonight with Atom Egoyan’s Exotica. Next week is Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Feb. 23 features a Cult Night triple-bill, with Monster Squad, The Brood, and The Human Tornado all showing. Screenings are at Innis College Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.

Also screening at the Innis is a repeat screening of the Reel Asian Film Festival Audience Award winning film Journey from the Fall, this Saturday at 7:00pm. Not cheap, however, at $15 a ticket ($10 for students.)

Cinematheque Ontario is offering a free screening on Wednesday, a tribute to James Tenney with works by Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann (at 6:30pm) But the pick of Cinematheque this week must be their Shohei Imamura retrospective, which features classics such as The Pornographers, on this Saturday at 8:30 pm.

Excellently, the Bloor and the Royal are both doing independent cinema proud with some great offerings this week, with the Bloor showing This Film Is Not Yet Rated and the Royal showing 13 Tzameti.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated is rated (oh the irony!) at least fairly highly by the critics. Now’s Deirdre Swain asks, however “Aside from being a nifty coup, what does revealing the raters themselves accomplish?” Which reminds us of The Golden Globes: Hollywood's Dirty Little Secret, the documentary that reveals the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to be a bunch of star-obsessed nobodies. The answer to Deirdre’s question? Well, probably not much, but it’s good to know, don't you think?

The Royal’s offering? Jason Anderson calls 13 Tzameti “effective as a thriller [and] equally ruthless as an allegory about money, power and the expendability of human life.”

There’s little special new outside of the indies, though, with a retread of mid-eighties horror flick The Hitcher hitting (The original starred Rutger Hauer! We don’t mind Sean Bean but come on! That dude is iconic, why bother?) Though there is the critically acclaimed Venus, starring Peter O’Toole as a drunken and creepy old man that likes to letch on younger women. What a stretch, eh?