In a moving assessment of the work of the late British independent Derek Jarman, writer-director Michael Almereyda speaks admiringly of the director’s fearlessness in making films that were “intrinsically uneven, unclassifiable, imperfect.” Despite significant differences that separate their bodies of work—generational, geographic, political—this characterization could apply equally to the ambitious, eccentric, and highly personal films that have emanated over the past decade and a half from the pen and lens of Almereyda. His work as a screenwriter has led to associations with some of the edgier artists at work in contemporary cinema, including David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Wim Wenders.

His directorial efforts have alternated between low-budget genre assignments (like those Roger Corman gave to Demme, Coppola, Scorsese, and many others whose careers were launched in this milieu) and his own no-budget films. Despite the disparate nature of these projects—a vampire movie, a heartland satire, a mummy film, an East Village comedy—there is an insistent interest in the paranormal and the fantastic, complemented by a signature predilection for incorporating small-format imagery (especially the degraded videographic output of the toy Pixelvision camera). While his focus on the nature of human subjectivity and his uses of unorthodox visual techniques hark back to the experimental cinema of the 1960s, his media-savvy imagery, quirky dialogue, and obsessed characters—all evident in his brilliant new media-laden adaptation of Hamlet—firmly situate Almereyda and his “intrinsically uneven, unclassifiable, imperfect” oeuvre in the forefront of contemporary cinema.