LIMITED RUN

48 Hour Film Project

See Blow Up. Neptune, Tues July 12 at 9 pm.

The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking

That freckled, red-haired creepy girl runs amok on the big screen. Central Cinema, Sat 4:30 pm, Sun noon, 2:15, 4:30 pm.

Auntie Mame

A GLAMN! (GayLesbianAlternative Movie Night) showing of the classic camp flick starring Rosalind Russel. Central Cinema, Wed 6:30, 9:30 pm.

Beyond Organic: A Vision of Fairview Gardens

A documentary about farming on the edge of a major suburban development. Environmental Learning Center, Seward Park, Wed July 7 at 7 pm.

Bone

From director Larry Cohen (Black Caesar) comes this strange 1959 film about race, class, extortion, and hostage taking. Starring the great Yaphet Kotto! Also known as Beverly Hills Nightmare! Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Whereas the last Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman collaboration, Human Nature, eventually crumbled under its own quirkiness, Eternal Sunshine finds director and scribe fitting perfectly together. This is a film that travels far beyond most of our imaginations. It is also one of the most beautifully assembled romances you will ever see. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

Happy Birthday Ray!

The Grand Illusion's celebration of Ray Harryhausen continues. All films screen at the Grand Illusion. Jason and the Argonauts, Fri 7, 11 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 7 pm, Tues-Thurs 7 pm. First Men in the Moon, Fri 9 pm, Sat 5, 11 pm, Sun 5 pm, Tues-Thurs 9 pm.

Hush!

Hush! is a film about an apparently Japanese lady who wants to get it on with an apparently gay Japanese engineer, for the purpose of having his baby. What subtleties of plot will she devise–the secret theft of sperm by way of exquisite technological devices, an open war on his homosexual psyche, the donning of transgendered attire? And just how does the word "hush" fit into this unsettling picture? Savery Hall Room 239, UW campus, Thurs July 14 at 7:30 pm.

Inlaws & Outlaws

See Stranger Suggests. Cinerama, Thurs July 7 at 7, 9 pm.

Invisible Invaders/Journey to the Seventh Planet

Two sci-fi schlockfests. Movie Legends, Sun July 10 at 1 pm.

King Creole

Elvis and Walter Matthau—together at last! Central Cinema, Wed-Sun 7, 9:30 pm.

Linda's Summer Movie Madness

This week: Classroom Classics #6, featuring classroom films from the '50s and '60s. Linda's, Wed July 13 at dusk.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"We're knights of the Round Table/We dance whene'er we're able/We do routines and chorus scenes with footwork impeccable/We dine well here in Camelot/We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot/We're knights of the Round Table/Our shows are for-mi-dable/But many times we're given rhymes that are quite un-sing-able/We're opera mad in Camelot/We sing from the diaphragm a lot/In war we're tough and able/Quite in-de-fa-ti-gable/Between our quests we sequin vests and impersonate Clark Gable/It's a busy life in Camelot." Fremont Outdoor Movies, Sat beginning at 8 pm.

Screenwriter's Salon

See Blow Up. Richard Hugo House, Mon July 11 at 7:30 pm.

Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll II: Rare Documentaries

MC5: A True Testimonial and Cocksucker Blues. Georgetown Records, Fri July 8 beginning at 10 pm.

A Summer Place

Part of the NWFF's "Summer Camp" series, this weird-ass flick contains these tantalizing elements: Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue, a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and a theme song from Max Steiner that you've undoubtedly heard if you've been in an elevator in the past three decades. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Wed 7, 9:30 pm.

Tell Them Who You Are

See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Wed 7:15, 9 pm.

Undead

See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 2, 4:30, 7:10, 9:45 pm, Mon-Thurs 7:10, 9:45 pm.

NOW PLAYING

The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D

Robert Rodriguez's latest kid movie explores the inherent sadness of childhood. Though the ending is happy, the substance of the film is sad, which is why it's the best kid's movie Robert Rodriguez has so far made. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Batman Begins

Taking equal inspiration from Sin City creator Frank Miller's Batman: Year One miniseries and artist Neil Adams' classic grim and gritty '70s run of Adam West apologia, Christopher Nolan and David Goyer's scenario circles back to the basics and has a ball reinventing the mythos. The defining elements are still there: boy loses parents, devotes life to fighting crime, becomes creature of the night. What's new is the filmmakers' attention to the inner life of their 2-D main character, devoting fully half their time to recounting Wayne's training and motivations for spending the nights all done up in batsuit. For the first time in a live-action recounting, the title character is actually allotted more attention than the inevitably showy villains. (Fear-gas maven The Scarecrow and eco-terrorist Ra's Al Guhl, for those fanboys keeping score.) As an origin story, it holds its own against the animated Mask of the Phantasm, previously the benchmark. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Bewitched

This Bewitched, by queen-of-cute writer/director Nora Ephron, is not a remake of the television show. It's a movie about a making a remake. You'd think this would lend the film some degree of ironic distance—or at least the opportunity to comment on the cultural significance of the original—but no. In this Bewitched, Nicole Kidman plays an adorable witch impersonating a normal woman (just like Elizabeth Montgomery in the original), who is then impressed into the Elizabeth Montgomery role in a remake of the original. Dizzying, no? It's like Bewitched sprouted an extra appendage that then, sponge-like, fell off and became an entity of its own. Kidman and Will Ferrell have zero chemistry, and there are precious few moments of genuine comedy, most of which involve either a dog or a man-hating production assistant. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Cinderella Man

If a gnarled creature were grown in a lab, bred and designed by unfeeling scientists to spend its soulless existence craving and consuming only Oscars... well, it would still come up short to Ron Howard's latest film. Cinderella Man, the much-ballyhooed reuniting of the team behind A Beautiful Mind, takes a story that's almost too perfect for cinematic recounting—over-the-hill boxer Gentleman Jim Braddock's legendary comeback during the Great Depression—and goes relentlessly, ploddingly by the numbers. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Crash

Crash certainly doesn't want for hubris, but ultimately stands as a case of laudable ambition overwhelming still-developing narrative abilities. Although his would-be epic of race relations in Los Angeles sports a handful of genuinely searing moments, it's hard to shake the sense of someone constantly rearranging three-by-five cards behind the scenes for maximum impact. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Heights

Based on a play, set among the idle rich, produced by Merchant/Ivory in unfamiliar modern-day mode: the early indicators of a tendon-stretching yawn are bodacious. Still, that old chestnut about initial impressions can occasionally be true. Heights, the fiercely entertaining, hugely precocious feature debut for 28-year-old director Chris Terrio, treads on some very familiar turf, but with enough style and unusual empathy to make the trip feel, if not quite new, well worth taking. And then there's Glenn Close. Man alive, what a performance. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Herbie: Fully Loaded

Rumors of star Lindsay Lohan's overly active social life and digitally reduced cup size may have led to toxic levels of advanced snark, but the rather unfortunately titled Herbie: Fully Loaded proves to be considerably less of a disaster than the Web buzz would suggest. What's more, as with Disney's previous Lohan-led retrofits from the vault, the results are honestly pretty entertaining; while not quite on a Freaky Friday level of surprise quality, the return of the beloved possessed Volkswagen should be a more-than-acceptable timewaster for both the jungle-gym set, and their captive chaperones. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Hitchhiker's Guide suffers from the same problem as planet Earth: too many Americans. Still, whenever there are at least two British actors on-screen—especially Martin Freeman, AKA Tim from The Office, or the film-stealing Bill Nighy—the movie version mines big, warm, absurd laughs alongside its hyper-imaginative graphics, and quasi-mystical pop metaphysicality. SEAN NELSON

The Holy Girl

This intoxicating film by Lucrecia Martel stars María Alche, a young Argentinean actor, and I'm tempted to say she's all the reason you need to see the movie. It's impossible to take your eyes off her, not because she's beautiful, exactly—though she has the smudged, rosy looks of a particularly luscious Renaissance Madonna—but because her face registers religious and sexual conflict with an alarming intensity. Her mouth crumples at the corners and her eyes become hooded as her character tries to will spiritual ecstasy or physical arousal, and she effortlessly navigates the tough contours of a plot that might not have made sense without her. Martel's direction is equally acute; even as the cinematography becomes more and more disorienting and hazily erotic, the emotional core of the film tightens until you have to remind yourself to breathe. (ANNIE WAGNER) Varsity, Fri-Sun 1:40, 4:15, 7:10, 9:40 pm, Mon-Thurs 7:10, 9:40 pm.

Howl's Moving Castle

When it comes to animation gods, there's Hayao Miyazaki, and then there's everybody else. Although reportedly considering retirement after completing the Oscar winning Spirited Away, Miyazaki was apparently intrigued enough by the prospect of adapting a novel by children's author Diana Wynne Jones to return to the drawing board. Now that the collaboration has finally made its way to the States, the results show that the material might actually have been too perfect a match for the director's patented sensibilities. For the first time, the Master's wondrous imagination feels slightly...familiar. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Interpreter

The Interpreter turns what could have been a smart and twisty political thriller—with heavy emphasis on political—into a bogged-down and bland mulling over of wounded souls and suppressed sexual attraction. It's hard to care about the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, since the actors seems to care very little about the characters themselves, and with their brooding relationship (kept chaste, thankfully) routinely burying the intricacies of the plot, interest easily wanes. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Kung Fu Hustle

Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, in which snazzy ax-wielding mobsters find themselves thwarted by a slum in which virtually every single senior citizen possesses mad fighting skills, is a loving send-up of seemingly every martial arts convention in the book. If you're in the mood for this sort of thing, the first 40 minutes or so are close to dead-solid perfect. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Ladies in Lavender

In this assemblage of implausible vignettes, Maggie Smith is the proper sister Janet, concerned with privacy and appearances. Judi Dench plays Ursula, a fragile little biddy stuck in a permanent state of childish desperation because—this is actually in the script—she's never been properly fucked. They like to garden and knit, and the camera likes to follow gulls as they soar majestically over the beach. Then, a hot teen boy (Daniel Brühl) washes up on the shore. Ursula goes crazy; Janet huffs and acts a little weird herself (her husband died long ago). The kid doesn't speak a word of English, and there's a brief moment when someone suspects he might be a German spy, but then that tangent trails off, and he's actually a Polish violin prodigy. Luckily, the sexy Franco-Russian girl next door has a famous maestro for a brother, and the movie ends with a rousing concert, which (like everything else in this film) is flimsy and unintentionally sad. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Land of the Dead

In the two decades since director George Romero last ventured into the realm of the undead, his original vision has been overtaken by a horde of fleet-footed, gut-munching pretenders. Big Daddy is back, and he's still got his teeth. Free of the financial stumbling block that hamstrung his previous Day of the Dead, Romero's ongoing concept of zombie evolution continues: here, the living are confined to a single Ballardian highrise (led by Dennis Hopper, of all people), with the dead folks taking up arms and organizing en masse just outside. Happily, despite adopting a leaner, action-oriented tone, Romero's genius for depicting the undead as alternately tragic, pathetic, comedic and ultimately terrifying remains intact. The shambling hordes still just want to get ya, but they also drag along the shopping carts and tubas from their former lives. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Lords of Dogtown

Director Catherine Hardwicke's (Thirteen) thinly fictionalized film follows a tribe of ne'er-do-well skating gods as they empty pools, bust 180s, and break hearts throughout So Cal. Dueling contracts and monster egos soon splinter the group, but the mutual love of the rush remains. Hardwicke clearly idolizes the energy of these kids, possibly a little too much. Her manic hand-held style and Larry Clark-lite shirtless fetishizing runs the risk of turning off anyone not already amped to the rafters. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Mad Hot Ballroom

In terms of scope, the first-time director and writer may have bitten off a bit more than they can comfortably chew, as the scenes of the kids' ballroom dancing contest come off as alternately long-winded and confusing. The ability to fashion anything even remotely comprehensible out of hundreds of hours of footage is admirable, but a slightly heavier hand in the editing bay could have worked wonders. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

March of the Penguins

I have never liked penguins, and now that I've watched this documentary I like them even less. To begin with, the creatures have ugly feet, and their awkward walk makes them look like sitting ducks. I'm surprised the penguin is not, like the dodo, extinct. March of the Penguins has one great moment: when it shows a group of female penguins going into the sea and swimming through the water in the way their featured relatives fly through the air. The water is clear blue, the surrounding ice forms a majestic architecture, and the penguins zip here and there, chasing fish and avoiding sea lions. But when they're back on the land, back on their ugly feet, all of the grace is gone and once again the penguin is a dull and clumsy creature. The only animal worth making a documentary about is the human. (CHARLES MUDEDE )

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Miranda July's feature-film debut is delicate and tense, a movie with a visual language so powerful that it seems to expand out of the movie theater and onto the sidewalk. Against a waterlogged electronic score by Michael Andrews, her characters bubble-wrap belongings, eulogize goldfish, draw ASCII tigers, tap quarters against bus stop poles, wear inspirational shirts that can only be read in the mirror, press dot stickers for good luck, flash their underwear at leering guys, and light themselves on fire. The movie is set in Portland (characters refer to Burnside Street and Laurelhurst Park) but it was shot in L.A. (witness the palm trees), and the discrepancy serves to displace the story from either setting. July's is a fantastical world where the most important contours are human shapes, where intense sexual longing collides with the paradoxical wish to escape your own skin, where those who have power try to abdicate it, and those who are powerless act out in agonizing, self-deceiving ways. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Millions

Danny Boyle has crafted a kid-friendly fable with enough sly modern-day relevance to keep adults from checking their watches. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Monster-in-Law

The beginning of this movie is so horrible, so bland, so curdled, so... well, typical, as romantic comedies go, that once the prospective mother-in-law (Jane Fonda) digs her claws into the bride-to-be (Jennifer Lopez), you can't help cheering wildly. It's like watching a bad movie eat itself. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

All Mr. & Mrs. Smith does is build to a fiery conclusion it never even attempts to earn, with both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie reduced to mere prop status along the way. Director Doug Liman still knows how to shoot action—his loose, even careless style brought a surprising amount of realism to Bourne Identity, and here it adds a sense of playfulness to all the gunplay—but this time action is all he has to offer. Pretty people making pretty explosions does not a good movie make. Just ask that ultimate hack Michael Bay. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

My Summer of Love

To be perfectly frank, a filmmaker better have one hell of a good reason to infringe on the turf of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. With that said, full props are due to screenwriter/director Pawel Palikowski. Without ever quite hitting the operatic heights of Jackson's genuine masterpiece, the former documentarian's My Summer of Love achieves a nervy, wonderfully het up fervor of its very own. Loosely based on Helen Cross' award-winning novel, the film focuses on Mona, a lower-class lost Yorkshire soul who lives in the upstairs of a grotty pub. Languishing one day in the tall grass, she stumbles across the path of Tamsin, a disdainful upper-crust spending the summer in the cavernous mansion of her zombified parents. Emotions soon run high, to the chagrin of the straight-laced community, personified by Mona's newly born again brother (Paddy Considine), an ex-con whose dangerous, raging ape temper is never more than one ill-advised word away. Inspired largely by the director's time spent researching small town religious zealotry for an aborted documentary, Considine's wild card of a character serves to wonderfully up the illogical attraction ante. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Rebound

After a quick jaunt with animal cruelty, superstar college basketball coach Roy (Martin Lawrence) finds that his once striving career, littered with product endorsements and fame, is on very thin ice. The ice is so thin, in fact, Roy faces banishment from the league if he doesn't prove himself capable of coaching a team without losing streaks, temper tantrums, and otherwise making a complete spectacle of himself and the entire sport of basketball. The new team he's assigned to coach while on probation? The Mount Vernon Smelters, his junior high alma mater. Predictably, the Smelters are hardly the career-saving champions Roy was hoping for; they are, in fact, a gaggle of awkward middle school kids with low self-image and zero talent. But, manned with enough patience, a few exciting sports montages, and the burning desire to get into one of the teammates' mom's pants, Coach Roy's convinced he can turn the team into winners. Sadly, though, he's really not all that funny while doing it. Unless you're 12. Then he's fucking hilarious. (MEGAN SELING)

Saving Face

A harried, bookwormy doctor's tentative attempts at same-sex romance with a free-spirited ballerina are scuttled when she becomes roomies with her newly shamed mother (Joan Chen). Seattle native Alice Wu's amiably low-key debut suffers a bit from the standard crowd-pleasing rom-com conventions, but stays afloat due to some effective wisecracks and the unforced, charming lead performance of the gorgeous Michelle Krusiec. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Episode III will, indeed, be impossible to resist. Like it or not, the Force is with all of us, and I for one am more than happy to have seen the series through. Though the film has its truly embarrassing elements—romance, as always, remains an elusive creature to Lucas, and in the end the evil Sith lord's scheme to turn Anakin over to the dark side is hysterically obvious (who knew Darth Vader was such an easily manipulated dolt?)—at this point there's doesn't seem to be much of a reason to quibble. The epic many of us grew up with has reached its end; a moment of silence, please, for both what was and what could have been. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

War of the Worlds

Though I usually take his side, if only for sport, the first hour of War of the Worlds had me convinced that Steven Spielberg had finally proven his detractors right. Before the bad things start happening, the stage is set for the kind of soulless, CGI-driven family redemption saga that could only happen in a grillion dollar movie. But then something happens. The supreme achievement of the effects seems to galvanize Spielberg into earning them. The drama enters some very dark territory, always motorized by the unimaginable terror of the invincible invaders—it's like the material is daring the director to show us what he's got. (SEAN NELSON)

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

On paper, this documentary about the five-year relationship between a gentle, sporadically homeless hippie with no visible means of support and an unruly flock of birds sounds like a recipe for instant tooth decay. Darned if it doesn't work, though. (ANDREW WRIGHT)