LIMITED RUN

42nd Street
The Depression-era musical by Lloyd Bacon, with kalaidoscope choreography by Busby Berkeley. Movie Legends, Sun Sept 4 at 1 pm.

Ghostbusters
"That's a big Twinkie." Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

Harold Lloyd Comedies
Though he isn't as well known to modern audiences as Chaplin and Keaton, the bespectacled bungler Harold Lloyd used to sell equally well at the box office—and his silent films sport the same brilliant pacing today. Lloyd is less of a sympathy sinkhole than his clowning brethren; he's a stunt man, and in Safety Last, his lipsticked smirk doesn't fully engage the audience until that famous final scene in which he scales the side of a buildng. But damn if that scene won't completely seduce you. The conceit, which involves a body double who's being chased up flights of stairs by a policeman, is ridiculous to the point of hilarity, and the climb itself is pure, sweaty-palmed pleasure. Struck by plagues ranging from aggressive urban pigeons to slippery nets that fall from nowhere, Lloyd often does nothing more than squirm, look nauseous, and hold on. And it's great. (ANNIE WAGNER) All films screen at the Varsity. Safety Last and Girl Shy, Fri-Sat; The Freshman and Speedy, Sun-Mon; The Kid Brother and Dr. Jack, Tues-Wed; Why Worry? and For Heaven's Sake, Thurs Sept 8. See Movie Times for details.

Ingmar Bergman Film Festival
See Blow Up. The Ingmar Bergman film festival continues at both the Grand Illusion and SAM. At the Grand Illusion: The Magic Flute, Weekdays 6:45 pm, Sat-Sun 2:30, 6:45 pm; The Devil's Eye, Weekdays 9:15 pm, Sat-Sun 5, 9:15 pm. At Seattle Art Museum: The Seventh Seal, Thurs Sept 1 at 7:30 pm; Wild Strawberries, Thurs Sept 8 at 7:30 pm.

Rebel Without a Cause
See Stranger Suggests and Blow Up. Northwest Film Forum, Daily 7, 9:15 pm (7 pm screening on Fri Sept 2 introduced by screenwriter Stewart Stern).

Who Is Bozo Texino?
See Stranger Suggests. Central Cinema, Fri-Sun 6:30, 8:15, 10 pm (final screening of each night 21+ w/ ID required).

NOW PLAYING

2046
2046, the long-awaited quasi-continuation of Wong Kar-Wai's swoony masterpiece In the Mood for Love, takes the director's trademark peccadilloes—women in high-necked dresses, lingering regrets, pop songs as holy writ—to what often feels like a rapturous endpoint. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Surprisingly smart and unashamed of a little jolt to the heartstrings, it's a sly movie, happy to shock occasionally, but happier still to bless its characters with the intelligence sorely lacking from most comedies. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

The Aristocrats
In The Aristocrats, dozens of comedians tell variations on the dirtiest joke in the world. In the end, the joke is just a vehicle for allowing these humormongers the opportunity to flex muscles their entertainment careers seldom allow them to flex. It's been at least two decades since Martin Mull has had a vehicle capable of expressing his brilliance, and he all but steals The Aristocrats. That honor belongs to Gottfried, whose performance of the joke at a Friars Club roast forms the soul of the film. (SEAN NELSON)

Asylum
As he previously showed with Young Adam, director David Mackenzie knows his way around a realistically grotty sex scene, but proves rather less successful detailing the progressively self-destructive nature of his characters. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Batman Begins
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. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Broken Flowers
This being a Jarmusch film, patience rules the day. Unfortunately, as with the fatally inert Coffee and Cigarettes, the style can't hold. Jarmusch's best films have always been built around an amicably aimless spirit, but Broken Flowers is undermined by a lack of drive comparable to that of its main character. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

The Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm seems tailor-made for director Terry Gilliam, yet it suffers from general incoherency, murky cinematography, and, frankly, irretrievably bad performances from Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, the two lead actors. (SEAN NELSON)

The Cave
While exploring a mysterious river system deep under the Romanian mountains, a group of foolhardy spelunkers get turned into Lunchables by a bloodthirsty pack of constantly evolving man-bats. That's about it, really. Debuting director Bruce Hunt (previously responsible for second-unit Matrix work) has atmosphere to burn (and one lulu of a set-piece involving a rock-climbing Piper Perabo), but his mixmaster editing style drains away much of the film's urgency, if not basic comprehensibility, early on. It's tough to get freaked out when you can't tell what the hell is going on. Still, the bats are pretty cool, especially when wending their way through the stalagti ... stalagmite ... the ones that point down. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The moment Willy Wonka makes his big entrance, cheering as an "It's a Small World"–style diorama bursts into flames, it's plain to see that Johnny Depp is in a world, and indeed a film, all his own. The problem—or maybe the point—is that the chocolate factory just isn't very magical. (SEAN NELSON)

Crónicas
John Leguizamo plays Manolo Bonilla, a hotshot reporter for a tabloid news show called One Hour with the Truth. Soon after arriving at a poor Ecuadorian village called Babahoyo, Manolo learns the identity of a serial killer. Manolo's fame in Latin America is huge; even the serial killer, who is in jail on unrelated charges, is one of his biggest fans. The serial killer, however, wants to get out of jail, and so he summons the reporter and makes Manolo the kind of offer that only the devil can make. And if there is anything we have learned since Faustus, in the end any gift from Lucifer is rotten. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Four Brothers
If, as the occasional brief moment suggests, this is all a straight-faced parody of such trash classics as Slaughter's Big Rip-Off and Truck Turner, John Singleton may have bigger talents than anyone has ever suspected. If serious, however, lord help us. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Great Raid
Escaping from the shelves after a two-year delay, The Great Raid commendably sheds light on one of the lesser-known conflicts of World War II, a siege of a Japanese-held POW camp in the Philippines. Bookended with a copious amount of striking newsreel footage, the results are heartfelt, reverent, and more than a little dull. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog has always had a thing for the abyss, of both the inner and outer kind. The much-Googled true story of Timothy Treadwell, a self-fashioned nature expert who spent 13 seasons in close contact with wild bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were devoured in 2003, seems so far up the director's alley as to be a little daunting—the kind of career-defining summation that can easily tar-baby a filmmaker into submission. He nails it. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Island
If director Michael Bay had focused on the paranoid dread built into the cloning conceit, the film might have turned out all right. But he didn't, and the result is an ungodly creature. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Junebug
A Sundance hit by director Phil Morrison and writer Angus MacLachlan (both from North Carolina), Junebug pretends to be about the South. It's really about the shame of being Southern. Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicago-based dealer in outsider art, travels to North Carolina to recruit a promising painter, and her new husband tags along to introduce her to his family. The new couple can't keep their hands off each other; his sister Ashley doesn't seem to comprehend sex, but she's about to have a baby. In a stunning demonstration of the lengths to which the script goes to prove Southern ignorance, she's also cheerfully trying to lose weight. (ANNIE WAGNER)

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. When a hot teen boy (Daniel Brühl) washes up on the shore, Ursula goes crazy, and Janet huffs and acts a little weird herself. 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)

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. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

March of the Penguins
The only animal worth making a documentary about is the human. (CHARLES MUDEDE )

Me and You and Everyone We Know
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. Miranda 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)

Mr. & 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. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Murderball
The opening moments of the hugely entertaining Murderball, in which garbage-talking wheelchair rugby players beat the living hell out of each other while Ministry blares on the soundtrack, signals that, at the very least, this won't be the same old genteel take on triumphing over adversity. On any level—crowd pleaser, sports film, lowbrow character study—this approach goes over like gangbusters. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Must Love Dogs
The absurd plot concerns a divorcee (Diane Lane) who's moping about her state of lonely celibacy. Her family stages an intervention (actual quote: "This is an intervention"), and after a few stale jokes about the horrors of internet dating (actual quote: "Dad, what are you doing here?"), John Cusack enters, carves some wooden sculls with his manly hands, and raves about Dr. Zhivago. It's a half-assed movie. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Red Eye
Wes Craven's Red-Eye may not quite have the propulsive clockwork ingenuity of, say, a Breakdown or Pitch Black, but its built for speed, no-nonsense style goes a long way towards juicing this summer's dog days. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Saint Ralph
Saint Ralph is about a 14-year-old boy (Adam Butcher) who abuses himself at every opportunity, and desires anything that moves with the shape of a woman. After falling and bumping his head, the boy opens his eyes and decides he needs to win the Boston Marathon. For reasons that are cosmic, the win will become the medical miracle his mother desperately needs. (And all of this is a comedy.) Only in Canada. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Taken as a whole, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is too scattershot to make much of an impression. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Sky High
In a surprisingly clever (for a kid's movie) way, Sky High comments on the retarded idiosyncrasies that happen during everyone's awkward high school years. This time, though, it's made even more awkward with the addition of villains and earth-threatening power tools. (MEGAN SELING)

A Sound of Thunder
This movie is about a man who goes back in time and kills a butterfly. Pop physics will tell you he made a very bad move.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
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?)—but at this point there's doesn't seem to be much reason to quibble. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Stealth
The hero of Stealth is Lt Gen Gannon (Josh Lucas), a blue-eyed, all-American flyboy. The sidekick is the first (and only one) to go, and the death of the Negro has much in common with the death of John Henry in American myth. But to go into all of that is to make this movie more interesting than it actually is. (CHARLES MUDEDE )

The Transporter 2
An action movie featuring evil vaccines. Must have been made by the French.

Underclassman
Another private school comedy from Marcos Siega, this time about a undercover detective.

Undiscovered
In this HORRIBLE movie about a sensitive musician turned overnight rockstar sensation, you'd think co-star Ashlee Simpson would be the blaringly easy target. And she is. But while she can't act and can barely sing, my main qualm isn't her. It's Steve Strait, the supposed rockstar the entire world is falling in love with. Not only do all the songs SUCK, but the big arena rock moments are often just a fucked up mix of diet Guns n' Roses being fronted by an ugly version of Creed's Scott Stapp (who, c'mon, wasn't pretty to begin with). We're talkin' moussed up and long curly hair (ew), loose silk shirts half unbuttoned (eww), and a frickin' overbite! And this is supposed to be the hot shit in LA circa NOW!? HARDLY! The movie's most heartbreaking moment, though, is when little Miss Ashlee is describing this supposed dreamboat's music... "It's like Jeff Buckley crossed with Elvis Costello..." AhhhHHHHHHhhh!! It burns!! I'm DYING! (MEGAN SELING)

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 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. (SEAN NELSON)

Wedding Crashers
Seemingly conceived, shot, and edited during a four-day weekend, Wedding Crashers, while occasionally amusing, is lazy enough to make '80s ass-gas-or-grass comedies look like models of precision timing. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
On paper, this documentary about the relationship between a 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)