Film, Faith, and Justice

This unique film festival takes its lineup of films from the traveling Human Rights Watch festival and gives them a religious context. If you want to get in a fight with a Christian about abstinence-only education, for example, this is your chance. POV's The Education of Shelby Knox is a fascinating, imperfect documentary about a high-school student from Lubbock, Texas, who learns the basics of political activism through her position on the youth commission of Lubbock's city council and then uses her skills to agitate for comprehensive sex education in the local public school system. The movie documents her clashes with parents, pastor, and peers, and her tentative, incremental alliance with members of the gay-straight alliance fighting for recognition from the same authority figures. Other films in the series deal with social justice in the Third World, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a racially charged mayoral race in Newark, New Jersey. (ANNIE WAGNER) See www.filmfaithandjustice.com for complete details about movies, lectures, and special guests. Films screen at Seattle Pacific University, Upper Gwinn Commons. State of Fear, Fri 7:35 pm; Occupation: Dreamland, Fri 10:05 pm; Pulled From the Rubble, Sat 9:10 am; Private (see review this issue), Sat 12:20 pm; MardiGras: Made in China, Sat 6:50 pm; Compadre, Sat 9:30 pm; Street Fight, Sun 1:10 pm; The Education of Shelby Knox, Sun 4:20 pm.

The Goonies

"I got an idea! Why don't we just put chocolate all over the floor and let Chunk eat his way through!" Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

See www.thestranger.com for review. Varsity, see Movie Times for details.

Independent Exposure

This edition of the excellent curated independent film series is focused on architecture—sometimes the main subject matter, sometimes incidental to the action. Central Cinema, Wed April 12 at 7, 9 pm.

The Intruder

See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Thurs 7, 9:30 pm.

The Lovers

SAM@MOHAI's Louis Malle series continues with this 1958 film starring Jeanne Moreau and a very famous (and Supreme Court-approved) sex scene. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs April 13 at 7:30 pm.

Mansex Agitprop

Patricio Guzmán stopped filming his documentary trilogy, The Battle of Chile, because he had to. It was Sept. 11, 1973, the day of the bloody, American-backed coup that overthrew the socialist-democratic president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and installed the military dictatorship of Gen. Augosto Pinochet. Guzmán, a leftist sympathizer, was imprisoned for two weeks before he could leave the country to edit and produce his documentary of the tumultuous last months of Allende's rule. The films became classics of political filmmaking precisely because they were made from the inside. The third film is especially tragic, dramatic, and complex, as workers heroically and ingeniously rescue the economy from collapse during a corrupt strike, then form "community commandos" that give calls for "popular power" a menacing edge. The last words in the film are spoken by a worker who, by contemporary American standards, is shockingly engaged in the formation of his own society and government: "It's now or never, comrade." He was right. (JEN GRAVES) Battle of Chile, Part 3 plays with the queer erotic short Phineas Slipped. Northwest Film Forum, Sat April 8 at 3 pm.

Mildred Pierce

The Pink Door continues its series of food movies. Tickets are $20. Pink Door, Thurs April 6 at 7 pm.

The Other Louis Malle

Lesser-known documentaries by the director of Au revoir, les enfants and other coming-of-age marvels. Phantom India is six and a half hours of short-ish documentaries Louis Malle made while stumbling around India in 1969. They're slow and meditative, almost as druggy as the hippies Malle finds in the temples. Most of the images are of Indians dancing and making bricks, of temples and festivals, but the most peculiar moments come when Malle turns his camera on other foreigners. He seems to be mocking them, and himself, for being so taken by India's exotic clichés. As Malle deadpans, "At Goa, on one of the immense beaches inhabited by hippies, an Italian nudist speaks of his disillusionment." (BRENDAN KILEY) All films screen at Northwest Film Forum. Phantom India (Part 1), Fri 7 pm, Sun 4 pm. Phantom India (Part 2), Sat-Sun 7 pm. World of Silence (Malle's first feature film, co-directed byJacques Cousteau, is the latter's first attempt to document undersea life), Mon 7, 9 pm, Wed 7 pm. Human, Too Human (about factory work), Tues 7, 9 pm, Wed 9 pm.

Private

See Stranger Suggests and review this issue. Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.

Rubin & Ed

Crispin Glover stars as (what else?) a loner who's looking for the perfect resting place for his deceased feline. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm. (And tickets are only a buck!)

The Trip w/ Psych-Out

A double bill of psychedelic '60s fare. Movie Legends, Sun April 9 at 1 pm.

TV Party

A new documentary about the legendary '80s cable access show in New York City. Northwest Film Forum, Thurs April 6 at 7, 9 pm.

Wild Beauty: the Films of Carroll Ballard

Two films by the beloved children's filmmaker Carroll Ballard (Duma). Films screen at Northwest Film Forum. The Black Stallion, Sun noon, Tues 11 am, Thurs 1 pm (continues through April 16). Never Cry Wolf, Sun 2:30 pm, Tues 1 pm, Thurs 11 am (continues through April 16).

now playing

16 Blocks

16 Blocks, Richard Donner's first film in three years, is an initially spiffy exercise in gritty neo-noir finally torpedoed by the director's lingering vanilla sensibilities and an intensely annoying central performance by Mos Def. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Ask the Dust

Colin Farrell as Arturo, a blocked short-story writer, who has relocated to a flophouse in the Bunker Hill area of L.A. during the height of the Depression. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!

Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! is a live Beastie Boys movie filmed at a 2004 Madison Square Garden performance. In order to top the thousands of "been there, done that" boring live DVDs out there, the Boys, the Boys, the Beastie Beastie Boys gave 50 random fans hand-held Hi8 cameras, told them "there are no rules," and released them into the crowd. Some were right by the stage, some way up in the balcony; some filmed the show, some filmed their friends, some even took the camera into the bathroom with them. The footage was edited down (that task alone is worth some kind of prize), and turned into an hour-and-a-half-long Beastie Boys video. Speaking as a Beastie fan, that's a very good thing. (MEGAN SELING)

The Benchwarmers

A movie about ballplayers so pathetic they compete against Little Leaguers. With Adam Sandler.

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain achieves an elegant hybrid between the "masculine" genre of the Western and the "feminine" genre of melodrama. (ANNIE WAGNER)

C.S.A.

This faux documentary purports to speculate about how the history of the United States would have changed had the South won the Civil War.Instead of charting a plausible alternate narrative, however, writer-director Kevin Willmott chooses actual events (from 1865 to the present) and gives them a shiny racist spin. Rather than being shot in a theater, for example, President Lincoln tries to escape to Canada in a top-hatted blackface disguise, to the humiliation of his former supporters. What C.S.A. is missing is any sense of the economic factors that propelled and secured the ideology of the abolitionists over the beliefs of the slave owners. There's no suggestion that the argument over the Southern "way of life" might have been a contest pitting agriculture against industry—a contest that, in the long term, the South was doomed to lose. And there's no implication that our nation's current transformation from a manufacturing to a service economy might be another kind of fork in the road, with equally deep, if less immediately visible, repercussions. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Capote

Despite its limited scope—it addresses only the years that Truman Capote was writing his groundbreaking In Cold Blood, about a Kansas robbery turned quadruple murder—you want to call the film, after the fashion of ambitious biographies, "A Life." Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, and his is an enveloping performance, in which every flighty affectation seems an invention of the man rather than the impersonator. His pursed lips and bons mots and the ravishing twirls of his overcoat become more and more infrequent until all that's left is alcohol and a horrible will to power. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is decent entertainment—epic and scary and icily pretty. If only it were safe enough to send your freethinking children to. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Curious George

I LOVED Curious George as a kid, and I still do. But I hate, hate, HATE this movie. (MEGAN SELING)

Don't Come Knocking

This meta-Western has a beautiful pedigree. Wim Wenders co-wrote and directed; Sam Shepard co-wrote the screenplay and stars; and Jessica Lange puts in a lovely performance. But nothing about the movie is as memorable as its setting in Butte, Montana. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Eight Below

Most of the film is a slow, weirdly enjoyable story of a pack of abandoned huskies eking out a feral existence in Antarctica. It's Survivor, doggie-style. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Failure to Launch

Oodles of nonsense, a horribly unfunny series of slapstick animal attacks, and several full minutes of Terry Bradshaw's gleaming, bare buttocks. (LINDY WEST)

Ice Age: The Meltdown

You know what rules!? Ice Age: The Meltdown rules! A bunch of famous people did the voices (Denis Leary, Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, Jay Leno...), and the animation is infinitely better than the first installment, with vivid colors and far more detail. Plus, that little acorn-loving squirrel guy is back. He's funny. (MEGAN SELING)

Inside Man

The plot has spongy spots, like the amorphous Aryan evil that both the good and bad guys ultimately have to contend with, but it's never less than fun. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Joyeux Noël

This bumbling footnote of a war movie was nominated for an Oscar, which is a good indication it was the worst thing to come out of France last year. Joyeux Noël tells the true story of trench soldiers in World War I who, on Christmas Eve 1914, ceased blowing one another's heads off for just long enough to do some holy-day bonding. (Remember when our deepest and bitterest hatreds were reserved for enemies who believed Jesus was born under a star in Bethlehem and preached that the meek would inherit the earth? Those were the days.) Apparently, they sang familiar carols, popped their heads out of the pits, and clinked champagne flutes. Then they got back to the business of war—but not before being reprimanded and forcibly dispersed by concerned generals. The movie about these events is a pile of sentimental trash. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector

Larry the Cable Guy is Larry the Cable guy in this comedy about food poisoning.

Match Point

Woody Allen's Match Point is a light and brutal thriller about the opposing forces of contempt and desire. Marriages are consummated, vows are broken, women are discovered to be fertile or infertile in inverse proportion to their social class, and the social order is upended. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Mrs. Henderson Presents

It's the very definition of melodrama, and it's awfully dumb. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a not-very-good movie about old ladies: cute ones, nice ones, grumpy ones, dead ones. (LINDY WEST)

Night Watch

There's vampire-fighting, an attempt to forestall a world-ending prophecy, and a guy who likes to use his own spine as a broadsword. I'm not sure what the hell I saw, but I wouldn't mind watching more of it. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Phat Girlz

A feel-good movie about an aspiring plus-size fashion designer.

The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther isn't awful, exactly, but it's so overwhelmingly blah that there's almost nothing to say. (LINDY WEST)

The Shaggy Dog

Tim Allen lifting his leg to pee in a urinal. Tim Allen licking a pretty lady's face. A grotesquely elongated CGI tongue lolling out of Tim Allen's mouth. The end. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Shakespeare Behind Bars

Hank Rogerson’s peek into a production of The Tempest by inmates in a Kentucky prison is less about the play than the sterile, monotonous world these prisoners try to escape by spending 37 weeks per year reading and rehearsing Shakespeare.

Some of the inmates are reformed hoods (like the murderer-cum-computer technician), some are damaged goods (like the once-closeted evangelical Christian who, in a fit of self-loathing, drew his wife a bath, then chucked in a hair dryer), and some are still unrepentant badasses. The most impressive thing about Shakespeare Behind Bars is that the inmates treat Shakespeare’s plays as they were meant to be treated: no schoolboy drudgery, no artsty-fartsy pretension, no false book-club reverence, no academic bullshit about whether the Bard was Catholic or queer or feminist or an earl. The Luther Luckett inmates grapple with his plays like Jacob wrestled with the angel—honestly and furiously. They shout the words, they puzzle over difficult passages, and they seriously consider who Shakespeare’s characters are and why we should pay attention to them. (BRENDAN KILEY)

She's the Man

A Twelfth Night update set on the prep-school soccer field (from the screenwriters of Ten Things I Hate About You).

Slither

Written and directed by James Gunn (who also did the screenplay for 2004's Dawn of the Dead along with a few of the Troma movies), Slither lives up to all expectations: It boasts an onslaught of blatant gore, a tentacle rape scene, and the complete understanding that it's a total joke. Slither isn't trying to break the mold, as far as horror movies go, it's paying homage to the old flicks that made you wanna puke and laugh at the same time. Well done, Mr. Gunn. (MEGAN SELING)

Summer Storm

Directed by German director Marco Kreuzpaintner, Summer Storm isn't about much at all: Tobi (Robert Stadlober) and Achim (Kostia Ullmann) are best friends and on the same rowing team; Tobi and Achim like to do physical things together (cross-country running, wrestling, land exercises); Achim loves Tobi platonically and Tobi loves Achim sexually; the pair attend a summer camp for rowing with their teammates and soon both have girlfriends; Tobi, however, doesn't care for his beautiful and buxom girlfriend—he only wants to fuck Achim; adding to the growing sexual tension is a gay rowing crew called Queerstroke; the gay rowers go out of their way to confuse the already confused straight rowers; and finally a storm gathers and the only significant thing in the whole movie happens. Suddenly, there is lightning. It strikes a pine tree. The tree falls exactly, and even neatly, between Tobi and the others, the straight rowers. After this moment of truth, what more is there to say? The film should pack its bags and leave the screen—but it doesn't. It goes on for about 20 minutes with nothing more to say because the thunderbolt (God!) has said everything: Tobi is gay; the others are not. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Syriana

Syriana wades deep into the muck of the worldwide oil industry. The usual suspects will no doubt squawk about anti-Bush bias and the Blame America First syndrome, but anyone willing to look past the pundit noise will find a beautifully constructed and patient thriller. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Thank You For Smoking

As a work of satire, Thank You for Smoking is safely and securely dated. The book it's adapted from (by conservative novelist Christopher Buckley) was published in the mid-'90s, when tobacco lawsuits were flying fast and loose and the word "probe" was rampant in headlines in the Washington Post. But what the movie loses in relevance, it gains in absurd comedy. When Nick visits his kid's school for a career day, a smarty-pants kid up front announces, "My mommy says cigarettes kill." Without batting an eye, he bends to her and sweetly inquires, "Now, is your mommy a doctor?" Eckhart, a blond Mormon with a toothpastey grin, plays Nick with evident relish; Cameron Bright, of the preternaturally blue eyes, brings his baby gravitas to the role of Nick's son. There are some hilarious smaller performances by Adam Brody (as the hyperactive assistant to a Hollywood agent) and William H. Macy (as a tongue-tied liberal senator from Vermont), and one very bad performance by Katie Holmes (as a spunky reporter). It's fast-paced and fun, and if some of the movie's values seem creaky, that's because neoconservatism has won out over conservatism, and public-speaking skills have become ever less relevant. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a masterpiece, flat out. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Tsotsi

Tsotsi, which means thug, tells a story that goes all the way back to Native Son—a young man whose life is a product of a festering ghetto. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

V for Vendetta

As a work of cinema, V for Vendetta is no Batman or Matrix. But its timing (it opened the day before the third anniversary of the second Iraq war) is impeccable. (CHARLES MUDEDE)