LIMITED RUN

recommended The City of Lost Children

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's film tells the story of a little girl named Miette who must face a nightmarish world of creepy adults and frightening villains who have lost the ability to dream. Central Cinema, Thurs-Sun at 7 and 9:30 pm. (Late show 21+.)

recommended Coachella

See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Daily 7, 9:30 pm.

Electile Dysfunction

The most ridiculously titled movie in the history of cinema proposes to educate you about how electronic voting machines are disenfranchising the American citizenry. Keystone Church, Fri June 9 at 7 pm.

Exporting Harm, w/ Digital Dump

Two 23-minute docs about disposing and recycling electronic waste. Environmental Learning Center at Camp Long, Thurs June 15 at 7 pm.

recommended Independent Exposure: Animated Shorts

An international program of animated shorts, including a "whimsical" montage of crushed Amoxycillan capsules and human nails, a 16mm film called "Unearthed" about the birth of a potato, and a Flash animation that hypothesizes about the appeal of a cocktail named for a Surrealist painter. Central Cinema, Wed June 14 at 7 and 9 pm.

recommended A Lion in the House

This exhausting, heartfelt, meticulous documentary, filmed over the course of six years and lasting 230 minutes, follows five families in and out of the cancer ward at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Through the brutal, unrelenting cycle of remission and relapse—of strokes and brain lesions and fungal infections and lost childhoods—the film focuses not only on the families (whose responses range from heroic acceptance to cheery denial), but also on the doctors and nurses who spend their lives surrounded by dying children. A Lion in the House is heavy and intimate, and unafraid to be unromantic: A little girl tearfully begs to be spared another spinal tap; a grandmother spitefully blames the family doctor for her grandson's relapse; an overwhelmed mother leaves her dying son alone in the hospital for days as he pleads for her. Part I is when you get to know how awesome and funny and hopeful these kids are. Part II is when the death starts. (LINDY WEST) Northwest Film Forum, Sat-Sun 4 pm. Admission free with an email to rsvp@communitycinema.org.

Mausoleum

Bobbie Bresee stars as a woman haunted by an ancient family curse, which transforms her, on occasion, into a nymphomaniac killer. Marjoe Gortner (as in the former pint-size preacher-boy of Marjoe fame) plays her terrorized husband. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

May Fools

A 1990 Louis Malle movie set in May 1968, and featuring many French country dinners. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs June 8 at 7:30 pm.

Nobelity

Poor spelling does not a pun make, but at least it's not Electile Dysfunction. This documentary brings you the wise words of nine Nobel Laureates in a variety of fields. East West Bookshop, Sat 7:30 pm, Sun 1 and 3:30 pm.

Pizza

Matt (Ethan Embry) is a 30-year-old career pizza deliveryman with a high IQ and squandered potential. Cara-Ethyl (Kylie Sparks) is a waddly, verbose high-school theater geek without friends. On the eve of Cara-Ethyl's 18th birthday, Matt allows her to join him for a night of philosophical pizza adventures, unlikely bond-formation, and much learning and teaching of lessons. Cara-Ethyl gapes at penises and cocaine! Matt pretends to like his life (but boy is he sad inside)! They hurt each other's feelings! They forgive! Pizza, for all its indie stylings, falls into some painfully predictable quirky-teen-loser-comedy rhythms, but it's not wholly without charm. Matt and Cara-Ethyl, shouldering their twin indignities (of being a loser and a fatso, respectively), share a few sincerely funny and sweet moments, and some of Cara-Ethyl's blurts ("Sorry to involve you in our fisticuffs" or "Like the savvy possum, I played dead") are awesomely weird. And my eyeballs aren't complaining about the opportunity to gaze upon Ethan Embry. (LINDY WEST) Northwest Film Forum, Sat-Sun at 5 pm.

Psychopathia Sexualis

Loosely adapted from Richard von Krafft-Ebing's treatise on sexual deviants, Psychopathia Sexualis is an exercise in mild kink with style to burn, but very little to keep a fire going. Director Bret Wood uses an arsenal of tricks—everything from pinhole cameras to paper puppets—to create a facile exploration of Krafft-Ebings's work that can't escape feeling like something a goth club coughed up. Heavily inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, the film is pretty to look at (and the narrator does a mean Alec Baldwin impersonation), but unless corsets are a part of your daily wear, your interest may be fleeting. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5 pm.

Seattle Poetry Slam's 2006 Grand Slam

A concert movie about a poetry competition. With Buddy Wakefield and others. On the House, Wed June 14 at 7:30 pm.

NOW PLAYING

Akeelah and the Bee

Keke Palmer, who is 11 years old and plays Akeelah, is a charming, promising actress who is constantly made to do sappy things you pretty much only find in after-school TV specials. Angela Bassett tries her damnedest to make Akeelah's mother resemble a real human being grappling with real problems, but the characters that writer/director Doug Atchison has dreamed up are pure foam. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)

An American Haunting

A horror movie about nineteenth century demons... and incest! With Donald Sutherland, Rachel Hurd-Wood, and Sissy Spacek.

Art School Confidential

Art School Confidential feels like a teen flick compared to Ghost World. There are laughs, but there's no sympathetic character or relationship to cling to, and the protagonist's goals are as trite as his fellow students' are contrived. (JEN GRAVES)

The Break-Up

Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston squabble toward an uplifting ending in this Peyton Reed (Down With Love) film.

recommended Brick

Brick is a hardboiled detective narrative retrofitted to high school, where homeroom lockers fill in for smoky offices, assistant principals apply police-commissioner levels of heat, and everyone talks in a knowingly archaic, rapid-fire patter. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Da Vinci Code

Everything about this movie is boiled until tough. Only Ian McKellen wrings any fun out of the plot, but then again, he gets two crutches to play with. (ANNIE WAGNER)

recommendedDistrict B13

Clocking in at 85 minutes, District B13 serves as an ideal sampler for writer-producer Luc Besson's (The Professional) distinct flavor of Eurotrash, where the men have manly goo-goo eyes for each other; the women are gold-hearted, punked-out skanks; and even the sluggiest thug wears Gautier. What makes District B13 stand out from the pack is the incorporation of parkour, a frankly dumbfounding extreme sport involving crazy rooftop shenanigans. Whatever the pseudo-philosophical bullstuff of its origins (the Wikipedia entry expounds at length about harmony and "being fluid like water"), it makes for the most irresistibly cinematic martial art since the hallowed Gymkata. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Friends with Money

Friends with Money atones for its shortcomings in the plot department by kicking unprecedented ass in the great-actress-triumvirate-of-delight department: Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand, and Catherine Keener. But it's still a movie about the emotional pain of building an addition to one's house. (LINDY WEST)

recommended Goal! The Dream Begins

The clichés are a mile wide and the characterizations an inch deep throughout, but director Danny Cannon conducts with enough good-natured polish to make the movie flow—this should be mandatory viewing for anyone who's able to spell Zinedine Zidane on the first try. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Hoot

Hoot is a movie about evil pancakes, tiny endangered subterranean owls, and a teenage environmentalist vigilante named Mullet Fingers. It glides along on a laidback soundtrack by Jimmy Buffett—who also produced, and stars as a beclogged hippie science teacher. Luke Wilson rides around in a tiny car. The whole thing is even weirder and less interesting than it sounds. (LINDY WEST)

recommendedAn Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth is workmanlike and clumsy at times—but it's also hugely invigorating. Tracking Gore's global-warming lecture as he schleps his Apple laptop across the country and to China, it's a collection of scientific facts and correlations made urgent through human drama and low-tech slide-show magic. It should be required viewing for every American citizen. And if it kicks up a storm of speculation regarding Al Gore's political prospects in 2008? So much the better. (ANNIE WAGNER)

recommended Mission: Impossible 3

This edition finds Tom Cruise's IMF hotshot semi-retired to instructor status and on the cusp of settling down with adorable nurse Michelle Monaghan. Before long, however, circumstances draw him back into the field, in the person of Philip Seymour Hoffman's sociopathic arms dealer with a grudge. Stuff goes boom. This rather A-to-B plot is fleshed out with a number of killer supporting acts. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

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)

The Omen

A remake of the 1976 horror film of the same name. Starring Liv Schreiber, Julia Stiles, and many creepy black-haired babies as Damien.

Over the Hedge

This movie is about cartoon animals with feelings who learn lessons about junk food and waste and suburban sprawl. There are three funny parts. The rest—despite an all-hits-no-misses cast and an awesome Ben Folds soundtrack—is a shrill combo of recycled jokes, less than hilarious mayhem, and demonic porcupine babies. (LINDY WEST)

Peaceful Warrior

Red-lipped, doe-eyed Scott Mechlowicz is Dan Millman—a single-minded and foolhardy college gymnast (rings, specifically) who spends his hours banging chicks, guzzling beer, and burning, burning, burning for that Olympic gold. Everything seems on track for Dan, until the night he goes out to buy some milk (fortifying!) and meets a wise, flying gas-station attendant with a magical secret name (AKA Nick Nolte)—the wise, flying gas-station attendant with a magical secret name who will change his life... forever! Wow, barf! (LINDY WEST)

Poseidon

Aside from a solid performance by the perennially undervalued Kurt Russell, it's just a bummer, through and through. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

See No Evil

A horror movie about a bunch of teen delinquents sent to clean a dilapidated hotel.

recommended Silent Hill

Until a late appeal to logic interrupts the fun, the new goth-friendly splatter flick Silent Hill delivers a freshly rancid freakout of the sort that's intelligible only to some dank level of your subconscious. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Sketches of Frank Gehry

The two great things about Sydney Pollock's documentary on the starchitect Frank Gehry (whose real name is Frank Goldberg) are, one, it does not mention the EMP (though it does show its curves and bright surfaces three or so times), and two, the harsh criticisms that are leveled at the starachitect by postmordern theorist Hal Foster. Gehry's buildings, Foster argues, are less architecture and more a logo like the Nike sign. The rest of the documentary features Gehry's famous fans (Michael Eisner, Bob Geldof, Dennis Hopper, Julian Schnabel) saying things that are as empty as the buildings he designs. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

recommended Stick It

A defiant teen with a taste for extreme sports, Haley (a smokin' if not particularly complex performance from Missy Peregrym) is, like her predecessor in Bring It On, much more hardcore than the pantywaist sport she's forced to take up. The rationale in Stick It is a little hazy—something involving a spectacular dirt-bike crash, an easily influenced judge, and a hefty cash prize in an amateur sport—but it does the trick. Haley has to train at Vickerman Gymnastics Academy with a coach from hell. Then Stick It veers off the sports-movie formula. The run-up to the big meet deemphasizes sweat and competition, opting instead for a delirious Busby Berkeley-style stretching circle against a bright red background. Routines on the uneven parallel bars are superimposed in one time-delayed sequence full of giants and releases and dismounts. And the climax isn't so much about perfect execution as it is about one ex-gymnast (Bendinger, natch) and her contradictory feelings about the alien psychology of the sport. (ANNIE WAGNER)

recommended 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. (ANNIE WAGNER)

recommended The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

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

recommendedTwelve and Holding

You think you get it at first: a standard snooze of a summer coming-of-age story, complete with bullies, bikes, a tree house, and a fat kid who loves Cheetos. But five minutes in, Twelve and Holding kicks you in the throat and you realize you have never been more wrong. It's the tale of Jake, a lesser-of-two-twins with a crimson birthmark splashed across his face, and his best friends, Leonard and Malee. The child actors—particularly the phenomenally funny Malee—are so much like tiny grown-ups that it's creepy. Conversational and smooth, heightened but not cartoony, the film accelerates firmly toward the fucked up at every juncture, in a string of beautiful, failed catharses. (LINDY WEST)

recommended United 93

There are very good reasons to sit through United 93. On the emotional register, the film hits a perfectly chosen note, neither aggressive enough to seem callous nor excessively deferential, which would have felt mawkish. (ANNIE WAGNER)

recommended 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)

Wah-Wah

Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, and Julie Walters join forces to make a big waste of time. Wah-Wah is a social, political, and artistic disaster that has Swaziland as its location and the late '60s as its era. The empire is down to its last breath, and all that's left for its subjects is booze and wife-swapping. But in the middle of this dissolution, there is a lonely white boy who needs love, who needs a country. What is going to happen to him when the empire dies? What role will he play in a world that is deracialized? It's just too horrible to imagine. How I hate this movie. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

recommended Water

Chuyia (Sarala) is a plump 8-year-old with a stick of sugarcane clenched tight in her fist; she barely seems to notice she's on her way to be married. But married she'll be, and shortly thereafter, her husband will die. In 1930s India, Chuyia the child-widow is shunted off to an ashram, condemned to spend the rest of her life shaved bald and desperately poor. Deepa Mehta's final film in a socially engaged trilogy, Water addresses an issue that's relatively remote from the concerns of Western audiences. The characters, however, are awfully familiar. Chuyia shakes up the pit of crones with her (of course) irrepressible spirit. One of the widows (Lisa Ray) is a beautiful, doomed prostitute with a heart—nay, an entire cardiovascular system—composed of gold. Will she run away from the ashram and marry a sexy follower of Gandhi? Your guess is as good as mine (and I've already seen the movie). Still, Mehta and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens illustrate their story with images that do much more than awaken the prescribed moral outrage. The trail of colors leads you through the narrative gently, and pushes the melodrama upward into a starker, purer realm. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Wild

A Disney movie about escaped zoo animals.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand

It's a shameful way for the trilogy to end. Director Brett Ratner has given us the summer blockbuster he wants to see—unfortunately, most everyone who enjoys movies has better taste. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)