The Affair of the Necklace, Ali, A Beautiful Mind, Burnt Money, The Devil's Backbone, Dinner Rush, How High, Impostor, In The Bedroom, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Joe Somebody, Kate and Leopold, Lord of the Rings, The Majestic, No Man's Land, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Shipping News

9.11/Turning Tragedy Into War
This documentary was shot in NYC in the weeks following the terror attacks, and examines the nascent movement against violent retaliation. Independent Media Center

Amy
Sweet Jesus, someone had a lot of gonads to make this thing. Okay, so, an Aussie rock star plays an outdoor concert in the rain and gets electrocuted while his wife and daughter watch, which somehow renders little Amy deaf and dumb. Well, see, she's not really deaf--it's just that she can only understand singing. Except nobody knows it. Three years later, Amy (novice Alana DeRoma) and her mom, Tanya (Rachel Griffiths), are scrapping along in the slums of Melbourne. But the scruffy guitarist next door figures out what Amy's deal is, and soon the kid is busting out into poorly dubbed song like the goddamned Pepsi girl. But CPS is trying to repossess her because Tanya is a bad mother, so they... anyway. Point is, this movie is astonishingly stupid. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Broadway Market

The Business of Strangers
Reviewed this issue. Stockard "Stockyard" Channing and Julia Stiles star in this reverse gender corporate revenge drama, cut from the same cloth as In the Company of Men. Though the actors, especially Channing, are excellent, the filmmaker's desire to lay bare a female variant on the archetypal male fantasy seems to expose something intrinsically male nonetheless. (SEAN NELSON) Harvard Exit

The Crow
Goths of the world unite! Your lodestone has been unearthed. I tried to watch this movie once at an Auburn drive-in (a double feature with the Meg Ryan AA vehicle When a Man Loves a Woman). It never really got dark enough. (SEAN NELSON) Egyptian

* Dignity
This hour-long documentary examines the people who live and work at two local houses for the mentally ill, the Mercer Inn and the Summit Inn. Directed by Lorian Elbert, the film features 24 interviews with patients, doctors, and staff members, all of whom seek to define the idea of dignity within the potentially dehumanizing confines of schizophrenia. 911 Media Arts Center

* It's A Wonderful Life
Reviewed this issue. This lachrymose landmark, featuring James Stewart as a 20th-century Job, stands as one of history's finest films, and a necessary annual reminder of how much of a bummer real life really is. (SEAN NELSON) Grand Illusion

JUNG: In the Land of the Mujaheddin
A documentary that depicts the unspeakable, untenable hell of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which is to say, the worst kind of fascist rule. The subjects of the film: A surgeon and a journalist are trying to open a hospital to help treat the wounds of the criminally undernourished, oppressed, and uneducated native people. Independent Media Center

La Bôche
Reviewed this issue. La Bôche ("The Yule Log") is set four days before Christmas and concerns a shattered family--three adult sisters, their divorced parents, a complicated network of spouses and lovers--in France, where Christmas evidently isn't Christmas without adultery and unplanned pregnancy. The story opens with Yvette (Françoise Fabian), the embittered matriarch and the death of her second husband. In lieu of the funeral, her daughters suggest that their father, Stanislas (Claude Rich), be included in the holiday festivities. Stanislas, who hasn't seen Yvette in 25 years, isn't eager to show his face, but his daughters ignore him and conspire to piece the smithereens of their family back together anyway. The girls, however, aren't the picture of composure themselves. This is a diorama of rich, selfish losers who are hanging by threads, and that's what most recommends it. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Varsity

* Music + Film at EMP
See Stranger Suggests. This week: two documents of swinging '60s-era London, Richard Lester's It's Trad, Dad and Desmond Davis' Smashing Time. JBL Theater at EMP

* NIGHT WEBS FILM NOIR
This week: Richard Fleischer's Violent Saturday, in which the kinks and crevices of a small town full of creeps, Quakers (yes, Virginia, that is Ernest Borgnine!), and reprobates collide when thugs (led by a young Lee Marvin) knock over the local bank. Other stars include Victor Mature, Tommy Noonan, and the luscious librarian Sylvia Sidney, a woman of such exquisite desire that the Japanese once put her face on a brand of condoms. Seattle Art Museum

Not Another Teen Movie
A spoof is typically the unofficial signal that studios will stop churning out films of a particular genre, but Not Another Teen Movie may simply provide studio execs with more reasons to carry on with the likes of She's All That, Varsity Blues, and anything that requires Freddy Prinze Jr. to say something idiotic and remove his shirt. The parody palette here is historically broad, lampooning everything from Bring It On and Cruel Intentions to almost every movie John Hughes made, and, most bizarrely, Grease. While little of it is effective (save for a cheerleader with Tourette's syndrome and some clever set design touches), the sheer volume of comedic ground plowed proves teens will always find themselves bemused by homophobia, slutty girls, and hapless individuals being doused in human feces. Yes it is another teen movie. (HANNAH LEVIN) Metro

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Though many describe this film as the worst of all time, it's safe to say that they're not counting Behind Enemy Lines, which was probably not bad on purpose, as this one obviously was. Look closely and you might spot a young Pia Zadora as one of the kids sitting on Santa's creepy lap. Grand Illusion

THEWARRENREPORT'S DISTINGUISHING FEATURES
Warren Etheridge's monthly screening series devoted to locally produced movies. This month: Joyful Partaking, in which local meteorologist and stage actor John "Mochaccino" Procaccino stars as an agoraphobic meteorologist looking for love in all the wrong places. Also starring such familiar regional names as Barbara Dirickson, Jane Jones, Kit Harris, George Catalano, and Jennifer Sue Johnson. Written and directed by William Moering. Seattle Art Museum

Vanilla Sky
Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz star in Cameron Crowe's remake of Alejandro Amenábar's Abre los Ojos. Rumor has it that the marketing team for the film tried to convince the director to change his name to Cameron Crews, so that the film might get a bit more press, but Cameron just didn't bite. Varsity

* Amélie
A beautifully kinetic testament to human sweetness that has audiences lining up around the block and contrarians carping about its artificiality. I'm not saying you have to be an asshole not to like Amélie, but it would probably help.... When director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was in Seattle recently, I asked him if the criticism of the film's fairy-tale aesthetic bothered him. "In France," he laughed, "sometimes if you have too much style, they crucify you. They prefer films about men and women fighting in ugly kitchens. They think if you have style, if the film is lit well, or is poetic, then you are not making something true. The reverse is true. The style is important. I love to play with everything. I can't avoid it. You need the style to get to the emotion. It's actually more realistic, dans un certain sense. When you do a film, it's for you. Very egoist. But you can please people if you are sincere." (SEAN NELSON) Egyptian, Redmond Town Center

Behind Enemy Lines
Two of the greatest American movie actors of this young century, Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson, share the screen in this utterly irredeemable piece of complete and total shit. In case the end of that last sentence didn't spell it out, suck on this: THERE IS NOTHING GOOD ABOUT THIS FILM. NOTHING. AT ALL. EVER. AT ALL ALL ALL!!! Ugly as sin, badly lit, poorly acted, logically untenable, and possibly not even written, Behind Enemy Lines is a total fucking travesty in which even the makeup is incompetently applied. I know everyone's desperate for The Royal Tennenbaums, but this jingo fetish Wilson-Hackman pairing is no kind of substitute. Do not see it, please, for the love of all things holy. (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Woodinville 12

The Black Knight
Martin Lawrence plays Jamal Walker, a brother who toils all day at a decrepit ghetto theme park known as Medieval World. While cleaning Medieval World's polluted moats he happens upon a medallion that transports him back in time to medieval England. The locals don't really know what to make of Lawrence's clothes, language, or mannerisms. And well, anyway, in an exercise of isolating exactly just what the world wasn't waiting for, Black Knight picks us up just where other "fish out of water" classics such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Turtles in Time left us: tunneling out of the theater with a spoon. (KUDZAI MUDEDE) Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
A documentary of Seattle's new favorite tragic failure of a sea voyage, Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 quest for Antarctica, which wound up, as we all know, with an icebound vessel full of starving crewmen reduced to smoking penguin feathers. Lucky for this documentary that they had a camera crew with'em.... Seven Gables

Fat Girl
Seems every film that Catherine Breillat has ever made is about naughty sex, which might explain why she seems to have run dry on interesting approaches with her latest one. Titled à ma soeur! in France (which does not translate to "Fat Girl"), it's about Anaïs, a phlegmatic 12-year-old fat girl with a foxy older sister, Elena. This film exists only to underscore those facts, so you keep thinking maybe it's building up to some point or revelation... but you keep being wrong. Save for a tense, tortured, Nabokovian sex scene between teenaged Elena and her law-student boyfriend (while Anaïs watches in plain view), the story never offers any real reward. Also, if you were a fat girl in junior high, you probably shouldn't see this movie because it will fuck you up. (MEG VAN HUYGEN)

Theater?

Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Fans of the novels won't be disappointed by Chris Columbus' adaptation, which is so faithful that it often feels like they just pointed a camera at the book and said "Action!" Those who haven't read it--myself included--may fail to be captivated by what feels like an exercise in defining the difference between page and screen. I had been led to believe there was some underlying artistic merit in the stories of Harry Potter, and maybe there is, but not in the film. The actors, sets, and effects are all great, but this really is a movie just for kids. (SEAN NELSON) Cinerama, Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Majestic Bay, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Woodinville 12

Heist
In Heist, writer-director David Mamet adores his plot-twisting, line-stinging script so much the acting comes off plastic, and you repeatedly run into the thought that no one would ever, ever say "she could talk her way out of a sunburn," and "my man is so cool, when he goes to sleep sheep count him" when lives are in danger. This isn't really a problem in itself, though, it's the whole point: the script is the thing to "watch," and Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, and Danny DeVito are its vehicles. What becomes a problem, however, is that at the end of the movie you'll remember that Mamet is capable of writing characters of incredible--profound, even--emotional depth, and there is absolutely none of that here. Even Mamet's slick, script-dependent film Spanish Prisoner makes me think about interpersonal ethics. In Heist, when characters betray, love, fight, save, etc., each other, it doesn't really matter. You wish it would, but it doesn't. This is a perfect summer movie! (BRIAN GOEDDE) Aurora Cinema Grill, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Metro

K-Pax
Universal Pictures has requested that The Stranger not review this film, which stars Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. And who are we to cross Universal Pictures? I saw the trailer though, and it didn't look very promising. Sort of like Cocoon meets Phenomenon. I'd rather eat my own shit for a year than see either of those monstrosities again. (SEAN NELSON) Aurora Cinema Grill, Pacific Place 11

Life as a House
Kevin Kline has cancer, but he hasn't told his ex-wife (Kristin Scott Thomas), who's too busy letting herself be an emotional doormat, or his son (Hayden Christensen), who's too busy huffing Scotchguard to care. Rather than come clean, he decides to fix everything by making his dysfunctional son help him build his dream house. In the process--surprise of surprises!--he does fix everything: the son wipes away the mascara and stops giving head to rich men for cash (hooking up with a nubile hottie in the process), the wife realizes she's still in love with her ex, and Kline gets to die the heroic death of a saintly drop-out. Histrionic folderol aside, this film is a guilty kind of good. (SEAN NELSON) Grand Alderwood, Guild 45th, Meridian 16, Woodinville 12

* The Man Who Wasn't There
The new film by the Coen Brothers, shot in glorious black and white, recalls the low-budget, slow burning, postwar noir of directors like Edgar G. Ulmer, and features Billy Bob Thornton's uncannily Bogartlike performance (In a Lonely Place-era) as the eponymous Man. Thornton's Ed Crane is a drastically affectless man, a barber who chain-smokes his way through a sexless marriage to a bourgeois wannabe in a postwar California town. When he discovers his wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini), Ed hatches a scheme and soon becomes embroiled in a complex imbroglio involving blackmail, murder, and dry cleaning. The Coens' genre fetish works astoundingly well in this film, which mines noir's deeply American absurdities for rich laughs, shrewd plotting, top-flight performances from all the actors (Thornton and Gandolfini in particular), and visuals that make your eyes swell. (SEAN NELSON) Neptune, Uptown

Monsters, Inc.
Sully (John Goodman) is one of Monsters, Inc.'s top Scarers, meaning that he excels at getting kids to scream in fright--and bottled screams are the fuel upon which Monstropolis, his hometown, depends. Kids, however, are supposed to be highly contagious, so when Sully accidentally brings a little girl back to

Monstropolis, he's got a lot of nervous running and hiding to do. The first two-thirds of this film are pleasant to watch, though the narcotizing currents of

confused cultural allegory that run through modern Disney films course just as strongly through this one. But the final third of the movie is excellent and beautiful, arriving suddenly at one of those gorgeous imaginary landscapes that legitimately become a part of a child's dream fabric. (EVAN SULT) Factoria, Majestic Bay, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree, Woodinville 12

* Mulholland Drive
This new work from David Lynch is confounding and bizarre (for a change). Originally conceived as a network TV pilot, Drive takes a long time establishing its characters--an aspiring actress, a glamorous amnesiac, a luckless Hollywood producer, and a mysterious gang of Mafiosi who are dead set on making sure a certain woman gets a certain part. Like all of Lynch's post-Wild at Heart work, Drive is more concerned with atmosphere and suggestion than linear meaning. But like all Lynch, period, it's beautifully constructed, bizarre, and funny. It's just impossible to say definitively whether this is good or not. (SEAN NELSON) Aurora Cinema Grill, Broadway Market, Metro

Novocaine
Steve Martin stars as a dentist who becomes embroiled in a murder fiasco straight out of pulp fiction in this charming, if self-satisfied noir update. Martin and his girlfriend (the hyperbolically fastidious Laura Dern) live a sanitary existence until saucy little junkie Helena Bonham Carter and her incestuous brother (Scott Caan) enter their lives by force, demanding such things as medical cocaine and sex in the dentist's chair. Soon, someone is dead, and someone is blamed, and someone has to fight to clear his name. This would be a fully smug and frustrating exercise in genre resuscitation if it weren't peopled by a game cast of excellent actors. The presence of pros like Martin and Carter (and Elias Koteas in a glorified cameo) elevates matters considerably. (SEAN NELSON) Crest, Uptown

* Ocean's 11
Steven Soderbergh remakes the classic (though turgid) Rat Pack heist film. This time, instead of Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Angie Dickinson, we get George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, and Julia Roberts. Ain't that a kick in the head? Guild 45th, Meridian 16, Oak Tree, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

The One
It's a fact that the philosophical theories that explained The Matrix were derived from the most exhausted metaphysical concepts about the split between phenomena and consciousness. When one compares The Matrix's reality to the one proposed in Jet Li's The One, however, The Matrix sounds like Kant. The One, which is about a bad Jet Li vs. a good Jet Li who lives in a parallel universe, also lacks poetry and beauty, like the bamboo sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But despite its lack of substance, The One is still fun to watch, because, you know, it's about kung fu in space. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Crest, Meridian 16

Out Cold
If you've seen the previews for this lowbrow snowboarding romp, you might think it's Porky's on Ice. And you'd almost be right. It's astoundingly stupid, all right. But shockingly, it's also sort of fun. It has just enough anarchic, substance-abusing, anti-authoritarian, apparently improvised hijinks in it to make it vaguely redolent of that all-time classic of unapologetic stupidity, Animal House. It even has a rotund, hairy lunatic named Zach Galifianakis who might have been cloned from a scraping of John Belushi's tongue. The plot about a group of slacker snowboarders foiling leathery-looking Lee Majors' gentrification of their rundown Alaskan ski resort is laughably implausible, but it's kinda nice to watch these good-looking kids lay an evil land developer low simply by getting their dicks stuck in his hot tub. Yow! (TAMARA PARIS) Factoria, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

* Pornstar: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
The plump Jack Falstaff of celluloid fucking is the subject of this engaging documentary, which examines Jeremy's unique position in the humorless aggro landscape of modern porn, as well as his desire to make it as a "real" actor. Varsity

Serendipity
John Cusack stars as John Cusack with a bad haircut, opposite the unremarkably beautiful Kate Beckinsale, in the very worst movie I've ever seen. Premise: They meet over Christmas shopping in Bloomingdales, sort of fall in love but not really, part ways, get betrothed to other people, and spend the rest of the movie trying to find each other again. Fine. The injury comes from the script relentlessly stabbing you in the gut with its transparent plot twists, maddening dialogue, and desperate "fateful coincidences." The fact that this film was ever made defies reason. If you like John Cusack, it will hurt your feelings. If you don't, it will make you want to die. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Pacific Place 11

Shallow Hal
A warning for dense women out there who believe a skunk can change his stripe: It's not going to happen. The Farrelly Brothers have handed out a new load of horseshit in the form of Hal (Jack Black), a chubby jackass who dates only physically flawless women. After a chance encounter with a motivational guru, Hal begins seeing inner beauty as outer beauty and falls in love with a 300-pound Peace Corps volunteer he thinks looks like Gwyneth Paltrow with falsies. Hal soon loses his new goggles, but does he go back to the way he was? Of course not, so all the heartbreaking fat gags and shameless burn victim makeup is acceptable, right? Because we all got enlightened? Horseshit.

(KATHLEEN WILSON) Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Northgate, Pacific Place 11

Sidewalks of New York
This film is way better than Ed Burns' other efforts, and it certainly towers over the last five Woody Allen misery marathons, and Stanley Tucci is great, and everyone else hits their mark and seems believable enough. However, it's nowhere near as good as Aerosmith, not even Draw the Line. (MICHAEL SHILLING) Metro, Uptown

The Spy Game
A mass-market espionage thriller starring Robert Redford as a CIA agent on the verge of retirement and Brad Pitt as his rogue protégé. Pitt has gone and gotten himself in a jam, Chinese prison-style, and Redford has only 24 hours (coincidentally, his final day at the office) to contrive a way to free Pitt. Despite a number of crowd-pleasing moments--Redford is in charmingly smug mode, and Brad Pitt is served up just the way I like him: in chains, mullet-headed, his face beaten to a pulpy maw--Spy Game is a big nothing of a movie. Director Tony Scott's trademark visual inflections, such as the recurring TV freeze-frame that lets us know how much time Redford has left to secure Pitt's rescue, are like billboards announcing his lack of interest in the movie he's making. (SEAN NELSON) Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Majestic Bay, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

* Tape
Richard Linklater bats two for two with this nervy character study that indicts all three of its subjects (played by Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, and Uma Thurman) by way of exploring questions of memory, friendship, and truth. Highly recommended. (SEAN NELSON)

Texas Rangers
At last! A Western starring contemporary teenage sitcom actors. Need a rugged band of salty Dixie boys to clean up the wilds of post-Civil War Texas? Call what's-his-butt from Dawson's Creek and who's-his-ass from That '70s Show! Also starring Rachel Leigh Cook, Tom Skerritt, Dylan McDermott, and Usher (ouch). Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center

* Together
Q: What do you get when you combine a'70s commune full of Swedish hippies, a soundtrack that features hits by ABBA and Nazareth, and a VW bus painted with flowers? A: This strangely sitcommish but thoroughly engaging little movie. Throw in a middle-class domestic-abuse refugee and her kids, a pre-op transsexual, some hilariously passive-aggressive dialogue about the importance of nonaggressiveness, a nymphomaniac, and a central character who suffers like a sweet-natured Job trying to keep the whole thing together (as it were); stir; cock your head in wonder; and enjoy. (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
Look, I hate anime as much as you do, and I feel a very deep-seated shame for admitting this, but... like... some of the artwork in this thing is pretty cool. The plot and the dialogue (vampires, zombies, hot chicks with impossibly huge guns) are nothing less than mortifying, of course--don't get me wrong. The detail in the backgrounds, though? All the cliffs and foliage and architecture? You can't help but be impressed. I dunno. Maybe you can pay off the projectionist to kill the sound or something. (MEG VAN HUYGEN) Metro

* Waking Life
Richard Linklater's monologue-heavy, beautifully animated opus about the quest for lucid dreaming and active living is one of the coolest, most interesting movies you'll ever see. Or you might hate it and think it's talky and pretentious. If you liked Slacker, however--wait, not if you liked it... if you GOT Slacker--and have been waiting for Linklater to return to philosophical quandary mode, don't wait another second. Go see Waking Life. (SEAN NELSON) Broadway Market