The Other Indie: Dispatches from the American Underground
Various directors
Opens Fri June 17 at Northwest Film Forum.

Nearly every movie in this excellent series blends nonfiction and narrative-or, if not full-on narrative, then a tangential lyricism that departs from the workmanlike documentaries TV has accustomed us to. There's an interest in geographical specificity and, conversely, displacement. Whether they are achingly beautiful (everything Jem Cohen has ever done), or smart and wryly hilarious (ditto Matt McCormick), or somewhat pedestrian in execution but nonetheless intriguing (Bill Brown and Thomas Comerford), each of these films is intense and understated, bombast turned inside out. (I can't speak to Ken Jacobs's two-part, 393-minute magnum opus Star Spangled to Death, which I haven't seen, but I have a hunch it's the exception to this rule. No movie featuring Flaming Creature's Jack Smith could be anything less than spectacularly overblown.)

Despite the similarities in tone, there are several standouts in this week's programming. The Saturday Matt McCormick show is a can't-miss retrospective of the Portland filmmaker's best work, from his aggressively experimental early movies to his more recent, laid-back docs about forgotten players in the modern world. His 1999 short Sincerely, Joe P. Bear is a strange, compelling little object. In it, a '60s beauty queen and a man in a polar-bear suit pose on a block of ice in a city street. The found footage is documenting a quaint PR stunt, but the computer-inflected voiceover reads a fictional letter, presumably from the bear to his brunette vixen, telling the story of sad, cracked, frustrated love. Wobbly lines like "I wish the good parts wouldn't go by so fast, and the bad parts didn't seem so... sticky" will lodge in your mind long after the lights come up. McCormick's 2001 tour de force, The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, is a fabulously clever send-up of Clement Greenberg's theory of the evolution of modern art that simultaneously pokes gentle fun at city government. It's also unexpectedly graceful and transfixing. And his newer films, like Towlines, a doc about tugboats with some striking footage of the Port of Seattle, are further proof of his sharp eye for color and the beauty of moving images.

No one has a better sense for filmic beauty than Brooklyn filmmaker Jem Cohen, and there's ample opportunity to check out his work this week as well. Most everyone who's seen it loves Instrument, his great documentary about Fugazi, but if you found yourself secretly more entranced by all the kids waiting in line outside the clubs than you were by the live footage, his other films have lots of treats in store for you. This is the Seattle premiere of his new movie Chain (being screened in its single-projector version, unfortunately), which is eerie and observant, a much smarter, more empathetic take on the globalization paranoia Hal Hartley smeared all over The Girl from Monday. (The closing credits encourage you to read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, if that tells you anything.) And then there's Benjamin Smoke. It makes me so sad that this delicate, funny, tearjerker of a documentary is only being screened once. If you know what's good for you, you'll be in the theater Monday night at 9:00 p.m., watching Benjamin (AKA Robert Dickerson) sing in his band Smoke, pontificate about great orgasms ("like chicken, only gamier") and Luke Perry's sexy feet, and finally, sicken and waste away as his gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood is washed out all around him. Cohen and his co-filmmaker, Peter Sillen, don't romanticize their subject's poverty and drug use, but their film is nonetheless a dark, stirring elegy to Benjamin's abundant talent and manifest spirit. Do not miss it. ANNIE WAGNER

My Summer of Love
dir. Pawel Pawlikowski
Opens Fri June 17.

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 Pawlikowski. Without ever quite hitting the operatic heights of Jackson's genuine masterpiece, the former documentarian's My Summer of Love achieves a nervy fervor of its very own.

Loosely based on Helen Cross's award-winning novel (very, very loosely, according to the director's comments while in town recently for his film's festival showing), Pawlikowski's script 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.

Talking to the director, he decried at length the prefab nature of current cinema acting, and prefers to let his cast feel their way through things as the cameras roll. Although such a process sounds lethally indulgent in the wrong hands, in this case, at least, it generates two exceptional performances from his stars. In the Kate Winslet role, relative newcomer Emily Blunt sports a cool beauty and a tricky air of bemused, bored cruelty. Several degrees greater, though, is Nathalie Press, who gives Mona a tangible aura of fierce, what's-she-going-to-do-next passion. Alternately homely and Valkyrie gorgeous, Press seems herself unsure of what exactly her character is capable of. When she turns her blue-eyed bullet glare towards the camera, the very tripod quakes. ANDREW WRIGHT