LIMITED RUN

40 Days and 1001 Nights
This work-in-progress documentary, subtitled "A Woman's Dance Through the Islamic World," is about a bellydancer named Tamalyn Dallal and her travels in Indonesia—the film will eventually include additional Islamic countries. Plays with a short documentary about Egypt and documentary footage of dances from Xinjiang, China. Grand Illusion, Sat Jan 7 at noon.

The AnTHORlogy
A retrospective DVD starring not the Norse god, but the seventies body builder/actor/rock legend Thor. Thor in music videos, Thor in commercials, Thor on Canadian kids' shows, and much, much more. Sunset Cinema, Thurs Jan 5 at 7 pm.

Brazil
Terry Gilliam's cult masterpiece, with wild visuals and a distinctly Orwellian slant. Central Cinema, Thurs-Fri 6:30, 9:30 pm, Sat 3:30, 6:30, 9:30 pm.

Bride of Frankenstein
James Whale's sentimental horror fave, in which romance is a jolt of electricity, a shock of white hair, and thou in the laboratory. (SEAN NELSON) Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

Dear Wendy
Lars von Trier is a huge prick. With that out of the way, let's get to his movies. Since first making a worldwide splash with 1991's Zentropa (in which Max von Sydow's narrator calmly counted down the seconds until the viewer's death) the Danish director has instigated a cascading series of knowingly inflammatory, formally daring projects, giving the finger to, respectively, religion (Breaking the Waves), conventional social niceties (The Idiots), and the American justice system (Dancer In The Dark, in which his notoriously bullying rehearsal methods even out-weirded Bjork). You may hate what he has to say—hell, he's probably counting on it—but his sheer talent for rabble-rousing is tough to deny.
Dear Wendy, in which producer/scripter von Trier sets his sights on the Second Amendment, feels unusually messy for the filmmaker (especially after his astringent, hateful masterpiece Dogville) but his gift for inspiring contradictory emotions in the viewer remains unsurpassed. Whether tree-hugger or Chuck Heston NRA devotee, you'll end up seeing red. Which is exactly what he wants.
The setup: In an odd, vaguely old-timey mining town, a dreamy pacifist (Jamie Bell) mistakenly comes into possession of a vintage revolver (Wendy), and quickly falls in love. After several bouts of passionate target practice, Bell forms The Dandies, a posse of likeminded misfits who drink port, dress themselves in velvet, and swear to use their increasing arsenal only for peaceful purposes. The early scenes of this goth gang finding mutual acceptance are jovial, even touching, but as director Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) films it, eventual apocalypse is never in doubt: These kids may profess the best intentions, but the way they lovingly study autopsy films and trajectory charts tells a different tale. By the time "America the Beautiful" plays over the final, exit-hole studded scene, you won't know whether to laugh, cry, or moon the screen. Von Trier shoots, von Trier scores. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat 3, 5, 7, 9 pm, Sun 5, 7, 9 pm.

Death Race 2000
"You know Myra, some people might think you're cute. But me, I think you're one very large baked potato." Sunset Cinema, Wed Jan 11 at 7 pm.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Just in time for the '70s revival comes this cheeky and delightful send-up of middle-class mores. The Discreet Charm... is surrealism as shaggy-dog story, but not quite Surrealism Lite. Like Mark Twain—another funny guy—Buñuel's humor, even at its gentlest, still bites. If you enjoy laughing at yourself (ah yes, my friend, you too are bourgeois), you won't find a better classic than this film. One question, though: How is it that Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, and the amazing Stéphane Audran are so glamorous wearing the same clothes that made the rest of us look like rumpled idiots? (BARLEY BLAIR) Movie Legends, Sun Jan 8 at 1 pm.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Howard Hawks's 1953 film about two transatlantic lounge singers played by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Part of Central Cinema's new sing-along series (the second Sunday of every month). Central Cinema, Sun Jan 8 at 4:45, 7, and 9:15 pm.

I Am a Sex Addict
See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Daily 7, 9 pm.

I Am Cuba
See review this issue. Northwest Film Forum, Weekdays 6:30, 9:15 pm, Sat-Sun 3:45, 6:30, 9:15 pm.

Independent Exposure
The monthly short film and video series returns to Central Cinema with 60 minutes of new programming. There are a few intriguing experimental shorts, including a Swiss film called Kunstdefinitionen, in which various bizarre characters emerge from snow globes to discourse on the definition of art (all of which are, of course, wildly off the mark), and spam letter + google image search = video entertainment, a sort of automatic writing for the internet age that does exactly what it proposes (every word from an e-mail about a supposedly enormous inheritance is set to an image suggested by Google) but somehow fails to live up to its promise. The best of the batch, however, are three documentaries: Starlet, an unsettling meta-documentary in which the earnest audition interviews from a gaggle of would-be starlets become the film itself; The Beautiful and the Fine, about a soft-spoken and misty-eyed "bio-collector" who refers to his carnivorous plants as "fellow travelers"; and Undressing My Mother, an Irish film about a middle-aged woman's unsentimental but emotional assessment of her own body. (ANNIE WAGNER) Central Cinema, Wed Jan 11 at 7, 9 pm.

Moving Heaven and Earth
A documentary about the Abayudaya, a community of observant Jewish Ugandans who adopted the religion under the guidance of their leader Semei Kakungulu in 1919. Temple Beth Am, Sun Jan 8 at 7 pm.

Negroes with Guns
A documentary about Robert Williams, a largely forgotten civil rights figure who advocated armed resistance in the Jim Crow South. Directed by Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts. Admission free with an email to rsvp@communitycinemaseattle.org. Northwest Film Forum, Sat Jan 7 at 5 pm.

Shakes the Clown
A narrative film about a drunken clown named Shakes. Sunset Cinema, Tues Jan 10 at 7 pm.

The Ten Commandments
The silent film series at the Paramount kicks off this week—but take note, they've changed days. A series of four Cecil B. DeMille films starts Sunday with the most stylish and economical of all Moses epics—the original, 1923 Cecil B. DeMille version that used the great Exodus as a mere prologue to some contemporary sibling rivalry drama. Accompanied by Dennis James on the Wurlitzer. Paramount, Sun Jan 8 at 4 pm.

NOW PLAYING

Breakfast on Pluto
Sure, it's a movie about a tranny sex worker whose father is a priest and whose foster mother is heartless and abusive. But the tone is all Mary Poppins. The story is so ridiculously earnest, and the protagonist so consistently opposed to earnestness, that you might expect the filmmakers to do something with that tension, to upend your expectations at the end. Sadly, nothing like this comes. No matter how many times Kitten brushes aside tragedy with the refrain "Oh, serious, serious, serious," it's clear from the treacly plot that the filmmakers are set on the importance of being, well, you know. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Brokeback Mountain
The first half is a gorgeous love story in which words are kept to a minimum and the arid, exhilarating images of high-altitude scenery and exalted flirtation leave you as breathless as the heroes. When the famous pup-tent consummation (faintly damned as "tasteful") finally occurs, their hunger for each other's bodies is fierce and convincing. In the film's devastating second half, the cowboys come down from the mountain, marry women, and inflict the violence of their disinterest on their families. Brokeback Mountain achieves an elegant hybrid between the "masculine" genre of the Western and the "feminine" genre of melodrama. The tragedy is layered: the punishment the cowboys experience at the hands of others, the hatred they unleash upon themselves, and the uncomfortable sex they have with their wives. But the gay sex is totally hot. (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)

Casanova
Casanova treats 18th-century Venice as a place where spit-takes graced every meal, mandatory pie-fights broke out on the hour, and even the filthiest urchin possessed bullwhip comedic timing. In its sheer desire to entertain, the film takes whimsy to levels normally outlawed by the Geneva Convention. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Cheaper by the Dozen 2
Not funny enough for kids, or anything enough for grown-ups, this movie is forlornly pointless—but fans of Eugene Levy's leg hair won't leave disappointed. (LINDY WEST)

The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Tilda Swinton is fantastic as the evil witch who's put Narnia in a state of deep freeze. William Moseley's Peter is so blandly heroic that it becomes a bit unsettling. The CGI Aslan isn't inspiring either. But Georgie Henley makes an especially engaging Lucy, and her early scenes with the faun Tumnus (James McAvoy) are almost as magical as they were in the book. 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)

The Constant Gardener
Heavily reworked by director Fernando Meirelles, the stripped-down screenplay retains John le Carré's basic thrust: following the disappearance of his activist wife, a middle-rung foreign ambassador goes proactive on a global scale, uncovering all sorts of corporate malfeasance before eventually zeroing in on illegal drug testing in the slums of Kenya. As in the best adaptations, there's a sense that The Constant Gardener is hijacking the source material in order to feed the filmmaker's personal obsessions. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Family Stone
In its attempt to be all things to all viewers, the holiday-themed smorgasbord The Family Stone hits every conceivable chord, no matter how much of a stretch. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Fun with Dick and Jane
With its occasional Bush-bash and sappy, tacked-on moral, Dick and Jane aims for topical satire, but does so awkwardly, at the expense of those whom it's trying to defend. (LINDY WEST)

Good Night, and Good Luck.
Documenting the Red Scare clash between Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and Joseph McCarthy, George Clooney's second trip behind the lens is a largely terrific picture: a scathing social document submerged within a deeply pleasurable entertainment. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Grandma's Boy
A movie from Adam Sandler's production company, in which a 35-year-old manboy who tests video games for a living moves in with his grandmother.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The fourth Harry Potter: In which Harry takes off his shirt, learns the value of altruism, and discovers that Lord Voldemort has no nose. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Hostel
See www.thestranger.com for review. A slasher set in Slovakia, from Cabin Fever director Eli Roth.

King Kong
As genuinely touching as the final New York scenes are, the true heart of the film lies in the insanely sustained second act, in which Kong, his gal, and her supposed rescuers come into contact with an army of dinosaurs, angry villagers, and seemingly every creepy thing ever to walk the earth. Throughout, Peter Jackson manages to simultaneously convey the sense of a filmmaker at the absolute top of his technical game, and a kid deliriously hopped up on Pop Rocks, going nuts with his favorite action figures. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Memoirs of a Geisha
The film is a confused mess—part chick flick drowning in silk brocade, part crass appeal to male voyeurism, and all woefully insubstantial. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Munich
Steven Spielberg has discovered a damning parable about America's post-9/11 strategy. He just hasn't turned it into a good movie. In 1972 Israel sent a hit squad after the Palestinians responsible for the fiendish guerrilla attack at the Munich Olympic games—a high-profile attack that, much like 9/11, brought the reality of terrorism and the fiery politics of the Middle East into popular culture. Israel's eye-for-an-eye reaction to Munich marked the beginning of a tragic, spiraling strategy of vengeance. Munich follows lead Israeli assassin Avner Kauffmann (Eric Bana) through the cloak-and-dagger underworld of counterintelligence and the bourgeois neighborhoods of Europe (where most of the ex-pat Palestinian plotters live) as he knocks off targets and becomes increasingly alienated. The film is heavy-handed, tedious, and—I gotta say—shockingly sexist. Women only exist in this movie to provide earthy symbols of home or as sympathetic props meant to increase our revulsion to the violence. (JOSH FEIT)

One
In April, 2002, a middle-aged, Midwestern father suddenly woke with an idea to make a documentary, interviewing dozens of people, famous and otherwise, about the meaning of life. Neither he nor his friends were filmmakers, but they made One, a tour of the world's spiritual clichés: be here now, accept Jesus Christ, every man for himself, meditate, serve Allah, enjoy yourself, etc. The evangelical Christians, Muslims, and atheists come off like scowling dunderheads compared to Trappist monk Father Thomas Keating, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and even the no-name street interviewees, who allow for ambiguity when answering the Big Questions. In one funny segment, a middle-aged hippie woman with fairy wings, tinted sunglasses, and tobacco-stained teeth rambles through a stoned metaphor about how we're all puzzle pieces, cut with high-level spiritual leaders saying pretty much the same thing. There's an awful fictionalized thread about some dude waking up in a flophouse hotel and eventually canoeing to a beach, but the interviews are occasionally interesting. Surprisingly, the best line goes to Ram Dass. Why are so many people depressed? "Because the game isn't as fun as they thought it would be." (BRENDAN KILEY)

Pride & Prejudice
Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy aren't so much in love as they are erotically enthralled. Their famous clash of wits isn't the cause of their affection; it's sublimation at its most sublime. In other words, forget stuffy: This Pride & Prejudice is totally hot. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Producers
Over the closing credits, Matthew Broderick sings "There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway," which features the couplet: "Movies drag/Their endings sag." There's your self-written capsule review. (PAUL CONSTANT)

Rent
Rent feels like a movie about American artists dying at the end of the millennium as imagined and shot by the director of Home Alone, which is exactly what it is. Plus, the music sounds awful. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)

The Ringer
It's easy to see how this sounded like a viable premise for a Johnny Knoxville vehicle: Motivated by dire financial need, an average Joe feigns mental retardation and attempts to fix the Special Olympics. Unfortunately, any shred of entertainment begins and ends with that promising foundation and even fans of Knoxville's fearless self-flagellation will be sorely disappointed. (HANNAH LEVIN)

Rumor Has It...
Sarah (Jennifer Aniston) thinks she's the product of the sexual union that inspired The Graduate. The third act of the movie is all about narrowly escaping having sex with one's father. If the plot doesn't convince you that you'd be in for an hour and a half of blown-up daytime TV, the drab lighting, flat jokes, and lame attempt at skewering Pasadena's upper classes should do it. Rumor Has It... is incredibly dull. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Squid and the Whale
Writer/director Noah Baumbach's semi-autobiographical tale of a disintegrating Park Slope family unit in the '80s is one of those rare films in which everything feels right, from period detail, to sympathetic yet unsentimental characterizations, to the way that family conversations can shift from funny to sad to terrifying. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

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)

Walk the Line
Joaquin Phoenix is a damn fine Man in Black. Cash's strongest emotional elements are developed through his courtship of June Carter. Theirs is a fiery interplay, and watching their tenderness grow through time and tribulation makes for a powerful story, even if its main subject feels larger than any one film could ever encapsulate. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Wallace and Gromit have invented the Bunny Vac 6000, a large vacuum that humanely sucks up the cutest frickin' bunnies in the whole wide world, and safely releases them to another location. Hooray! The humor is just as funny as the classic Looney Tunes (which were funny!) but even smarter because it's not actually American-made. (MEGAN SELING)

Wolf Creek
Wolf Creek makes your brain (and gag reflex) do backflips. I found myself admiring the skill both behind and before the camera, while simultaneously searching for a blowtorch so I could destroy the negative. (ANDREW WRIGHT)