Limited Run

The Beales of Grey Gardens
See review. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sun 7, 9 pm.

The Big Combo
SAM's film noir series picks up again after Thanksgiving with this slurpy 1955 B-noir about a police lieutenant named Diamond and a girl named Susan. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs Nov 30 at 7:30 pm.

Bring Your Own Projector
A weekly free-for-all that will provide a wall onto which you project your Super-8 or 16mm film or slides or filmstrip or digital video or whatever, along with many other simultaneous projections. (You may also bring DVD shorts and still slides to show using the complimentary in-house equipment.) Mad visual cacophony ensues. Alibi Room (downstairs), Mon Dec 4 at 6 pm.

Bullitt
In this 1968 policier, Steve McQueen plays a cop named Bullitt who's assigned to watch a witness in the hours leading up to a big trial. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs Dec 7 at 7:30 pm.

Dark Passage
The quality of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall's films may have tailed off somewhat in the absence of director Howard Hawks, but the chemistry stayed the same. Dark Passage, from 1947, is a relatively subdued noir entry from director Delmer Daves (a favorite of John Waters), featuring a nifty use of subjective camera and Bacall at her flintiest. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.

Encounter Point
A documentary by Julia Bacha (Control Room) and Ronit Avni about pro-peace Israelis (including a settler) and Palestinians (including an ex-prisoner). Northwest Film Forum, Tues 7 pm, Wed-Thurs 7, 9:15 pm. (Director Julie Bacha in attendance.)

Ethiopian Film Festival
Ethiopian filmmaker Tewodros Teshome screens three of his films: Cold Flame (about a fledgling romance between two university students that's cut short by an HIV/AIDS diagnosis), Love Verdict, and Red Error. This event is a benefit for Blue Nile Children's Organization and its project to construct a medical clinic in Addis Ababa. Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, Sat Dec 2. Cold Flame at 11 am, Love Verdict at 3:30 pm, Red Error at 5:45 pm. (Program repeats Dec 9.)

Fuck
See review. Varsity, Fri-Sun 2:50, 7:20 pm, Mon-Thurs 7:20 pm.

NEXT Fest NW: Dance Films
A program of dance shorts, including Gaelen Hanson's Your Lights Are Out or Burning Badly (an intriguing piece set in a worn but elegant ballroom, in which balletic transitions link stylized avian preening and what looks like a mimed sorority-girl walk of shame), Christine Axelson's stop-action, anti-gravity ballet dramatizing a selection from Don Quixote, a deeply strange droopy-eyed burlesque from Maureen Whiting, and an insubstantial ode to dress-up clothes by Heather Budd. Follows a live performance at 8 pm. (ANNIE WAGNER) Velocity MainSpace, Fri-Sat 10:30 pm.

Sátántangó
See preview. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sun 2 pm.

SIFF Poster Auction w/ Edward Scissorhands
SIFF's annual poster auction, followed by a screening of the holiday-themed Edward Scissorhands. Central Cinema, Sat Dec 2 at 5 pm.

Snow Falling on Cedars
An island in the postwar Pacific Northwest is the setting for a murder trial that reunites reporter Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) with Hatsue Miyamoto (Youki Kudoh), the great love of his young life, who was sent to a Japanese American internment camp and now suffers besides her accused husband, Kazuo (Rick Yune). Director Scott Hicks has created a truly stunning visual design for the story, weaving burnished memories into every gorgeously wounded frame. Still, what fells the film is its lack of a compelling center; it starts to bore you without anyone to carry its consuming passions. Smoking around its edges are intriguing details about the appalling treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but the romance that supposedly burns beneath all the pain of history is as remote as the hollowed cedar tree that acts as a touchstone for its lovers. (STEVE WIECKING) Central Cinema, Fri and Sun 6:30, 9:30 pm. (Late shows 21+.)

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
Heroism comes a dime a dozen in the movies, but there aren't many other terms to describe adequately the actions of this Oscar-nominated drama's title character, a 21-year-old student arrested along with her brother while distributing anti-Nazi propaganda at Munich University in 1943. Compiling information from witnesses and previously unpublished court testimony, the narrative painstakingly details her arrest, imprisonment, and defiant entry into legend. (The title may be a spoiler, but the way that her sentence is ultimately carried out delivers a serious jolt, no matter the preparation.) While occasionally poky (as strong as Julia Jentsch is in the lead performance, director Marc Rothemund relies a little too much on her body language, turning the second half into a series of beatific silent sufferings), there are enough terrific, terrifically felt moments—particularly a centerpiece interrogation that turns into a marvel of intellectual gamesmanship—that more than compensate. An absolute bummer, to be sure, but a beautiful one. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Keystone Church, Fri Dec 1 at 7 pm.

This Is Spinal Tap
"It's like, 'how much more black could this be?'—and the answer is none. None more black." Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

To Have and Have Not
Famously conceived as a counter to Casablanca by director Howard Hawks, this supremely fun film (the first to pair Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) ditches its Hemingway inspiration early on, in favor of a series of seemingly improvised, increasingly delightful set pieces. All this, plus Walter Brennan wandering through the wings, rambling drunkenly about bees. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Central Cinema, Thurs Dec 7 at 6:30, 9 pm. (Late shows 21+, continues through Dec 10.)

Transforming City Spaces and Landscapes
The monthly documentary program Green Film Series brings you A Lot in Common (about turning a vacant BART lot in San Francisco into a bountiful garden) and Pomegranate Center (about an Issaquah nonprofit). 911 Media Arts, Fri Dec 1 at 7:30 pm.

Twisted
An autobiograpical documentary about the rare neurological disorder dystonia, which causes muscles to contract and twist involuntarily. Northwest Film Forum, Sat Dec 2 at 4 pm. (Free with an email to rsvp@communitycinemaseattle.org.)

We Found It in the Basement
A curated tour of Grand Illusion's whack collection of film stock—cartoon shorts, bizarre previews, industry spots, and more. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

Now Playing

Babel
Babel is a huge, messy, sensuous film, its 142 minutes stretched over such riches as an embarrassingly intimate scene in which Cate Blanchett struggles to steady herself over a bedpan, a startlingly cheerful moment in which suburban American children are subjected to the slaughter of a chicken, and a lovely, turbulent sequence in which a deaf Japanese schoolgirl (the fascinating Rinko Kikuchi) takes Ecstasy and goes out dancing. The movie is clearly of a piece with Amores Perros and 21 Grams, the previous collaborations between writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu: A Japanese man traveling in Morocco gives a rifle to a goatherd, whose son accidentally shoots an American woman, whose government wildly overreacts. Meanwhile, the young son and daughter of the hemorrhaging woman are taken to a wedding in Mexico by their immigrant nanny; as the exhausted revelers return to California, U.S. border control guards provoke another wild overreaction, and the kids end up stranded in the desert. In the story with the most tenuous connection to the rest, a deaf Japanese schoolgirl tries to get laid or at least touched by other human hands. Each of the stories concerns parents and children, and each is preoccupied with the arbitrary yet unbridgeable borders between people. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Bobby
After winning California's 1968 presidential primary, Robert F. Kennedy left the ballroom stage with the famous words, "Now, it's on to Chicago." He then cut through the kitchen of L.A.'s regal Ambassador Hotel, greeting the working-class kitchen staff on his way, and was gunned down at point-blank range by assassin Sirhan Sirhan. This infamous moment in American history (there's no way Nixon would have beaten him) was preserved in a black-and-white still of Kennedy elegantly sprawled on the kitchen floor as an equally elegant kitchen staffer (an angelic Hispanic teenager in formal kitchen whites) crouched down to comfort him. Rewind 20 hours. Writer-director Emilio Estevez (seriously!) imagines the life of this teenage kitchen worker (he had tickets to the Dodgers game, but had to work a double shift that day) and conjures 20 or so other commonplace dramas that, Robert Altman—style, revolve around the Ambassador Hotel on that fateful June 4. A few of the storylines—like those involving the racial dynamics of the kitchen staff and the one about the aging doorman—are engaging. But most are lackluster. (JOSH FEIT)

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
It's hairy, balls-out humor—but behind the seemingly random spray of political incorrectness, it's very carefully calibrated. Borat is a Kazakh television personality from a backwater where, supposedly, retarded brothers are stored in cages, where sisters are prostitutes and wives are enormously ugly, where pretty much everybody is related to the town rapist. On a scale of dangerous humor, riffs about a place few Americans have ever heard of, except perhaps in news reports about its self-aggrandizing dictator, are probably pretty safe. Humor about humorless feminists: relatively safe. Humor about idiot frat boys ingesting unidentifiable substances: very safe. Almost not-humor about red-state bigots: Uh, wait, aren't they most of the moviegoing public? Humor about Jews (even delivered by a Cohen): safe as Palestinian houses. There's also a reason it wasn't initially released in much of middle America. It comes down on homophobes hard, and proves, without a doubt, that Jews eat sandwiches too. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Casino Royale
It gives me great relief to say that Casino Royale is good. Really, really good. Maybe, in fact, the best entry since 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. What's more, this may be the first installment—courtesy of a smashing lead performance by Daniel Craig—to capture the rock-hearted, alligator-blooded nature of Ian Fleming's literary character. No offense to St. Connery is intended, but, man, Craig has it down cold. And, just like that, drinking and shooting and driving fast and screwing are cool all over again. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Deck the Halls
Unless you're a bad person, Deck the Halls will make you want to strangle yourself with a string of Christmas lights and gouge out your own eyes with the hook end of a candy cane. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Déjà Vu
Hey, tough guy! Think nothing could possibly make Denzel Washington more awesome (besides astronaut training and laser eyes)? Well, how about the ability to TRAVEL through TIME? And how about the ability to travel through time while engaging in witty patter with hilarious Hebrew Adam Goldberg? And how about if he also has a HEART OF GOLD? It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and a party ferry—loaded with crisp, white American sailors, with brides and babies in tow—blows up, to the tune of 543 casualties. With the help of a secret government "surveillance" team, Denzel tracks down the culprit: a McVeigh-style superpatriot who believes that "sometimes a little human collateral is the cost of freedom." Freedom from what? Doesn't matter! Denzel's 'boutsta travel through TIIIIIIIIIIME! (LINDY WEST)

The Departed
Returning at last from the gold statuette wilderness, Martin Scorsese has assembled The Departed with an absolute precision that's been lacking in his work since Goodfellas. The result is a film that's not so much a puzzle as it is a pretzel, overlapping and tying itself up at any given moment, and effectively capturing us within the twisted lives of its two leads. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Fast Food Nation
Fast Food Nation, the movie by Richard Linklater (who cowrote the screenplay with journalist Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation the book), has no room for facts. It's a fictional narrative inspired by the themes of a nonfiction book, and the transition is just as clunky as it sounds. Everyone from the lovely Ashley Johnson (playing a Colorado teen with a crap job at "Mickey's") to Ethan Hawke (as her chill uncle) to Avril Lavigne (as a ditzy environmentalist) has a little speech to deliver, a naive position to espouse, and the result is a cacophony in monotone. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Flushed Away
Flushed Away, Aardman's first feature-length film since the triumphant Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (and notably, the first made without the participation of Nick Park), is indeed significantly more manic than the films that made the studio famous. Fortunately, it's a great kind of manic, with an unapologetically crass, blitzkrieg approach that more than delivers the comedic goods. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

For Your Consideration
The mockumentary formula that Christopher Guest helped invent is getting very tired. So the shiny new innovation in For Your Consideration is... there's no "umentary"! Now it's all mock. All the usual suspects do their usual shticks, but only Fred Willard (as the host of an Access Hollywood clone) lands on the sweet spot between earnest and deliriously off-kilter. Everybody else looks like they'd rather be somewhere—anywhere—else. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Fountain
Darren Aronofsky's ambitious, confounding take on the Fountain of Youth is the damnedest thing: an intimate, eon-spanning love story (starring an extremely game Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz) where profound and profoundly silly are never separated by more than a subliminal thread. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
The film's hypothesis: Diane Arbus, the midcentury American photographer who'd become famous for her cool portraits of misfits, was nothing but a neurotic housewife... until she fell in love with the asthmatic ape-man who lived upstairs! We're not meant to take this proposition as fact: It's an imaginary portrait, the opening title card reiterates, reaching "beyond reality" to offer the most pigheadedly literal symbolism I think I've ever encountered in a film. (ANNIE WAGNER)

A Good Year
Ridley Scott departs his native terrain of manly action-adventure epics and plunges into the viticultural riches of Provence, dragging home the most shamelessly silly movie about grapes ever made. You know how the movie ends before it rightly begins, but despite my best efforts, I didn't hate it. I blame the excellent cast. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Happy Feet
So anyway, Happy Feet is about a penguin named Mumble. He's fucking adorable. No thanks to a clumsy dad who dropped him before he hatched from his egg, though, Mumble's a little different from all the other penguins. See, all the other penguins can sing, and they rely on their talent to attract them a mate. But poor little dropped Mumble screeches like nails on a chalkboard as soon as he opens his mouth. It's so not sexy and it's so not going to find him a lady penguin to get down with. But what Mumble can do, is dance. And boy can that motherfucker's feet fly! He's like Fred Astaire on ice! With uh... feathers! And a beak! (MEGAN SELING)

The Illusionist
Edward Norton plays Eisenheim, a cabinet-maker's apprentice turned master of illusions and sloshy consonants. In front of adoring Viennese audiences, he makes an orange seedling sprout instantaneously into a gnarly little tree. You must forgive yourself for not being equally astounded—you're in a movie theater, where your l'œil is tromped with some regularity. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Iraq in Fragments
The Stranger gave local filmmaker James Longley the 2006 Genius Award largely on the merits of this truly astonishing film. Longley's digital video (blown up into creamy 35 mm) makes the colors pop; and it's hard to count the ways Iraq in Fragments departs from the standard photojournalistic techniques for documenting a war. There are its highly psychological portraits of children, who have nothing to do with the politics of the region and little interest in the religious and ethnic divisions that are pulling the country apart. The process of shooting is hands-off, in the cinéma vérité tradition; but during editing, the footage turns in on itself, burrowing into the minds of its characters through asynchronous voiceover, provided by the subjects themselves. At the same time, the footage of blood-spattered Shiite religious observance and a vigilante attack on alcohol vendors in Nasiriyah is the stuff of traditional, daredevil war correspondence. Iraq in Fragments bears more relation to the close-range reporting of Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Shadid (whom Longley met while they were both in Iraq) than it does to any of the other documentaries about the war. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Let's Go to Prison
Habitual offender (Dax Shepard) voluntarily checks himself back into the pokey in order to torment the white-bread son of a judge (Arrested Development's Will Arnett). To be fair, the rapid-fire slew of rape jokes does occasionally hit a surrealistic beat worthy of its director's back catalog, but the number of thuds may be more than even the most ardent new-school comedy fan can forgive. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Little Children
The children in Little Children are like aliens. They may be in this world, but they are not of it. With their tiny heads and big eyes, they stare and jut their imperceptible hips and fixate passionately on such objects as plush jester's hats and light-addled moths. One of the wonderful things about the film, which is full of more ordinary virtues, is that it recognizes that children create their own worlds, and that in a story about their parents, they're just strange little visitors—adorable, perhaps, but unreachable and opaque. The kids in question belong to Sarah (a rumpled, lovely Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson), two stay-at-home parents who chance to meet at a suburban playground. Against the backdrop of their quickly feverish, sun-dappled affair, a pedophile named Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) moves back into his mother's house in town. Ronnie is pitiable, and his mother still loves him, and those paltry scraps contain all the makings of tragedy. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Little Miss Sunshine
A dysfunctional family road trip comedy built upon a mountain of character quirks. Call it Indie Filmmaking 101. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Marie Antoinette
Inadvertently, Sofia Coppola has painted a pathetic portrait of a spoiled kitten not unlike herself, born into unlimited resources and without a thought in her pretty head, before she lost it entirely. (MICHAEL ATKINSON)

The Prestige
The complicated plot boils down to a mundane feud between rival London magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. The film is all formless and shallow until the final payoff—known in magic jargon as "the prestige"—when doubles and sacrifice and character all coalesce into one dark metaphysical conceit. There's no sleight-of-hand here, just sick magic (not slick, mind you, sick), and it's tremendous. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Queen
Basically, The Queen is The West Wing populated by stuck-up twits, and in addition to the studiously wooden figurehead (a metaphor that's never seemed so apt), there are a whole crew of politicians and staffers conducting surreptitiously from backstage. Michael Sheen, as Tony Blair, is excellent as the sort of squishy leader celebrity-era democracy is prone to. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Science of Sleep
Wads of cotton are tossed into the air and become clouds. A tiny stuffed horse is magically spurred to life. There are so many wondrous sights to behold that you can't help but get swept up in the cacophony; Michel Gondry's overactive imagination alone makes the film worth seeing. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Shortbus
It's a cozy invention, the NYC Shortbus cabaret whose orgies are presided over by a benevolently catty Justin Bond. But a setting can't sustain an entire movie, and the plot is outright lazy. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Shut Up & Sing
When Dixie Chicks frontwoman Natalie Maines took the stage of Shepherds Bush Empire in London and told an audibly sympathetic audience that she was ashamed that Dubya was from the band's home state of Texas, even the most pessimistic liberal couldn't have anticipated the fallout. Initially apologetic and bewildered, the Chicks' journey from meek-voiced penitents to defiant and articulate free-speech advocates is nothing short of inspiring. (HANNAH LEVIN)

Stranger Than Fiction
If you were left cold by the self-loathing machinations of Adaptation, then Stranger Than Fiction should prove to be a tamer, and less complicated, antidote. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny
For the record, I usually pretty much love Tenacious D. The Pick of Destiny, though—well, I just liked it. (MEGAN SELING)

Turistas
For all the critical grousing about the rising popularity of torture porn, it’s hard to dismiss the seamy voyeuristic buzz generated when done right/wrong. Director John (Into the Blue) Stockwell’s Turistas, in which a bunch of foxy American vacationers get their innards removed in Brazil, can’t match the over-the-top, post-modern grue of Hostel or the Saw series, but its unwinking, relentless mojo handily trumps the other contenders in the genre. (It also helps that Stockwell, a former actor, actually seems to like his cast of sacrificial twentysomethings, which makes the constant threat of spleen removal feel unusually tense.) The splattery xenophobia does peter out before the climax, but this is still the first of the new horror wave to feel like a true modern-day descendant of the straight-faced, grainy sleazefests of yore. Also, there’s a completely gratuitous cliff sequence that does Wile E. Coyote proud. Hey, these days, you take what you can get. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj
Taj (partly for plot reasons, mostly to explain the lack of Ryan "Van Wilder" Reynolds) is now pursuing a degree at some snooty British school that looks like Hogwarts and is full of haughty Brits who say things like “Good day” and “Well, now really” and “quite a kerscuffle.” Moments after Taj’s arrival in this wonderland of stiff upper lips, the conceited Pipp (Daniel Percival) refuses Taj entry into his super-gay fraternity, Fox and Hounds. Taj soon realizes his true destiny: to team up with the biggest losers on campus, start a new frat called Cock and Bulls, and give Pipp and his fey cohorts what they deserve! This mostly involves reenacting Revenge of the Nerds. Amidst all the subsequent boozing and tit shots, Taj repeatedly brings up Serious Issues, like the inherent inequity lurking within political and cultural imperialism. But while Taj’s anger is righteous, Pipp and the rest of his snotty crew don’t even care about how their forefathers exploited Taj’s! (BOOO!) They even seem proud of it! (HISSSS!) So of course Taj has no choice but to feed Viagra to Pipp’s prized mastiff—leading to quite the kerscuffle at the campus dog show! Take that, limeys! U-S-A! U-S-A! IN-DI-A! IN-DI-A! (ERIK HENRIKSEN)

Volver
Somewhere between Alfred Hitchcock and Clare Boothe Luce, but with a campy, peppery nativity all his own, Pedro Almodóvar has emerged as the world's premier post-feminist yarn-spinner, a wizened gay devotee of all things Sirkian, candy-colored, tear-jerking, and hormonal. That said, are we running in place in San Pedro? Audiences who have attended to this year's "Viva Pedro!" traveling retro-series may well be wearying of Almodóvar's similar plot structures and tame psychosexual playfulness. You can't be blamed for being ambivalent about Volver, even though it might be the wittiest and most emotionally coherent film he's made in years. (MICHAEL ATKINSON)