LIMITED RUN


American Jobs
A documentary about the impact of globalization on U.S. and Mexican workers. Town Hall, Mon Sept 13 at 7 pm.

Ballard FilmFeast
Fourteen shorts by Washington state filmmakers. For details, please see www.artsballard.org/filmfeast. Sat Sept 11 at 7 pm.

Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 2:15, 4:30, 7, 9:15 pm.

Bottle Rocket
Wes (Rushmore) Anderson's debut feature about three wannabe criminals. Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

Get the Script to Woody Allen w/ Grass
A 2004 romantic comedy by New York director Keith Black and a 1925 doc about crossing the deserts of Iran. Rendezvous, Wed Sept 15 at 7:30 pm.

Kansas City Bomber
Raquel Welch plays a roller-derby skater looking for love and fame. Featuring an appearance by the Rat City Rollergirls. 911 Media Arts Center, Sat Sept 11 at dusk.

* Kucharama
See Stranger Suggests and Blow Up. New work from the avant-sleaze prodigies George and Mike Kuchar, now all growed up. Consolidated Works, Sat Sept 11 at 7:15 and 9:45 pm.

* Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
Everyone who's seen it calls this 1981 film about a punk girl band one of the best rock 'n' roll movies ever made. If you couldn't care less about that, it also stars the always wonderful Diane Lane. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

The Legacy
A documentary by Michael J. Moore about the 1994 California "Three Strikes and You're Out" initiative. Capitol Hill Library, Wed Sept 15 at 6:30 pm.

The New American Farm Film Festival
The film branch of FarmAid swings into Seattle for this one-day event. For details, see www.hazelfilm.org/farmfest. All films screen at the Market Theater, Sat Sept 11. Fed Up! at 11 am, Burning Barrel at 12:15 pm, Terminator Tomatoes and Valley at the Crossroads at 1 pm, Deconstructing Supper at 1:45 pm, Hot Potatoes at 3 pm, Beyond Organic at 4 pm, and Broken Limbs: Apples, Agriculture, and the New American Farmer (a doc about a Wenatchee family farm) at 6 pm.

Poetry in Wartime
A feature-length documentary about poetry in a time of war. Central Library, Sat Sept 11 at 11 am and 1 pm. Capitol Hill Library, Sat Sept 11 at 3 pm. West Seattle Library, Sat Sept 11 at 11 am.

Screaming Men
The first entry in Northwest Film Forum's Up Close and Personal documentary series is this 2003 film about a screaming choir from Finland. Northwest Film Forum, Thurs Sept 16 at 7 pm.

September 11
Timing is everything. I saw 11'09"01 (now renamed September 11) on the first anniversary of 9/11. A few days prior, a U.S. critic who saw it deemed it "anti-American." People generally thought that was an extreme reaction, but two years and two American wars after the tragedy you have to wonder what these 11 directors from 11 countries who made films exactly 11 minutes, nine seconds, and one frame long would have come up with today--and you'd have to expect that audiences would read them differently too. That's not to say 11'09"01 isn't a thoughtful response to September 11, but again, timing is everything. Given what's happened in the world since 9/11, the films of 11'09"01 are less and less surprising too. (SHANNON GEE) Green Lake Library, Sat Sept 11 at 2 pm.

Something in the Air
This 2002 film by Brazilian director Helvecio Ratton is about a group of friends who start a pirate radio station in a shantytown. This screening marks the one-year anniversary of Cinema Diaspora. Richard Hugo House, Sun Sept 12 at 1, 4, and 8:30 pm.

Student Animation and Video Festival
Short films by Seattle-area college students, hosted by Kevin Seal. Moore Theatre, Fri Sept 10 at 8 pm.

Synchrony in Estrus w/ Pangaea's Brood
Reproductively themed animation from Thomas Edwards Productions opens for bands The Pulses and Intelligence. Rendezvous, Sat Sept 11 at 10 pm.

Tasveer Film Festival Opening Gala
South Asian short films, music videos, and trailers will be screened at this big party. Consolidated Works, Thurs Sept 16 at 8 pm.

* Time of the Wolf
In the tradition of Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, German-born director Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf is a film about the end of the world. In The Sacrifice, the end is brought about by a nuclear exchange between the superpowers; in Time of the Wolf, there is no explanation as to why Europe has returned to the dark ages. The film begins with a bourgeois family arriving in a Euro minivan at their country cottage--but then, all at once, things go terribly wrong, and the truth is revealed: This is not a vacation; this is an evacuation from a city. In Haneke's afterworld there is no money, nor are there stores or acts of kindness. Law and order is maintained by the strong (those with guns and big muscles), and water is the most important commodity. Like wild animals, people move in packs; like bush men, they gather firewood and hunt for food; and like the damned, they wait for a train that will take them somewhere else that might be better than the bleak countryside that is menaced by wolves. The movie is impressive, especially its first half, which throws us into the middle of the end--the blackest night in the history of Europe. The end of the film, however, offers something that looks like hope. It comes in the form of a boy who decides to sacrifice himself for the world. This ending brings the film very close to The Sacrifice, which had a philosopher who decides to sleep with a witch in order to save the world. It is curious that Europe would find its salvation in a boy, whereas Russia imagined it as a woman--that is something to think about. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 6:30, 8:45 pm, Sat-Sun 2, 4:15, 6:30, 8:45 pm.

Two-Lane Blacktop
An existential road trip movie by cult director Monte Hellman. Movie Legends, Sun Sept 12 at 1 pm. NOW PLAYING


Alien vs. Predator
The title says it all. Except that said personages are in Antartica. Maybe they should have called it Alien vs. Predator in Antartica. Then they could have made Alien vs. Predator in Borneo and Alien vs. Predator in Kazakhstan as sequels.

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
Egads.

* Before Sunset
The best romances force you to care unreasonably about their characters, and watching Jesse and Celine reunited, I couldn't help but feel a bittersweet twinge; I was 21 when Before Sunrise was released--just as dreamy and dewy as I could be--and now, nearly a decade later, their return feels like the arrival of beloved, yet somehow forgotten, friends. I fell in love with them then and, as I found out, I'm still in love with them. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

* The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
Although "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's attempts at inserting choreography are probably better as an idea than they are in execution, the movie is still funny and light, and deliciously gory to boot. It is also deceptive. For one thing, it's a kind of quasi-musical. There isn't much singing, and the big dance number doesn't come until the very end, but Kitano most definitely had something musical in mind. (ADAM HART)

* The Bourne Supremacy
Forget the plot. Remember the dizzying fight scenes, the indefatigable cloak and dagger in which everyone is the smartest person in the room (and Bourne is the smartest of them all), the best car chase ever filmed (fact!). Remember director Paul Greengrass's masterful handheld choreography. Best of all, remember the supporting cast: Brian Cox, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Franka Potente, all of whom, along with Damon--whose robotic beauty has never better served a character than this one--help to elevate the Robert Ludlum pulp into a high lowbrow masterpiece. (SEAN NELSON)

* Bright Young Things
See review this issue.

Brown Bunny
See review this issue.

Cellular
A man receives a call on his cell phone, and the caller claims to have been kidnapped. But his cell battery is running out....

Collateral
As polished and pleasant as all this scenery is (and as good as both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx are), Collateral nonetheless fails, both as a thriller and as yet another entry into Michael Mann's brooding-men oeuvre. What may have been intended as a thinking man's thriller--patient, observant, character-driven--is thoroughly derailed by a surprising source: Mann's inability to shoot action. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

The Cookout
An NBA star signs a massive deal with his hometown team, but he wants to show he's still a neighborly guy, so he decides to throw a barbecue. Boy, that's gotta be one exciting barbecue.

The Corporation
Basically, the movie looks down upon the masses of people who thoughtlessly consume products made by corrupt corporations. But you know what? I identify more with the masses than I do with the filmmakers; if I want to spend 145 minutes being told I'm an idiot, I'd rather spend that time in the singles bars. (ANDY SPLETZER)

Criminal
See review this issue.

De-Lovely
De-Lovely is perfumed with preciousness, and ultimately suffers from the self-consciousness of its Hollywood gloss, as well as the difficult-to-swallow progressiveness of its characters. (Oddly enough, the sub rosa insinuation of Cole Porter's homosexuality in the 1946 biopic Night and Day rings much truer to the life one imagines a gay man leading in the '20s and '30s.) Still, the fine performances of Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd diminish the film's more troublesome liberties. (SEAN NELSON)

Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
Having studied the film carefully a few times, I still can't tell if the plot's weird calculus--what actually happens, to whom, and where, and when--actually adds up to anything more than a semi-random sequence of related but unconnected events. What I can say, however, is that the film resonates with a uniquely American kind of sadness. (SEAN NELSON)

Evergreen
See review this issue.

Exorcist: The Beginning
The soundtrack may be big and booming, and there may be plenty of super-gory violence, but Exorcist: The Beginning just fails to be scary. Nothing about it has an ounce of authenticity, and since nothing is believable, nothing is frightening. The only thing worth anything in the entire film is the bang-up makeup jobs done on the demon-possessed--an old-school tribute to 1970's latex. But even that's not worth nine bucks. (KELLY O)

* Facing Windows
Throughout the film, Ferzan Ozpetek's golden light conveys romance and elegy at once, and several times he brings striking images of great beauty and depth to the screen. The film's opening sequence depicts a bloody handprint fading over time as dawn light illuminates the wall that carries it, moving the narrative forward by 50 years. The handprint faded from the wall but replayed in my mind long after the film's screening. (MIKE WHYBARK)

* Fahrenheit 9/11
Michael Moore is a propagandist, taking the fight to the opposition on their terms, and winning. Because of his motives and his audience, this propagandist is the most important filmmaker we have, and Fahrenheit 9/11 is the best film he's ever made. (SEAN NELSON)

Festival Express
There's not much movie to Festival Express. It's just (beautiful) performance footage, behind the scenes b-roll, and some modern day reminiscences from key talking heads. The concert scenes are as good as the bands themselves. The Grateful Dead are way better than you'd think, especially since they hadn't devolved into the year-round wankathon they're now remembered as. And I'm not much of a Janis Joplin fan, but the film shows her at her peak. Buddy Guy's rendition of "Money" is astonishing, though, if only for his guitar tone, and The Band's raw, funky genius is rescued from the polish and choreography of The Last Waltz. What makes the film indelible are the train scenes, where all these amazing musicians hang out, jam, drink, and get high for a solid week, stopping only to play amazing shows and restock the liquor cabinets. The Utopian vibe casts the beginning of the end of the rock era in a light that's too sweet to be bittersweet. Best of all is an impromptu singalong of "Ain't No More Cane," featuring a very wasted Rick Danko, Janis Joplin, and Jerry Garcia, whose casual camaraderie and romantic triangulation glows with warmth. Then you realize that everyone in the frame is dead and it hits you like a freight train. (SEAN NELSON)

* Garden State
Zack Braff's debut film, Garden State, which he wrote, directed, and stars in, may very well be a similar act of egogasm (when you put Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack of your examination of disaffected twentysomethings, you're just asking for it), but it features enough odd grace notes among the rampant navel-gazing to warrant a watch. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

* Hero
Initially, Yimou Zhang, the director of such intimate character pieces as Raise the Red Lantern and To Live, may seem an odd choice to successfully rekindle the flaming swords and arrows of the martial arts genre, but from the opening frames he sells you. Hero melds modern wirework effects with the director's own mastery of character to create an awesome chop-socky epic with an honestly moving emotional backbeat. This time, at least, the hype can be believed. I could watch it every night. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Intimate Strangers
Directed by Patrice Leconte, Intimate Strangers has a strong start and a weak finish. The opening is strong because the premise actually works. But once the accountant is exposed, the comedy dies and a drama is born. With the comedy gone for good, all that's left to enjoy are the film's set designs and the cinematography, which works hard to capture the bourgeois elegance of Sandrine Bonnaire's face. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

* The Manchurian Candidate
The film is far from flawless--silly flourishes include the painful cliché of the retired professor the hero turns to for advice, and a gross pantomime of mental illness that's lifted straight out of A Beautiful Mind--but it's just as mesmerizing and suspenseful as the original. (ANNIE WAGNER)

* Maria Full of Grace
Following an angelic (i.e., stunningly gorgeous) young woman--pregnant and sick of life in her one-factory town--who joins up with the local drug lord for a single trip across the Colombian border, this first film from writer-director Joshua Marston is an admirably restrained, even-handed debut that wisely avoids making sweeping societal pronouncements, shrinking Maria's world--whether she's in rural Colombia or big-city New Jersey--to the small circle of people who directly impact her life. (ADAM HART)

Mean Creek
Don't be fooled by the intriguing trailer. Like Open Water, Mean Creek is a strong premise gone horribly awry. Five small-town Oregon teenagers banding together to punish a school bully sounds like a great launch pad for a contemporary update of River's Edge, the ultimate treatment of teen amorality. Unfortunately, in the hands of young director Jacob Aaron Estes (of course he would have three names), it's a moralistic drag whose 87 minutes feel like a long, miserable weekend. (SEAN NELSON)

* Napoleon Dynamite
In this charming new film, 24-year-old writer/ director Jared Hess mines the nebulous area between popular chic and weirdo freak, where outcast attributes are both quality, subtle comedy, and a charmingly dark part of our collective high-school unconscious. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

* Open Water
This year's Sundance bidding champ, Open Water, made with a skeleton crew and produced on a budget unfair to most shoestrings, has a central gimmick that's hard to trump: actors in the water messing around with real live sharks. Where husband-and-wife team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau excel is in creating the steadily mounting feeling that something could go terribly wrong at any moment, both in front of and behind the camera. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Paparazzi
A celebrity gets even with a pushy paparazzi.

Red Lights
See review this issue.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Alice (Milla Jovovich) survives a dastardly laboratory incident! But now she has to flee from the undead! The horror.

Seducing Dr. Lewis
To live in St. Marie-La-Mauderne is to live in hell. But this is precisely what the director, Jean-Franÿois Pouliot, wanted to show: A town whose condition is so dreadful that its attempts to trick a hip young doctor, David Boutin, into staying seems totally absurd. And it is here, at this very point, that one is supposed to find and enjoy the comedy--in the absurdity of it all. But the comedy is not there. You look hard but can only see shabby fish-folk who probably smell and snore as they sleep in this horribly hopeless town. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Spider-man 2
In Sam Raimi's vision of Spider-man, however, his normally manic camera joins with CGI to create a work that is often completely fraudulent. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
They're smart, they've got big heads (proportionally speaking). What more do you need to know?

Suspect Zero
Ben Kingsley is a serial killer who prefers other serial killers as his victims.

* Tae Guk Gi
Here is a truism: When the battle scenes in a war movie become too graphic, the movie essentially becomes an antiwar movie. This is the case of Tae Guk Gi, an epic about two brothers who are swept into the middle of the civil war between North and South Korea. The movie, which is directed by Je-Kyu Kang, makes obvious statements about how the war was meaningless--there were no real differences between the enemies, and ultimately what took place was brother killing brother, father killing son, son killing sister. However, these apparent criticisms of the civil war (which has yet to be resolved), and war in general, are not as powerful as the images of combat--exploding bodies, bullets striking heads and guts, grenades blowing off limbs. To show this is in great detail, which Tae Guk Gi does, is to make a final case against the state of war. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

THX 1138
See review this issue.

Uncovered: The War on Iraq
See review this issue.

Vanity Fair
The problem with Reese Witherspoon as Becky is linked to the way this film tries to reinvent her character. Thackeray's secret sympathy for his conniving protagonist--who is so bad she even hates children--always seeps through the cynical narration. Becky Sharp is great because, no matter how much we admire her pluck from the safe distance of the 21st century, she was a terrible bitch. Mira Nair does not agree. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Village
Here's a twist: M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is thick-headed, obvious, and dull. Actually, thinking back on the abominations Unbreakable and Signs, that's not really a twist at all. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Warriors of Heaven and Earth
See review this issue.

We Don't Live Here Anymore
If I were in charge of Hollywood, this movie would be called Still Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and not just because this dirge about the shallow moral lives of two partner-swapping New England academic couples feels like an update of Edward Albee's masterpiece. It's that the film has almost no sense of humor, and could really use one. (SEAN NELSON)

What the #$*! Do We Know?!
This ungainly, inane film purports to be about quantum physics but is really about the power of positive thinking, with a midlife-crisis plot (starring Marlee Matlin) and some childish cartoon figures and a series of talking heads who can't stop using the word "paradigm." (EMILY HALL)

Wicker Park
An adaptation of a French thriller about a guy who becomes obsessed with a girl he sees in a cafe.

Without a Paddle
Without a Paddle is bad. Really bad. Terrible. Thoroughly derivative and unfunny, and obviously conceived at every step of production as nothing more than a cynical stab at key demographics. (ADAM HART)