LIMITED RUN

Angels with Dirty Faces

A 1938 film starring James Cagney, Angels with Dirty Faces is about two boyhood pals who land on opposite sides of the law. Movie Legends, Sun May 29 at 1 pm.

The Being

Though it may sound like an ontological query about our place in the universe, The Being is actually a 1983 horror movie about a creature who rises from the slime of a toxic waste dump. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

Elegy to Violence

A 1966 Japanese satire about a gang of proto-fascist schoolboys. Savery Hall Room 239, Thurs May 26 at 7:30 pm.

Evil Dead

Before there was Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, there was Evil Dead, a murky, homemade work of horror comedy genius by the great Sam Raimi, before he became the mezzo mezzo Sam Raimi. (SEAN NELSON) Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality

The documentary opens by directly confronting the final fact of life, that being comes to an end. We see graveyards and tombstones as somber Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, the documentary's narrator (who successfully played Satan in a 1999 apocalyptic film that starred the governor of California) explains that since the dawn of civilization humans have searched for immortality and, inevitably, failed to find it. Death undoes us all. Psychologists from prestigious institutions around America are interviewed and their explanations and conclusions about death are the same as that of Ernest Becker, the author of The Denial of Death-it won a Pulitzer in 1974, the year Becker died. A cultural anthropologist, Becker's basic idea was that humans solved "the existential problem of death... by constructing and maintaining what [Becker] calls culture," as one professor explains. Ultimately, death is what drives us to form religions, political parties, nationalistic ideals, and traditions. The documentary's point of view about death is very scientific; none of the thinkers believes in God, or gives the idea of an afterlife any value save the role it plays in a given culture. As an atheist, I agreed with the documentary's sober opinion about death; as an aesthetician, I couldn't help but feel that the documentary is perfect for a university psych class examining what is impressively called The Human Condition. I also found the documentary's uplifting, Zen-positive ending disagreeable. After convincingly showing us how death is cause of so much evil and misery in the world, and how there is nothing we can do about it except wait for it to arrive and return us to the void from which we came-after all this, why did the director, Patrick Shen, suddenly have the sun come out and leave us with a happy picture? (CHARLES MUDEDE) Northwest Film Forum, Daily 7, 9 pm.

La Rupture (The Breakup)

A 1970 Claude Chabrol film about a wife who is wrongly blamed for her son's injury. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs June 2 at 7:30 pm.

Mississippi Mermaid

François Truffaut's hommage to the French New Wave which he helped found, a twisted story of a classifieds love affair gone wrong-or is it so wrong it's right? Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as a 37-year-old South African tobacco baron who orders himself a nice, spiritual mail-order bride. He gets Catherine Deneuve. The white lies he's put into his letters are nothing compared to hers, and soon it becomes a Hitchcock-inspired thriller of obscured identity (especially with that icy blond!) and finally a love story about outlaws on the run. Made in 1969, 10 years after the first crest of the French New Wave, Truffaut seems to be trying to recapture the spirit and energy of off-the-cuff filmmaking, which could explain some of the disjointed plot twists and turns. Even with 13 minutes restored, the film remains an entertaining mess. (ANDY SPLETZER) Seattle Art Museum, Thurs May 26 at 7:30 pm.

Our Man in Havana

This 1959 film, written/adapted by Graham Greene, is a spy thriller with a comic twist. Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.

Seattle Student Film Festival

The third annual festival of films by students in or from the Pacific Northwest. Curated by Adam Hart. Northwest Film Forum, Thurs May 26 at 7 pm.

We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen

For many in the punk world, the Minutemen were something of a legend. The San Pedro trio only lasted five years in the early '80s, but their chemistry, odd rhythms, clipped song lengths, and political/humorous lyrics influenced musicians for years to come. We Jam Econo is a love letter to the band-Mike Watt, D. Boon, and George Hurley, all of whom are interviewed in this film. (Boon was killed in a car crash in 1985, but there is vintage footage of the guitarist from the band's early days). Director Irwin didn't leave the perspective on the Minutemen entirely on the band, however, including interview footage from members of the Dead Kennedys, X, Wilco, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wire, Fugazi, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr., among others. The hardcore Minutemen appreciation society will most likely appreciate the little details that come out of the film's extensive scope-like how Boon and Watt met as kids when Boon fell out of a tree, or how Watt went into a music store not knowing what a bass was (somehow) after already starting to play the instrument. (JENNIFER MAERZ) Northwest Film Forum, Daily 7, 9 pm.

NOW PLAYING

The Amityville Horror

Based on a true story: house for a song, dark past, black gunk on the walls, something in the cellar, flies on the priest, yadda yadda yadda, "Get Out!" and so on. Not a complete waste-there's one genuinely tense bit on the roof, Ryan Reynolds has some cool facial hair, and a sequence involving a sexpot babysitter trapped in the closet favorably recalls the grisly grindhouse days-but nothing worth justifying anything above matinee price. I just pray they leave The Entity alone. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Crash

Crash, the directing debut of Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, certainly doesn't want for hubris, but ultimately stands as a case of laudable ambition overwhelming still-developing narrative abilities. Although his would-be epic of race relations in Los Angeles sports a handful of genuinely searing moments, it's hard to shake the sense of someone constantly rearranging three-by-five cards behind the scenes for maximum impact. The cast, led by Don Cheadle's tragically clear-eyed central homicide cop, almost makes it fly, though, with special mention going to Ludacris (as a carjacker hilariously obsessed with the Man), and, especially, Sandra Bullock's admirably against-type portrayal of an upper-class housewife with a major chip on her shoulder. Together, they can't quite make Haggis' preachy puppet show feel entirely organic, but they certainly take some of the glare off of the strings. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Downfall

There are a lot of sentimental war moments in Downfall, and the conceit that we are watching through the eyes of Hitler's sheltered and therefore ignorant (and therefore blameless) secretary, is flimsy on many levels. Because the characters are Nazis, their panic and its subsequent rash of suicides and murders are deeply satisfying. Because it's a movie, however, you're left with the unpleasant prospect of watching a bunch of rats slowly drowning for two and a half hours. There are better ways to go. (SEAN NELSON)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The scariest thing about Enron's fraudulent business plan was this: The corrupt mastermind, CEO Jeff Skilling, was likely onto the future model of the American economy. With the collapse of traditional industry, it's possible that 21st-century American companies-like Enron in the late 20th century-will be trading purely in abstractions, dealing in virtual commodities and virtual profits. Enron got caught first. And this accessible, damning documentary shows us the corporate double-speak in action. Problem is, while it's certainly a pleasure to listen in on a conference call shortly before the gig was up-where a skeptical analyst demands that Skilling cough up a balance sheet (Skilling calls the guy an asshole)-I can't help but think that Enron's subterfuge was a prescient version of our future economy. (JOSH FEIT)

Fever Pitch

People seem to love the Farrelly brothers. More specifically, people seem to love their peculiar take on love. Peter and Bobby have already directed a number of well-received quirky romantic comedies that make women giggle and swoon while guys laugh so hard they bust a nut, and now they've made Fever Pitch (based on the Nick Hornby novel), which is yet another take on two awkward people doing their best to work their way through an unconventionally warped relationship. Since it was filmed during the Sox's 2004 World Series-winning season, Fever Pitch isn't as funny as other Farrelly classics. It still has that "cute as fuck" spin to it that is utterly unhateable (even if you usually don't like the whole romantic comedy thing), but no nuts will be busted this time around. (MEGAN SELING)

Hitch

For the most part, the movie is dull because Will Smith plays a playa (a man who has all the right moves). It's only late in the film where things turn lively, as Smith finally wakes up and begins to do more of what he always did when he was as a teen rapper and a '90s TV star: comedy. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I am not a Hitchhiker's Guide nerd, but even I know that Ford Prefect is no American rapper, sir. Mos Def isn't the only grossly miscast actor in this adaptation of Douglas Adams' beloved novels; even the great Sam Rockwell is too much to take. The film suffers from the same problem as planet Earth: too many Americans. Still, whenever there are at least two British actors on-screen-especially Martin Freeman, AKA Tim from The Office, or the film-stealing Bill Nighy-the movie version mines big, warm, absurd laughs alongside its hyper-imaginative graphics, and quasi-mystical pop metaphysicality. How ironic that this, of all movies, would suffer from not being British enough. SEAN NELSON

The Interpreter

The Interpreter turns what could have been a smart and twisty political thriller-with heavy emphasis on political-into a bogged-down and bland mulling over of wounded souls and suppressed sexual attraction. It's hard to care about the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, since the actors seems to care very little about the characters themselves (she hides beneath a weak accent; he is in full-blown Penn mumbling mode), and with their brooding relationship (kept chaste, thankfully) routinely burying the intricacies of the plot, interest easily wanes. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Kicking & Screaming

Kicking & Screaming stars Ferrell as Phil Weston, a grown man cowering in the shadow of his competitive father, Buck (Robert Duvall). Everything Phil does, Buck has to do one better; when Phil has his first child, Buck becomes a dad again the same day. But Phil gets backed into a corner when his dad coaches the local 10-year-olds' soccer team, and with father and son's kids on the same team, it's Phil's boy who stays a benchwarmer. So Phil decides to coach the opposing team (with his kid on it) and slap-your-forehead humor and Mike Ditka cameos ensue. Although some of the jokes are subtle enough to elicit snickering (i.e., Phil's fumbling for words with the hot lesbian soccer moms), Kicking is really a kids' movie with nothing for adults but the hope that Ferrell moves back into R country soon. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

Kingdom of Heaven

The dance between carnage and faith is a delicate one, and it's to Ridley Scott's credit that he doesn't allow his film to be overcome with the thrills of gore. The spiritual tunnels the director mines are not terribly deep, but Kingdom of Heaven's refusal to take sides-condemning neither Christians nor Muslims-gives the film a startling strength. Some may call this decision a cop-out, or even cowardly, and it may indeed be both. But it's hard to argue that for an epic crafted around the spectacle of violence, the amount of attention Scott has given to the meaning of God (and, in the case of the film's hero, the question of God), is surprising in these polemic times. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Kontroll

Broad low comedy is alive and well in Eastern Europe. This might not sound like big news, given that broad low comedy is as Eastern European as adulterous bedroom farce is French. The better news is that this Hungarian film, which follows a ragtag group of ticket takers on the Istanbul subway, combines its broad low comedy index with a modern-world-weary surrealism, yielding a glorious goulash of the all-in-one-night exhilaration of films like After Hours and Miracle Mile, the high-lowbrow paranoid wit of Kafka, and the bawdy humor of '80s teen comedies. There's a murder mystery along the way, and all the antics you might expect from such an ensemble dark comedy-challenges of authority, friendships made and tested, sudden death-but plot is obviously just a way to help the filmmakers stay down in the subway station as long as they possibly can, the better to amuse themselves (and us) with grim behavioral observations. Kontroll all but literally spills over with bodily fluids, crude jokes, and a morbid humor that, however obliquely, reveals the film's core truth: We are trapped in life, and there's no sense pretending there's anything better to expect once we leave it. Again, how much more Eastern European could you ever want to be? (SEAN NELSON)

Kung Fu Hustle

Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, in which snazzy ax-wielding mobsters find themselves thwarted by a slum in which virtually every single senior citizen possesses mad fighting skills, is a loving send-up of seemingly every martial arts convention in the book. If you're in the mood for this sort of thing, the first 40 minutes or so are close to dead-solid perfect, culminating in an extended sight gag involving snakes and misthrown butcher knives which belongs in the physical comedy Parthenon. The second half, in which Chow's sad sack gangster wannabe takes a backseat to colossal bouts of CGI combat, suffers somewhat, but only in the sense that the inspired gags slow down to one or two per frame. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Look At Me

Amid the unceasing slew of soft-focus, easily multiplexed foreign fare, director Agnes Jaoui's 2000 debut The Taste of Others was a welcome blast of unpredictable air, a razor-sharp farce that gloried in the complex nature of its characters. Jaoui's follow-up, the occasionally plodding yet mostly wonderful Look At Me, revels in a series of similarly hard-to-guess Lockhorn pairings, the most intriguing of which involves a monstrously egotistical writer (co-writer Jean-Pierre Bachri, wonderful as a cackling bastard) and his fiercely body-conscious daughter. (The director herself delivers a strong performance as a music teacher enlisted as an initially reluctant shoehorn between the two.) While the potentially hoary themes of self-worth and family foibles will no doubt have the remake police licking their chops, the breezy, hyper-literate vibe, which feels like it could peel out into pathos or screwball comedy at any moment, should prove much less replicable. Jauoi is quickly proving herself as one to keep an eye on, and possibly even more; any filmmaker who can successfully quickdraw between lilting chorals and House of Pain on the soundtrack is potentially one for the vaults. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

A Lot Like Love

The worst thing about this romantic comedy is the torturous dates the two would-be lovers (Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet) go on whenever they meet up. Since they have awful, deadening California lives, they try to recapture their shared, spontaneous Manhattan history (which, by this point in the movie, we also remember fondly) by abandoning all semblance of adult conversation. Nostalgia for the recent past blurs with nostalgia for kindergarten, and the two overgrown babies spend all their time sticking straws up their noses and spitting mouthfuls of water at each other. And when plastic walrus tusks get old, they take long-exposure photographs of themselves embracing naked on a rock in Joshua Tree National Park. They never should have left New York. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Millions

Danny Boyle has crafted a kid-friendly fable with enough sly modern-day relevance to keep adults from checking their watches. An over-imaginative 7-year-old stumbles across a huge bag of loot in the field near his new house, days before the mandatory UK changeover to the euro. While the money initially brings nothing but good fortune, dealing with the newfound stash gets steadily more complicated as the deadline approaches. Teamed again with his 28 Days cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Boyle successfully maintains a child's eye visual sensibility throughout, in a miraculously noncloying fashion. Every blade of grass is a nuclear Jolly Rancher green, bad guys block out the sun, tract houses quick assemble around the oblivious tenants, and landscapes stretch out for eons. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Mindhunters

The only reason why you should enter a theater screening this film is if you are being pursued by the cops and need a dark place to elude them. As you sink into your seat, always keeping one eye on the entrance, the other eye might chance to see LL Cool J getting knocked on the head by a propane tank. Mama said knock you out indeed. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Monster-in-Law

The beginning of this movie is so horrible, so bland, so curdled, so... well, typical, as romantic comedies go, that once the prospective mother-in-law (Jane Fonda) digs her claws into the bride-to-be (Jennifer Lopez), you can't help cheering wildly. It's like watching a bad movie eat itself. I'm not claiming the second half of Monster-in-Law will keep you from feeling ashamed of yourself. For example, there are not one but two walking-stereotype sidekicks: a sass-talking black assistant, played by Wanda Sykes, and a compliment-doling gay best friend, played by Adam Scott. But the thing is, it's extremely satisfying to watch someone try to poison J. Lo. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Sahara

Thankfully, only the barest plot and character elements are held over from Clive Cussler's virtually unreadable doorstop of a novel, which is the kind of tech-heavy, mondo-macho potboiler that stewardesses must get tired of sweeping up after every flight. What still remains: Matthew McConaughey is the wonderfully named Dirk Pitt, a ludicrously rad underwater explorer/rare-car enthusiast/secret agent/master of languages/all-around stud who, along with faithful companion/hetero life partner Steve Zahn, gets caught up in a sinister desert plot involving Civil War battleships, ocean-killing water pollution, toxic waste, slithery French industrialists, feuding generals, and Lord knows what else. McConaughey's THC-saturated, lounge-lizardy persona may be far from the standard Man of Action template, but it adds a wobbly nonchalance to his various acts of over the top derring-do. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Sin City

In purely aesthetic terms, Sin City is without a doubt the ultimate comic-book movie. Dialogue, sets, costumes, even framing-each has been thoroughly copped from the pages of Miller's comics, almost to the point of absurdity. To call the film an adaptation is a massive understatement; this isn't a translation, it's a cut-and-paste job, bringing Miller's twisted vision directly to the screen in all its unfiltered glory. The result is one of the most daring and beautifully made films you'll ever see-too bad, then, that it's as thin as the pages the comic was printed on. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Episode III will, indeed, be impossible to resist. Like it or not, the Force is with all of us, and I for one am more than happy to have seen the series through. There are haunting moments in Revenge of the Sith (when Anakin switches on his light saber in the Jedi Academy I defy you not to get chills), and even though the film also has its truly embarrassing elements-romance, as always, remains an elusive creature to Lucas, and in the end the evil Sith lord's scheme to turn Anakin over to the dark side is hysterically obvious (who knew Darth Vader was such an easily manipulated dolt?)-at this point there's doesn't seem to be much of a reason to quibble. The epic many of us grew up with has reached its end; a moment of silence, please, for both what was and what could have been. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Unleashed

Jet Li plays an uneducated slave who knows only how to fight. But then his master dies, and he comes to appreciate classical music.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

On paper, this documentary about the five-year relationship between a gentle, sporadically homeless hippie with no visible means of support and an unruly flock of birds sounds like a recipe for instant tooth decay. Darned if it doesn't work, though. Despite a few unfortunately syrupy music cues and an occasional drift into the land of the overly cutes, director/photographer Judy Irving's film is a refreshingly nonjudgmental, beautifully shot look at a genuine original, and the San Franciscan community that affectionately supports his decidedly unusual drumbeat. Mild tonal sputtering aside, this word-of-mouth art house phenom is the rare movie that honestly earns its sentimentality, with a Zapruderish photographic reveal in the final act that's seriously the most affecting thing I've seen all year. Stock up on Kleenex and take the folks. (ANDREW WRIGHT)