LIMITED RUN

Arab Short Film Festival
A collection of short films from young Arab filmmakers. Seattle Children's Theatre's Eve Alvord Theatre, Sat Aug 6 at 3 pm, Sun Aug 7 at 5:30 pm.

Baby Face
After her abusive pappy meets his maker in a still explosion, a streetsmart country gal moves to the big city and proceeds to quickly, ahem, scoot her way up the corporate ladder. Along the way, a slew of easily duped businessmen (including a noticeably uneasy John Wayne) eagerly swan dive into the gutter in her pheromone-laden wake. Even in these days of reality tv, Paris Hilton, and office webcams, this 1933 pre-code wonder remains wonderfully, shockingly venal, mainly due to the indelible performance of Barbara Stanwyck. Always an inspired actress, here she delivers a single-minded, bottom-feeding trashiness that somehow comes off as damnably admirable. A last-minute studio-insisted coda attempts to redeem Stanwyck's character somewhat, but Her Royal Badness resists any softening. The Northwest Film Forum print includes 5 newly discovered minutes, which reportedly cranks up the already rampant sleaze to eleven. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sat at 8, 9:30 pm.

Baked Alaska
A documentary on the man-made warming of America's coldest state. Environmental Learning Center, Seward Park, Wed Aug 10 at 7 pm.

The Big Lebowski
See Stranger Suggests. Egyptian, Fri-Sat at midnight.

Classroom Classics #7
Hilarious (and often creepy) classroom "instructional" film from the '50s and '60s. Linda's, Wed Aug 10 at dusk.

Cure
Following in the wake of David Fincher's Seven, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film covers much of the same ground at a more languid pace, and without the benefit of variety in its murders. A young drifter with the ability to mesmerize is all that links a series of gruesome slayings, all committed by people who can't seem to remember their motivation—or the drifter—when the deed is done. Eventually the drifter leaves a trail of witnesses who aid in his capture. His identity, past, and modus operandi are discovered, but not before the lead investigators' good cop-bad cop act places the tediousness of the case—and the film—in sharp relief. (Sarah Sternau) Savery Hall, Room 239, UW campus, Thurs Aug 11 at 7:30 pm.

Dennis Nyback's Favorite Films
The eccentric film archivist Dennis Nyback is doing a residency at Grand Illusion, and showing a different program of assorted oddities and offensiveness every night. Gumby Superstar!!!, Thurs Aug 4 at 7 pm. Happy 110th Buster Keaton, Thurs Aug 4 at 9 pm. Tough Babes of the Silent Film, Fri Aug 5 at 7 pm. Wacky Women in 1930's Comedy, Fri Aug 5 at 9 pm. Our Gang Was Great, Sat Aug 6 at 3, 5 pm. The Funny Funny Forgotten Men, Sat Aug 6 at 7 pm. Silent Stars Knockabout In Sound Shorts, Sat Aug 6 at 9 pm. Three Stooges, Sun Aug 7 at 3, 5 pm. Buster Keaton At His Best, Sun Aug 7 at 7 pm. The Funny Funny Fatty, Sun Aug 7 at 9 pm. Funny Films at Orphan Studios, Mon Aug 8 at 7 pm. Mack Sennett: The King of Slapstick, Mon Aug 8 at 9 pm. Hal Roach: The Prince of Slapstick, Tues Aug 9 at 7 pm. The Great Charlie Chaplin, Tues Aug 9 at 9 pm. The Strong Man, Wed Aug 10 at 7 pm. When Educational Films Meant Slapstick, Wed Aug 10 at 9 pm. Laurel and Hardy, Thurs Aug 11 at 7 pm. Grandma's Boy, Thurs Aug 11 at 9 pm.

Free Form Film Festival
A touring film festival featuring innovative and experimental shorts. Seattle's stop is at the Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater, Wed Aug 10 at 7:30 pm. The group Inlake'ch will perform.

The Goonies
"I got an idea! Why don't we just put chocolate all over the floor and let Chunk eat his way through!" Fremont Outdoor Movies, Sat Aug 6 at dusk.

Lustigfest
The Northwest Film Forum is celebrating the career of famed exploitation director William Listig with a showing of three of his best. And here's the kicker: Lustig himself will present the screenings! Vigilante, Thurs Aug 4 at 11 pm, Maniac Cop, Fri Aug 5 at 11 pm, Maniac Cop II, Sat Aug 6 at 11 pm.

The Muppet Movie
"Good grief, it's a running gag." Central Cinema, Sat-Sun at noon, 2:15, 4:30 pm.

Real Women Have Curves
A simplistic and thought-provokeless tale about one spirited teenage member of the underclass' struggle to individuate her young self in the context of her traditional, stifling, almost-poverty-stricken family. Every major scene devolves into sloganeering, a champagne socialist's daydream of life in the po' house. Real Women is a lowest-common-denominator piece of silky propaganda. (Michael Shilling) Homer Harris Park, Sat Aug 6 at dusk.

Save the Green Planet
Jang Jun Hwan's Save The Green Planet is a movie that has a lot of everything: comedy, drama, horror, crime thriller, romance, and science fiction. And because it has everything, the film is a mess, a glorious and gory mess. There is no easy way to explain the substance of the film, which is set in South Korea, but basically it's about a youngish man, Lee Byeong Gu (Ha-kyun Shin), who has a slow girlfriend (mentally slow, that is), and a dying mother. For reasons that lead all the way back to his troubled boyhood, Shin believes that a powerful industrialist is an alien bent on destroying the earth. He kidnaps the industrialist (Baek Yun Shik) and cruelly tortures him in an effort to extract his secrets. The film is also about other movies. It makes references to a bunch of Kubrick films (notably 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, even Killer's Kiss); the horror movie Misery; and the science fiction masterpiece Blade Runner. It's inexhaustible. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Thurs at 7, 9:15 pm.

The Seventh Seal
"I met Death today. We are playing chess." Movie Legends, Sun Aug 7 at 1 pm.

The Sun's Burial
A 1960 Japanese film by Oshima Nagisa, in which teenage thugs and prostitutes vie for control of a profitable business. Savery Hall, Room 239, UW campus, Thurs Aug 4 at 7:30 pm.

The Thing From Another World
See Blow Up. Science Fiction Museum (formerly EMP), Sun Aug 7 at 4 pm.

The Thomas Crown Affair
The hilariously outdated classic starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. Dig that sexy chess match! Central Cinema, Thurs-Sun at 7, 9:15 pm.

Trollywood
The homeless in Hollywood: Doesn't that sound hilarious? Oh, wait, this isn't a Mel Brooks film, but a documentary. The premise is a little obvious—the close proximity of dreammakers and the destitute—but a good dose of well-placed righteousness can always perk up your day. Keystone Congregational Church, Sat Aug 6 at 7 pm.

NOW PLAYING

The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D
Robert Rodriguez's latest kid movie explores the inherent sadness of childhood. Though the ending is happy, the substance of the film is sad, which is why it's the best kid's movie Robert Rodriguez has so far made. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Bad News Bears
Billy Bob Thornton coaches baseball. Now there's a bright idea.

Batman Begins
Taking equal inspiration from Sin City creator Frank Miller's Batman: Year One miniseries and artist Neil Adams' classic grim and gritty '70s run of Adam West apologia, Christopher Nolan and David Goyer's scenario circles back to the basics and has a ball reinventing the mythos. The defining elements are still there: boy loses parents, devotes life to fighting crime, becomes creature of the night. What's new is the filmmakers' attention to the inner life of their 2-D main character, devoting fully half their time to recounting Wayne's training and motivations for spending the nights all done up in batsuit. For the first time in a live-action recounting, the title character is actually allotted more attention than the inevitably showy villains. (Fear-gas maven The Scarecrow and eco-terrorist Ra's Al Guhl, for those fanboys keeping score.) As an origin story, it holds its own against the animated Mask of the Phantasm, previously the benchmark. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Beat That My Heart Skipped
In updating James Toback's 1978 debut Fingers, where Harvey Keitel played a second-generation New York gangster who would rather be a concert pianist, French director Jacques Audiard moves the story to Paris and changes the line of work to a thug for a shady real estate developer. Which means he hasn't changed much at all in terms of story. Both suspenseful and musical, The Beat that My Heart Skipped should appeal to fans of gangster movies and classical music alike. (ANDY SPLETZER)

Bewitched
This Bewitched, by queen-of-cute writer/director Nora Ephron, is not a remake of the television show. It's a movie about a making a remake. You'd think this would lend the film some degree of ironic distance--or at least the opportunity to comment on the cultural significance of the original--but no. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The moment Willy Wonka makes his big entrance, cheering as an "It's a Small World"-style diorama bursts into flames, it's plain to see that Johnny Depp is in a world, and indeed a film, all his own. That's fine, actually. Depp's at his best in this mode; like Bill Murray and Peter Sellers before him, he has long since mastered the secret art of being better than the films he acts in. Unfortunately, director Tim Burton either doesn't know or doesn't care that the source material is being undermined by Depp's inventions. The problem—or maybe the point—is that the chocolate factory just isn't very magical. Given the infinite possibilities of digital effects, Burton fails to invest the space with any sense of dimension. Kids still deserve better. (SEAN NELSON)

Cinderella Man
If a gnarled creature were grown in a lab, bred and designed by unfeeling scientists to spend its soulless existence craving and consuming only Oscars... well, it would still come up short to Ron Howard's latest film. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Crash
Crash certainly doesn't want for hubris, but ultimately stands as a case of laudable ambition overwhelming still-developing narrative abilities. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Dark Water
Japan has long existed without a decent rendition of Poltergeist to call its own. The wait is over. A demonic apartment building gets miffed at a woman and her 6-year-old daughter, and proceeds to toy with them to its heart's content. Koji Suzuki, known as "The Stephen King of Japan," wrote the original story.

The Dukes of Hazzard
Yeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaawwwwwwww!

Fantastic Four
Sometimes previews lie. Preemptively clobbered by fanboys and much maligned by critics, this easygoing adaptation of Marvel Comics' oldest superhero team (Earth, Wind, Fire & Rubber) is actually sort of... neat. More explicitly kid-friendly than the rest of the recent wave of comic adaptations (no Batman Begins gravitas here), Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost's zippy origin script benefits mightily from splash-panel perfect performances by Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans. The action set pieces suffer from below-par special effects (pity Mr. Fantastic), and a director (Barbershop's Tim Story) clearly out of his comfort zone, but the linking material still manages to capture the retro, slightly dorky charm of Stan Lee's squabbling nuclear-radiated family unit. 'Nuff said, true believers. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Heights
Based on a play, set among the idle rich, produced by Merchant/Ivory in unfamiliar modern-day mode: the early indicators of a tendon-stretching yawn are bodacious. Still, that old chestnut about initial impressions can occasionally be true. Heights, the fiercely entertaining, hugely precocious feature debut for 28-year-old director Chris Terrio, treads on some very familiar turf, but with enough style and unusual empathy to make the trip feel, if not quite new, well worth taking. And then there's Glenn Close. Man alive, what a performance. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Herbie: Fully Loaded
Rumors of star Lindsay Lohan's overly active social life and digitally reduced cup size may have led to toxic levels of advanced snark, but the rather unfortunately titled Herbie: Fully Loaded proves to be considerably less of a disaster than the Web buzz would suggest. What's more, as with Disney's previous Lohan-led retrofits from the vault, the results are honestly pretty entertaining; while not quite on a Freaky Friday level of surprise quality, the return of the beloved possessed Volkswagen should be a more-than-acceptable timewaster for both the jungle-gym set and their captive chaperones. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Howl's Moving Castle
When it comes to animation gods, there's Hayao Miyazaki, and then there's everybody else. Although reportedly considering retirement after completing the Oscar winning Spirited Away, Miyazaki was apparently intrigued enough by the prospect of adapting a novel by children's author Diana Wynne Jones to return to the drawing board. Now that the collaboration has finally made its way to the States, the results show that the material might actually have been too perfect a match for the director's patented sensibilities. For the first time, the Master's wondrous imagination feels slightly...familiar. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Hustle & Flow
You could never say Hustle & Flow glamorizes being a pimp—everything in the lives of DJay (Terrence Howard) and his girls is super depressing. And the degree to which they all band together to help DJay's dream of becoming a rapper come true is plausible, despite being fraught with a certain compound pathos (is anything sadder than seeing an abused person bend over backwards to embrace her abuser?). The songwriting scenes are super compelling; music films seldom give a convincing presentation of the means by which music is conceived and recorded, and you can see why the girls, especially Shug (Taraji P. Henson), are so enthralled just to be near it. What's tricky is that the terms of the genre—as well as the fantastic performances—demand that we also get behind DJay, and in order to do that, we either have to overlook or forgive the fact that he's basically one step up the moral ladder from a slave owner. Everyone here is a victim—of poverty, power, religion, class, race, gender—and not all victims get to rise up. (SEAN NELSON)

The Island
As derivative sci-fi plots go, things could be worse. If director Michael Bay had focused on the paranoid dread built into the cloning conceit, the film might have turned out all right. But he didn't, and the result is an ungodly creature—half musings on the role of morality in science, half preposterous stunt collage. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Land of the Dead
In the two decades since director George Romero last ventured into the realm of the undead, his original vision has been overtaken by a horde of fleet-footed, gut-munching pretenders. Big Daddy is back, and he's still got his teeth. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Last Days
Dealing with the death of a rock star like Kurt Cobain is a tricky business because it was a major news event to begin with. The director's task is to somehow take Cobain's death out of the glaring lights of the media and the public, and transport it to the quiet spaces, bedrooms, and living rooms of the existential, to the house of being. Because he needed to add lots of weight and heaviness to the death of Cobain, Gus Van Sant borrowed the visual language, the wide and seemingly loose rhythms, and deep and detailed focus of Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son. As a result, Last Days is slow. It's also beautiful. Nothing particularly striking or weighty happens on Blake's/Kurt's last day on earth; all the way to the end of the movie, he is as light as a feather, as high as a kite. And so it is the style of the film, much like in Sokurov's, that gives these quiet moments their substance. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

The Longest Yard
Adam Sandler is never funny, Chris Rock (as another convict) is sometimes funny, Nelly (the rapper) is very funny (not intentionally, however), and Burt Reynolds is always sad. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Mad Hot Ballroom
In terms of scope, the first-time director and writer may have bitten off a bit more than they can comfortably chew, as the scenes of the kids' ballroom dancing contest come off as alternately long-winded and confusing. The ability to fashion anything even remotely comprehensible out of hundreds of hours of footage is admirable, but a slightly heavier hand in the editing bay could have worked wonders. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Madagascar
Madagascar is kiddie slop puffed and polished into a Pixar-wannabe sheen. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

March of the Penguins
I have never liked penguins, and now that I've watched this documentary I like them even less. The only animal worth making a documentary about is the human. (CHARLES MUDEDE )

Me and You and Everyone We Know
Miranda July's feature-film debut is delicate and tense, a movie with a visual language so powerful that it seems to expand out of the movie theater and onto the sidewalk. July's is a fantastical world where the most important contours are human shapes, where intense sexual longing collides with the paradoxical wish to escape your own skin, where those who have power try to abdicate it, and those who are powerless act out in agonizing, self-deceiving ways. (ANNIE WAGNER)

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. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Mr. & Mrs. Smith
All Mr. & Mrs. Smith does is build to a fiery conclusion it never even attempts to earn, with both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie reduced to mere prop status along the way. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Murderball
The opening moments of the hugely entertaining Murderball, in which garbage-talking wheelchair rugby players beat the living hell out of each other while Ministry blares on the soundtrack, signals that, at the very least, this won't be the same old genteel take on triumphing over adversity. On any level—crowd pleaser, sports film, lowbrow character study—this approach goes over like gangbusters. Filmed over a period of two and a half years, co-directors Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry-Alex Rubin's all-access camera follows the bitter rivalry between the U.S. and Canada's quadriplegic rugby teams, culminating in the 2004 Athens Paralympics. In between tournaments, the backstory and day-to-day existence (including sex, via a hilariously square educational short) of the players is dealt with. However, both the subjects and the filmmakers demonstrate markedly less of an interest in how they got there than in where and what they are now: survivors second, beer drinkers and hell-raisers first and foremost. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Must Love Dogs
This absurd movie concerns a divorcee (Diane Lane) who’s moping about her state of lonely celibacy. Her family stages an intervention (actual quote: “This is an intervention”), and after a few stale jokes about the horrors of internet dating (actual quote: “Dad, what are you doing here?”), John Cusack enters, carves some wooden sculls with his manly hands, and raves about Dr. Zhivago. It’s a half-assed movie, carefully focus-grouped to make women of a certain age believe that they’re inherently more interesting than 24-year-olds (even if they’ve been teaching preschool since before their youthful rivals were born), but with nothing of value for other demographics. (ANNIE WAGNER)

November
Countless films have explored the consequences of cheating on a lover. The most powerful of these movies deal with the grave aftermath of the ensuing emotional breakdown—where, even in the outrageousness of, say, a husband killing a homewrecker, there's an identifiable grief that expresses the dismal reality of hurting someone so intimately. November, the latest film from indie director Greg Harrison (Groove), goes beyond telling a story of infidelity; it lingers in the cracks, scars, and violent schisms that can occur with such a personal breach of trust. Starring the very un-Friends-like Courtney Cox, it's a true art film, taking you leagues deeper than most into unsettling realizations that cause your skin to crawl and your mind to race. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

The Perfect Man
Hilary Duff tries to set her mother up with... you get the drift.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The structure (in which four adolescent girls share a pair of miraculous pants) is a flimsy excuse to break the film into multicultural vignettes of self-discovery. Alexis Bledel as the withdrawn Lena is more endearing than her slight story of star-crossed love gives her the right to be, while Blake Lively never makes much of her daughter-of-a-suicide-driven-to-slutdom cliché of a character. Amber Tamblyn is great as a budding documentarian, at least until her pint-size sidekick is stricken with cancer and the narrative wanders off into goopy spiritual melodrama. And the story about a mixed-race kid (America Ferrera) who has to chase down the affections of her white dad is surprisingly sweet. Taken as a whole, though, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is too scattershot to make much of an impression. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Sky High
In a surprisingly clever (for a kid's movie) way, Sky High comments on the retarded idiosyncrasies that happen during everyone's awkward high school years. This time, though, it's made even more awkward with the addition of villains and earth-threatening power tools. (MEGAN SELING)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
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)

Stealth
The hero of Stealth is Lt. Gen. Gannon (Josh Lucas), a blue-eyed, all-American flyboy. The love interest is a thick-lipped beauty named Kara Wade (Jessica Biel). The Negro sidekick is Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx). The sidekick is the first (and only one) to go, and the death of the Negro has much in common with the death of John Henry in American myth. But to go into all of that is to make this movie more interesting than it actually is. Indeed, any amount of thinking, consideration of themes, tropes, figures, Barthian connotations, or narratological deep structures, could not veil the fact that this movie sucks real bad. (CHARLES MUDEDE )

War of the Worlds
Though I usually take his side, if only for sport, the first hour of War of the Worlds had me convinced that Steven Spielberg had finally proven his detractors right. Before the bad things start happening, the stage is set for the kind of soulless, CGI-driven family redemption saga that could only happen in a grillion dollar movie. But then something happens. The supreme achievement of the effects seems to galvanize Spielberg into earning them. The drama enters some very dark territory, always motorized by the unimaginable terror of the invincible invaders—it's like the material is daring the director to show us what he's got. (SEAN NELSON)

Wedding Crashers
Seemingly conceived, shot, and edited during a four-day weekend, Wedding Crashers, while occasionally amusing, is lazy enough to make '80s ass-gas-or-grass comedies like H.O.T.S. or Hamburger: The Motion Picture look like models of precision timing. The overall sloppiness and genial contempt for the viewer is tough to ignore. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

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. (ANDREW WRIGHT)