LIMITED RUN

Apollo 13
"I'm so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead rhinoceros." Seattle Center Mural Amphitheatre, Sat Aug 27 at dusk.

Around the World in 80 Days
This is the David Niven version, not the Jackie Chan remake/abomination. Central Cinema, Sat-Sun noon, 3:30 pm.

Edward Scissorhands
"Hello? Avon calling!" Egyptian, Fri-Sat at midnight.

Fat City
John Huston's 1972 movie stars Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges as boxers—one on his way up and the other on his way down—in Stockton, CA. It's a brilliantly understated mood piece that captures the feel of its location perfectly, especially the sadness of the El Dorado Hotel. Movie Legends, Sun Aug 28 at 1 pm.

Hype!
See Stranger Suggests. Central Cinema, Fri-Sun 9:30 pm.

Ingmar Bergman Film Festival
See Stranger Suggests. All shows are at Grand Illusion. Cries and Whispers, Weekdays 7 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 7 pm. Secrets of Women, Weekdays 9 pm, Sat-Sun 5, 9 pm.

Jaws
"This was no boating accident." Fremont Outdoor Movies, Sat Aug 27 at dusk.

Kings & Queen
See review this issue. Varsity, Fri-Sun 1:30, 4:40, 8 pm, Mon-Thurs 8 pm.

The Next Industrial Revolution
A featurette about sustainable economies, narrated by Susan Sarandon. Environmental Learning Center (Camp Long), Thurs Aug 25 at 7 pm.

The Princess Bride
"You mock my pain!" Seattle Center Mural Amphitheatre, Sun Aug 28 at dusk.

Shark Tale
Dreamworks' faux-Disney offering is a drably animated parable about the perils of watching too much Cribs. (ANNIE WAGNER) Seattle Center Mural Amphitheatre, Fri Aug 26 at dusk.

Silent Movie Mondays
The silent movie series continues at the Paramount. This week: Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality and The High Sign. Paramount, Mon Aug 29 at 7 pm.

Singles
See Stranger Suggests. Central Cinema, Fri-Sun 7 pm.

Travel Queeries: Queeruption, Barcelona
A documentary on Queeruption 8, a gathering of "radikal queers" that took place in Barcelona this past spring. Tonight is the premiere, with ticket proceeds going to benefit the project. Century Ballroom, Fri Aug 26 at 6 pm.

Waiting for Guffman
"Eight months? Seven? I don't know, somethin' like that. It's fun. Just do the cones... make sundaes, make Blizzards, 'n... put stuff on 'em, 'n... see a lot of people come in, a lot of people come to the D.Q.... burgers... ice cream... anything, you know? Cokes... just drive in and get a Coke, if you're thirsty." South Lake Union Discovery Center, Fri Aug 26 at 9:30 pm.

Who Is Bozo Texino?
See Blow Up. Central Cinema, Wed-Thurs at 6:30, 8:15, 10 pm.

NOW PLAYING

The 40-Year-Old Virgin
The trailers for The 40-Year-Old Virgin promised yet another lame romp through sexual humiliation—Losin' It with gray hairs. The trailers, however, lied. Surprisingly smart and unashamed of a little jolt to the heartstrings, it's a sly movie, happy to shock occasionally, but happier still to bless its characters with the intelligence sorely lacking from most comedies. As Andy, Steve Carell may be the star of the film, but his performance is little more than the eye of the storm, with a stellar supporting cast (Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, and Seth Rosen as his co-workers; the great Catherine Keener as his would-be love interest) shouldering much of the comedic load around him. The result is a film that, for the time being at least, wrestles comedy from the pimple-faced masses and hands it back to the adults. It's also the funniest movie you will see all year. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

9 Songs
In between bouts of rocking out at the local club to the likes of Franz Ferdinand and The Dandy Warhols, a straight laced Brit geologist and firebrand American riot grrrl meet up at his dingy flat to boink. And boink. And boink some more. Raw as all get out, director Michael (24 Hour Party People) Winterbottom's largely improvised combination of concert footage and NC-17 money shots is both seriously hot and strangely frustrating, in increasingly unstable proportions. The director is on to something major here—a graphic illustration of the tidal phases of a short-term relationship—and his damn-the-torpedoes approach occasionally pays off mightily. Ultimately, though, at a brief 69 (har!) minutes, the hugely promising synergy of overt physicality and fill-in-the-blank psyches only really registers on a theoretical level. Still, even if Ron Jeremy won't have to give up his day job any time soon, this is one of the most audacious experiments in recent memory. Props are due. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Aristocrats
In The Aristocrats, a film co-directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, dozens of legendary (and sub-legendary) comedians tell variations on the dirtiest joke in the world. At least, that's what the movie pretends to be. In the end, the joke is just a vehicle for allowing these humormongers the opportunity to flex muscles their entertainment careers seldom allow them to flex. Robin Williams hasn't been funny on screen in years, but he's unstoppably hilarious here. Likewise with Shelley Berman, Larry Storch, Rip Taylor, Phyllis Diller, and countless other comics from all strata of the business, who wring laughs from the sketchiest of premises. It's been at least two decades since Martin Mull has had a vehicle capable of expressing his brilliance, and he all but steals The Aristocrats. That honor belongs to Gottfried, whose performance of the joke at a Friars Club roast forms the soul of the film. (SEAN NELSON)

Asylum
Based on the novel by Spider author Patrick McGrath, Patrick (Closer) Marber's screenplay follows the willful downward spiral of Natasha Richardson, a hugely dissatisfied doctor's wife and mother who apparently subsists on a diet of booze, cigarettes, and scorn. Soon after taking up residence at the titular institution, she begins an affair with a patient (hunky up and comer Marton Csokas) with a history of savagely flying off the handle at the slightest hint of betrayal. Before long, an escape attempt (and the vested interests of pervy fly-on-the-wall administrator Ian McKellen) brings things to a tragic head. As he previously showed with Young Adam, director David Mackenzie knows his way around a realistically grotty sex scene, but proves rather less successful detailing the progressively self-destructive nature of his characters. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

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)

Broken Flowers
This being a Jarmusch film, patience rules the day. Unfortunately, as with the fatally inert Coffee and Cigarettes, the style can't hold. Jarmusch's best films have always been built around an amicably aimless spirit, but Broken Flowers is undermined by a lack of drive comparable to that of its main character. It's one thing to watch someone wander for 90 minutes as long as we trust that he (and we) will eventually arrive at a destination. In this case, Jarmusch appears to have no real focus, and by the time the "mystery" reveals itself to be maddeningly inconsequential, the entire film borders on a malicious prank. There's slight and there's shiftless—Broken Flowers, sadly, is the latter. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

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. Cinderella Man, the much-ballyhooed reuniting of the team behind A Beautiful Mind, takes a story that's almost too perfect for cinematic recounting—over-the-hill boxer Gentleman Jim Braddock's legendary comeback during the Great Depression—and goes relentlessly, ploddingly by the numbers. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

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)

Four Brothers
Whatever his faults, director John Singleton has always had a touch with actors, and here he draws relaxed performances from André 3000, Tyrese Gibson, and especially Chiwetel Ejiofor, as a cartoonishly evil mastermind who occasionally forces his henchmen to eat off of the floor. On the tech side, David Arnold's score lays gloriously heavy on the wa-wa pedal, and the photography and production design favorably recall the glory days of the '70s exploitation film, when folks like Roy Scheider and Jim Brown busted up Caddys and Dusters by the score. If, as the occasional brief moment suggests, this is all a straight-faced parody of such trash classics as Slaughter's Big Rip-Off and Truck Turner, Singleton may have bigger talents than anyone has ever suspected. If serious, however, lord help us. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Great Raid
Escaping from the shelves after a two-year delay, The Great Raid commendably sheds light on one of the lesser-known conflicts of World War II, a behind-the-lines, off-the-books siege of a Japanese-held POW camp in the Philippines, which culminated in the largest rescue mission in American history. Bookended with a copious amount of striking newsreel footage and staged with an impressive degree of historical accuracy, the results are heartfelt, reverent, honorable, and, ultimately, more than a little dull. As much as this tale deserves to be told, it's difficult at times not to quibble with the execution. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog has always had a thing for the abyss, of both the inner and outer kind. The much-Googled true story of Timothy Treadwell, a self-fashioned nature expert who spent 13 seasons in close contact with wild bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were devoured in 2003 by a rogue grizzly, seems so far up the director's alley as to be a little daunting—the kind of career-defining summation that can easily tar-baby a filmmaker into submission. He nails it. For all of the film's considerable ingenuity and power throughout, the sink-or-swim moment for audiences ultimately may hinge on the late unveiling of an audiotape documenting the couple's death. Those familiar with Herzog's past tendencies toward boundary-busting may be forgiven for feeling queasy over the prospect of such a revelation entering the realm of the snuff film (see When the Green Ants Dream). The way he handles the evidence, however, proves to be one of the eeriest, oddly beautiful things I've ever seen on a screen. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

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. There are some truly cool moments in The Island (one car chase involving a semi, two-ton train wheels, and numerous crashes is a triumph of bang for bucks), but the absurd spectacle we look for from a colorful hack like Bay is undermined by his ridiculous and transparent desire to be taken seriously. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Junebug
A Sundance hit by director Phil Morrison and writer Angus MacLachlan (both from North Carolina), Junebug pretends to be about the South. It's really about the shame of being Southern. And because it's hard to hate oneself for an hour and a half straight, it's also about what self-absorbed assholes Yankees are. Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicago-based dealer in outsider art, travels to North Carolina to recruit a promising painter, and her new husband tags along to introduce her to his family. The new couple can't keep their hands off each other; his sister Ashley doesn't seem to comprehend sex, but she's about to have a baby. In a stunning demonstration of the lengths to which the script goes to prove Southern ignorance, she's also cheerfully trying to lose weight. The movie is packed with these sorts of bitter "insights," and they poison the entire experience. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Ladies in Lavender
In this assemblage of implausible vignettes , Maggie Smith is the proper sister Janet, concerned with privacy and appearances. Judi Dench plays Ursula, a fragile little biddy stuck in a permanent state of childish desperation because—this is actually in the script—she's never been properly fucked. They like to garden and knit, and the camera likes to follow gulls as they soar majestically over the beach. Then, a hot teen boy (Daniel Brühl) washes up on the shore. Ursula goes crazy; Janet huffs and acts a little weird herself (her husband died long ago). The kid doesn't speak a word of English, and there's a brief moment when someone suspects he might be a German spy, but then that tangent trails off, and he's actually a Polish violin prodigy. Luckily, the sexy Franco-Russian girl next door has a famous maestro for a brother, and the movie ends with a rousing concert, which (like everything else in this film) is flimsy and unintentionally sad. (ANNIE WAGNER)

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)

March of the Penguins
I have never liked penguins, and now that I've watched this documentary I like them even less. To begin with, the creatures have ugly feet, and their awkward walk makes them look like sitting ducks. I'm surprised the penguin is not, like the dodo, extinct. March of the Penguins has one great moment: when it shows a group of female penguins going into the sea and swimming through the water in the way their featured relatives fly through the air. The water is clear blue, the surrounding ice forms a majestic architecture, and the penguins zip here and there, chasing fish and avoiding sea lions. But when they're back on the land, back on their ugly feet, all of the grace is gone and once again the penguin is a dull and clumsy creature. 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. Against a waterlogged electronic score by Michael Andrews, her characters bubble-wrap belongings, eulogize goldfish, draw ASCII tigers, tap quarters against bus stop poles, wear inspirational shirts that can only be read in the mirror, press dot stickers for good luck, flash their underwear at leering guys, and light themselves on fire. The movie is set in Portland (characters refer to Burnside Street and Laurelhurst Park) but it was shot in L.A. (witness the palm trees), and the discrepancy serves to displace the story from either setting. 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)

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. Director Doug Liman still knows how to shoot action—his loose, even careless style brought a surprising amount of realism to Bourne Identity, and here it adds a sense of playfulness to all the gunplay—but this time action is all he has to offer. Pretty people making pretty explosions does not a good movie make. Just ask that ultimate hack Michael Bay. (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)

Red Eye
At a time when the bulk of adrenaline cinema seems divvied up between high-stakes Michael Bay mega-orgasms or Sci-Fi channel exclusives starring Lou Diamond Phillips and giant CGI snakes, the lean, stripped-down pleasures of an honest-to-goodness B-picture are sorely needed. Coming in at a fairly miraculous 85 minutes, Wes Craven's Red-Eye may not quite have the propulsive clockwork ingenuity of, say, a Breakdown or Pitch Black, but its built for speed, no-nonsense style goes a long way towards juicing this summer's dog days. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Saint Ralph
No American, in right or wrong mind, could make a movie like Saint Ralph, which is about a 14-year-old boy (Adam Butcher) who abuses himself at every opportunity, and desires anything that moves with the shape of a woman. He even comes in a swimming pool when he gets a glimpse of a curvy naked woman showering in a changing room. But the movie is not about his sexual awakening; it's about him becoming an orphan, and his failure to deal with this fact. After falling and bumping his head, the boy opens his eyes and decides he needs to win the Boston Marathon, an achievement that would constitute a miracle. For reasons that are cosmic, the winning miracle will become the medical miracle his mother desperately needs. (And all of this is a comedy.) Only in Canada. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

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)

Skeleton Key
A voodoo thriller starring Kate Hudson, Peter Saarsgard (!), and Gena Rowlands (!!).

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
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. Though the film 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)

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 )

Supercross
Why the death of a father would motivate two brothers to start racing motocross again is beyond me, but that's the plot of this movie.

Undiscovered
A pack of L.A. wannabes, including Ashlee "La La" Simpson, attempt to become stars in this film penned by one "John Galt."

Valiant
Valiant breaks down into a simple story about a bird war hero. It makes war look sorta uncomfortable (they show some cartoon bullets), but at the same time it's oh-so-cute and manageable, with happy endings all around—a half-assed army recruitment tool disguised as an adorable animated Disney flick. (MEGAN SELING)

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. In a nutshell: Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are lawyers who get their kicks by boozily infiltrating the nuptials of strangers, eventually meeting their match with a pair of Kennedyesque sisters. Christopher Walken drops by to do his thing. This is all likely to go over like gangbusters at the box office (the mere appearance of a certain super secret guest star—i.e., the guy in all these movies who isn't Ben Stiller—brought the preview audience to hysterical tears, even before he opened his mouth), but 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)