The Anniversary Party, Dr. Dolittle 2, The Fast & the Furious, Peking Opera Blues, The Road Home, Series 7, Sexy Beast, Songcatcher, Spletz-O-Rama, Startup.com, Strictly Sinatra

Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Once upon a time there was a great and mighty kingdom where enlightenment reigned and the citizenry was blessed with wisdom and alacrity of spirit that surpassed those of even the most evolved of modern nations. Then, for reasons no one has ever understood, the great and mighty kingdom fell, its very existence relegated to the annals of apocrypha. But enough about Disney. This movie is about some island or whatnot. It's a cartoon. Opens Fri. Metro

ByDesign 2001
The second annual exploration of of the relationship between design and film is held at the Little Theatre, itself a triumph of design and film. Week one features a look at the early ad work of pioneering graphic artist Oskar Fischinger (Thurs-Fri), and the classic animation of the great husband and wife team Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, who made the Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia, among other indelible works (Sat-Sun). Thurs-Sun June 14-17. Little Theatre

Fast Food Fast Women
Reviewed this issue. A sophisticated New York romance from the director of Whore 2. If you've ever wondered about (or lived through) the erotic yearnings of the aged, this just might be the film for you. Opens Fri. Broadway Market

Incubus/The Mask in 3-D
See Stranger Suggests. The first film is in Esperanto (the "international language of peace"), the second in 3-D. If this camp-o-riffic double feature were to be intercut deftly, you could experience the unique sensation of having something you don't understand leap right off the screen at you. Thurs-Sat June 14-16. Consolidated Works

Jack Strange, Literary Hero
A locally-shot short film about a blocked writer battling past literary figures. This premiere party features music by Sinforosa. Thurs June 14. Sit & Spin

Linda's Summer Movies
Back again for a seventh season, Linda's Summer Movies is the original outdoor drinking/film-watching extravaganza, presented, as always, FOR FREE!! By the time the plot falls apart, you'll be too drunk to care!! This week: Beyond the Door. Wed June 20. Linda's

Psychedelic Sexualis
The first installment of the Grand Illusion's late-night Albert Zugsmith retrospective series. Zugsmith was one of the pioneers of '50s-'60s sexploitation cinema, a genre distinguished by slow pacing, violent undercurrents, swirly lights, and breasts-a-go-go. The hot button issue being exploited in this 1966 gem is psychoanalysis. Craaazy. Fri-Sat June 15-16. Grand Illusion

* Super 8: Work
The theme for this month's Super 8 screening is work. Office work, home work, dirty work--it don't matter what kind. If you'd like to show your work, submit it a day before the screening to the nice people who work at Wigglyworld. There's also that great Lou Reed-John Cale song called "Work" from that Songs for Drella record, that would also be appropriate to mention. Wed June 20. Little Theatre

* Tomb Raider
The masturbation fantasy of a billion preteens is made flesh as Angelina Jolie (the masturbation fantasy of a billion post-teens, ahem) gives corporeal dimension to the video game heroine whose outrageous measurements and minimal coverage do not deter her from running through ancient temples, kicking evil robots in the "face," and blowing a bunch of shit up. Bla-DOW! Opens Fri. Varsity

* Vagabond
On the surface, Agnes Varda's perverse and wonderful Vagabond seems a simple (if astonishingly convincing) story of a homeless girl whose amorality condemns her to a fringe existence. What is remarkable about the film is how subtly its cinematography and nonlinear story line work to illuminate the girl (Sandrine Bonnaire)'s existence, and how intimate we feel with a subject about whom, by the end of the film, we really know very little. (Traci Vogel) Opens Fri. Grand Illusion

About Adam
About Adam is an Irish comedy with a madcap premise and a morally corrupt punchline. The premise, in which three sisters, and one brother, all fall for the same man--Adam--results in a candy-colored tale of narrowly missed confrontations, misunderstandings, hilarity, and sex sex sex. Oddly, Adam is revealed as an unapologetic hedonist, and is held up as the family's salvation. (Traci Vogel) Broadway Market

* Amores Perros
Pungently translated as Love's a Bitch, Amores Perros comprises three stories of life, love, and aggressively twisted fate in the most polluted metropolis on the planet. Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga have enrolled in the Tarantino school of storytelling, but the style and vision is so distinctive and assured that no one should dwell on that point. This is a breakthrough work for Mexican cinema, and for a bold and powerful new talent. (Richard T. Jameson) Broadway Market

Angel Eyes
Jennifer Lopez stars as a Chicago cop ("Stop, or my publicist will shoot!") whose life is saved by a mysterious stud who seems eerily familiar. Uptown

The Animal
Rob Schneider stars as a man about whom nothing is funny, especially when he pretends to be a dolphin or a monkey or a dog. Factoria, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center, Varsity

Big Eden
Henry, a gay urbanite artist, returns to the quaint country home of his youth to care for his sick grandfather, where a cast of lovable, quirky locals are all to eager to help him get laid. Who will it be? The old high-school buddy? Or the guy who runs the general store? Either way, this movie will teach you how to love. (Jason Pagano) Broadway Market

Blow
Add an "s" to this film's title for a one-word review. Uptown

Bridget Jones's Diary
Bridget Jones's Diary features a successful career woman (Renée Zellweger) with a personal life that leaves one wondering how she attained any success at all. She desires a boyfriend, sets her sights on the office cad (Hugh Grant), and moans when he dumps her. The film banks on "the eye-rolling sisterhood of solidarity," the notion that girls love to grumble over a lying, dog-ass guy. (Kathleen Wilson) Aurora Cinema Grill, Guild 45th, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center

* Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
This attempt to wed emotionally reticent drama with the exhilarating freedom of Hong Kong-genre filmmaking finds its rhythm and earns its accolades once it gives its heart over to the young and engaging Zhang Ziyi. (Bruce Reid) Crest, Lewis & Clark, Uptown

The Dish
Here at last is a film that is about a radar dish and it really is about a radar dish! The huge dish overwhelms even the stars (Sam Neill, Patrick Warburton) and the plot (which is about Australia's participation in the Apollo 11 moon mission of 1969). (Charles Mudede) Metro

Evolution
Reviewed this issue.

David Caruso--er, Duchovny-- and the guy from the 7-Up commercials entrust their fragile careers to the man who brought us Meatballs.

Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree, Redmond Town Center

Himalaya
Himalaya is a groundbreaking, genuine portrait of the Dolpo region of Nepal. The story revolves around Tinle, an old chief who loses his eldest son. What follows is a mesmerizing adventure that evokes the forces of ancestral strife and nature at its most treacherous. Says director Eric Valli: "This film is a love story, a love story between this place, these people, and me. It's very simple." (Kudzai Mudede) Varsity

A Knight's Tale
To spruce up a jousting story with a modern soundtrack (well, kind of modern), is hardly a reinvention. It's just a cute contrivance, unsuccessfully masking the deep hollow that lies at the heart of this club-footed attempt to foist a Teen Gladiator on historically malnourished summer audiences. (Sean Nelson) Grand Alderwood, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16

The Man Who Cried
With a list of characters that should end with "...all walk into a bar," and scenes that often seem like they've been taken from romance novels, The Man Who Cried tells the story of a Gypsy (Johnny Depp), a Jewish refugee (Christina Ricci), and a Russian dancer's (Cate Blanchett) attempts at love in World War II Paris. Heavy on the pregnant pauses and aggressively poignant violin music, the whole two hours is an exercise in well-acted depression, i.e. children kidnapped, villages burning, horses dying. (Nathan Albee) Seven Gables

* Memento
Telling the backwards tale of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a vengeful investigator suffering from short-term memory loss trying to hunt down his wife's murderer, Memento effectively mines the rich soil of the film noir mystery with universally corrupt characters and a watertight, intricate plot. (Jamie Hook) Aurora Cinema Grill, Guild 45th, Meridian 16

* Moulin Rouge
To the list of great musicals, we can now add Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, a spectacular whose vernacular is well beyond contemporary--it's practically hypertext. Like Luhrmann's past work (Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), Rouge isn't so much a feast as a food fight for the senses. Throughout the film, Luhrmann batters us with a collage of fractal stimuli, which, like Disneyland, you can't see all of in a single visit. But amid the relentless digression, the things you need to know--"truth, beauty, freedom, and above all, love"--are repeated again and again. It's hard to deny that Moulin Rouge is a flawed gem. What's harder to deny, however, is the heart that beats at the center of the elephantine spectacle--the rapturous love for the possibilities of movies and romance that once made musicals matter. (Sean Nelson) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Majestic Bay, Meridian 16, Neptune, Oak Tree, Southcenter

The Mummy Returns
The first (or, rather, the last) Mummy--the one that came out in 1998 and seemed like it just couldn't be good--actually kind of was thanks to its updating of the classic matinee combo of bad special effects and silly situations coming together to create a movie that just by not being terrible, managed to seem really charming. The sequel--in which not just the mummy, but the whole cast, plot, several lines of dialogue, the m.o. of ripping off every movie ever made, and most of the stunts return--fails to pull off the same trick. (Sean Nelson) Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center

* O Brother, Where Art Thou?
George Clooney stars as Everett Ulysses McGill, a suave and well-groomed petty criminal doing hard time in a depression-era chain gang, shackled to Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). He convinces them to join him in escaping by promising to split a fortune in buried treasure. (Andy Spletzer) Admiral, Metro

Pearl Harbor
Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor--and that's really what it should be called (like Fellini's Roma or the George Foreman Grill, the vision expressed could only belong to one man)--is everything the preview led you to believe: overlong, overlit, overwrought, and overpaid. It's nationalism porn, delivering all the basest flag-waving heroism with none of the meat and mettle of actual history or conflict. And as with real porn, your blood surges in the heat of the moment--with digital bombing raids over phallic turrets standing in for cum shots--and then, the second it's over you feel dirty for having let yourself watch. (Sean Nelson) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Majestic Bay, Metro, Oak Tree, Pacific Place 11, Redmond Town Center

* Seattle International Film Festival
Um, they're like showing a bunch of movies and movies are good (even though sometimes they're bad). Consult The Stranger's monumental SIFF Notes supplement for full details. Broadway Performance Hall, Cinerama, Egyptian, Harvard Exit, Pacific Place 11

Shrek
Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) is the name of an ogre who lives by himself in a swamp; he takes great pride in his job, which mainly consists of being nasty at all times to all things. After he sends one particular batch of terrified knights packing, his swamp is overrun by the entire cast of traditional Western fairy tales, from Pinocchio to Aesop's talking donkey (Eddie Murphy). He finds the local lord, one Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), and demands his swamp back, but gets hoodwinked into rescuing a princess (Cameron Diaz) instead. The film is both terrible and great. (Evan Sult) Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Majestic Bay, Metro, Northgate, Pacific Place 11

Swordfish
Reviewed this issue. John Travolta (whom my late grandmother always used to call "John Revolting") stars with Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, and the great Don Cheadle in this bloaterrific heist number. Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Metro, Oak Tree

What's the Worst That Could Happen?
There is nothing quite so unsatisfactory for a movie viewer than to be hoodwinked by a dazzling preview that turns out be the authoritative oeuvre for what is otherwise a rather rank piece of motion picture making. Oddly enough, this movie has opted for a complete reversal: a capable film that suffers the promotion of a preview which humiliates both studio and viewer. Anyway, an evil tycoon (Danny DeVito) steals a tacky good luck ring from a small time crook (Martin Lawrence). Mr. Lawrence does not take kindly to this state of events and spends the rest of the movie robbing Mr. DeVito blind. (Kudzai Mudede) Aurora Cinema Grill, Factoria, Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center

* With a Friend Like Harry
The blackest hue of comedy tints the tale of Harry (Sergi Lopez), a wealthy bon vivant with an unshakable affinity for Michel (Laurent Lucas). Harry, firm in his belief that Michel's child-strewn, moneyless life could be made more easy, begins to use his influence--and cash--to remove various obstacles to Michel's happiness. A new car here and a case of champagne there escalates to a predictably absurd degree. The film is plain in comparison to its obvious inspiration, Hitchcock's oeuvre. But a deft French wit, and that oh-so-well-done trick of Euro-allegory (about the difficulty of making art) rise like cream to the top of this film. (Jamie Hook) Harvard Exit