In the Paris of 2054, a hardcase detective (voiced by Daniel Craig) is charged with finding a missing researcher. Before long, he stumbles across a high-level conspiracy, as well as a bunch of dudes with stealth cloaks and high-tech nailguns. Drawing equally from Blade Runner and Heavy Metal magazine, director Christian Volkman's ambitious, CGI-animated slice of tech-noir manages to find a few new wrinkles in the genre, striking an impressive balance between newfangled gizmos and old-fashioned car chases. Fitfully engaging as this plot is, however, it quickly fades before the overwhelming look of the film, an uncompromising, high-contrast B&W minimalism that makes the similarly rendered Sin City seem like the work of a hyperactive toddler armed with Crayolas. Such austere eye candy can't wholly justify the nearly two-hour length, but its purity and occasional novelty of vision makes for a fairly dazzling tone poem. Screw the viaduct, we need clear Plexiglas sidewalks, pronto. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Varsity, Fri-Sun 2:10, 4:30, 7, 9:20 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9:20 pm.

Streetwise, w/ Erin

See "Tiny Has Nine Children" and Stranger Suggests. Frye Art Museum, Sun Oct 8 at 2 pm. Tickets available online at www.fryemuseum.org/streetwise.html.

Taiwan Film Festival

At this tour of relatively low-profile Taiwanese films from 1997-2005, all screenings (and lectures) are free! Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (a documentary about Taiwan in the '20s and '30s), Physics-Astronomy Auditorium Room A102, UW campus, Thurs Oct 5 at 6:30 pm. Ocean Fever (doc about a music fesival), PA A102, Thurs Oct 5 at 8:45 pm. Murmur of Youth (narrative feature about two lesbian schoolgirls named Mei-li), PA A102, Fri Oct 6 at 6:30 pm. Tigerwomen Grow Wings (a cross-generational doc by German director Monika Treut), PA A102, Fri Oct 6 at 8:30 pm. The Strait Story (doc about a Taiwanese artist named Huang Ching-cheng), PA A102, Sat Oct 7 at 5 pm Spring: The Story of Hsu Chin-yu (doc about political prisoner Hsu Ching-yu), PA A102, Sat Oct 7 at 8 pm. The Human Comedy (narrative feature by Chen Yu-Hsun), MOHAI, Sun Oct 8 at 5:30 pm. Love Go Go (a second narrative feature by Chen Yu-Hsun), MOHAI, Sun Oct 8 at 7:45 pm.

now playing

13 Tzameti

A slacking roofer intercepts a letter meant for his doped-out client. Following a series of cryptic clues, he soon ends up at a cabin in the woods, where a seriously messed-up game is about to begin. (Think The Deer Hunter, with maybe a smidge of Audition. In other words, we're talking a sphincter factor of about 11.) Gela Babluani's debut, gorgeously shot in black and white, augments a classic suspense set-up with some exquisitely grueling nu-school sadism. See it before the already announced Brad Pitt remake louses things up. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

All the King's Men

As Willie Stark, idealistic hick turned honorably corrupt Louisiana governor, Sean Penn rains fire and brimstone down upon anyone willing to listen. Bellowing before a crowd, he commands attention every moment he's on screen. His performance is so good, in fact, that it completely outclasses the film containing it. Delving deep into the beautiful muck of Louisiana politics, where honesty comes with a price and everyone is for sale, All the King's Men aims to scold as harmlessly as possible—a morality tale writ Southern genteel. But in bringing Warren's novel to the screen, writer-director Steven Zaillian makes a number of alarming missteps. Taken as a whole, All the King's Men is an overstuffed failure, ponderous and self-important. But one stretch in particular—a single lengthy diatribe by Penn that serves as an entire campaign run—is so breathtaking in its assemblage that it nearly makes the entire effort worthwhile. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Army of Shadows

On top of the perfect title Army of Shadows, about cruelty at the core of French Resistance heroism, is a damn near unimpeachable movie: serious, complex, and relentlessly intense. It's an object lesson in how to make an art film. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Black Dahlia

Starring Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart-as Officer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert and Sergeant Leland "Lee" Blanchard, respectively—The Black Dahlia reimagines the notorious murder of Elizabeth Short, whose bisected and otherwise mutilated body turned up in a vacant lot one cruel morning in the winter of 1947. Comparisons between The Black Dahlia and 1997's L.A. Confidential are unavoidable. Both were born from the obsessions of writer James Ellroy. Both take place amid the glamour and hidden grime of postwar Hollywood. And both are less about crime than they are about men with bruised knuckles searching for redemption. But The Black Dahlia, despite the direction of Brian De Palma and a some solid performances, can't achieve the greatness of Curtis Hanson's film; if it accomplishes anything, it will be to remind you of just how much of a miracle L.A. Confidential turned out to be. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Boynton Beach Club

A jaunty geriatric comedy that just happens to be the ickiest smut-pile ever made. Listen. I'm all for the old folks doin' it. Especially when "it" is foxtrotting, eating Werther's Originals, talking about the Depression, or giving me $50 for my birthday. And okay, I'm even for old people having sex. But is it really necessary—REALLY?—for Sally Kellerman's dead naked titties to be all dingle-danglin' in my face? (LINDY WEST)

Conversations with Other Women

Conversations with Other Women is one of those movies built entirely on ponderous chitchat. It unfolds entirely in split screen: an annoying, disorienting gimmick that I totally liked. An overly literal he-said she-said, the two sides inform and enhance and contradict each other in an organic and charming way. (LINDY WEST)

The Devil Wears Prada

Is Meryl Streep afraid of Anna Wintour? There's something weirdly soft in her portrayal of "dragon lady" that completely contradicts the spirit of the movie. But to be fair, it's not her fault: Streep can't help but play a human being, and the characters in The Devil Wears Prada are not human beings. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Employee of the Month

Jessica Simpson stars as a retail hottie who agrees to date the store's employee of the month.

Everyone's Hero

Well, you can stop crying, because Dana and Christopher Reeve have one final inspirational trick up their dearly departed sleeves: an animated baseball movie (starring her and directed by him) called Everyone's Hero. According to the press notes, "The project's theme of perseverance against all odds was inspired by the film's originating director and executive producer, Christopher Reeve." The animation in Everyone's Hero isn't great. The story doesn't make any sense. The jokes basically consist of a talking baseball not wanting to smell the farts of a human boy. Also, Babe Ruth is fat. But in the end, the main character, named Yankee Irving, turns out to be everyone's hero, just exactly literally the same as Christopher Reeve! Except—oh yeah—Christopher Reeve is dead. I'm depressed. (LINDY WEST)

Facing the Giants

A movie about Christians playing football.

Flyboys

A World War I aerial drama with a remarkably nonchalant attitude toward its many anachronisms (James Franco's frosted highlights bring just the right touch of boy-band glamour to the trenches), Flyboys is about as silly as its title suggests. The squadron members spend much of their time hanging out in the donated chateau that serves as their barracks ("These Frenchies sure put on a nice war!"), but Rawlings soon hooks up with a petite amie named Lucienne (Jennifer Decker). The meet-cute scenario is nothing short of ludicrous: Rawlings's plane crashes outside the base and he's nursed back to health in a nearby brothel, where Lucienne, the virginal guardian of three children, just so happens to be passing through. That said, their clumsy courtship is actually sort of endearing, and there is nothing in this world so adorable as a chorus of kids cheerfully yelling "D'accord!" as they're flown out of a combat zone in a rickety aircraft. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Gridiron Gang

Gridiron Gang breaks absolutely no new ground in its chosen field: the weepy, rah-rah sports movie. Based on actual events (the grainy documentary snippets of which, as shown in the closing credits, prove more compelling than anything in the script), the film follows L.A. County juvenile-corrections officer Sean Porter (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), an ex-jock frustrated by the revolving door recidivism and increasing mortality rate of his teenage charges. Under the wary gaze of his superiors, he forms a ramshackle football team, which is soon competing against local high schools. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Guardian

The United States Coast Guard is awesome. The Guardian (not even remotely awesome) is about rescue swimmers, the hearty souls who jump out of helicopters in storms and save the drowning. Kevin Costner is a rescue swimmer in Kodiak, Alaska, and a grizzled old military cliché—stoic, brooding, haunted. He winds up indignantly assigned as lead instructor at the rescue swimmer's school in the lower 48, where he meets Ashton Kutcher, a new recruit and hotshot cliché—cocky, capable, and also haunted. When the two clichés meet, clichéd things happen. They lock clichéd horns. They shed manly, clichéd tears. In the end, one of them—guess which?—sacrifices something big for the other one. It would be moving, if it wasn't so goddamned cliché. The badasses in the Coast Guard deserve their own action movie. It's just too bad that this is what they got. (BRENDAN KILEY)

Half Nelson

Man, you guys! Ryan Gosling (or "the Goz," as I like to call him) is fucking attractive! Even when perched on a feces-encrusted toilet smoking crack and crying. I crown him King of Babes. And I guess the movie—about an idealistic, drug-addled 8th-grade history teacher—is pretty good, too. (LINDY WEST)

The Illusionist

The Illusionist is, according to usually staid critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "a lush piece of romanticism" (read: a sepia-stained triumph of ahistoricism); or, if you prefer to have it from Stephen Holden, The Illusionist "rouses your slumbering belief in the miraculous" (read: Jessica Biel is so boring you'll nod off in your cushioned megaplex seat). I saw The Illusionist (twice) at the Seattle International Film Festival, back before beer bongs and airborne snakes ruled the screens, and I can assure you, with all confidence, that the movie is dumb. Really, really, dumb. (ANNIE WAGNER)

An Inconvenient Truth

It should be required viewing for every American citizen. And if it kicks up a storm of speculation regarding Al Gore's political prospects in 2008? So much the better. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Invincible

The new biopic about the late-'70s Philadelphia Eagles walk-on sensation Vince Papale has a fairly healthy awareness about its hardwired limitations. Led by Mark Wahlberg at his most underdoggedly appealing, it's about as soft sell as the prefab sports genre gets. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

jackass: number two

The once endearing, fresh-faced nature of the participants has pretty much disappeared in a haze of tattoos and lingering contusions; the hidden-camera man-on-the-street segments are still more mean-spirited than funny; and the whole shebang has a weirdly staged, overproduced quality missing from previous installments. That said, I still laughed my damn fool head off. Scoff at the electrified dwarf, if you must, or the guy who nonchalantly chugs horse goo, but, honestly, any real complaints about form or content pale before the sight of idiots cheerfully doing such idiotic things to themselves. (The overall conceptual beauty of the gizmo known as the Fart Helmet, especially, is beyond my ability to describe.) Yes, yes, it's very likely the death of cinema and society and all that, but, jesus, I seriously thought I was going to have to put down plastic. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Jet Li's Fearless

Fearless, Jet Li's much-ballyhooed farewell to the historical martial-arts genre, serves as a rousing, philosophically high-minded reminder of the actor's glory days. If the subject matter occasionally cries out for a longer length—and how many action movies can you say that about?—it still feels like an appropriate capper to a career routinely defying the laws of physics. A semifictionalized recounting of the life of Huo Yuanjia—the Chinese folk hero responsible for unifying China's various martial-arts factions—the period setting allows the star to revisit many of his old tropes, with a newly Buddhist underlay. A surprising amount of the focus is on the main character's interior journey from brash powerhouse to reflective man of action. If, as Li claims, this is his final historical go-round, he's chosen an appropriate sendoff. Besides, if he really feels that it's time to pack it in, who's gonna argue with him? You? (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum is good when Maggie Smith is bopping people on the head, and pretty effing horrible the rest of the time. Rowan Atkinson, playing it utterly straight-faced as a Vicar Walter Goodfellow in the parish of Little Wallop (get it? wallop?), has a number of problems. First of all, he has to address a vicar convention on the subject of "God's Mysterious Ways." Secondly, his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) is being instructed by vinyl-thong-wearing Patrick Swayze in the art of golf. Plus, his son is a wimp, and his daughter is a slut. What is a mild-mannered vicar to do? He gets an elderly housekeeper named Grace (Dame Maggie Smith, who's surprisingly upstaged by her younger incarnation, the radiant Emilia Fox), and his problems start dropping like flies. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Lady in the Water

Holy shit. Everything is wrong with this picture. Everything! The photography is exceptionally dull. The story has nothing new to reveal. Lastly, the lady from the water is a pure-white, Pre-Raphaelite woman (played by Bryce Dallas Howard); whereas the evil being is simply a black mass. This binary construction leads us, by way of King Kong, back to The Birth of a Nation. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Little Miss Sunshine

A dysfunctional family road trip comedy built upon a mountain of character quirks. Call it Indie Filmmaking 101. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Open Season

First of all, porcupines aren't fucking blue. Where do the Sony Pictures animators get off making the porcupine blue!? They're not blue! For the most part, everything else in the movie is the appropriate color. The beavers are brown, the skunks are black and white, and the ducks are all green and brown and white and shit-so WHY IS THE PORCUPINE BLUE?! The point is, children and their sugar-drenched brains will laugh at almost anything so long as it's in cartoon form. Even (and in some cases especially) if it's the WRONG COLOR. Open Season knows it, and that's all Open Season gives you-man vs. beast. Not in the depressing Steve Irwin vs. stingray kind of way, though. In the Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd kind of way. Not in the depressing Steve Irwin vs. stingray kind of way. In the Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd kind of way. (MEGAN SELING)

School for Scoundrels

Very loosely based on a 1960 British film about getting ahead in life by insulting people and exploiting their good breeding—which in turn was based on self-help manuals by midcentury parodist Stephen Potter-School for Scoundrels dispenses with all the middle-class anxiety and gets down to the basics. Losers get kicked in the balls. Winners kick other people in the balls. Hilarious! What does it say when a movie released in 2006 is more preoccupied with castration than a self-help parody published in the 1950s? Somebody let the Freud out, and an all-star cast (including Sarah Silverman and David Cross in minor roles) can't even hope to keep up. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Science of Sleep

Wads of cotton are tossed into the air and become clouds. A tiny stuffed horse is magically spurred to life. There are so many wondrous sights to behold that you can't help but get swept up in the cacophony; Gondry's overactive imagination alone makes the film worth seeing. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Scoop

Match Point was slick, a film that politely looked the other way as you began to sympathize with the lead character's alternating lust for and horror of women (an ambivalence that ends in homicidal panic). Scoop is a screwball murder mystery—frequently funny, but somehow less fun. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

This prequel illustrates the birth of Leatherface. Yum!

The U.S. vs. John Lennon

The basic facts are fascinating: After the breakup of the Beatles, the freshly married John Lennon and Yoko Ono relocate to New York City, where they begin an inspired and frequently ridiculous campaign to promote peace in the face of the Vietnam War. For their efforts, the Lennons were rewarded with worldwide headlines and an orchestrated campaign of harassment by the highest levels of the U.S. government. Given the richness of the setup, it's sad that the film ultimately feels so flimsy. Armed with dynamite historical footage and some top-notch talking heads (Gore Vidal, Angela Davis), the filmmakers reject the riveting true story of free speech under attack in favor of a disappointingly superficial portrait of a saint besieged by evil and corruption. The film's deification of Lennon is simplistic in a way the man and his art never were, and the end result is a work that feels less like a full-blooded film and more like a particularly good episode of VH1's Behind the Music. (DAVID SCHMADER)

Wordplay

Compared to the several Scrabble documentaries that came out a few years ago, Wordplay is conspicuously lacking in crazy characters. But the interviews with Will Shortz are dorky-adorable. (ANNIE WAGNER)