Screen Listings

HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS: Opposites attract.

2 Days in Paris

In her directorial debut, Julie Delpy shows the poise, aplomb and savoir-faire of a typical YouTube auteur. She's made a dumb culture-clash comedy in which a French girl and an American boy visit her parents, which is merely a ragged framework for scoring cheap and easy pseudo-political points. Delpy's palpable smugness makes her as creepy as what she complains about. R. N.P. THOMPSON. Cinema 21.

3:10 to Yuma

In filming this western duel between Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, director James Mangold is remaking a 1957 Glenn Ford picture of the noble-gunslinger variety, while underlining the ethical choices with extra ink. As Mangold last proved in his Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, he has a deft hand with a cliché, but he doesn't like to leave any untouched. So 3:10 to Yuma may feature two men rushing to make a train, but they have a lot to talk over before they get there. The film is elevated by Crowe, who plays the stagecoach robber Ben Wade as a deadly badman—but a sleek, sophisticated badman, urbane in his manners and fond of drawing birds. He glides through the role. Bale has a rougher time as Dan Evans, the rancher paid to escort Wade. He's hobbled by a stack of psychological burdens, and Bale is too edgy and meticulous an actor not to address every single emotion. But the conflicting performances balance each other out nicely; by the movie's second act, it's a showdown between labor and ease, with Wade starting to see the temptation of doing right. R. AARON MESH. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Across the Universe

A dreamboat named Jude meets a sweetheart named Lucy, and they accompany her brother Max on a voyage through the Beatles songbook. This initially sounds like a spectacularly irritating idea (let's play Moulin Rouge! with the Fab Four!), but in practice it's often astonishing, and might have worked even better if director Julie Taymor had followed her literal notion to its logical end and simply made a Beatles opera. If all the movie's words had been written by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, we would have been spared some embarrassing dialogue—though it would have done nothing to improve the doe-in-the-headlights performance of Evan Rachel Wood, or Taymor's LSD-and-NutraSweet vision of the 1960s. (At times, Across the Universe feels like Forrest Gump: The Musical.) Taymor's specialty is the intricately choreographed crescendo, and even this overlong work includes several showstoppers. I thrilled to see an interpretation of "I Want You" in an Army recruitment office; I was earnestly grinning as a lesbian cheerleader belted out "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on a football field; and when Bono arrived in purple shades to sing "I Am the Walrus"...well, at that point, happiness would have been a warm gun. But when a concept is this far-fetched, it's a pleasant surprise when any of it works. PG-13. AARON MESH. Lloyd Center, Bridgeport.

Balls of Fury

It might be argued Dan Fogler's performance in the sports farce Balls of Fury strikes some sort of blow for diversity, if only by dismantling the stereotype that overweight people are humorous. As former table-tennis phenom Randy Daytona, Fogler sweats profusely, flops awkwardly and bulges out of his undersized track shorts. But he isn't funny. He's just fat. PG-13. AARON MESH. 99 Indoor Twin.

The Bothersome Man

In Jens Lien's barbed parable about a Scandinavia drained of desire, Trond Fausa Aurvaag has plenty to goggle at. Dropped off by bus in an antiseptic purgatory where the wine contains no alcohol and the food no flavor ("Hot chocolate, pussy, burgers: Nothing tastes any good," a fellow citizen complains), he tries to find some snatch of beauty or love. Or at least successfully throw himself under a train. Well, desire is messy. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

The Bourne Ultimatum

The presumed final chapter in Jason Bourne's adventures, The Bourne Ultimatum stands like a giant over the rest of the summer's "threequels." Picking up right where Supremacy left off, Matt Damon is hell-bent on tracking down the government agents who turned him into a monster, which means more globe-trotting, more fast walking, more chases and some truly gnarly fight sequences. Ultimatum is a film just as cold, calculated and exhilarating as its hero, and a helluva way to end blockbuster season. PG-13. AP KRYZA. 99 West Drive-In, Broadway, Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Brave One

Jodie Foster plays a soothing public-radio commentator—think of Terry Gross without the interviews—who strolls into the wrong Central Park tunnel. There, she loses first her dog and then her fiancé to brutal muggers. When Foster awakens and takes stock of her losses, she realizes she can never recover her boyfriend. But she rallies with the discovery that she can get her dignity back. And maybe the dog, too. Director Neil Jordan has given us revenge for NPR listeners. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Division, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Broken English

Broken English begins with the face of its heroine, Nora Wilder, positioned between two glasses of wine. This is a place where Nora finds herself most of the time. But as imagined by director Zoe Cassavetes (yes, the daughter of John) and inhabited by Parker Posey, Nora self-medicates the way real people do: She feels intoxicated because it's better than feeling something worse. She's sipping her way through another party when in bounds Julien (Melvil Poupaud)—lanky, French and possessed of the remarkable ability to make a straw hat look sexy. It's not terribly difficult to imagine where Broken English goes from there, but it's not so easy to predict the dimensions of acting Posey shows. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

Dedication

Quick, name the movie: Despondent yet dashing man-boy cured of clinical depression by cute and quirky girl with problems of her own, set to hipster indie soundtrack. If the words Garden State popped into your head, you win a prize. And that prize is to know that should you see Dedication, the directorial debut from actor Justin Theroux, you won't struggle to understand the plot. Sure, there's a slightly different story line, with Billy Crudup as a messed-up children's book author and Mandy Moore as the novice illustrator forced to work with him and find his tireless psychosis endearing. But, really, this type of "complicated love" has been done many times before. Theroux brings a strange beauty to the screen with seaside scenes and the help of Joanna Newsom's alien voice. Crudup is efficiently oddball as a man who wears a bike helmet while driving, and Moore is indeed quirky and cute. But the movie drags and the development of love between the leads (culminating in a scene where Crudup gives Moore a rock and tells her she's "that princess shit") is both forced and sluggish and, when not creepy, unbelievable at best. R. ANNIE BETHANCOURT. Lloyd Center.

Deep Water

[TWO DAYS ONLY] In the fall of 1968, a friendly faced amateur sailor named Donald Crowhurst set off from Teignmouth, England, in a self-customized trimaran to compete in a globe-circling yacht race. He was alone, he was ill-prepared and within weeks he was in deep trouble. "If Don went forward, he was committing suicide," recalls a friend. "If he came back, he was ruined." But then Crowhurst thought of a third option. Directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell have spliced together Crowhurst's oceanic footage, eloquent interviews and the era's Fleet Street media circus to create the most suspenseful, affecting documentary I've seen in some time. PG. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday-Thursday only.

Eastern Promises

On its surface, David Cronenberg's voyage into London's Russian-mob underworld tells a familiar story. Stop me if you've heard this one: A newborn baby is menaced by ruthless gangsters until a gruff hero arises to the child's defense. (Audiences could be forgiven for yawning, then searching around the theater for Clive Owen.) But Eastern Promises isn't just a movie with haunting themes playing under its surface: It's a movie explicitly concerned with how surfaces warp the things they cover up. Such details are in keeping with Cronenberg's long-held fascination with mutation and mutilation. This time around, instead of turning Jeff Goldblum into an insect à la The Fly, he buries Viggo Mortensen's body in black-and-blue tats, dolling him up to look like a young Paulie Walnuts sucking on a lemon. But this role, as a mob cleanup man, is more textured than anything he's done previously. It's certainly more revealing: He wages a climactic battle in a Turkish bath, his naked body as powerful and unprotected as any wounded animal. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Bridgpeort, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place.

Eco-Sicko

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] The NW Film Center's fusion of ecological disaster and classic cinema opens with local-boy-made-good Todd Haynes' 1995 tour de force Safe, a tale of "environmental illness" that may—or may not—be all in its heroine's head. If you've found Julianne Moore's recent performances lackluster, you owe it to yourself to check out the actress at the top of her game—and intentionally vapid. R. AARON MESH. Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Saturday, Oct. 6.

Exiled

It has long been established that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones, but here comes Hong Kong director Johnnie To with an important corollary: Gangsters who dine in glass restaurants should not plan to conduct assassinations there. An atrium shootout is just one of the absurd set pieces in To's Macau mayhem, which pays tribute to Sergio Leone and is stylized to the brink of absurdity. The director of Triad Election films his dark alleys in lurid green and yellow; it doesn't take long for him to add crimson to his palette. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Director Hara Kazuo's 1974 film follows his ex-wife (that's not creepy at all) and discovers "heartache, sex, insecurities, gender politics, and even on-camera childbirth." So it's just like Knocked Up, but in Japanese. Presented by 40 Frames and the NW Film Center. Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Tuesday, Oct. 9.

Feast of Love

Like any good, red-blooded American, I believe in movies with naked women, multiple-story-line collages and Morgan Freeman being twinkly and wise. And as a new Portlander, my burgeoning civic pride makes me favorably inclined toward any PDX-set film that isn't about drug addicts or serial killers. But none of my proclivities can justify Feast of Love, a generous helping of middlebrow twaddle that tries to find supernatural profundity in Greg Kinnear being cuckolded by two different women (Selma Blair and Radha Mitchell, who join Alexa Davalos and Stana Katic in disrobing—the movie might have been better titled Feast of Breasts). The usually excellent director Robert Benton leaves no aphorism unuttered; the story culminates in a character explaining that God must care about us, because he gave us love, and love is, like, pretty great. This is not the most convincing theodicy, but it's far from the movie's most preposterous moment—which comes several scenes earlier, when someone dies stuck in traffic caused by a Portland State Vikings football tailgate party. Seriously. It's a Jerry Glanville wet dream. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place.

Feel the Noise

A would-be rapper (Omarion Grandberry) goes on the lam to Puerto Rico. The movie with the yawn-inducing title was not screened for critics. PG-13. Bridgeport.

The Game Plan

Do you smell what Dwayne "The Rock" Robinson is cookin'? It's pretty pungent. The former WWF star's newest vehicle, The Game Plan, is the Jersey Girl of sports movies—a Disney-produced piece of cinematic poo that stings the nose like a burnt, sugar-coated baby turd. If that sounds rash, consider what the film offers. A hotshot quarterback is greeted at his door by his daughter, who he never knew existed. She takes over his A-list lifestyle. She meets her dad. He finds some sense of himself. She's a ballerina—so you can bet your ass he makes googly eyes at her hottie ballet teacher and dons some tights. The Rock certainly isn't without charm, but like so many action heroes before him (Bruce Willis in The Kid, Ah-nuld in Jingle All the Way), he seems content to gawk at the camera like so much Ben Affleck while being out-acted by an 8-year-old. If the formula of a cocky athlete becoming a decent person sounds familiar, it is. It took three writers to scribe The Game Plan's endless scenes of the Rock yelling football plays at his kid. But who needs writers when you've got the Disney soft-serve machine? PG. AP KRYZA. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Global Concern: Human Rights on Film

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] When former Marine Captain Brian Steidle arrived in Sudan to monitor an ostensible ceasefire in 2004—his job with the African Union, it turned out, was to photograph genocide—he expected to see ugly things. ("Welcome to hell," came the greeting as Steidle stepped off a helicopter into Darfur.) His photos captured the atrocities firsthand, as Janjaweed—"devil on horseback"—gunmen slaughtered desert villages and refugee camps. What Steidle never expected is that the world would see his images in The New York Times and the United Nations, and respond with apathy. The Devil Came on Horseback, the latest entry in the NW Film Center's Global Concern series, rightly focuses on Chinese eagerness to supply the Sudanese government with the tools of death in exchange for (yep) oil, but directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg make their most direct appeal to Americans. "I honestly thought that if the people of America could see what I've seen, there'd be troops here in one week," Steidle says at the film's close. "They've seen it now. And we've still done nothing." It's a story no less shameful for being so familiar. Also screening is The Unforeseen, which pits George W. Bush against a beloved Austin, Texas, swimming hole. Bush doesn't care about swimming people, either. AARON MESH. Whitsell Auditorium. The Devil Came on Horseback screens 7 pm Thursday, Oct. 4. The Unforeseen screens 7 pm Sunday, Oct. 7.

Good Luck Chuck

If voluntarily witnessing Dane Cook go down on a stuffed penguin with utter carnal desire is the last visual you'd find funny, then Good Luck Chuck is probably not for you. The story line is just entertaining enough to get away with the same crass, sexually charged fratitude that had you doubling over (or rolling your eyes) during Wedding Crashers: Cook's Chuck comes to realize that he's cursed; one sexual escapade with him, and the next man a girl meets will be her true love. Persuaded by his half-wit cohort Stu (a despicable Dan Fogler), Chuck decides to "help" these desperate women. R. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, City Center, Cinetopia, Division, Forest, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

From massive Cthulhu to the cunnilingular undead of Re-Animator, H.P. Lovecraft-based films demonstrate the unknown is more terrifying than any well-worn monster in the closet. With the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival—Portland's annual celebration of the macabre, the insane and the downright disgusting—the early-20th-century author's influence is explored through discussions, presentations and the films his work has inspired. The H.G. Wells of pulp terror, Lovecraft created monstrosities that have been directly applied to over 70 films; the indirect influence of his "cosmic horror" can be felt in hundreds more. Admittedly, it can be a mixed bag, but even bad Lovecraft-based movies are a kick. The features and shorts at this festival offer a splattering of Lovecraftian creepiness. John Carpenter is pulling double-duty with his classic The Thing—the Arctic nightmare of a murderous alien, cabin fever and Kurt Russell—and the not-so-classic In the Mouth of Madness. Most exciting among the new films is the truly scary The Last Winter: A sister piece to The Thing, this apocalyptic global-warming freakout centers on an Arctic drilling team facing death from a mysterious entity as well as a murderous collapse from within. Also great is the bloody, hellish noir Nobody, concerning an assassin, machetes and dreams. Of the not-so-great variety is the gimmicky occult thriller 9 Lives of Mara, which plays out like a student scare film about witchcraft. The shorts offer a wide variety of gloom, ranging from the Mexican mysticism of The Hermetic Abyss to a Claymation version of Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum and a Rob Zombie-esque splatter-take on The Telltale Heart. Between dismemberment, voodoo, witches and mental breakdowns, there's something for every cosmic sadist at the fest, a blissful celebration of a very twisted horror pioneer. AP KRYZA. Hollywood Theatre. Friday-Sunday, Oct. 5-7. See Movietimes, page 75, for a detailed schedule.

Hannah Takes the Stairs

Director Joe Swanberg's addition to the "mumblecore" corpus opens with a bright credit sequence set to Tchikovsky's 1812 Overture being played by what sounds like a marching band on Quaaludes. This sets the tone for what follows, as Swanberg manages to pull some classic themes into the slight world of post-collegiate ennui. Hannah (Greta Gerwig) may not quite be an Emma Bovary or Hedda Gabler for her generation, but she shares the traits of being easily bored and smarter than the men around her. So she bed-hops her way through a series of boyfriends (including arch-mumbler Andrew Bujalski) before finding happiness—or at least shared trumpet-playing ability—with a TV writer (Kent Osborne). The script (true to the genre, it's a collaborative affair, with Swanberg, Gerwig and Osborne all pitching in) manages to create characters who for once can talk about something beyond their own experiences: Contemporary politics rate a mention, Hannah is writing a play about Immanuel Kant and Sir Isaac Newton as 13-year-old boys, and the question "What Would Eugene O'Neill Do?" is considered with some seriousness. But even with a winsome performance from Gerwig, I'm not sure Hannah carries much meaning—except in its lesson that when you date a girl who complains of "chronic dissatisfaction," you shouldn't expect to satisfy her. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

The Heartbreak Kid

Ben Stiller and the Farrellys remake a Neil Simon comedy. So long as they leave The Odd Couple alone, we're cool. Look for Aaron Mesh's review on wweek.com. R. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

IDA DocuWeek

[TWO WEEKS ONLY] A slate of good ol' non-fiction filmmakin', including the highly praised Haitian cane-cutting documentary The Price of Sugar. Nor available for review by press time; look for full reviews in next week's edition. Hollywood Theatre. Monday-Thursday, Oct. 8-18. See movietimes for a detailed schedule.

In the Shadow of the Moon

[TWO WEEKS ONLY] If you believe they put a man on the moon, here's a documentary to remind you how incredible that feat actually was. (If you're one of those crackpots who maintain the whole thing was staged, there's an epilogue in which the Apollo astronauts basically make fun of you.) David Sington's film combines rich outer-space footage from the NASA archives—much of it never seen outside government warehouses—with moving testimonies from the rocket men. Apollo 11 pilot Mike Collins emerges as the soft-spoken hero of the space program—he was saddled with the unenviable knowledge that if he couldn't redock with the lunar module, he would have to leave his friends to die. Meanwhile, Buzz Aldrin claims his own bit of extraterrestrial turf: Neil Armstrong may have been the first man to walk on the moon, but Aldrin was the first guy to take a piss on it. As with any project produced by Ron Howard, In the Shadow of the Moon is dopey, reverential and square—and pretty thoroughly delightful. PG. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. Wednesday-Thursday, Oct. 3-11.

In the Valley of Elah

Of all the commanding performances Tommy Lee Jones has delivered in a fine career, this may be his best—searching for his AWOL soldier son, he travels so completely into grief he never needs to provide an actorly demonstration. The movie needs him, though. In the Valley of Elah wants to be Deer Hunter for a new quagmire, but instead it plays as a very special episode of Law & Order (complete with Charlize Theron as Jill Hennessy, 1993-96). It's certainly ripped from the headlines: The murderer is revealed to be...The War. As the first drama to explicitly address Iraq, Elah feels designed to appeal to theoretical heartland audiences who have turned against the Bush cadre and want to see their worst fears confirmed. (Our soldiers visit titty bars! Our soldiers torture! Our soldiers have lost their souls!) This naiveté rings false, and it smells suspiciously of Haggis. As both director and screenwriter, Paul Haggis keeps playing hide-the-ball with his messages, using characters as disguises for a third-act sermon. Elah, which takes its title from the story of David and Goliath, is another Sunday-school lesson. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Fox Tower.

The Jane Austen Book Club

There's a reason why women love Jane Austen. Her books present a frank, worldly voice all buttoned up in Regency period garb. But take away the fancy clothes and insert a couple hundred years and you get a bunch of stressed-out women in bad outfits bellyaching about life. In other words, you get the soulless screen adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler's enjoyable 2005 novel. The Austenesque plot centers on a group of California women (and one clueless gent) who, in an effort to blow off steam, reconnect with friends or show off their English degrees, join a reading group devoted to you-know-who. And who's in The Jane Austen Book Club? Complete tools. Major themes to discuss at our next meeting? Technology is bad, men are hopeless but sweet, and Jane Austen will, eventually, get you totally hitched. Why the Sony powers-that-be didn't just sell the script to Lifetime and be done with it I'll never know. PG-13. KELLY CLARKE. Cedar Hills, Bridgeport, Fox Tower, Roseway.

The Kingdom

Peter Berg has made an action movie that is set in Saudi Arabia, that includes a great many terrorist bastards getting wasted, and is ultimately a responsible and even a very fine piece of filmmaking. What makes it a good movie is how Berg starts with an initial atrocity—a broad-daylight attack on an American housing complex—and then carefully adds information, until we gather exactly how complex the situation is. An FBI investigative team made up of Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner (both, as usual, slightly lacking in personality) as well as Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman (both, as usual, a joy to watch) flies into Saudi Arabia, where they're faced with an inquiry hamstrung by Saudi and American authorities. Berg uses the delays to capture a sense of place. He employs the same lyrical montages that distinguished his football movie Friday Night Lights—only this time he concentrates on Friday night prayers. When violence finally arrives in The Kingdom, it's a double-edged sword. The movie's final 30 minutes are so richly vengeful they border on crass wish-fulfillment, but what's come before casts doubt on the wish. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Lives of Others

Gerd Wiesler (the late Ulrich Mühe) is ordered to spy on a theatrical couple, and the once-robotic Stasi operative is tested beyond imagining. R. BECKY OHLSEN. Living Room Theaters.

Let It Ride: The Craig Kelly Story

[ONE WEEK ONLY] Before an avalanche got the best of Kelly, he was the world's best snowboarder. Here's the proof. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Friday-Thursday, Oct. 5-11.

The Man Who Souled the World

[ONE WEEK ONLY] Entrepreneur Steve Rocco helped kickstart Spike Jones and Jackass. But the most impressive thing about the star of this documentary? He's a skateboarder and he has a job. Look for review on wweek.com. Clinton Street Theater. 9 pm Friday-Thursday, Oct. 5-11.

Mr. Woodcock

Expectations should always be kept low for a movie with a dick joke in its title, but this one is nearly agreeable. That's entirely thanks to Billy Bob Thornton as the titular gym teacher, a sadistic old coot who torments Seann William Scott. None of this sounds the slightest bit promising, but there's a perverse pleasure in watching Thornton tighten his caustic persona down to an angry fist: His Woodcock contains no emotion except disdain. Scott, meanwhile, borrows John Krasinski's haircut and about one-tenth of his charm. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Cornelius, Division, Oak Grove, Sandy.

Once

A winsome romance about a street musician trying to finish a demo tape, Once has the same ratio of irritation and appeal as a first album by any lachrymose singer-songwriter: You can condemn it for being histrionic and self-pitying, but you'll have to do so with a lump in your throat. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.

Outsourced

[TWO DAYS ONLY] Novelty-product salesman Josh Hamilton is sent to India with orders to train call-center employees to "sell kitsch to rednecks." The story is fairly kitschy itself: Not a single expectation is subverted as Hamilton's peeved Todd Anderson expands his consciousness through foreign travel. Yet director John Jeffcoat's Outsourced is doggedly likable. Maybe it's the reappearance of Hamilton, who hasn't had a starring role in years, and seems to have been using the wait to store up straight-faced charm. Maybe it's Ayesha Dharker, a wide-eyed actress with that rare ability to melt hearts every time her big brown peepers fill with tears. Or maybe it's simply that these performances meet in a movie unafraid to tell a warmhearted story without any superiority or overemphasis. Jeffcoat doesn't feel the need to turn his culture-clash love story into a lesson about globalization, imperialism or misunderstanding. It's just a love story, and a comedy where a joke as simple as Todd's name being mangled into "Mr. Toad" is allowed to develop long enough to become endearing. Mr. Toad's ride isn't a wild one, but it's satisfying. And while I've seen better movies this year, I haven't seen any that made me feel this happy. PG-13. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre, Wednesday-Thursday only.

Paprika

The latest anime contribution from Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers) concerns a dream-sharing headset called the DC Mini, which looks like an iPod gone very, very sinister, and is mostly a pretext for a movie about dreams within movies within dreams. It's all rather disturbing, yet it's hard to resist joining the mad party. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Milla Jovovich continues to survive the apocalypse without the aid of critics. R. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising

A little boy discovers he is an immortal warrior. Also, there are Orcs! Wait—you're telling us there's no Orcs? Well, just forget it then. Look for Ethan Smith's review on wweek.com. PG. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Wilsonville.

Stardust

Describing Claire Danes as a movie star has, until now, been something of a stretch. But in this clamorous adaptation of a Neil Gaiman fantasy novel, Danes plays, well...a star, a luminous orb that is lassoed to earth complete with a creamy dress and blond locks. This doesn't make any sense, but it's in keeping with the generally preposterous tone of Stardust. PG-13. AARON MESH. 99 Indoor Twin, City Center.

Superbad

Seth Rogen has co-written an entire movie about two high-school seniors trying to buy alcohol in the firm hope that underage drinking will lead directly to underage sex. (The Oregon Partnership is simply appalled; see Murmurs on page 13.) It ranks among the funniest movies ever made. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera play the unpopular guys who seek booze and babes at least in part to distract themselves from the fear of losing their friendship after graduation. R. AARON MESH. Cinema 99, Division, Vancouver Plaza.

Sydney White

Amanda Bynes plays a young "tomboy" (I use this term loosely, because who wears silver eye shadow while doing construction work?) who goes away to college with hopes of joining her deceased mother's sorority. Denied admission, Sydney is forced to live in dilapidated housing with seven dorks, where she gains the courage to challenge the evil queen on campus, navigate the perils of poisoned Apple laptops and find her Prince Charming. It's a fairy-tale flick so cloying you may get diabetes from watching it. PG-13. ANNIE BETHANCOURT. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Forest, Oak Grove, Sherwood.

This Is England

Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), the Yorkshire 12-year-old who makes dangerous new friends in Shane Meadows' movie, has a blunt, perplexed face; he looks like he might grow up to be Ricky Gervais. But other people want Shaun to become like them: The affable skinhead Woody (Joe Gilgun) takes him under his wing, and then Combo (Stephen Graham) emerges from prison and offers himself as a less-benign father figure. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

The Unknown Soldier

Fundamentally, this German documentary is about a controversial touring exhibition of war crimes perpetrated by the Wehrmacht during World War II. The historians behind the exhibit question the "common sense" lingering in the German collective subconscious that "Grandpa is not a Nazi," and "orders are orders." Filmmaker Michael Verhoeven challenges his audience to consider both the struggle for German acceptance of their history and their need to break free from it. The film examines German guilt and pride colliding, and how the specter of NS time lies just below the surface like a shallow grave, haunting the people of Germany. Are the veterans of the Wehrmacht absolved by publicly condemning others' actions? Who are the heroes of an unjust war? This study of the aftereffects of war and atrocity on generations of Germans, and how differently it is interpreted, is infinitely fascinating—and applicable to our own demons. JIM SANDBERG. Living Room Theaters.

Vanaja

From India comes a movie that proves that no matter where we may live, no matter what cultural barriers may divide us, we can all be bored by giggling children. Vanaja (Mamatha Bhukya) is a scrawny 14-year-old girl who wants to...all together now...dance! "I've never seen such an irritating girl," says her rich landlady benefactor, and I couldn't argue with the sentiment—at least not until a truly loathsome figure arrives to break the whimsy. It's the landlady's son (Karan Singh), a Snidely Whiplash type sent directly from central caste-ing. His predations plunge Vanaja into shame and abasement. I suppose these developments make Rajnesh Domalpalli's film a more consequential work, but I wasn't compelled by the juxtaposition of vibrant Bollywood colors and a stilted social-injustice plot. (This might be my problem alone; a similar clash ruined Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven for me.) At least Vanaja learns to dance—and does so with alarming fire in her eyes. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.