Screen Listings

The 11th Hour

So, bad news for industrialized nations: Not only have we ravaged the planet, created a false bubble of energy resources, and contributed to possibly irreversible climate change—we have also seriously pissed off Leonardo DiCaprio. The cost of these former offenses has yet to be experienced, but if it's anything like the penalty extracted by DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, it's going to be all kinds of unpleasant. The environmental cover boy has assembled a litany of panelists (ranging from Stephen Hawking to, rather inexplicably, Mikhail Gorbachev) to explain in extremely somber tones how the human race has pretty much condemned itself to extinction if we don't clean our rooms right now. On the plus side, the Portland Streetcar makes an appearance as a positive example of sustainable technology. So we may all be dead, but the animals that reclaim the planet are going to get a very nice streetcar. PG. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.

2 Days in Paris

I walked in thinking that I liked Julie Delpy (Before Sunset was my favorite film of 2004). By the time 2 Days in Paris ended—well before then, actually—I had reassessed my opinion: She's an embarrassment. Delpy, in her directorial debut, 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. Fox Tower.

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. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Moreland, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Ajafea

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Local writer-director brYan presents a horror movie about "the loneliness that accompanies the knowledge that one is all alone in the universe." Which is probably what's eating Freddy Krueger, too. Clinton Street Theater. 11:30 pm Friday, Sept. 21.

Alice Neel

[THREE DAYS ONLY] The woman who painted portraits of Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg is profiled in a documentary by her grandson. Grandma got run over by a cultural revolution! NW Film Center, Whitsell Auditorium. 7 and 9 pm Friday-Saturday, Sept. 21-22. 4 and 6 pm Sunday, Sept. 23.

Balls of Fury

It might be argued that 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 the 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. Cedar Hills, Oak Grove, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza.

Becoming Jane

Jane Austen: The Beginning might more accurately convey the clichéd approach of writers Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams, who reduce the youthful days of the popular author to meet-cute melodrama, the sort of thing that in her novels is barely achieved or described. It's all veddy Hollywood: Austen is played by the gamine American Anne Hathaway, and she wins the heart of James McAvoy's hunky Irish boxer-lawyer with such proto-feminist antics as playing cricket with the boys. For many loyal readers, though, this Jane will still seem too damn nice. PG. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. City Center.

The Bothersome Man

The Norwegian actor Trond Fausa Aurvaag has a nice line in blank, Zach Braffian stares—the kind where the eyes bulge and the mouth drops at the stultifying surroundings. In Jens Lien's barbed parable about a Scandinavia drained of desire, 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. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lake Twin, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Brave One

Jodie Foster plays a soothing public-radio commentator—think of Terri 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. Around the time The Brave One switches from unlikely to insulting—that would be the moment when Foster recites Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" before offing a dude with a crowbar—it's good to remember that this movie is directed by Neil Jordan, that master of the middlebrow. Which suggests the possibility that every audience demographic now has a revenge movie catering specifically to its tastes. Now Neil Jordan gives us revenge for NPR listeners. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, 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 with 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.

Chalk

Halfway through this look into the harried lives of Texas high-school teachers, I was convinced it was too good to be true: The educators were a bit too oblivious to the camera, the ironies were a touch too neat, and how exactly did director Mike Akel get permission to film these unruly students? It looked like another manipulative documentary, and not the first one from producer Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame). But the joke was on me: Chalk is a drama, and by far the most convincing faux-doc I've ever seen. So I tip my hat to a superbly inconspicuous cast: Troy Schremmer is painfully abject as a first-year history teacher, and his wife, Janelle Schremmer, steals the screen as an aggressive, lovelorn gym coach. PG-13. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

Death at a Funeral

In search of the elusive "black comedy," Frank Oz has returned to his native Britain but come up with a screenwriter who by all appearances is a rusty computer running John Cusack 95 (the hairstylist seems happy to oblige). It's a gray comedy consisting of exactly five jokes, as stale as day-old crumpets, repeated ad nauseam. R. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Fox Tower, City Center.

Deep Water

[ONE WEEK 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 Crowhurt's oceanic footage, eloquent interviews and the era's Fleet Street media circus to create the most suspenseful, affecting documentary I've seen in years. It's not the man-vs.-the-elements story its outline suggests; instead, it's an elegy for an ordinary man who painted himself into a corner, and discovered that corner was the open sea. Fitting, somehow, that two of the last words in Crowhurst's log are "mercy" and "harmful"—the first is the thing he did not receive, and the second is what his bravest dreams turned out to be. PG. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, Sept. 21-27.

Dragon Wars: D-War

Yep. It's dragons, warring. Remarkably, not screened for critics. PG-13. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Draughtsman's Contract

[REVIVAL] A retrospective of provocative Welshman Peter Greenaway begins with this 1982 puzzler about an artist who requires "intimate hospitality" in exchange for his services. R. Living Room Theaters.

Film Projector Loops by Devon Damonte

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Curtis and Michael Knapp provide accompanying music for Damonte's loops, which are made without cameras: The images are "rubbed from beach glass fragments onto variegated grids of engineering plotting papers." We aren't quite sure how that works, but it sounds cool. Oak Street Building, 425 SE 3rd Ave., third-floor rooftop. 8 pm Tuesday, Sept. 25. Presented by 40 Frames.

Good Luck Chuck

[DOUCHEBAG] A teaser poster actually showed Dane Cook receiving fellatio. We can only hope the movie bites. Look for review on WWire at wweek.com. R. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Hairspray

John Waters' indomitable PG cult flick has been made over: First into a pastel-pink Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2002, and now a Hollywood-style song-and-dance buffet packed with more stars than an L.A. plastic surgeon's waiting room. As a remake, Hairspray is a dirty shame. But as a musical, it's a surprisingly good time. PG. KELLY CLARKE. City Center, Cornelius (warning: sing-along), Lake Twin, Lloyd Mall.

Halloween

As he did in The Devil's Rejects, rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie seeks to evoke sympathy for a stone-cold killer in Halloween. The ninth film in the series—a partial remake of John Carpenter's original masterpiece—chronicles iconic boogeyman Michael Myers' descent into madness as a child. Zombie goes all psychoanalytical on Michael's ass, dissecting the 9-year-old's reasons for slaughtering his family, and in the aftermath we watch him go through the mental health system. As a new entry, he succeeds in creating a background for an iconic killer. Trouble is, old-school Michael's lack of motivation for killing added to the terror. Zombie presents him as a scared little kid with mommy issues. R. AP KRYZA. Eastport, Cornelius, Lloyd Mall, Oak Grove, Sandy.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

From pipsqueak to full-blown hero, Harry Potter's cinematic self has seen young actor Daniel Radcliffe mature from cute kid to Tiger Beat hunk, and Radcliffe's skills have improved with his character's magical abilities. Here, Harry faces multiple challenges, not the least of which is the funny feeling in his pants when he locks eyes with Cho Chang (Katie Leung). PG-13. AP KRYZA. City Center, Evergreen, Lloyd Mall.

How Digging a Well Can Undermine Censorship: Narrative Strategies in Iranian and Arab Films

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, LECTURE] It's exactly what it sounds like: German film writer and critic Heile Kuehn discusses her sympathetic views of Middle Eastern filmmaking. NW Film Center, Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Wednesday, Sept. 19.

Hula Girls

Coal miners' daughters learn to shimmy when a Hawaiian theme park invades their provincial town, but the trite scenario is as rancid as last year's sesame oil. Any chance that this might've been good kitsch flies out the window in the face of plodding direction, overacting that's screechy and gooey at the same time, and schizoid screenwriting that veers between pratfalls, stuck zippers and child abuse. Yasuko Matsuyuki, nonetheless, shows a trace of freshness as the chain-smoking, bored-out-of-her-mind hula instructor. The leading lady deploys genuine resourcefulness in working against the straitjacket confines of what amounts to a sitcom with subtitles. Shockingly enough, this stale yakisoba was Japan's official entry for the last round of Academy Awards—not a good sign for world cinema. N.P. THOMPSON. Hollywood Theatre.

The Hunting Party

"It'd make a helluva movie," a U.S. lieutenant colonel told Esquire reporter Scott Anderson after he and four colleagues were mistaken for a CIA assassination squad in postwar Bosnia. It should've made a helluva movie—but it didn't. It's not hard to trace where the project went wrong: Unlike the journalists whose story he adapted, writer/director Richard Shepard has stayed squarely in safe territory. He's rearranged Anderson's article to fit the template of his last movie, 2005's The Matador. In place of a dissolute Pierce Brosnan we get a dissolute Richard Gere, cultivating gray stubble, a drinking habit and memories of the clichéd atrocities that ruined his life. (Strange how much less interest the movie takes in the atrocities that destroyed Balkan lives.) Terrence Howard can't do much with the reasonable-sidekick role he's tossed, though Jesse Eisenberg (the angry older brother in The Squid and the Whale) puts a fresh spin on the trust-fund kid who tags along for the ride into Serbia. Truth may not be stranger than fiction, but in this case it's certainly more interesting. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Eastport, City Center, Lloyd Mall.

The King of Kong

Seth Gordon's riotously funny documentary follows Steve Wiebe, a milquetoast science teacher from Washington and a prodigy of Donkey Kong. When Wiebe videotapes his finest performance—the highest score ever—and submits it to record-keepers, in comes the Donkey Kong Devil. It's former record-holder Billy Mitchell, who sets the wheels turning against Wiebe. Sporting a goofy beard-ponytail and an American-flag necktie, Mitchell looks like Chuck Norris' wussy brother. And, like Mighty Chuck, Mitchell can smell fear. It's all a blast, and a true David-and-Goliath story. Only this time, Goliath is a sociopathic grownup version of the geekiest kid in high school, and the results are far funnier. PG-13. AP KRYZA. Fox Tower.

Labyrinth

[REVIVAL] In 1986, riding high on 10 years of Muppet production, Jim Henson had an acid flashback. And oh, what an acid dream Labyrinth is. Henson's celebration of monsters and talking door-knockers finds jailbait Jennifer Connelly whisked to the Goblin Kingdom to rescue her baby brother. She must navigate a living labyrinth to confront the Goblin King, encountering all manner of friend and foe. But the strangest thing on a screen full of Muppets is human Muppet David Bowie, whose androgynous Goblin King Jareth prances across the screen, aided by an army of monsters and extremely tight pants, making his the most prominently featured cock-and-balls in a children's movie. PG. AP KRYZA. Hollywood Theatre.

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.

Mr. Bean's Holiday

Where the original Rowan Atkinson movie put a plastic bag over its own head, Mr. Bean's Holiday is surprisingly good. At its core, it's a simple, standard road movie—after Bean wins a trip to the Cannes Film Festival at a church raffle, Holiday follows the super-flexible, tweed-wearing goofball's roundabout journey from dreary London to the glitzy French Riviera. PG. LANCE KRAMER. Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, Wilsonville.

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 young John Farley and then decides to marry the boy's mother (Susan Sarandon) once he's grown up (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. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard.

The Nanny Diaries

Scarlet Johansson's au pair story could have been a decent film, had it stuck to the bare-boned, shrewd voice that only makes a dozen or so short-lived appearances. It has a perceptive underlying plot—a nanny's case study of the elite lives of mothers living on the frothy Upper East Side who neither work nor rear their children, and the servants who consequently raise their prep-school tots amid pastel Nantucket summers and required bedtime readings from The Wall Street Journal. The problem with Diaries is that, like Johansson's character Annie, the movie is stuck between accepting reality and remaining innocent and dreamy. PG-13. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Evergreen, Lloyd Mall.

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. Hollywood Theatre, Fox Tower.

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.

Portland Latin American Film Festival

[FOUR DAYS ONLY] How generous of American culture—the conventions of Hollywood musical biopics are now available to the rest of the world. El Benny, one of a dozen movies in Portland's first Latin American Film Festival, uses them to portray perhaps Cuba's greatest musician, Benny More. The film claims it's "inspired by" More's life, so the character's personal pitfalls and intersections with Cuban history feel contrived. But it looks great for a low-budget period piece, and its central performance by Renny Arozarena brims with charisma. As long as the focus is on the music, the movie gets things right; scenes of the band rehearsing feel more realistic than similar moments in many films. Buena Vista Social Club fans will thrill to see Cuban music performed against a backdrop as vibrantly colorful as the sounds themselves, rather than the rundown Havana of today. Contemporary Cuba takes center stage in Camila Guzmán Urzúa's diaristic documentary, The Sugar Curtain—specifically, the difference between today's struggling country and that of Urzua's 1980s childhood, when Soviet money swelled the island's economy. The film starts out charming and compelling, but its angst ultimately feels too personal—though today's American youth, perched atop a vertiginous economic roller coaster, might heed its gentle warning. Young women growing up in poverty meet music-movie clichés in Antonia, which opens the fest; its attempt at a Brazilian 8 Mile-meets-Dreamgirls is hampered by a haphazard, melodramatic plot and characters that fail to engage. Its glimpse of gritty São Paolo's hip-hop scene, though, is fascinating and fresh. JEFF ROSENBERG. Antonia screens at the NW Film Center, Whitsell Auditorium, 7 pm Thursday, Sept. 20. El Benny and The Sugar Curtain screen at Living Room Theaters Friday-Sunday, Sept. 21-23. See Movietimes, page 72, for additional shows.

Quiet City

Director Aaron Katz's second film crystallizes the elements that have characterized the movies of his "mumblecore" associates Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation) and Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs). Here we have the non-professional actors, the digressive, inconsequential conversations, the tentative love story and the Brooklyn hipster neighborhoods—all in one 78-minute package. Two people meet, they make some sandwiches and talk about coleslaw, they go to a gallery exhibition and then they go to a house party. This is not very different from the plot of Dance Party, USA, which Katz filmed in Portland—and which, come to think of it, also featured a house party. In fact, the movies made by Katz and his partners-in-mumbling feel like house parties themselves: A group of friends gets together and tries to define its generation through collaborative art. And yes, their connection is sweet and affecting. But presumably some of these kids—who have enough money to rent lofts in Brooklyn—have been to college. Presumably they have the ability to converse about matters loftier or more intimate than cabbage salad. It'd be nice if they'd try. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

Ratatouille

Brad Bird's story of a foodie rat's rise in Paris' culinary world is not just the best animated film this year, it's the best animated film to come out of the U.S. since Bird's last effort, The Incredibles. The story of a rat named Remy (Patton Oswalt) who finds himself secretly spicing up bland food in a Paris eatery is aimed at kids, but it's loaded with so much madcap humor that adults won't be able to resist. G. AP KRYZA. Lloyd Mall, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Milla Jovovich continues to survive the apocalypse without the aid of critics. R. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Rocket Science

The second movie from director Jeffrey Blitz (his first, the documentary Spellbound, was an intricate examination of the National Spelling Bee), Rocket Science shows the same familiarity with the rituals of adolescent competition, from memorization drills to makeshift podiums. It is a measure of the movie's earnest tone that the hero's goal is to join the school debate team, and that this aspiration is never treated as a joke. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.

Rush Hour 3

The nadir of director Brett Ratner's opus comes after Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan have an argument: The strains of Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" waft onto the soundtrack as Tucker purchases mu shu pork and Chan orders fried chicken. It's a sad, sad situation. And it's getting more and more absurd. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cinema 99, Sandy, Vancouver Plaza.

Screaming Masterpiece

[FOUR DAYS ONLY] They come from the land of the ice and snow...and they can rap, rock and wail. In fact, it could be argued that the chief cultural significance of Iceland, apart from producing the world's supply of umlauts, is its music scene. How did a nation of 311,396 wind up forming bands that open for the Foo Fighters? Documentary director Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon traces Icelandic musical heritage to Vikings kidnapping Irish women "for DNA enrichment and poetry." (Perhaps those weren't the stated justifications, but who's going to argue with Vikings?) More convincing is the argument that pop stars like Björk rose from a dedicated 1980s punk scene; the movie contains wonderful footage from an '82 rock doc, Rokk í Reykjavík, which displays angry young Norsemen destroying their guitars. The varied artists of the current scene are often transfixing—I was particularly taken by a camo-clad Reykjavik rapper. It's a footnote of a movie, but it certainly whets the appetite for another Sigur Rós album when it reveals the band performing an 800-year-old epic poem (Odin's Raven Magic, if you must know) on sandstone xylophones. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre. Friday-Monday, Sept. 21-24.

Shoot 'Em Up

Nine months after midwifing the rebirth of humanity in Children of Men, Owen begins this live-action, hyper-violent cartoon by delivering another baby in tricky circumstances—this time trading bullets with murderous ruffians led by Paul Giamatti. Minutes after cutting the umbilical cord with a well-aimed shot, Owen is back in the world of good-hearted whores and amoral alleyways he last prowled in Sin City, proving his worth by killing a whole lot of people. The movie exists for its action scenes, which are stylized, ridiculous and memorable. In fact, the movie would be a frivolous, kinky classic but for one insurmountable problem: It moves too fast for its own good. It's not breathless so much as it is hyperventilating. To describe Shoot 'Em Up in its own terms (director Michael Davis has a real weakness for guns-as-penises jokes), the movie is one continuous premature ejaculation. R. AARON MESH. Broadway, Eastport, Cornelius, Evergreen, Lloyd Mall.

Show Business

This formulaic documentary puts a new spin on the recent spate of "several teams in a competition" documentaries. This time, the competitors are the creative teams behind the four most anticipated Broadway musicals of the 2003 theater season, and they're all after the Tony Award for Best Musical. The parts they're meant to play are clear from the start: Wicked is the big-money safe bet, Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change is the high-art underdog, Avenue Q is the little show that could, and Boy George's Rosie O'Donnell-backed vanity production, Taboo, is the bad guy. Nicely directed and edited, if heavily derivative of other works in the genre. BEN WATERHOUSE. Living Room Theaters.

The Simpsons Movie

Nationwide Groening veneration makes it harder to see The Simpsons Movie for what it is: a mediocre film based on an obsolete television show. Actually, the movie is very funny, if only in sporadic bursts. PG-13. AARON MESH. Tigard.

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. Broadway, Cedar Hills, City Center, Lloyd Mall.

Sunshine

Danny Boyle's grim space thriller follows a crew of astronauts trying to reignite our dying sun with a bomb in the year 2057. Handily enough, this will save the human race from extinction. R. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Fox Tower.

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. It ranks among the funniest movies ever made. Rogen and producer Judd Apatow are not just superbad themselves; they are the cause of superbadness in others. Their beneficiaries include director Greg Mottola and the actors Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, playing 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. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinemagic, Cinema 99, Evergreen, Forest, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub, Tigard-Joy, Wilsonville.

Sydney White

It started when Hilary Duff played Cinderella. Then Lindsey Lohan did Herbie (ew, not in that way). Now, fellow "not a teen, not yet a woman" star Amanda Bynes adds another feather in the cutesy-cap of the Remake Revolution with Sydney White, a modern fairytale that follows a young "tomboy" (I use this term loosely, because who wears silver eyeshadow while doing construction work?) as she 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 fairytale flick so cloying you may get diabetes from watching it. The prince is dull, the dorks are two-dimensional and the usually likable Bynes is distracting as the dark-haired (is that a weave?) beauty with the orange "I've-been-rolling-around-in-Cheetos" fake tan. But is it creepy that I thought Sneezy was hot? Call me: We could make a happy ending after all. PG-13. ANNIE BETHANCOURT. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville.

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, best known as the hapless Tommy in Snatch) emerges from prison and offers himself as a less benign father figure.AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

Transformers

It doesn't matter that the Autobots and the Decepticons look like they were designed by Frank Gehry. It doesn't matter that the relationship between Shia LaBeouf and Bumblebee borrows liberally from the plot of E.T. None of it matters. PG-13. AARON MESH. Bridgeport.

Vortex I

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] The true story of how Oregon Gov. Tom McCall thwarted a Nixon protest by hosting a music festival. This could probably still work. "No blood for...ooh, pretty noises!" Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Thursday, Sept. 20.

Zebraman

[ONE WEEK ONLY, ALIEN GOO] Director Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) is a notorious Japanese gore-lord, a director whose hyper-stylized violence, brooding atmosphere and Lynchian mind-fucks make American counterparts like Eli Roth look like pussies. But what many don't realize is that Miike has made more than 70 films since he hit the scene in 1991, and it's not all blood and guts. In fact, as Zebraman proves, Miike can be...cute. The campy film tells the story of nerdy high-school teacher Ichikawa, who dresses up as childhood hero Zebraman, a striped equine crimefighter reminiscent of Japanese camp favorites like Ultraman. Soon Ichikawa's unwittingly instilled with real powers and balls-deep in aliens and other bad special-effects monsters. Sweet and silly, Zebraman has hints of the Miike we know and love (in the form of spurting green alien goo), yet in a much more easily stomached form. This is not a crowning achievement—it's corny, sometimes oversugared and definitely only for fans of superhero camp—but it's a look at Miike's other side, the side that's not stained with blood, sinew and semen. AP KRYZA. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9:30 pm Friday-Thursday, Sept. 21-27.

A Zed & Two Noughts

[REVIVAL] Peter Greenaway's 1985 film contains amputation, cannibalism and a car accident caused by a rare swan. It's complicated. R. Living Room Theaters.