Screen Listings

A Touch of Spice

Tassos Boulmetis’ film relates the story of Fanis (Georges Corraface), a professor of astrophysics who learned to correlate spices with the planets at his grandfather’s store in Istanbul in 1959. When Fanis is told that his grandfather is dying, the film flashes back to his formative years. The 7-year-old boy meets Saime (Basak Köklükaya), whom he teaches to cook in return for her dancing for him. Before his teens, however, Famis and his father are deported to Greece because of political tensions in Cyprus. His grandfather, who is Turkish, stays behind. Told in the context of a seven-course dinner, A Touch of Spice is a lesson in politics, but more a memory of the past, and what was good in life. The joys of the movie are in its evocation of a specific place and time: the hustle and bustle of the marketplace, the beauties of the church. The episodic work is mostly, though not entirely, successful. It is gentle and bittersweet, and selective in what it shows as we remember with Fanis. A Touch of Spice is about letting go, and beginning again, and how spices make the presentation of the dinner most satisfying. MICHAEL SAMACHSON.

A Very Animated Christmas

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] A presentation of two seasonal cartoons, including the timeless The Snowman. You know the one: It's that British musical sketch about the snowman who flies. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Sunday-Monday, Dec. 9-10.

August Rush

For anyone who’s ever stayed up late trying to get good at something, director Kirsten Sheridan’s August Rush is insulting. Little August (Freddie Highmore), the love child of a renowned concert cellist (Keri Russell) and an Irish rock guitarist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), is put up for adoption and spends his life in an orphanage, until he escapes and sets out on a journey to New York City to find his real parents. Turns out he’s an uncanny musical prodigy, and can master just about any instrument within five minutes of touching it. After a series of urban misadventures, his talent is discovered by Robin Williams, playing a street-musician pimp dressed like Bono. And soon enough, August is picked up by Juilliard and performing his compositions in Central Park. It all sounds peachy keen, but accepting that August is the new millennial Mozart and, beyond that, ingesting August Rush’s shopping cart full of all-too-convenient plot points, rampant clichés (someone actually says, “Run, August, run!” with a straight face) and overbearing narration requires more suspension of disbelief than it’s worth. PG. LANCE KRAMER.

Awake

Dudes try to kill Hayden Christensen while he’s under anesthesia. But guess who wakes up. No, seriously, guess: The movie wasn’t screened for critics. R.

Bee Movie

Jerry Seinfeld’s insect cartoon is evidently not the product of people who have asked a lot of hard questions about their material. No one seems to have considered whether children—presumably the target audience for jaunty animation—would be entertained by a courtroom drama, or by jokes about TiVo, or by an unconsummated love story between a bee (Seinfeld) and a human woman (Renee Zellweger). But what does plot matter? It’s just a clothesline for the Jerry Seinfeld observational humor, which is...remarkably unfunny, actually. The jokes are flat, self-satisfied and hopelessly dated. Seinfeld’s participation in Bee Movie is evidence that celebrities, like insects, are attracted to bright, shiny things—with equally messy results. PG. AARON MESH.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Any movie that opens in the middle of graphic sexual intercourse between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei is going to have to do quite a bit to keep the audience’s attention at the same level. Fortunately, director Sidney Lumet has plenty up his sleeve for an encore; his movie is absolutely riveting. It takes its title from the old Irish blessing, “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead”—and the initial copulation must count as half an hour, because everything that happens to the characters from that point on is a building catastrophe. Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play brothers who plan to rob their parents’ strip-mall jewelry store; when the plan goes wrong, the sins of the sons are visited on the father (a fierce Albert Finney). Lumet, revisiting the triumphs of 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon, slices his story down to bone and tendon, and the stark emotions suit the actors—especially Hoffman, who winces at every kind touch, rejects the easy comforts of playing likable, and makes a case for himself among the pre-eminent actors of his generation. R. AARON MESH.

Bella

A noble cook comes to the rescue of a pregnant waitress. Toronto Film Festival audiences loved it, New York critics hated it, and Portland critics...well, we weren’t allowed to see it. PG-13.

Beowulf

Thirteen centuries of poetic tradition, and here is the reward: Anthony Hopkins’ digitally enhanced naked ass. This is one of the first sights in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, which translates the Old English epic into motion-capture computer animation—and 3-D animation at that. There’s more nudity where that came from: A running theme is stripping Ray Winstone naked and strategically placing his sexy beast behind long, pointy objects—a candle, a broadsword, a claw and, yes, a helmet—that jut out at the audience. Indeed, a desire for penetration is the prevailing mood, especially after an action scene climaxes with a money shot of its hero bursting through a sea monster’s eye while screaming his own name. (“Beeoowuuuulf!” Really.) It’s all achingly bad, and it appears to be a result of the screenwriters—Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary—listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin at age 12, then moving on to watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies while reading Maxim. This seems increasingly likely as time is devoted to the monster Grendel, a music-hatin’ troll that looks suspiciously like Gollum, and his mother. That would be Angelina Jolie, nude, with her naughty bits covered in gold body paint. Forget all that ancient guff about honor and glory; Grendel’s mom was a MILF? PG-13. AARON MESH.

Broken English

As imagined by director Zoe Cassavetes (yes, the daughter of John), Parker Posey’s 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.

Dan in Real Life

Two things make me automatically hate a romantic comedy. One is shitbag Dane Cook. The other is the presence of Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door.” So why is it that, midway through Dan in Real Life, when Dane Cook sings the wretched song, it didn’t make me hate the movie? Two words: Steve Carell. Carell’s been on thin ice since the awful Evan Almighty, but with the surprisingly sweet Dan, he’s back on track. As a milquetoast columnist and widower with three young girls, Carell’s at his subdued, tortured best. Carell packs his girls off for a family vacation, falls for his brother’s girlfriend (the ever-stunning Juliette Binoche, inexplicably dating Cook), and spends the majority of the film with a case of blue balls while his family prods him to find romance. Director Peter Hedges (Pieces of April) grounds the film in reality, and instead of offering a lackluster dramedy, he keeps it real and heartfelt, focusing wisely on the family element and offering a simplistic, funny and touching film that skimps neither on the laughs nor the heart. PG-13. AP KRYZA.

Danny Wiliams Factory Films

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] PICA and the NW Film Center present three films from Danny Williams, filmmaker, chronicler and lover of Andy Warhol. The silent, grainy films move unhurriedly, documenting intimate moments behind the scenes in the Factory, Warhol's artsy clubhouse. Candid shots of the Velvet Underground would bore anyone but the most fervent VU fan, presented as they are, completely devoid of music—though it is novel to see such a young Lou Reed. The film collection amounts to a surreal tour of a photography coffee-table book, except for the standout Harold Stevenson Part 1 and Part 2 (1966), which will be accompanied for its 40-minute runtime by a live soundtrack from the Quavers, a pair of skilled Portland musicians in the vein of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. JIM SANDBERG. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum. 7:30 pm Saturday, Dec. 8.

Darfur Now

Ted Braun’s documentary about the ongoing government-supported genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan follows six people either involved in the struggle or working to end it. (An estimated 200,000 people have been murdered and another 2.5 million have been forced to flee their homes since February 2003, in events that that have led the U.S. to label an ongoing event genocide for the first time in history.) Some of the most sobering scenes come from one of the refugee camps, where a woman named Hejewa Adam, whose child has been murdered, joins a civilian rebel unit. As the group (made primarily of women) marches, they chant, "We are the killers of those who exploit Sudan!"—and we in the audience see the first seeds of what could be decades of civil war. Refreshingly, a good deal of the film is also dedicated to those working both on international law and at the grassroots, bringing action against the Sudanese government. While all the different perspectives give a very informative introduction to the atrocity—which has received far from adequate mainstream coverage—it largely passes up the opportunity to empower its viewers on a personal level. The reality might be there just aren't any quick fixes. JOE JATCKO.

Enchanted

Where the Shrek trilogy needled the Disney corporate hierarchy in not-so-subtle terms, Disney’s own Enchanted reclaims the studio’s time-honored fairy-tale archetypes, repackaging saccharine princesses and lethally gorgeous evil queens in both CGI and live-action landscapes. When creature-friendly Giselle (Amy Adams) waltzes into the arms of virtuous Prince Edward (James Marsden), their hand-animated happy ending is interrupted by the machinations of a bitchy stepmother, voiced by Susan Sarandon. The witch’s sleight of hand reroutes the disoriented Giselle to modern-day New York, where she is taken in by divorce lawyer and single dad Robert (Patrick Dempsey). Marsden bounds onto the scene with panache; Dempsey watches the musical montages Giselle unleashes onto Central Park with the quiet bemusement that’s become his calling card on the small screen. Adams has studied the Disney heroines closely, and her stylish homage to the wide-eyed waifs makes for an enjoyable 107 minutes. While tweaking the Disney formula, Enchanted is still pretty damn formulaic, but the sweet, all-age-appropriate flick at least attempts to patch the real-world plot hole (and fairy-tale staple) of unconditional love at first sight. It is Adams’ indie cred and undeniable charm, however, that give the soft-hearted parody a more satirical edge. PG. SAUNDRA SORENSON.

Finishing the Game

Justin Lin’s enormously clever send-up of Hollywood’s patronizing of Asian actors follows a hapless 1970s effort to complete Bruce Lee’s The Game of Death—even though only 12 minutes of the lost martial-arts picture were shot in the first place. Lin is as ethnically self-aware here as he was in his last personal project, the high-school gangbanger Better Luck Tomorrow—but this film trades the preposterous solemnity for knowing winks. (The tone is set immediately when title cards announce that the has movie been brought to us by “a grant from the Bucherer-Wassell Tobacco Company, and viewers like you.”) Nothing here will seem radically original to anyone who has seen a Christopher Guest movie (or the Dirk Diggler documentary within Boogie Nights), but it’s still an enjoyable lark filled with sharp satirical edges. Dustin Nguyen parodies his 21 Jump Street days as Troy Poon, an actor whose big break on a cop show called Golden Gate Guns is as short-lived as his co-star. The rest of the ensemble cast—familiar from Better Luck Tomorrow and the kind of “exotic” supporting roles that suggest movies haven’t gotten that much more enlightened—is uniformly witty. The Game’s only weakness, ironically, is that it doesn’t have much of a finish. AARON MESH.

For the Bible Tells Me So

A thought-provoking documentary by Daniel Karslake tries to explain what should be obvious to anyone with half a brain: that is, how ostensibly high-minded Christian leaders have twisted Bible verses to instill fear of gays in their followers. For example, the whole thing with Leviticus and how gays are supposedly an “abomination” before God? Well, that had little to do with the immorality of who lay with whom, and much more to do with rituals that could save the Hebrew nation’s ass at a time when they were being told to get lost. Karslake trots out a Sunday school’s worth of theologians to help viewers understand how easy it has been to use Holy Scripture as a weapon of Mass destructiveness. It’s powerful stuff and shows just how easy it is to lead people around by their noses if you just cover their eyes and ears. The one glimmer of hope this film offers is through the compelling stories of several devoutly religious families who are forced to deal with homosexuality after finding out one of their own is gay. Take Gene Robinson: He didn’t just “become” the first openly gay man to be elected a bishop of the Episcopal Church. Accepting his sexuality wasn’t easy for him, or his Midwestern parents. But to see the pride in their eyes when he is ordained in 2003 is enough to make you weep. BYRON BECK. Living Room Theaters.

Fred Claus

David Dobkin has not directed the worst Christmas movie ever—though, golly, it looks close there for a while. Fred contains nearly two hours of Vince Vaughn (as the titular, estranged brother of St. Nick) motor-mouthing his way through thick treacle and mirthless buffoonery. It’s complete with clanks and whistles when characters get hit on the head—appropriate, since the movie’s first hour feels much like being beaten about the head and shoulders with an oversized candy cane. Explaining the awfulness requires remembering it—which I would decidedly prefer not to do—but let it suffice to say it involves elves. Breakdancing elves. Also ninja elves. Paul Giamatti sporadically plays his Santa as a W.C. Fields impression, while a persnickety Kevin Spacey (now more closeted than ever!) stops in as an efficiency inspector. The second half of Fred is mildly more bearable, if only because naked sentiment is a little better than digitally enhanced slapstick, and it’s almost pleasant to see familiar eyes (including those of Rachel Weisz) getting all misty around each other. Almost. PG. AARON MESH.

Hitman

Matt Damon stirred up an extremely silly controversy this summer when he claimed his Jason Bourne character was a direct rebuke to the imperialist tradition of James Bond. He was wrong. The opposite of Bond isn’t Bourne: It’s Agent 47, the assassin at the center of the video-game adaptation Hitman. As played by Timothy Olyphant, this hired gun has no sense of humor, no sex drive, no charisma and no guiding morality. He’s instantly forgettable—well, except for the bar code tattooed on the back of his bald cranium, a mark that makes his supposed anonymity in crowds slightly difficult to believe. The movie doesn’t have even that much distinction. It’s not vigorous enough to be bad. Thirty minutes into this soporific blandness, relieved only by Olyphant’s glowering and leading lady Olga Kurylenko’s admirable breasts, I was praying for a laughable line—anything to break the torpor. Even the heroine thinks Hitman is boring. “You don’t want to kill me and you don’t want to fuck me,” she complains. “I’ve never felt such indifference in all my life.” Neither have I, darling. R. AARON MESH.

How to Cook Your Life

Judging from Dorris Dörrie’s documentary, Zen master and chef Edward Espe Brown has achieved enlightenment. The problem with enlightenment, however, is that is eliminates conflict and desire, and movies without conflict and desire can be a bit of a drag. Dörrie follows Espe Brown as he teaches Zen cooking at Buddhist centers in California and Austria, complete with chanting and offerings. The filmmaking technique is nearly as austere: First we hear Espe Brown’s instructions, then we see them in action. “When you’re washing the rice, wash the rice,” goes a typical bit of wisdom. Then he washes the rice. If you come armed with a large coffee, the rhythms develop a hypnotic appeal. And Espe Brown proves to have his own hidden frustrations and flaws, which seem especially meaningful for being slowly revealed. But among this year’s philosopher-chef documentaries, How to Cook Your Life is simply inferior to I Like Killing Flies, whose cantankerous subject—New York diner tyrant Kenny Shopsin—had more zest and a more original attitude. His food looked tastier, too. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cinema 21.

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

It’s hard to fight the temptation to join the critical voices comparing Jeff Garlin’s new comedy with Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Garlin plays David’s chubby, amicable sidekick on the HBO show, and for his own movie has borrowed the jaunty music and the humor of awkward confrontation. So I’m not going to resist temptation. Where Larry David hates everyone around him, Garlin’s James is a plus-sized mensch—he eats because he’s unhappy, and he’s unhappy because he eats—who has mastered “the magic of self-loathing.” If Larry David had wanted the same jazz album as Bonnie Hunt in a record store, he would start a lifelong feud; James just gives her the album and weakly flirts. Larry David probably wouldn’t get to sleep with the foxy, insane Sarah Silverman, but he certainly wouldn’t have his heart broken by her. This contrast is impossible to overlook, because while I Want Someone has regular moments of charm, at only 80 minutes it feels like a toothless episode of Curb stretched too long. It’s nice, but it needs to trim some fat. R. AARON MESH.

I'm Not There

The conceit of Todd Haynes’ new movie about Bob Dylan is that it isn’t actually about Bob Dylan at all, because Dylan is unknowable; it’s about a few of the personas the singer tried on and discarded like so many winter overcoats. It’s about the people that Bob Dylan has pretended to be—six of them, played by actors including Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett. This movie doesn’t need a review; it needs a set of CliffsNotes. But what distinguishes I’m Not There is not its message but its style, which is as strange and inscrutable and awe-inspiring as the artist himself. Trying to find a single narrative here is a fool’s errand. But if you look back at the six stories, you may notice a pattern of flight and pursuit; the Dylan avatars are all on the run from authorities who want to explain them away. A need for obscurity is Haynes’ method and his point. I’m Not There is a portrait of the artist as a young deity, slipping through the grasp of his critics and wounding anyone who tries to cling to him. It concludes, appropriately, with Blanchett staring blankly at the camera, then smiling cryptically. She makes it all too concise and too clear that Bob Dylan’s not here. R. AARON MESH.

Into the Wild

There are all kinds of movies that could be made from Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, which recounts the short life of Christopher McCandless—a young man who left everyone he knew to live off the Alaskan wilderness, and wound up dying of starvation in an abandoned bus. The one made by Sean Penn is infuriating, self-important, bewitching and poignant—which is appropriate, since McCandless (Emile Hirsch) was all of those things as well. But the movie possesses one quality that its hero apparently lacked: It understands the feelings of people not named Christopher McCandless. Most of all, it recognizes how the youngster’s journey ripped a hole into the people he met; each person who hoped to adopt him was met with an extended goodbye. “Just get your pack and get out of here, OK?” Catherine Keener weeps as she sees the boy off. “I don’t think I could take a hug.” Penn’s movie is a farewell embrace of McCandless, and at its best it’s an agonizing hug to take. R. AARON MESH.

Inventing Obscurities

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] The great Samuel Beckett made only one film—titled, appropriately enough, Film, it starred an aging Buster Keaton as a man chased by a camera's eye. Beckett's work is presented by Cinema Project alongside movies by Stuart Sherman and Louise Bourque. New American Art Union, 922 SW Ankeny St. 7:30 pm Tuesday-Wednesday, Dec. 11-12.

Ira and Abby

The neurotics take Manhattan in a romantic comedy starring and written by Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein).

Lars and the Real Girl

What kind of emotionally damaged man buys an anatomically correct Real Doll on the Internet, declares that it is his religiously conservative girlfriend Bianca, and asks his brother and sister-in-law if Bianca can stay in the guest room? He would have to be a deeply troubled individual. But to be in director Craig Gillespie’s whimsical heartwarmer Lars and the Real Girl, the hero played by Ryan Gosling also has to be sweet and charming—ideal dating material, if not for that whole deranged talking-to-a-plastic-woman thing. I watched Gosling’s performance as Lars with a kind of dumbstruck awe, wondering exactly what he was doing with his bulging eyes, hesitant speech and eager overbite. And then it hit me: He was doing an impersonation of Andy Kaufman’s Latka from Taxi. Not everything in the movie is quite as ludicrous as Gosling’s performance. Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer, as Lars’ bewildered relatives, do the best they can to find the proper emotional register while playing scenes with an uncanny, blank-faced co-star. I mean Gosling, of course. Bianca is pretty convincing. PG-13. AARON MESH.

Lions for Lambs

If Robert Redford wants to make a noble, earnest political-science lecture about American foreign policy, more power to him—but maybe, just maybe, he shouldn’t signal his intentions so blatantly as to cast himself as a noble, earnest political-science lecturer. That’s about the level of subtlety achieved in Lions for Lambs, which is far from the most obnoxious or least honest of the new crop of Middle East quagmire flicks, but may be the most hectoring, and is certainly the most completely scraped clean of drama. In three parallel plots, Redford scolds a cynical undergraduate (Andrew Garfield), a TV reporter (Meryl Streep) quizzes a Republican senator (Tom Cruise), and two young platoon buddies face death in computer-generated Afghan mountains. The conversational volleys are sub-West Wing rapid-fire patter, but they at least match their combatants evenly—though it’s a shame that Cruise’s casting telegraphs his senator as a used-car salesman. The best work comes from Derek Luke and Michael Peña (Hollywood’s Era of Terror victim du jour) as the idealistic soldiers; their performances have enough life to make the movie feel momentarily like something more than a stilted, flaccid homily. Well, at least Redford gave it the old college try. R. AARON MESH.

Margot at the Wedding

Played to ruthless perfection by Nicole Kidman, the titular character of Noah Baumbach’s superior new movie is icily acerbic at her best moments—and her best moments are often compromised by drink (white wine with one ice cube) or marijuana, either of which can inspire her to lash out with stinging criticisms thinly disguised as helpful honesty, or casual betrayals masquerading as intimate confidences. Baumbach uses Kidman’s chilly star power—that distance she’s always projected toward the actors around her—to evoke Margot’s attitude of entitled superiority. With her fey teenage son (Zane Pais) in tow, she deigns to appear at the Hamptons marriage of her mousy sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is betrothed to Malcolm, a depressive layabout (Jack Black). What happens next confirms Baumbach’s status as the supreme cinematic chronicler of intellectual vanity. In an early scene, Malcolm makes an unwise confession to Margot: “I haven’t had that thing yet where you realize you’re not the most important person in the world,” he says. “I’m anxious for it to happen.” The movie makes this knowledge seem a long way off for Malcolm—and light years away from Margot—but it proves that Baumbach has realized it completely. R. AARON MESH.

Memories of Tomorrow

A rather forgettable Alzheimer’s movie is elevated only slightly by a fiercely committed performance by Ken Watanabe. The actor best known to Americans for playing noble warriors in The Last Samurai and Letters from Iwo Jima here transforms himself into Saeki, an obsequious Tokyo businessman terrified by his encroaching memory loss. His deterioration is marred by an overbearing musical score and some very bad speeches. (“I’m new to this job,” a young doctor says as Saeki considers suicide, “but I’m certain about one thing. To die is our destiny. Growing old is inevitable.” Well, thanks for clearing that up!) But director Yukihiko Tsutsumi makes a cagey decision in showing the disease’s progression from Saeki’s point of view. This perspective results in two inspired chase sequences: a blind rush through suddenly unfamiliar Shibuya streets, and the pursuit of a young woman representing the last of Saeki’s memories. But in between, the film covers familiar territory. AARON MESH.

Michael Clayton

George Clooney plays the titular guy behind the guy behind the guy, a law-firm “fixer” who finds himself embroiled in a sinister case not so easily fixed. It tends to throw a wrench into your legal strategy when your chief counsel (Tom Wilkinson) has stopped taking his medication, declared himself “Shiva, the god of death,” and is holed up in his loft with damning evidence and a month’s supply of baguettes. The directorial debut of writer Tony Gilroy (the pen behind all three Bourne movies) is literate, sleek and elegant—and certainly never dull, though the material feel a touch rehashed. The story of chemical-corporation malfeasance hearkens back to A Civil Action and The Insider, but with fictional touches that feel a good bit stranger than truth. (I’m sorry, but I’m simply not buying the car bomb, no matter how artfully handled.) Gilroy should thank his lucky stars—Clooney, Tilda Swinton and especially Wilkinson—for supplying a gravity Michael Clayton would otherwise lack. R. AARON MESH.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Dustin Hoffman plays Edward Magorium, a lisping Dr. Seuss copyright infringement and the 243-year-old owner of a magical toy store. Natalie Portman is his predictably sweet store manager and eventual heir; Jason Bateman plays the store’s predictably stuffy accountant who, of course, does not believe in magic; and Zach Mills plays a random kid who seems to have unlimited time and resources to spend on toys. They each do a good job with what they’re given, though there is almost no plot other than Magorium’s occasional mention that he will be “going away” soon. The film suffers from lacking any type of antagonist—no rival toy distributor, no over-the-top Jim Carrey villain, no stuffy bureaucrats lobbying to tear the store down and build a housing subdivision—nothing beyond Hoffman’s zaniness and Portman’s cuteness to keep it floating. (The fact that there’s a character dubbed “Lora, Who Wants a Fire Engine” is an indication of what’s at stake here.) On the upside, for a movie that looked as if it were bound to be one of the most irritating in years, it could have been a lot worse. G. JOE JATCKO.

No Country for Old Men

Reading through Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel now, it seems inevitable not only that it would be made into a movie, but that it would be made into a Coen brothers movie. The prose and story are such a natural fit, they feel expressly tailored to the Coens. Both works cover the same territory, which is the desert just north of the Rio Grande and, more specifically, a desolate valley where a marksman named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles onto the aftermath of a drug deal and reaches for a bag filled with $2 million cash. Soon he’s racing across Texas from motel to motel, pursued by a Mexican cartel, an upright sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), and an implacable killer called Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Who is this Chigurh? “He’s a psychopathic killer, but so what?” explains a bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson. Of course, the bounty hunter soon learns exactly what. Chigurh’s name sounds like a beast from folklore (something that sucks the blood from chickens, maybe), and he’s played by Bardem with the merciless logic of a classic movie monster—he even decides the fates of bystanders by flipping a coin. The Coens have crossbred the Western with the vampire movie, and this sleight of hand transforms the carnage that follows into a haunting cosmic joke. R. AARON MESH.

Revolution Green

Although it’s narrated by Woody Harrelson and features stars like Willie Nelson, Stephen Strout’s documentary is really about a man named Bob King, who pioneered one of the first blends of biodiesel to work in a standard diesel engine. He and his wife Kelly, who founded the company Pacific Biodiesel in Hawaii in the mid-’90s, seek to put biodiesel plants into agricultural communities, allowing the communities to contribute to their own source of fuel. Recognizing the benefits for farmers and truckers, two of his most beloved groups of people, singer Nelson came on board as a spokesman and backer of King’s company in 2004. The film does a good job of explaining the positive impact biodiesel can have not only on the environment, but also on the world economy. It’s refreshing that some of the most honest and thought-provoking commentary comes from those directly affected by high oil prices in some of the most conservative parts of the country, particularly Mike Frybarger, a long-haul trucker who sounds just like Dale from King of the Hill. Keep your eyes open for an appearance by Oregon’s own Gov. Ted Kulongoski.  JOE JATCKO.

Terror's Advocate

Jacques Vergès, the showboating and sinister French criminal defense attorney examined in Barbet Schroeder’s documentary, concludes the movie by explaining the duties of lawyers to their clients. “This trust compels us to fight tooth and nail to defend him, and use every legal device there is,” he says. “But we must never cross that white line, or else we become vulnerable.” How do you know when you’ve crossed the “white line” from advocate to accomplice? Here’s a hint: When you’re getting your clients from mysterious Nazis, it’s a bad sign. Vergès has never met a war criminal he didn’t like—so long as they espoused sufficient hostility to the West. He’s defended everyone from Carlos the Jackal to Pol Pot to Slobodan Milosevic, and insisted that every one of these men were victims of misunderstanding by colonial oppressors. Schroeder’s profile might at first seem like it lets Vergès off easy, but it in fact draws an admirably subtle portrait of moral degradation, showing how the lawyer—who started his career fighting authentic French subjugation in Algeria—found it ever so easy to move from defending those who bomb cafes for the “right” reasons to befriending people who killed for no reason at all. Schroeder, who’s familiar enough with courtroom snakes after directing Reversal of Fortune, delivers an exquisite case for Vergès’ prosecution. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

The Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson’s fifth film is not his best, but it contains moments of maturity he has never shown before. Adrian Brody, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson play three brothers who have boarded an ornate Indian train for a “spiritual journey,” which mostly seems to consist of consuming a lot of spirits, along with tranquilizers and prescription medications. The question at the heart of any criticism of The Darjeeling Limited—and Anderson’s directorial vision—is whether he knows what to do with the messy, absurd world. I don’t think this movie provides a definitive answer, but it contains some encouraging signs. It is often noted that Anderson’s storytelling owes a debt to J.D. Salinger, but Darjeeling also contains a great deal of a much better writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald: There’s a similar critique of entitled, callous and very lonely people. Wes Anderson beats on, while his characters are borne back ceaselessly into their pasts. R. AARON MESH.

The Jane Austen Book Club

A group of California women (and one clueless gent) join a reading group devoted to you-know-who. And who’s in the Jane Austen Book Club? Complete tools. PG-13. KELLY CLARKE.

The Life of Reilly

Most people of my generation regard Charles Nelson Reilly as the butt of a joke—Will Ferrell’s joke, from a Saturday Night Live skit where he described Reilly’s screechy voice as “like looking into the face of God and seeing him smiling back.” Reilly, the veteran of countless ’70s panel game shows, may have been an easy satirical mark, but he got the last laugh with a one-man live show, Save It for the Stage! The show ended with Reilly’s death this spring, but directors Frank L. Anderson and Barry Poltermann have preserved its finer moments. And fine they are: Reilly, whose monologues usually crescendo from a whisper to a scream, tells of surviving a circus fire, taking acting lessons with Hal Holbrook, and being tossed from the NBC president’s office with the dismissal, “They don’t let queers on television.” He proved them wrong, but the most impressive—and moving—parts of Reilly’s show are his memories of an unhappy childhood: a mother who screamed abuse at neighborhood Jews, and an artist father who never recovered from the regret of turning down a partnership offer from Walt Disney. Reilly relates these sad, funny stories in a hush that hypnotizes his audience. He is, in a word, scrumtrilescent.  AARON MESH.

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.

The Mist

It looks like Frank Darabont is still a touch bitter about The Majestic. Six years after his maudlin Jim Carrey movie tanked, the director has returned to his specialties—claustrophobic horror and Stephen King adaptations—with an unremittingly grim new vision of human nature. Thomas Jane (The Punisher) stars as a family man who gets trapped with most of his Maine neighbors in the local supermarket when a thick fog rolls in, carrying inside it some very ugly visitors. It doesn’t take two days before Jane is in Lord of the Flies territory—only with the addition of real, venomous flies on the other side of the grocery-store glass. Marcia Gay Harden is even more annoying than usual as the demented Bible-thumper who makes matters far worse; Toby Jones more than compensates with sharp work as a resourceful clerk with much-needed shooting-range experience. After a year of ironic tributes to ’70s B-movies, it’s a pleasure to watch Darabont unabashedly deliver the genuine article; by the time the bleak final act arrives, we’re in the middle of an H.P. Lovecraft nightmare. “There’s something in the mist!” a man cries as the bad weather first descends. My, is there ever. R. AARON MESH.

The Rape of Europa

The story of how the Nazis stole and destroyed some of Europe's greatest Jewish artworks during World War II, The Rape of Europa, directed by Richard Berge, illustrates how Adolf Hitler's assault on Europe was about art almost as much as it was about race. Being a mediocre painter, Hitler was rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a school full of Jewish professors and students. Hitler went on to become the world's largest purchaser, plunderer and destroyer of Jewish art. The movie, much like the war itself, drags on for longer than anyone really wants, but it drives home the point: The Nazis were dicks. NATE SMITH.

The Red Balloon, White Mane

[TWO DAYS ONLY, REVIVAL] French director Albert Lamorisse was a man of diverse accomplishment: When he wasn’t shooting documentaries, he was inventing the board game Risk. But for those more interested in world cinema than world domination, Lamorisse is best remembered as the director of two brief, crystalline children’s movies: The Red Balloon and White Mane. Presented in restored prints, the twin bill is the perfect antidote to the holiday season’s glut of loud, cluttered family trash. In crisp, naturalistic frames, Lamorisse traces two stories of young boys and the creatures they love: a wild horse and a personable balloon. Neither movie contains much dialogue, but the kids won’t be bored—they’re in the careful hands of a filmmaker who understands the capricious whims of the young, and reflects their freedom in his fables. AARON MESH.

This Christmas

Preston A. Whitmore II, director of the unforgettable basketball movie Crossover, has made a family-reunion picture. Guess what holiday it's about. Guess who wasn't allowed to screen it.

Trigger Man

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Director Ti West's low-budget hunters-become-the-hunted flick was described in The Village Voice as "Old Joy reconceived as a horror movie." That sounds pretty creepy, all right. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Friday, Dec. 7.

Underskatement Film Fest

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] The fourth annual medley of films about skateboarders, by skateboarders, for skateboarders.  Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Saturday, Dec. 8. 9 pm show is 21+.

A Man Vanishes

Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura artistically and publicly expressed a fascination with what he termed "the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure." Never did those two lower parts collide more drastically than in A Man Vanishes (7 pm Sunday, Dec. 9), the documentary that gives the NW Film Center's series its name. Imamura set out to chart the disappearance of a man believed murdered, only to find the victim's fiancée falling in love with him. This week's portion of Imamura's work also highlights Profound Desire of the Gods (7 pm Sunday, Dec. 9), a 172-minute drama about the ancient culture of the Ryukyu Islands. Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum.

Czech Modernism

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] The NW Film Center's retrospective of Czech cinema begins with 1933's On the Sunny Side (7 pm Friday, Dec. 7, and 5 pm Sunday, Dec. 9), a Buñuel-flavored dollop of surrealism, and the 1947 unite-the-workers drama The Strike (8:30 pm Friday, Dec. 7, and 4 pm Saturday, Dec. 8). Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum.

Truckstop Mental Hop Double Feature

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, PORN REVIVAL] Two sleazy studies in chrome and flesh: 1985's Sex Drive (7 pm) and 1981's Skintight (9 pm). Clinton Street Theater. Tuesday-Thursday, Dec. 11-13.