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A Serious Man

A physics professor living in a tract neighborhood as treeless and sun-scorched as the Holy Land, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is suffering the inverse afflictions of Job—whereas the patriarch lost his family, Larry’s relations won’t go away. His wife (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce so she can marry the astonishingly supercilious Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), but she won’t leave the house. His brother (Richard Kind) has taken up the couch and the bathroom, forever draining a sebaceous cyst. There are harassing calls from the Columbia Record Company, a student is sinisterly trying to extort his way out of a failing grade, and Larry’s tenure request is met with the ominous assurance, “You should not be worried.” Oh, Larry is worried. He senses a bottomless abyss beneath his life. This is the Coen brothers’ third-straight film—after No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading—to repeat the same gag, with increasing mirth and finality: Don’t look down, because there isn’t anything there. A Serious Man ends about 10 minutes before you expect it to, with brutal, beautiful abruptness—no one does endings like the Coens, because they understand that every story ends the same way. Never before have they so explicitly addressed their ambivalent feelings toward Judaism (aside from The Big Lebowski’s “Moses to Sandy Koufax” speech, maybe), but they’ve been wrestling with God a long time, and they know his moves. R. AARON MESH. Academy Theater, Bagdad Theater and Pub, Kennedy School Theater, Laurelhurst Theatre, Mission Theater and Pub, Valley Theater.

A Single Man

It doesn’t have a whole lot of story. It’s tedious at times, and it has a bad ending. That said, A Single Man is one of the most striking and remarkable films of the year. First-time director Tom Ford (of Gucci design fame) does such inspired work with sound, light and color that conflict and character are halfway accomplished before Colin Firth even opens his mouth. This only intensifies Firth’s spectacular performance as George, an English professor in Los Angeles (based on the Christopher Isherwood novel’s protagonist based on Christopher Isherwood), who is struggling with heartbreak over the loss of his lover during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There’s not a lot George does besides mourn—in his repressed environs, there’s not a lot that he can do—which leaves Ford and Firth with a character study. Some critics have berated Ford for his emphasis on art direction, not recognizing that his flourishes are being put to dramatic use, not merely displays for aesthetic pleasure. Memories of past lovers are so strong, why shouldn’t they be filmed in the most luxurious palettes? It’s a literal way to assign value to feelings that can’t always be expressed in words. Inspired filmmaking has a way of making you forgive flaws, even if they’re glaring. Despite the pitfalls, A Single Man is a film to be felt, and admired. R. ALI ROTHSCHILD. Fox Tower Stadium 10, Hollywood Theatre, Lake Twin Cinema.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

Following their inexplicably successful ‘07 reboot, fuzzy little nutsacks Alvin, Simon and Theodore return with Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. And there is no adjective—“eye-gougingly horrendous” or otherwise—that will stop kids from dragging parents to the multiplex. This time around, rodent paterfamilias Dave Seville is hospitalized early on (lucky for Jason Lee, who phones in his screams of “Alllllvin!” from a hospital bed), leaving his underachieving nephew (Chuck dweeb Zachary Levi) to care for the little rapscallions. Having conquered the record industry, the chipmunks set out to subdue high school—where the jocks are out to take the pipsqueaks down a peg and prepubescent girls lust for rodents. (Let’s not think about this.) Meanwhile, sinister record exec David Cross exploits the Chipettes, singing female chipmunks who dance like strippers. Along the way, we’re treated to high-pitched versions of hits by Beyoncé, the Kinks, and Dead or Alive. Had The Squeakquel settled for what it is—nostalgia aping a 1980s cartoon that itself was nostalgia humping a ’50s novelty act—the film would have been a lifeless little distraction, but its characters just keep getting in the way. Alvin is a backstabbing power grabber, Simon’s a know-it-all, and Theodore’s a wuss. Their female counterparts fare no better. By the time the ’Munks/’Ettes supergroup forms, the flick’s a rotten acorn. PG. AP KRYZA. Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10.

Armored

An attempt to rob an armored truck goes awry. Not screened for critics by WW press deadlines. PG-13. Grand Lodge Compass Room Theater, St. Johns Pub and Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Avatar

When was the last time we saw such jaw-dropping visual wonders tied to such a staggeringly inane story? Oh, that’s right: Titanic. But Titanic didn’t have dragons fighting helicopters. Avatar does. Avatar, in fact, has many things no movie made by James Cameron or anybody else has ever had. Does Avatar change movies? I suppose it does, if by “change movies” you mean “make movies more like the flight-simulator ride at Sea World.” It’s hard to deny that the picture, especially in 3-D, is a great advance in multidimensional immersion. Plus, it has lots of dragons, and dragons are rad. If you are not interested in seeing a young Blue Gazelle Person become a man by taming his own Art Deco Riding Dragon using the fiber-optic cables in their respective tails, then diving and banking with them through a skyscape of floating mountains, I’m afraid there is nothing I can do to help you. This experience is pure sensation, and it only gets better when the people riding the dragons are armed with semiautomatic weapons. It’s all eye candy—but what candy! That said, Cameron’s script breaks new ground for one-dimensionality. The plot and its noble-savage stereotypes are filched wholesale from Pocahontas—Disney’s Pocahontas. An excess of nobility is, in fact, Cameron’s weakness—he wants to reboot the entire history of Western colonialism from Jamestown on. Avatar is his uncompromised vision, its nonsense unfiltered through any naysayers, and it is a glorious folly. But it's still a folly. PG-13. AARON MESH. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, City Center Stadium 12, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Broken Embraces

The only thing Pedro Almodóvar’s characters like more than sex is melodrama. Broken Embraces doesn’t bust out of the director’s telenovela conventions, but that’s part of its appeal: It’s a brisk walking tour of the Almodóvar grounds. In a flashback structure, Lluís Homar plays the hero—a director with the rather Hitchcockian name of Harry Caine—before and after his fateful blinding. He’s fortunate to have the use of his sight in the part of the picture where Penélope Cruz plays his lover and performs her perennial topless scene. She then vomits, which slightly ruins the tableau—and confirms the movie’s slyness. Broken Embraces is a film of giddy, slightly hyperbolic surfaces. Cruz dines beneath a giant portrait of fruit. She wears wigs that make her look like Audrey Hepburn, then Marilyn Monroe. Her teardrops fall on ripe red tomatoes. This last image comes as she performs a scene at the direction of Harry Caine: “Now, think of all the times you’ve made gazpacho for Ivan, and how he enjoyed it.” I don’t know that any of the movie’s ripe emotions can be taken any more seriously than these soup-inspired tears. I don’t know that it matters. Whatever its nutritional value, Broken Embraces is rich and creamy. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower Stadium 10, Hollywood Theatre.

Cascade Festival of African Films

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] The 20th annual monthlong fest opens with Teza, a 2008 drama about a German-educated doctor who is appalled by what he finds in his Ethiopian homeland. The weekend also includes Water First: Reaching the Millennium Development Goals, a documentary following a Malawian fireman trying to provide his country with clean drinking water. Teza screens at 7 pm Friday, Feb. 5 at the Hollywood Theatre. Director Haile Gerima will attend the screening. Water First screens at 2 pm Saturday, Feb. 6 at PCC's Cascade Campus, Moriarty Building, Room 104.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

I have only one complaint with the cinematic adaptation of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, that endearing children’s book about a town where the weather is made of food. Still, it’s a significant complaint: I don’t like the food. Ron Barrett’s original pen-and-ink illustrations were intricate and moody, filled with awe and mystery as well as peanut-butter-and-jelly blizzards. The edibles that fall from the sky in Sony’s CGI cartoon look like Fisher-Price play food, all bright plastic artificiality. It’s quite a comedown. But just about everything else in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s movie exceeds any reasonable expectation. The delights begin with the filmmakers' reimagining of the town of Chewandswallow as a sardine-fishing village decimated by the decline of canned-fish popularity; by the time the mayor (voice by Bruce Campbell, hair from Jaws) decides to revitalize the burg with sardine tourism, it becomes obvious why the inventor hero (Bill Hader) is named Flint. A fable about the dangers of overconsumption, Meatballs is one of the few current cartoons with some social bite, and the admittedly hackneyed subplot about Flint’s need to please his father (James Caan, drawn as a walking unibrow) is as affecting as any relationship requiring the line “Dad, I’m surrounded by man-eating chickens right now!” can hope to be. So I won’t complain about the weather. PG. AARON MESH. Valley Theater.

Coco Before Chanel

Audrey Tautou plays the fashionista in a biopic. WW did not attend the screening; look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Fox Tower. Living Room Theaters.

Come Together Home

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Portland documentarian Ivy Lin (Knowing All of You Like I Do) examines a corner of Lone Fir Cemetery, once a resting place for Chinese immigrants until their remains were exhumed and shipped back home. UO’s White Stag Block, 70 NW Couch St. 6 pm Tuesday, Feb. 9.

Couples Retreat

A hymn to settling for whatever’s around: a spouse you don’t like, a shot you don’t bother to frame, a joke you’ve told before. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau star in a DOA movie about marriage therapy for the improbably well-heeled (if you’re going to get counseling, why not do it in Bora Bora bungalows that run $1,780 a night?) and immensely self-involved—fat schlubs Vaughn and Favreau must summon the internal fortitude to remain faithful to Malin Ackerman and Kristin Davis. Those poor boys. However do they cope? They’ve roped in buddy Peter Billingsley (Ralphie from A Christmas Story) to direct, and I wanted to shoot my eye out. The guy shot on location in French Polynesia and managed to make it look like a soundstage. The comedic scaffold is the same one trotted out by Adam Sandler's Anger Management: Use a grueling regimen of stupid exercises to substitute for writing any actual characters. One by one, each of four rotten marriages is saved for no reason other than the movie’s fear of troubling a complacent audience. Here’s Vaughn exhorting Favreau to save his union: “You’re not going to have anybody to go to Applebee’s with you.” Could there be a stronger case for divorce? PG-13. AARON MESH. Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Crazy Heart

As embodied by Jeff Bridges in the wondrously calm picture Crazy Heart, country singer Bad Blake is a man who has found everything hard, and so has given up trying too much. Maybe that’s why he spends every day at the bottom of a whisky bottle—when you’re trapped there, everybody’s expectations for you (including your own) get lowered. It is tempting to compare Bad Blake to Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski—especially since Crazy Heart opens in a bowling alley—but in fact this performance is organically connected to Jeff Bridges’ whole career, and its demonstration of magnificent ease. His voice lilting and cracking, and his mouth hanging open at the right edge of his smile, Bridges has approached every role as a chance to stretch his legs and take a look around the room. In this movie, he even sings (the outlaw tunes are written by Ryan Bingham, the late Stephen Bruton and the great T Bone Burnett), and that too seems to come naturally. The movie around him is also at peace. The best films, like the best days, are often the ones that don’t have too much riding on them. In the midst of movies that scream about how they are changing movies, Crazy Heart is refreshingly non-essential. It joins Jeff Bridges in not worrying about how they’ll be remembered. And, of course, they will be remembered very well. They’re gonna live forever. They will abide. R. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Fox Tower Stadium 10, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema.

Edge of Darkness

“I’m not gonna hit you again,” Mel Gibson assures one of the conspirators in his daughter’s death. “She wouldn’t like that. But she’s not here because of you, you son of a bitch!” Then Mel hits him again. This moment is a perfect distillation of that unique blend of sanctimony and sadism that makes the Mel Gibson revenge picture. This one, directed by Martin Campbell from his own 1985 BBC miniseries, is better and more sophisticated than one would expect—but not that much better. When Gibson’s family reunion with his kid (Bojana Novakovic) is truncated by vomiting, nosebleeds and a fatal rifle blast, the Boston cop mourns by sitting on park benches and literally talking to her memory—there is quite a lot of this—and then investigating her former employer, a weapons R&D plant with a Berkshire mountaintop headquarters that for some reason put me in mind of Elsinore Brewery. There are a couple of nice suspense set pieces, which remind us that Gibson really doesn’t belong behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, and some pandering sacred hokum at the end. Ray Winstone is very good as a saturnine fixer, though the movie is briefly stolen by the appearance of Denis O’Hare—an all-star That Guy—as an aggressively miserable government spook. Gibson, by contrast, exudes a spiritual weariness, as if he finally were too old for this shit. Well, no one’s making him do it. R. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Extraordinary Measures

Extraordinary Measures is not just a disease-of-the-week movie. It’s a disease-of-the-week movie with Harrison Ford being homespun, grumpy and weird. Ford often seems annoyed to be in this movie, and his lashing out improves it. This is enough to make Extraordinary Measures the best Hollywood commercial project to be shot in Portland in the past decade, beating out the serial killer movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and the serial killer movie starring Diane Lane. It is certainly the first to consider the difficulty of navigating the MAX trains while holding a bouquet of balloons. This is where we first meet Brendan Fraser (himself ballooned rather), who is late for his adorable daughter’s birthday party, though she doesn’t really mind because she is very busy dying. She and her little brother have Pompe disease, a rare genetic disorder that weakens muscles and causes bodily organs to swell, thanks to a missing enzyme that can perhaps be restored with a formula pioneered by—yep—Harrison Ford. Honestly, Extraordinary Measures is pretty enjoyable. It is unfortunately shot with a gauzy angelic glow, but the performances are very good (though it is not pleasant to watch Brendan Fraser cry). If you want to see a movie about a family triumphing against the odds and glowing slightly, you are unlikely to do much better. If someone who has sex with you wants to see a movie about a family triumphing against the odds and glowing slightly, at least you’ll have angry Harrison Ford, and that helps a lot. PG. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Cinetopia, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Mr. Fox has it all—a beautiful spouse, a precocious son, a handsome if moderately priced treehouse, and an eminently respectable job as a newspaper columnist—but he is dissatisfied, and longs for the lost vivacity of his days as a poultry thief. Brooding in the branches of his new domicile, the hero (voiced by George Clooney) grouses: “What is a fox without, if you’ll pardon the expression, a chicken in his teeth?” Whatever Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) may think, he’s going to do one last job in the barns of the evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The fox can’t change its stripes—even if it’s wearing a very natty corduroy blazer. Wes Anderson isn’t changing, either.  Fantastic Mr. Fox is hardly a departure—it is, if anything, even more distinctively Andersonian than anything he’s made before. Every time we expect him to zig, he zigs even further. I’m not complaining. Any time you get George Clooney as a fox arguing with Bill Murray as a badger ("Are you cussin' with me?"), it is a mistake to look that Thanksgiving gift in the toothy, feral mouth. Transplanted to the habitat of animation—especially the archaic medium of a stop-motion that rejects any use of computers—Anderson’s meticulous costume and set design gain an ecstatic polish. We'll never catch him, 'cause he's cussin' innocent. PG. AARON MESH. Fox Tower Stadium 10, Grand Lodge Compass Room Theater.

From Paris With Love

Continuing where he left off with Taken, director Pierre Morel keeps making American xenophobia look like affectionate ribbing compared with French xenophobia. Or maybe he’s mocking us; it’s hard to say. All I know is that when Jonathan Rhys Meyers asks, “How many more of them do you think there are?”—in reference to Chinese cocaine dealers John Travolta is offhandedly massacring—the secret agent has a ready reply: “Last census? About a billion.” And From Paris with Love seems perfectly content to slaughter the population of the developing world, if it is so presumptuous as to interfere with Travolta’s terrorism investigation. Much of the carnage—with the dark-skinned baddies always on the receiving end—functions as a sight gag. The movie is absolutely shameless. It is also dreadfully entertaining. I especially admired a bit where Travolta, looking like an undead leather fetishist, calculates how long it will take for jihadists to descend a flight of housing-project stairs and reach their car, so he can drop their suicide jacket on them. (He could have just looked out the window, but what fun would that be?) There’s also a very good scene where he interrupts a dinner party by shooting a woman in the head. If you’re looking for an afternoon of unabashed trash, this is hard to beat, but it’s also hard to stomach. R. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Frozen

Three skiers are stuck on a chairlift, with no access to hot chocolate. This is why we don't ski. Not screened for Portland critics. R.

Full Metal Jacket

[REVIVAL] What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? R. Living Room Theaters. No showtimes.

House

A horror movie based on a story by Frank Peretti, who is kind of the Stephen King of evangelical spiritual-warfare novels. Hey, Sarah Palin has a free weekend, right? R. Cinema 21.

Invictus

Soon after his presidential election, Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) rallies South Africa around the Springboks rugby team, which still wears the green and gold hues of the apartheid flag. This is roughly the equivalent of Barack Obama wooing the birthers by becoming a fan of the Atlanta Braves, if the Braves were composed entirely of bigoted pitcher John Rocker. Can Mandela pull it off? Wait for it: Yes he can. The Mandela of Clint Eastwood’s movie talks in aphorisms all the time—when he is jogging, when he is having tea, when he is watching rugby. Working for him, the film suggests, would be like working for a combination of Mahatma Gandhi, The West Wing’s Jed Bartlett and the I Ching. Freeman’s portrayal has obvious gravitas and palpable honor—but where’s the improvisation, the sense of pleasure in his political calculations? Is there a song using a verse from the William Ernest Henley poem that gives the movie its title? Of course there is. And there’s also a rugby team visit to the prison on Robben Island, and the sight of Mandela’s actual gaol cell is powerful—until Matt Damon looks out the bars into the yard and sees a vision of Freeman, looking like Red in The Shawshank Redemption, hammering rocks while his voice-over recites a stanza of “Invictus.” The movie bludgeons you with inspiration. PG-13. AARON MESH. Fox Tower Stadium 10.

Its Complicated

No, it isn’t. It’s more lifestyle porn from Nancy Meyers for Women Who Wear Purple, with Meryl Streep making the entitlement sound poignant. Streep plays her role—a divorcée hooking up with chubby ex-hubby Alec Baldwin—as girlish, even coquettish. Her age wouldn’t be an issue if the movie didn’t treat it as such a novelty. Baldwin is a wild-haired cartoon of beefy priapism, while Steve Martin plays shy as the architect, and is dignified in a way no one else here manages. Eventually everybody smokes a doobie. It’s just like 1967! Except we’re all really fucking wealthy! As in any Nancy Meyers picture (Something’s Gotta Give), the actors are unimpeachable and the production values are spiffy, but it is probably impossible for viewers in their late 20s to watch this movie in these times and not feel a surge of homicidal generational rage. The movie’s subtext—maybe it’s even the text—is rich, selfish boomers continuing to ruin their children’s lives with inconsiderate, infantile behavior. Streep tells her weeping kids she understands how seeing their parents re-dabbling in free love might be traumatizing, “but I did this for me.” Well, that’s a shocker. It’s not complicated at all: It’s just you justifying doing whatever you want, again. R. AARON MESH. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Tigard 11 Cinemas.

Legion

“Maybe He just got tired of all the bullshit,” says knocked-up, chain-smoking Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), explaining in droll voiceover God’s reason for a prophesized apocalypse. Those words are more prophetic than intended in Legion, a horror-action yarn pitting a group of survivors against the armies of heaven, ordered by the big man to exterminate humanity. Bullshit is director Scott Stewart’s business, and the joyless Legion piles it high, ruining what could have been a fun little chunk of ultraviolence by taking it all so seriously. God, in his infinite wisdom, decides, rather than simply erasing mankind or unleashing his vast army of indestructible angels, to have the cherubs possess the least efficient humans—an octogenarian, an ice-cream man, and a crew of punk rockers among them—in an effort to kill Charlie’s unborn Christ baby at the truck stop where she works. Luckily, though, the possessed are highly susceptible to bullets, especially when they’re fired by Paul Bettany’s machine-gun-double-fisting archangel Michael, who shows up to protect Charlie’s Mary and her dweeby Joseph, named Jeep. It’s a humorless, shoddily made flick that uses half-baked religious ideologies to mask a story that’s pretty much about God performing an abortion on Jesus. If only Legion’s director had realized how funny that prospect is—especially when paired with kung-fu angels and spider grandmas—it could have become an instant classic. Instead, most audiences will quickly get tired of all Legion’s bullshit. R. AP KRYZA. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas.

Nine

In Rob Marshall’s drooling imitation of 8½, Daniel Day-Lewis stars as the creatively spent and spiritually bereft filmmaker Guido, whose latest project is nearing production without a screenplay or even a workable idea. Beset by a harem of women both real and imagined, Guido attempts to disappear into himself, only to find yet another tormenting mother and/or whore stroking his shoulder and/or subconscious, which isn’t as bad as you’d think, considering the constituent parts of Guido’s oh-so-Catholic girl trouble: Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Fergie, Judi Dench, and Sophia Loren all take turns getting their licks in. Avoiding the considerably more dangerous but possibly more rewarding tack of spinning indelible scenes into strange new shapes, Marshall quarantines the musical numbers in carelessly blocked, Chicago-style duds that interrupt the drama with all the subtlety and grace of a bedazzled seizure. You get two films for the price of one—a remake of a perfect film and a loud Broadway production—but neither works. Sliced and diced into vague flashes of color and light, the musical interludes feature the aforementioned parade of buxom vessels cooing sweet nothings and raunchy promises, while Day-Lewis croons in a mangled accent reminiscent of Jason Segel’s vampire puppet in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In a way, Marshall’s misguided strategy pays off: 8½ makes it through unsullied, and Fellini walks away brushing Nine’s dust from his jacket. PG-13. CHRIS STAMM. Academy Theater, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Laurelhurst Theatre, Valley Theater.

Planet 51

Otherworldly suburbanites are horrified when a human spaceman lands in their backyard. WW did not attend the screening. PG. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Edgefield Powerstation Theater, Milwaukie Cinema, Portlander Cinema, St. Johns Pub and Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Precious: Based on the Novel ``Push by Sapphire

Clareece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is 16 years old, weighs 350 pounds, and is pregnant with her second child—conceived, like the first, in a rape by her own father. Over the course of the movie, we will learn that Precious is illiterate, and she will learn that she is HIV-positive. In a menthol-smoky Harlem apartment, her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), beats and molests her, force-feeding her plates of soul food to literally weigh her down. “Don’t let it get cold,” she warns, “’cause cold-ass pigs' feet is nasty.” Everything in Precious’ life is nasty. The movie arrives in Portland as an Oscar frontrunner (backed by Oprah) with a vociferous backlash (deriding it as self-inflicted racism), but what you may not have heard is how much of the picture functions as a horror movie. Even Precious herself is a grotesquerie. I know that’s a potentially inflammatory thing to say about an obese teenage girl, and I mean no insult to Sidibe, who carries her girth with grace. But when a movie shows its heroine running down the street with a stolen bucket of fried chicken, dropping battered thighs on the sidewalk while smearing most of her face with grease, that movie is not shy about pressing its racial stereotypes beyond anything in blaxploitation pictures. But I see how the movie could serve as a uniquely cathartic experience, especially to survivors of abuse. The piling on of cruelty—those “unrelenting circumstances” that threaten to make Precious a scapegoat for every variety of shame and self-hatred—eventually feels like a purging: All of this was done to us, and we won’t look away. Precious escapes the horror show of her world. The movie isn’t so lucky. R. AARON MESH. Division Street Stadium 13, Fox Tower Stadium 10, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Reel Music 27

[FINAL WEEK] In Intangible Asset Number 82, the last show in the NW Film Center's documentary fest, another pop musician goes on a vision quest for indigenous musical genius—this time it’s Australian jazz drummer Simon Barker train-hopping across the rolling green mountains of South Korea on a hunt for shaman percussionist Kim Seok-Chul, who is as difficult to find as his government designation makes him sound. You’ve heard this tune before, but the arrangement this time through is laden with real mystery. Director Emma Franz’s insertion of 16-mm frames is distracting, but she and Barker do a fine job of getting upstaged by the sages they encounter in the hills. These include a fascinatingly dedicated singer who has spent 18 hours a day for seven years kneeling at the foot of a waterfall and howling. He seems really happy. And that’s the movie’s clear subtext: Settling into the peace of artistic meditation means abandoning the need for resolution. So does Barker ever find Kim, the “intangible asset”? Wrong question, young grasshopper. AARON MESH. NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium. Intangible Asset Number 82 screens at 7 pm Sunday, Feb. 7. Visit nwfilm.org for additional screenings.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

[ONE WEEK ONLY] Paul Sorvino and Paris Hilton star in a horror rock opera about an unscrupulous organ-transplant corporation. Not screened for critics, though we very much wish it had been. R. Clinton Street Theater. Friday-Thursday, Nov. 28-Dec. 4. Clinton Street Theater.

Sherlock Holmes

Do you want to have fun? Do you want a good time? Well then, lads, pop on down to Baker Street, where Guy Ritchie has established an elementary school. His Sherlock Holmes isn’t so much a revisionist edition as a dumbing down and thickening up. Gone is the sleuth’s cocaine habit, replaced with a hooligan’s penchant for boozing (“You do know what you’re drinking is meant for eye surgery?” deduces Jude Law’s Watson), a filthy flat and a farting bulldog. That Holmes—he’s just a regular bloke! When he’s not displaying his six-pack for some bare-knuckle fisticuffs, Robert Downey Jr. plays the detective as a fop savant; with his ornamental cravat and acerbic gibes, he’s more Oscar Wilde than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (Oddly, this clotheshound of the Baskervilles trades in his deerstalker for leather—a terrible sartorial decision.) Ritchie’s most intriguing idea is to construe Holmes’ powers of observation as a form of ADHD, upping the background noises on the soundtrack mix while Downey’s eyes dart about dining rooms and laboratories. The rest is formula. The movie’s only distinction is a gruesome tone for a PG-13 release—a buzzsaw bisecting pig carcasses is a typical grace note. In short, it’s a remake of the Hughes brothers’ From Hell, without the conviction of its own paranoia. Should you see Avatar instead? No shit, Sherlock. PG-13. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, CineMagic Theatre, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

The Blind Side

Surely the most odious phrase in movie marketing is “Based on a True Story.” These are the magic words with which Michael Oher, a rags-to-riches NFL draftee, becomes an excuse for Sandra Bullock to play his adoptive mother as Memphis’ most generous, least racist housewife. She kicks off her new film, The Blind Side, with a football commentary on the strategic importance of Oher’s tackle position. Narrating in a Southern accent, she makes Oher’s vocation sound positively divine. If there was more to this story than a white woman’s ego, Hollywood begs to differ. Bullock tries on a Tennessee twang to play Leigh Anne Tuohy: a Christian, Republican and former Ole Miss cheerleader who took a huge, poor black boy into her home and groomed him for football stardom. Football stardom at her alma mater, as it turned out. That conflict of interest is one of many the movie swiftly smooths over in worshipping the Tuohys’ color-blind Christian largesse. Charity, it seems, is next to vanity. Meanwhile, hints of the plantation are hard to ignore: The high-school athlete is compared to a children’s book character—“Ferdinand the Bull”—and bringing him home gives the lady of the house a bedtime thrill, like a marital aid. “Is this some kind of white guilt thing?” Bullock is asked, and remembering her participation in Crash, the answer is obvious. PG-13. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Fox Tower Stadium 10, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16.

The Book of Eli

For 20 minutes, I really thought they had something. Sure, The Book of Eli is The Road Redux: Denzel Washington trudges to the sea across crispy-fried interstate overpasses, the last righteous figure in a landscape of cannibal highwaymen. But always-promising sibling directors Albert and Allen Hughes (Menace II Society, From Hell) have conjured up a moderately original post-nuke desert—one where a blistering sun requires survivors to don sweet shades, and makes water and ChapStick the most valuable commodities. But then it emerges that what Denzel is carrying to the ocean is a leather-bound King Jimmy, the last copy of scripture on the godforsaken planet. When he arrives at an outpost governed by Good Book-coveting Gary Oldman, the boss greets him with Old Testament hospitality, sending his girlfriend’s daughter (Mila Kunis) as company for the night. Denzel offers her dinner, and teaches her how to say grace. This was the moment when I began to get worried: They’re going to make rather a big deal about this, aren’t they? Yea, they surely art. The Book of Eli is a My Momma’s Bible movie, a means for commercial filmmakers to affirm their deep spiritual roots. Combined with action-picture carnage (knives, arrows, guns, a rocket launcher), this mentality provides divine justification for the Prophet Washington to cudgel and maul anyone he likes in the name of militant Christianity. The Hughes brothers have something, all right. What they have is Children of Men for fundamentalist zealots. R. AARON MESH. Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, St. Johns Twin Cinemas and Pub, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

The Hurt Locker

Director Kathryn Bigelow is an action-flick choreographer best known for the surfing-detective picture Point Break, and in addressing the Iraq War, she isn’t satisfied with aloof hand-wringing. Instead, she conjures Baghdad as an Old West frontier boomtown with high-noon showdowns in the streets—except the sheriff (a pitch-perfect Jeremy Renner) is wearing a moonsuit, and his adversary drives a car potentially packed with IEDs. It is impossible to remain detached from The Hurt Locker. You are a soldier trying to foil one calamity before you get the call to prevent another calamity. And all you can say is, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as another human being is ripped to pieces and you turn to run away from the blast. And if you survive, you have to do it again, because now you’re hooked on the jolt of certainty you felt for a second, before everything exploded into shit. This is the experience of war. It is also the provenance of art. Both are the territory of The Hurt Locker, which is not only the first credible drama about Iraq but merits serious consideration for the finest movie of the year. Kathryn Bigelow uses her capacity for action to make war exciting—and understands that this thrill is exactly what makes it addicting. The Hurt Locker is horrifying. It’s hopeless. I want to go see it again. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower. Director Kathryn Bigelow will introduce her film at a benefit showing at the Hollywood Theatre at 7 pm Monday, July 20. Academy Theater, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

It’s just Terry Gilliam’s luck that his dreams are often so darn impossible. The 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha famously depicted his ill-fated production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, while Heath Ledger’s death ground Imaginarium to a halt. Even though Gilliam was ultimately able to salvage the latter by enlisting Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell as stand-ins, this long-awaited re-team with Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen screenwriter Charles McKeown is mostly known now as Ledger’s final film. The late Australian actually plays second fiddle here to Christopher Plummer’s title character, a monk-turned-sideshow maestro who won immortality in a bet with the devilish Mr. Nick (Tom Waits) some centuries earlier. Ledger is amnesiac Tony, whom the sideshow troupe finds hanging by a noose under a bridge, rescues and recruits as a barker. Regrettably, Ledger’s final performance is not particularly memorable, and sharing the role with three other actors certainly doesn’t help. Plummer, on the other hand, is mesmerizing. Playing against type (i.e., Charles Muntz in Up), he is unusually animated, whimsical and physical. At 80, Plummer is still light on his feet and at the top of his game. PG-13. MARTIN TSAI. Living Room Theaters, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema.

The Informant!

Steven Soderbergh hasn’t settled for making the funniest and flat-out best movie of his career, or for capsizing the corporate-scandal drama into a pool of farce. He’s also managed to do something more subtle and radical: He’s sabotaged all the clichés of voice-over narration in film. The device is often a crutch, used to reveal what a central character is thinking. The question of what agribusiness whistle-blower Mark Whitacre (a mustachioed Matt Damon) is thinking is the central dilemma of The Informant!—it contains the clues to what this apparent naïf is really up to—and yet the more insistent his voice-over is, the less that internal monologue tells us. Much of the supple comedy in The Informant! comes from Soderbergh contrasting his hero’s romantic vision of himself—Damon’s fine performance has echoes of Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can—against the banality of his espionage. The rest of the humor—and it is a bottomless well—comes from the alarmed reactions of Whitacre’s FBI handlers (especially Joel McHale of The Soup) and his lawyers (especially Tony Hale, Arrested Development’s Buster) as they learn, along with us, that Mark hasn’t “been telling you guys the whole truth,” as he blithely puts it. There’s also an amazing hairpiece joke. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower. Laurelhurst Theatre.

The Inglorious Bastards

[FIVE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] The original 1978 Enzo G. Castellari B-picture about AWOL soldiers in the European theater. (Tarantino stole the title, mutilated it, and abandoned everything else.) Clinton Street Theater. Friday-Tuesday, Aug. 21-25. Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

The Lovely Bones

The problem with The Lovely Bones is that it has no bones. I mean this both literally and metaphorically: The discovery of a slain child’s olecranon is a crucial scene in Alice Sebold’s novel, but the movie expunges it, the same way it glosses over every painful reality in its rush to healing. After 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is raped and murdered in a subterranean bunker by neighbor Stanley Tucci (he talks like Jimmy Stewart, which somehow makes it worse), she is whisked off to a heaven that looks like a cross between Lothlórien and a mid-'90s screen saver, while her parents (Mark Wahlberg and an ignored Rachel Weisz) suspect everybody but that nice old Mr. Harvey. Susie spends much of her afterlife calling hello and goodbye to people from celestial amber waves of grain; here is where you know the movie was directed by Peter Jackson, because it strongly resembles Frodo greeting all his pals at the end of The Return of the King. Back on earth, Tucci continues to be insultingly conspicuous. (To put it crassly: A man builds one rape shelter in his backyard, and it might be overlooked by the neighbors; he builds two, and it’s just going to draw attention.) All dramatic sense, let alone any hope of catharsis, is denied by lurching transitions—it is not the actors’ fault if much of the picture seems like an episode of Mark Wahlberg Talks to Ghosts. By the time it finishes failing at everything it attempts, The Lovely Bones has become an offense to real grieving, to good taste and most of all to the music of Brian Eno. “Of course it’s beautiful,” chirrups one of Susie’s new friends. “It’s heaven!” It’s Touched by a Neighbor, Then an Angel. PG-13. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10.

The Princess and the Frog

About one hour into Disney’s latest “animated classic,” a Cajun-flavored spin on “The Frog Prince,” Tiana, the film’s waitress/princess lead, exclaims for the fifth or sixth time that only hard work, and not wishing upon stars, will make dreams come true. Disney Animation as a whole seems to have come to the conclusion that it’s time to head back, literally, to the drawing board. Directors Ron Clements and John Musker wield multiple visual styles: Jazz Age New Orleans and the bayou are illustrated with lush, hyperdetailed backgrounds, characters are drawn with Jungle Book-style clean lines, and voodoo dance numbers (of which there are a few) come with nightmarish splashes of color. Visually, it’s every bit as lovely as The Lion King, if not nearly so charming. The preachy protagonist, an industrious would-be restaurateur named Tiana (Anika Noni Rose), finds her plans derailed by some sketchy real estate shenanigans and, in a moment of desperation, kisses a frog claiming to be Naveen, the ambiguously ethnic prince of Maldonia. Tiana is black. This is a first for Disney, and likely of great import to the studio’s marketing department, but of none whatsoever to the film, which portrays New Orleans as a sort of prejudice-free dreamland where all you need to get ahead, no matter the color of your skin, is a little cash. G. BEN WATERHOUSE. Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee follows the singular life of Pippa (Robin Wright Penn), a frail, vulnerable mother who has married a much older man (Alan Arkin) and moved to the suburbs. Haunted by the fate of her pill-popping mother (Maria Bello) and her own lonely past, Pippa fears she’s near a nervous breakdown. Writer-director Miller (The Ballad of Jack and Rose) bounces between the extremes of very authentic and very heavy-handed filmmaking that becomes muddled with arbitrary dream sequences that just miss the mark. Another problem is that just about everyone in the film is some form of unstable or crazy, so it’s difficult to feel sorry for any one particular party except yourself, for being subjected to it all. The film boasts enough capable actors to keep things interesting, among them Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder and Blake Lively of Gossip Girl. The incredibly watchable Lively, who plays the younger Pippa, is both radiant and sincere, but still can’t shake the script’s melodrama. Keanu Reeves has a surprisingly strong presence as Pippa’s neighbor and savior, Chris. When you’re sitting through a film hoping that a Keanu Reeves character pops up more often, you know something’s wrong. In this case, the people feel incredibly true to life. They’re just not that dramatically satisfying. R. ALI ROTHSCHILD. Living Room Theaters.

The Road

I don’t know what it says about this stage in the American empire that every other Hollywood movie, from 2012 to Zombieland, is a vision of a horrible, hopeless future (or that the other half are films about pubescent vampires). But The Road should just about sate the appetite for destruction. The vast preponderance of the picture’s two hours consists of Viggo Mortensen trying to decide if this is the moment when he will shoot his son in the head, so he won’t be taken by cannibals. Walking toward South Carolina past midnight blasts of napalm, Mortensen’s unnamed hero explains to his kid (Kodi Smit-McPhee) that the brave new foodless world is divided into “good people” and “bad people”—which may seem too simple a formulation, until you consider that the bad people like to eat the good people for lunch, alive. (In the film’s spookiest sequence, the duo takes refuge in a plantation house, only to discover the residents are storing humans in the basement and consuming them limb by limb, like a Christmas honey ham to nibble off from time to time.) The Road is admirable in its refusal to soft-sell its horrors, and individual elements are very fine—Robert Duvall shines as a blind coot gobbling a fruit cocktail—but director John Hillcoat is too cautious to put his own stamp on Cormac McCarthy’s storytelling. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] The Clinton Street Theater expands its weekly midnight screenings for Halloween, offering three extra chances to sing along with Dr. Frank-N-Furter. R. Clinton Street Theater. 8 pm and midnight Friday-Saturday, Oct. 31-Nov. 1. Clinton Street Theater.

The Spy Next Door

Jackie Chan babysits your children for about $5 an hour. Probably beats leaving them with chipmunks, but who really knows? It wasn't screened for critics. PG. Century Eastport 16, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

The Stepfather

Mom's new man is a psychotic killer. Not screened for critics. PG-13. Mt. Hood Theatre.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

She should so choose Jacob. From an opening dream sequence that echoes Wild Strawberries to a cliffhanger finale featuring an ingeniously hammy Michael Sheen—and especially in the middle, while a shirtless wolfpack broods and brawls across the screen—New Moon is infinitely better than Twilight. Sorry, Portland: The sexually repressed vampire picture Catherine Hardwicke filmed here can’t hold a candle to the woozy vampires-vs.-werewolves sequel Chris Weitz didn’t film here. (He went to British Columbia instead.) The new movie is so much better, in fact, that I find myself wondering if it might actually be…no, it couldn’t be…is it good? God help me. I’ve become a 12-year-old girl. It’s basically a supernatural Dawson’s Creek—a humiliatingly addicting soap opera in the meadows, with glampire Edward (Pattinson) as Dawson and Native American beefcake Jacob (Taylor Lautner) as Pacey. Kristen Stewart continues to play Bella as a twine ball of hormones, yet the events of New Moon proceed with astonishing good humor and an even more surprising lack of hyperbole. The whole affair is like watching Gus Van Sant film a Dungeons and Dragons convention: Shirtless boys jump in the air, and they land as snarling CGI wolves. This is a lot more fun than vampires moaning through a baseball game. So I can’t defend New Moon, but yeah, fine: I liked it. I’m going to go write in my diary now. PG-13. AARON MESH. Academy Theater, Avalon Theatre, Bagdad Theater and Pub, Kennedy School Theater, Kiggins Theatre, Laurelhurst Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Mt. Hood Theatre, Portlander Cinema.

The Young Victoria

"Look at that demure little head,” a catty dowager in the Royal Court says of Emily Blunt’s queen-to-be. “And all of us wondering what’s inside it.” Quebecois director Jean-Marc Vallée’s first English-language feature is distinguished from most princess movies—live-action or Disney franchises—by being most interested in the workings of its heroine’s mind. Blunt, who has forged a career out of being the best thing in dreadful indie movies, rightly decides to play Princess Victoria as a reticent girl who still confuses stubbornness and strength. A dastardly adviser (Mark Strong) makes portentous threats about Victoria being “a china doll walking over a precipice,” but she’ll have none of that: “Then I must smash!” she proclaims, sounding like a regal Bruce Banner. Once Victoria ascends to the throne, Vallée is savvy to use the political tug of war between Prince Albert and Lord Melbourne (Rupert Friend and Paul Bettany, respectively) as a Trojan horse to sneak in a love story. Bettany, who has forged a career out of being the best thing in dull costume dramas, is enjoyably cynical, while Friend actually makes the “he’s a good listener” trait sexy. Victoria makes several missteps—a repeated love theme sung by Sinéad O’Connor sounds exactly like Neil Diamond’s “Holly Holy”—but I found myself unexpectedly moved by this ever-so-practical romance. PG. AARON MESH. Fox Tower Stadium 10.

Tooth Fairy

Possibly the first movie star I ever saw on screen was Julie Andrews, climbing those Austrian hills to The Sound of Music. How nice to see her again in a new family comedy, lecturing Dwayne Johnson on his responsibilities as a tooth fairy. And how disappointing that neither she, nor he, nor anyone else, has anything interesting to do in this bland entertainment. Johnson portrays a washed-up hockey player with the bummer conviction that “Dreams are bad.” He upsets his girlfriend (Ashley Judd) by trying to tell her daughter that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist. Justice for our hero is swift, if not that poetic: a pair of fluffy wings, a new night job, and lots of wacky hijinks. As with other pictures from the Walden Media company, the message is wholesome, but this movie about the importance of imagination fails to practice what it preaches. It’s all cheap ribbing and ugly lighting and computer-generated fairy dust. Dreams are better. PG. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Until the Light Takes Us

[DISTURBING DOC] This no-budget documentary paints a sympathetic portrait of the surviving founders of the Norwegian black-metal scene. Co-directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s access to the genre’s reclusive leaders is impressive: Notorious musician and convicted murderer (and church-burner!) Varg Vikernes is interviewed at length in his country-clublike prison cell. There are several beautifying shots of the Norwegian landscape and plenty of archival bits from local news stations; otherwise the footage is appropriately lo-fi and functional, like the music itself. The aesthetic is described as “cold,” and myriad parallels are drawn between black metal music and other modern art movements that conservatives (i.e., the bands’ parents) can see only as lazy garbage produced by hacks (remember, Edvard Munch’s screaming originated in Norway, too). The story follows the consistent divergence between Vikernes of the one-man band Burzum and Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell, singer and drummer of Darkthrone. On one hand is the charismatic Vikernes, whose political interests eventually outshine his passion for music (hence the jail sentence, which ended last year). On the other path is alternately glib and grim “boy next door” Fenriz, who shuns politics in favor of creating primitive black metal art, laboring for two decades to set an example for all of the poseurs and copycats who have replaced pagan beliefs with faux Satanism, musical commercialism and the posturing of young vandals. This film is a key companion to Michael Moynihan’s Lords of Chaos book: fascinating to fans, pure sociological horror to everyone else. NATHAN CARSON. Clinton Street theater, 7 and 9 pm Friday-Thursday, Feb. 5-11. Clinton Street Theater.

Up in the Air

When you live above the clouds, the forecast is always sunny. So that’s where George Clooney’s Up in the Air hero chooses to exist, in a mile-high club accessed by frequent-flyer platinum cards. As a means to this lifestyle, he soothingly executes mass layoffs for cubicle farms, confiscating the key-cards of the newly fired on their way out the door. “We are here to make limbo tolerable,” he tells his protégée (Anna Kendrick), but he loves limbo and is comforted by the way all airports look the same, offering no reminders that he’s in Wichita or St. Louis. Why would he join the poor saps who commit to something when he knows exactly how that ends? But Up in the Air is ultimately a warning about what happens when you refuse to settle—it’s a heartwarming movie with an unbelievably sad movie struggling to get out. Clooney takes Kendrick, an eager little gerbil of a Cornell graduate, along for an itinerary of firings, and director Jason Reitman (Juno) paints a white-collar world where the glass-walled protection from the cold outside is melting with the economy. Up in the Air is a very good movie (I’d happily watch it again), but it wants to be a better one. Instead, it’s this decade’s Jerry Maguire. Which isn’t bad, but it’s settling. R. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, CineMagic Theatre, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Lake Twin Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, St. Johns Twin Cinemas and Pub, Tigard 11 Cinemas.

Valley Girl

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] It could have been just another in a long list of teen sex comedies that dominated multiplexes and late-night cable in the 1980s. But, thanks to a breakout performance by Nicolas Cage, a killer soundtrack and a timeless tale of ill-fated lovers from opposite sides of the tracks, director Martha Coolidge's time-capsule romantic comedy has endured the test of time, like, totally, fer sure. R. DAVID WALKER. Clinton Street Theater. 9 pm Thursday, Feb. 14. Clinton Street Theater.

Valley Girl

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] It could have been just another in a long list of teen sex comedies that dominated multiplexes and late-night cable in the 1980s. But, thanks to a breakout performance by Nicolas Cage, a killer soundtrack and a timeless tale of ill-fated lovers from opposite sides of the tracks, director Martha Coolidge's time-capsule romantic comedy has endured the test of time, like, totally, fer sure. R. DAVID WALKER. Clinton Street Theater. 9:35 pm Saturday, Feb. 14. Clinton Street Theater.

When in Rome

When in Rome…gear up for a Napoleon Dynamite Pedro cameo. That at least is what Mark Steven Johnson’s When in Rome spends much of its 91 thankless minutes building up to. The film could have easily been a harmless romantic romp through Italy for the age group between Under the Tuscan Sun and The Lizzie McGuire Movie. It’s worse. The plotline of Rome, if one is forced to decipher one, is that Beth (Kristen Bell), with the high-powered job and luckless love life, takes coins out of the Fountain of Love at her sister’s Roman wedding, magically causing a quartet of men to fall in love with her. These unfortunate coin owners include Will Arnett, Danny DeVito and Jon Heder, who attack Beth from every angle with various methods of “seduction,” the least offensive of which is a sausage gift basket. DeVito does his best, Arnett breaks my heart by signing on to this movie, and Heder is excruciatingly unfunny. What else is there? A lot of awful Italian accents and stereotypes, which make the Prego commercials look authentic, and an overwhelming amount of slapstick. I thought the era of getting hit by cars, tripping and face-planting was over, but Johnson makes up for lost time by including some sort of injury every three minutes. This movie, which has nothing to do with the title's adage and mostly doesn’t take place in Rome, can’t even follow its own senseless logic. David Diamond and David Weissman, who penned this travesty as well as Old Dogs, should not be allowed near so much as a crayon ever again. PG-13. ALI ROTHSCHILD. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Where the Wild Things Are

It’s standard practice to praise family movies by saying they’ll be enjoyed by parents and children alike, but in the case of the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s picture book, I suspect that some parents will sink blissfully into a reverie watching the characters throw clods of dirt, while their offspring tug on sleeves to ask when they can go outside and throw clods of dirt. Where the Wild Things Are is like watching a game of Calvinball scripted by Robert Altman—no rules, lots of running in circles and everybody grumbling at once—but at least it looks great. All the truest moments arrive before little Max (a subtly emotive young Portlander named Max Records) sails away from home in a tantrum and projects his feelings onto wonderfully tangible animal puppets, detailed by Jim Henson's people down to the soil clinging to woolly legs and the mucus under nostrils. But the oddly glum cavorting looks like those Olympic opening ceremonies where dancers wander beneath indigenous obelisks, only set to hipster Kidz Bop tapes. The monsters whiz by in an alarming jumble of infantile hurt feelings expressed in a large vocabulary; they don’t sound like children, or even a child’s understanding of their elders, so much as adults who don’t want to be adults. That’s exactly who it was made by, and for. PG. AARON MESH. Avalon Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

Whip It

The first 15 minutes of films about the first years of womanhood are such a difficult time. The opening act of Whip It gives little reason to hope it will be anything more than a retread of Juno, which was itself a copy of Ghost World. But as soon as alternateen Ellen Page hops a senior-citizen bingo bus for a ride to roller-derby tryouts—and shares a sympathetic exchange with a fellow bluehair—the movie reveals a capacity for openheartedness and understanding far beyond its predecessors’. Debut director Drew Barrymore’s movie has editing problems, but it’s filled with delights, even beyond the mischief of tiny Page skating “like a weevil” while tatted ladies try to board-check her. Barrymore’s direction grows surer as Whip It goes along. (An underwater make-out session, set to Jens Lekman, is cut so the partners magically never need surface; love seems to have given them gills instead of wings.) With the exception of an obligatory Jimmy Fallon, the cast is superb, with Kristen Wiig, Alia Shawkat and Daniel Stern giving the performances of their careers. But the movie belongs to Marcia Gay Harden, whose interpretation of a controlling stage parent is so understanding it might cause people to forgive their own mothers. PG-13. AARON MESH. No showtimes.

Youth in Revolt

I counted one functioning joke in the entirety of Youth in Revolt: Michael Cera playing a French New Wave scoundrel—Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, to be precise. This is, admittedly, a pretty good joke. Cera continues to look exactly like Cera—that is, like a 15-year-old boy—but as Francois Dillinger, the invented doppelgänger of lovesick hero Nick Twisp, he acts like a contemptuous roué, flicking cigarettes with dissolute languor, staring into the distance from behind aviator shades, and murmuring exhortations like, “I’m not going anywhere until you stick your filthy dick in this tomato.” So that’s one half of Cera’s double performance, which comes across as a junior varsity Fight Club, or The Parent Trap for delinquents. The other half is Cera doing George Michael Bluth again, all panicked pauses and horrified repression, though if you actually go back and watch him in Arrested Development you’ll notice he seemed both more active and more natural there; the awkwardness had a poignant integrity. In this movie, as in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Paper Heart, the extended shyness begins to feel affected, as it has no more connection to his real self than those viral Internet clips where he plays “Michael Cera” and acts like a petulant jerk. The persona is a sham, like those second virginities you can get at the better megachurches. Cera must be on like his eighth virginity by now. R. AARON MESH. Academy Theater, Kennedy School Theater, Laurelhurst Theatre, Mission Theater and Pub, Portlander Cinema, Valley Theater.

 

A partial list of things destroyed in Roland Emmerich’s majestically shameless end-of-the-world movie 2012: Mayan-calendar cultists (suicide). A dill pickle (consumed by conspiracy theorist Woody Harrelson). John Cusack’s family home (swallowed by the San Andreas fault). The entire Los Angeles freeway system (ibid.). The city of Los Angeles proper. Yellowstone National Park (explodes into gargantuan volcanic caldera). Several airline runways, right after John Cusack’s planes take off. Woody Harrelson’s Winnebago. Woody Harrelson (flaming fir tree). “The vice president’s chopper went down in the ash cloud outside of Pittsburgh.” President Danny Glover’s video feed for an address to the nation—one line into the Lord’s Prayer. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, with major fissures rupturing between the fingers of God and Adam. The whole damn Vatican. The White House (crushed by tsunami-capsized aircraft carrier the USS John F. Kennedy). President Danny Glover (“I’m comin’ home, Dorothy”). The Indus Valley, along with one symbolically important geologist (unspeakably massive tidal wave). Much of the bow of Ark No. 4, one of the floating vessels secretly constructed in Nepal by the world’s governments to save a select remnant from the global flooding (it scrapes some glaciers). The rest of the world. A partial list of things not destroyed in 2012: Hope. John Cusack. A cute lap dog. PG-13. AARON MESH. Avalon Theatre, Edgefield Powerstation Theater, Kiggins Theatre, Milwaukie Cinema, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema.

 

Not since Rolf the friendly Nazi informed Liesl in The Sound of Music that because she was 16 going on 17, he’d take care of her, has a movie contemplated the compromise of a minor with as much good cheer as does An Education. The movie has been lifted by Danish director Lone Scherfig and pop writer Nick Hornby from the memoirs of British journalist Lynn Barber, who in 1961 was herself 16 going on 17, and seduced by a suitor twice her age. Mulligan faultlessly plays the heroine, here called Jenny, as a girl whose worst affectations—snobbery toward her schoolmates, ridicule of her parents, and a tendency to drop French bons mots into everyday conversation—are endearing because they are being tried on for the first time, and tentatively. This is also her attitude, at first, toward David (Peter Sarsgaard), the man who cruises his Bristol automobile to her Twickenham bus stop and offers to give her rain-soaked cello a lift home. The movie’s dramatization of these events is funny and heartening—but praising it begs the question of how funny and heartening a movie about predation ought to be. R. AARON MESH. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, City Center Stadium 12, Fox Tower Stadium 10, Hollywood Theatre, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Moreland Theatre, Movies On TV Stadium 16, St. Johns Twin Cinemas and Pub.

 

A blast of transgression, so close you can smell the crack smoke and prophylactic rubber, Werner Herzog’s karaoke cover of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Christological cop drama has no interest in guilt and redemption—it delights in sin as performance art, like a DUII sobriety test performed on a high wire. It’s possible to take it entirely as a joke (or, in Ferrara’s case, as an insult): The Saturday-night audience I saw it with was in stitches, and understandably so. Nicolas Cage is parodying every outsized performance he’s delivered in the past decade, and allowing Herzog to rebuff the Leaving Las Vegas addiction-as-tragedy motif. Weaving through the movie with a Richard III limp and a slurred accent somewhere between Humphrey Bogart and Bugs Bunny, Cage has scenes here so outrageous—a bit in a nursing home with a portable electric shaver springs to mind—that they surpass any bear-suit antics from The Wicker Man. And only Herzog would pause police-procedural scenes to consider them from the POV of a passing alligator or iguana. But the movie is not a joke, and multiple viewings are going to establish it as a swampy opus—its poetic madness only functions because it is so carefully controlled (the screenplay by William Finkelstein has the spiraling structure of top-shelf noir). Never before has the improvised chaos of the narcotized life been so well used as a comment on societal decay—why do you think the movie is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, anyway? It’s one of the year’s finest, strangest achievements. Like the man said: Sin boldly. R. AARON MESH. Laurelhurst Theatre, Living Room Theaters.

 

Like most movies based on investigative journalism, this adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book—about the U.S. Army’s misadventures in telepathic warfare—feels like an appetizer, with the whole story left dangling tantalizingly close. But that frustration is exacerbated by The Men Who Stare at Goats, which, like the military’s secret New Earth Battalion, starts ever so promisingly before realizing it doesn’t know what to do with its powers. It’s a rare film that can treat the freeing of Iraqi prisoners of war as an afterthought, lost behind the freeing of barnyard animals. George Clooney is a psychic soldier, trained by a hippie visionary (Jeff Bridges, coasting blissfully by) to disarm America’s enemies in the nonviolent tradition of “Jesus Christ, Lao Tze Tung, Walt Disney.” The film’s revelations—all too absurd to be concocted—are gleefully staged, as interlopers led by Kevin Spacey find ways to bring colonial oppression back into the mix. But director Grant Heslov (a journeyman actor) stresses the punch lines, as if he’d been watching Coen brothers movies and thought they were only about jokes. Goats is probably the first comedy to show the U.S. military-industrial complex torturing kittens and dachshunds, but it’s one of many War on Terror satires to join its targets in blithe dismissal of brown-skinned collateral. R. AARON MESH. Laurelhurst Theatre.

Bitch Slap

[ONE WEEK ONLY] A neo-sexploitation picture finds three bosomy heroines in deep-desert trouble. Not screened for critics. R. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Friday-Thursday, Feb. 12-18. No shows on Feb. 14 or 17. Clinton Street Theater.

Cascade Festival of African Films

[THREE DAYS ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] PIFF and BAM may have our attention, but don't forget Portland Community College's Cascade campus roundup of African cinema, which this week brings South African playwright, actor and director John Kani to town with his family-secrets drama Nothing But the Truth (Moriarty Building, 12 noon Thursday, Feb. 11, and Hollywood Theatre, 7 pm Friday, Feb. 12). Also screening is Wrestling Grounds (Moriarty Building, 2 pm Thursday and 7 pm Saturday, Feb. 11 & 13), about a Senegalese teenager who joins a championship grappling squad. Hollywood Theatre. PCC Cascade campus Moriarty Building, room 104.

Dear John

Dear John is about cutie pie Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) and badass bro John Tyree (Channing Tatum) falling in love on the coast of South Carolina. Savannah teaches John about tolerance and patience, and John teaches Savannah how to surf. In one scene, John is crouched over on the sand, trying to start a fire in the dark. A close-up on his face shows lips that are pouted with purpose. The dude is hawt and he knows it. When he lights the fire using only two sticks, Savannah compliments how “primal” his skills are. I think, “Yes, hottie Channing Tatum does make me feel primal.” But then John, who is in the Army, has to ship out to the Middle East. Savannah is sad but they promise to love each other forever and write each other love letters. Alas, tragedy strikes; tears are shed; sobs are muffled in the movie theater audience. But in the end, the lights go on, and the crowd—which was about 90 percent female at the screening I attended—applauds enthusiastically. Sure, we’re sobbing, but we’re lovin’ it. Our mascara might be smudged, but we’re damn horny. Taking your girlfriend to a Nicholas Sparks movie will be the best date you ever go on. Sure, it will probably make her cry, but at least she’ll probably want to bang you afterward. PG-13. INDIA NICHOLAS. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

Julie & Julia Dinner and a Movie

A damn sweet idea for the foodie dork in your life. The Heathman screens the charming Julia Child biopic Julie & Julia while you grub on a six-course dinner revolving around recipes from Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, from the infamous duck en croute to lobster thermidor and tarte tatin. I know—best idea ever. The Heathman, 1001 SW Broadway, 790-7752. 6:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, Feb. 13-14. $75 per person, wine and gratuity not included.

Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] The gay-bar twin-bill movie screenings continue with Event Horizon, followed by Snatch. Boxxes Video Bar, 330 SW 11th Ave. 8:30 pm Monday, Feb. 15.

North Face

The portrait of a German in 1936 is not often painted in shades of courage and heroism; in American cinema we’re far more comfortable with “brainwashed zealot” or “Jew killer.” However, Nazi Germany is only at the periphery of Philipp Stölzl’s film North Face; instead, the movie takes a breathtaking look outside the rising fascism to the equally destructive forces of nature in the Swiss Alps. More gripping than any mountain-climbing film that’s come out in recent years, North Face re-enacts the failed expedition of four Austrian-Germans trying to summit what the Nazis called “The Last Problem of the Alps” (they just loved to identify problems): the near-vertical north face of Mount Eiger in Switzerland. Rock slides, avalanches and bitter cold are the foes that face Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas), two adventurers who leave the army to scale Eiger in a competition to promote Aryan superiority. Kurz and Hinterstoisser, who refuse to answer to greetings of “Heil Hitler!” are in it for themselves. Stölzl weaves a few fictional threads into the film—chiefly the character of Luise, a journalist who follows the climbers to cover them, but also to be near Kurz, with whom she has a romantic history. Though not historically accurate, the love interest is subtle enough to intensify the heart-racing tension, with extraordinary cinematography from Kolja Brandt that will leave mouths agape through the last 45 minutes of the film. ALI ROTHSCHILD. Cinema 21.

Percy Jackson the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

A boy finds out that he's the son of the god Poseidon, which means he'll be crucified. Or go on adventures, or something. Not screened for critics by WW press deadlines. PG. Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13.

The Beaches of Agnès

Agnès Varda’s doc The Gleaners and I was somewhat spoiled by the navel-gazing “I” part of that equation, but without another subject to intrude upon, her giddy, freeform look back at her life here is most welcome and enchanting. She delves into everything from her childhood to her films (including the New Wave classic Cléo from 5 to 7) to her marriage to fellow director Jacques Demy, using photographs and film clips merged with fanciful real-world visual concoctions, all guided by her winningly insouciant charm. What results is a portrait not just of a life but of how a life is made. ANDY DAVIS. Living Room Theaters. No showtimes.

The Last Station

It’s early-1900s Russia, and everyone loves Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy's diva wife loves Tolstoy, Tolstoy's socialist followers love Tolstoy and, most of all, Tolstoy loves Tolstoy. Now let’s all act like baboons over it. In Michael Hoffman’s period piece The Last Station, Christopher Plummer's Tolstoy has become a saint of pacifism, and his devoted wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), has her feathers ruffled when his self-imposed movement leads him to renounce his noble title and property. Adding to her agitation is Paul Giamatti as Tolsoy’s butt-boy Vladimir Chertkov, who urges Tolstoy to bequeath his family’s will to the people of Russia. Tizzy is a polite word for what this throws Sofya into, and Mirren decides it’s go big or go home. There is so much acting that the performances float somewhere between impressive and overkill. Giamatti’s villain is Looney Tunes evil, clutching his mustache wax with such bwa-ha-ha ridiculousness it makes one sympathize with all of Sofya’s braying. Also, why is it that “period piece” always seems to translate to “British accents” in Hollywood, even when the film clearly takes place in Russia? There is a charming scene between the best actors in the film when Tolstoy and Sofya cluck like chickens in their own private foreplay patois. It would be even more endearing if the characters didn’t already do the vernacular equivalent of squawking during the rest of the movie. Elsewhere, James McAvoy plays Tolstoy’s virginal assistant whose nasty cough is used as a funny (read: not funny) gimmick. R. ALI ROTHSCHILD. Fox Tower.

The Late Night European Horror Series

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] Grindhouse Film Festival curator Dan Halsted concludes his screenings of Continental terror with Dario Argento's Creepers (1985). "Before there was David Lynch," writes Halsted, "there was Dario Argento, and if you ask me, this is Argento's best movie." Good enough for us. Cinema 21. 11:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 13.

The Room

The Room is more than just a movie. It is like an object in space with a density greater than the center of the sun. At the collapsing center of this cinematic black hole is a mad genius who is working to save the film industry, one theater at a time: The Room’s director, writer, producer, financier and star, Tommy Wiseau. In his unidentifiable European accent, Wiseau explains his movie: “The Room is about life. Everyone should see it at least four times in theaters.” Having seen it dozens of times, I can only agree. The Room, by all accounts, was intended as a serious drama about Johnny (Wiseau), a San Francisco banker struggling with an unfaithful fiancée; a backstabbing best friend; a drug-using, adopted ward; and a pushy, balding psychologist who is always giving Johnny unsolicited, emotionally blunt advice. But what started as a bland tragedy instantly became a sublime comedy in the eyes of audiences in 2003. That’s something that Wiseau—a man who has been described as a Croatian cyborg, a Belgian vampire, a Danish refugee and possibly not from this world or even this dimension—doesn’t mind at all. “I am an American,” he says, apropos of an unrelated question. “And before people see the movie, I always say, ‘You can laugh, you can cry, you can express yourself, but please don’t hurt each other.’” KEVIN BURKE. Cinema 21. 11 pm Friday, Feb. 12. No showtimes.

The Shining

[REVIVAL] Twin girls hacked to pieces. Torrents of blood spilling from an elevator. Shelley Duvall (shudder). Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is full of creepy imagery. But it’s the film’s family dynamic that’s the stuff of real nightmares, and what makes The Shining among the most frightening films of all time—the feeling that those you love and trust are the real bogeymen. Isolated in a secluded hotel, author and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson, one of the screen’s scariest monsters, subbing erratic eyebrows for claws and fangs) slowly descends into madness, with a literal ax to grind with his wife (Duvall) and psychic son (Danny Lloyd) as his inner demons get friendly with the real ones roaming the hotel. The simmering evil—prodded along by Kubrick’s patient buildup, then-revolutionary sound mix and Stedicam work, and a brooding score—imparts a blood-boiling sense of dread throughout. Just in time for Halloween, The Shining hits Living Room Theaters in glorious HD, while Timberline Lodge—the source of the film’s freaktastic exterior shots, but sans the hedge maze—is replicating the film’s climactic 1920s “fish and goose soiree” on All Hallow’s, complete with in-room screenings. Tell ’em Delbert Grady sent you…and stay away from Room 237. R. AP KRYZA. Living Room Theaters. Timberline Lodge party on Friday, Oct. 31. No showtimes.

The Soloist

Reporter Robert Downey Jr. tries to aid mentally ill musican Jamie Foxx. Perhaps together they can catch the Zodiac Killer. PG-13. No showtimes.

The Third Man

[ONE WEEK ONLY, REVIVAL] No matter how many times you’ve seen The Third Man, the shock of Orson Welles’ first appearance never wears off: There’s the circumstances of Harry Lime’s Vienna disinterment, of course, but also the perpetual surprise of seeing Welles looking so insouciant, young and sleek. (This time, he struck me as looking almost exactly like the early Tom Arnold.) Other observations from another viewing: Graham Greene never ceases to delight in mocking the guilelessness of Americans (Joseph Cotten does everything but fall down a manhole); the surrealist camera tilts throughout the film all build to a very subtle payoff in the famous Ferris wheel scene; and female lead Alida Valli’s ostensibly disillusioned loyalty is actually pretty shitty behavior that the movie excuses basically on the grounds that she’s a woman. Draw your own conclusions with another viewing. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, Feb. 12-18.

The Wolfman

Benecio Del Toro is hairier than usual. Not screened for critics by WW press deadlines; look for a review on wweek.com. R.  Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.