Screen Listings

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

3:10 to Yuma

In filming this Western duel between Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, director James Mangold is remaking a 1957 Glenn Ford picture of the noble-gunslinger variety, while underlining the ethical choices with extra ink. As Mangold last proved in his Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, he has a deft hand with a cliché, but he doesn't like to leave any untouched. So 3:10 to Yuma may feature two men rushing to make a train, but they have a lot to talk over before they get there. The film is elevated by Crowe, who plays the stagecoach robber Ben Wade as a deadly badman—but a sleek, sophisticated badman, urbane in his manners and fond of drawing birds. He glides through the role. R. AARON MESH. 99 West Drive-in, Cedar Hills, Eastport, City Center, Forest, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Sandy, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Across the Universe

A dreamboat named Jude meets a sweetheart named Lucy, and they accompany her brother Max on a voyage through the Beatles songbook. This initially sounds like a spectacularly irritating idea (let's play Moulin Rouge! with the Fab Four!), but in practice it's often astonishing, and might have worked even better if director Julie Taymor had followed her literal notion to its logical end and simply made a Beatles opera. If all the movie's words had been written by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, we would have been spared some embarrassing dialogue—though it would have done nothing to improve the doe-in-the-headlights performance of Evan Rachel Wood, or Taymor's LSD-and-NutraSweet vision of the 1960s. (At times, Across the Universe feels like Forrest Gump: The Musical.) But when a concept is this far-fetched, it's a pleasant surprise when any of it works. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place.

Arid Lands

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] During World War II, the feds decided a huge isolated desert "wasteland" with an "expendable" native population in Eastern Washington would be a perfect spot to cook up plutonium. And almost overnight, 50,000 pasty folk showed up at the now-abandoned Hanford site to produce a laundry list of humanitarian widgets, its chief claim to fame being the radioactive guts of the bomb that wiped out Nagasaki. The area is also home to what's got to be the country's most bizarre suburbia, a place where lush golf courses, wineries and McMansions butt up against one of the world's largest environmental clean-up nightmares. The Tri-Cities' environmental sins over the years would give Captain Planet an ulcer—the site has pumped millions of gallons of glowing waste into the air, soil and Columbia River. Grant Aaker and Josh Wallaert's film reveals that the Tri-Cities are a shitty place to live if you're a salmon, but not so bad if you're Homo sapiens—because, oddly enough, the mega-billions funding the current cleanup effort have made the area one of the fastest-growing and lucrative regions in the Northwest. Arid Lands is a smart, comprehensive and beautiful film that tells this strange story of an environmental emergency happening right in our backyard. LANCE KRAMER. 5th Avenue Cinema, 510 SW Hall St. 7 pm Friday, Oct. 12. Co-director Josh Wallaert will answer questions.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The long-delayed, obnoxiously titled Assassination has the makings of a classic Western, starting with powerhouse performances. Playing the legendary outlaw in his last days, Brad Pitt is masterful. His middle-aged Jesse is conflicted, bounding seamlessly from laid-back family man to murderous psycho. He's matched step for step by Casey Affleck as Ford, a fanboy whose admiration for the famed robber takes a dark turn. Affleck's performance is a revelation. His Ford is a stammering hanger-on, but buried beneath his sparkly blue eyes is a conniving sociopath. Fine performances are matched by haunting cinematography that gives the prairies a hellish glow. Yet although these ingredients are great, sophomore writer/director Andrew Dominik (Chopper) just can't make his story move. Boy howdy, is Jesse James a boring heap of uninspired dialogue and unnecessary subplots. Anyone jonesing for a good ol' fashioned shootout will be suffering from blue balls by the time the anticlimactic, titular act of violence occurs more than two hours into the 160-minute film. Jesse James could have been a masterpiece. Instead, it'll suffer the same fate as Robert Ford himself: Briefly discussed, then utterly forgotten. R. AP KRYZA. Cedar Hills, City Center, Lloyd Center.

Bend Film Festival

Still kicking yourself about missing Outsourced, the best movie of the year about Americans in India? It's just 175 miles to Bend, where you can also catch the Oregon debut of the well-reviewed Great Wall of Sound. Visit bendfilm.org for more festival details.

The Bothersome Man

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

The Bourne Ultimatum

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

Broken English

Broken English begins with the face of its heroine, Nora Wilder, positioned between two glasses of wine. This is a place where Nora finds herself most of the time. But as imagined by director Zoe Cassavetes (yes, the daughter of John) and inhabited by Parker Posey, Nora self-medicates the way real people do: She feels intoxicated because it's better than feeling something worse. It's not terribly difficult to imagine where Broken English goes from there, but it's not so easy to predict the dimensions of acting Posey shows. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

Buddha's Lost Children

[ONE WEEK ONLY] With explosive colors, vibrant photography and impossibly beautiful scenery, director Mark Verkerk's Buddha's Lost Children has such a gloss that, at first glance, it's hard to believe it's a documentary rather than an art film. Verkerk's touching film centers on Khru Bah, a Buddhist monk living in Thailand's Golden Triangle, an impoverished, violent and drug-addled section of the world where food, schools and hope are sparse. The monk, riding on horseback, spends his days at his monastery, taking in children—he calls them novices—and putting them through a regimen of tough love, compete with training in Thai boxing (Bah was a former champion) horseback riding, old-style religion and life skills. Buddha's Lost Children, initially released in 2006, hits Portland at an interesting time. Khru Bah's monastery is close to the border of Burma, making this peaceful and thoughtful film about hope and faith something of a prologue to the violence now tearing the region, focused on people not unlike Bah. The film now almost demands a follow-up. AP KRYZA. Clinton Street Theater. Friday, Oct. 12. Sunday-Thursday, Oct. 14-18.

Dans Paris

The pearl-gray skies of Paris in late December are reason enough to take in this intermittently enjoyable bad film about Paul (Romain Duris), a clean young man with neat sideburns who attempts suicide because the unwashed hag of his dreams resents him for taking showers. Ohh, it's all so Français! Bathing regularly soon leads to a plunge into the wintry Seine. Yet, instead of drowning or dying from hypothermia, Paul emerges—ahh, refreshed—like a true Frenchman. Sans his Molière wig, Duris looks handsome, as well he should for a role that mandates he spend most of the movie in bed in his boxers. N.P. THOMPSON. Hollywood Theatre.

Eastern Promises

On its surface, David Cronenberg's voyage into London's Russian-mob underworld tells a familiar story. Stop me if you've heard this one: A newborn baby is menaced by ruthless gangsters until a gruff hero arises to the child's defense. But Eastern Promises isn't just a movie with haunting themes playing under its surface: It's a movie explicitly concerned with how surfaces warp the things they cover up. Such details are in keeping with Cronenberg's long-held fascination with mutation and mutilation. This time around, instead of turning Jeff Goldblum into an insect à la The Fly, he buries Viggo Mortensen's body in black-and-blue tats, dolling him up to look like a young Paulie Walnuts sucking on a lemon. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinetopia, City Center, Division, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Sandy, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub, Tigard.

Eco-Sicko

[FOUR NIGHTS ONLY, WRITER APPEARANCE] Give credit to the NW Film Center and Eco-Sicko series curator Jacques Boyreau: They've picked a truly diverse swath of movies touching on the theme of environmental disaster. This week's offerings include Burn!, a Marlon Brando war-in-the-Caribbean movie, alongside Michelangelo Antonioni's cold classic Red Desert and Gregory Peck horribly cast as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. But the highlight is a double feature from screenwriter David Seltzer. First on the bill is The Hellstrom Chronicle, which in Boyreau's unimprovable description is "a probing jeremiad that totters man's arrogance through awe of bugs." And that's nothing next to Prophecy, a 1979 horror film directed by John Frankenheimer. Talia Shire travels to the Maine woods (which are fairly obviously the British Columbian woods) to learn that mercury poisoning has created...a giant latex mutant bear! I thought I was burnt out on ironically enjoyable weirdness, but Prophecy lured me back: First with the insane raccoons, then with the boy in the exploding sleeping bag, but mostly with that wonderful, angry bear—which looks like a 20-foot-tall Winnie the Pooh dropped in a vat of rubber cement. I'd attend a lot more environmental rallies if they trotted out this bear. AARON MESH. Whitsell Auditorium. Burn! screens 7 pm Friday, Oct. 12. David Seltzer introduces The Hellstrom Chronicle and Prophecy at 7 and 9 pm Saturday, Oct. 13. Red Desert screens 7 pm Sunday, Oct. 14. Moby Dick screens 7 pm Tuesday, Oct. 16.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Cate Blanchett plays Bob Dylan in his British-monarch period. Look for Aaron Mesh's review on wweek.com. PG-13. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Tigard, Wilsonville.

Enemies of Happiness

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] A woman runs for office in Afghanistan. It's safe to call it an uphill battle. Bread and Roses Center, 819 N Killingsworth St.. 7:30 pm Saturday, Oct. 13.

Exiled

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

Feast of Love

Like any good, red-blooded American, I believe in movies with naked women, multiple-story-line collages and Morgan Freeman being twinkly and wise. And as a new Portlander, my burgeoning civic pride makes me favorably inclined toward any PDX-set film that isn't about drug addicts or serial killers. But none of my proclivities can justify Feast of Love, a generous helping of middlebrow twaddle that tries to find supernatural profundity in Greg Kinnear being cuckolded by two different women (Selma Blair and Radha Mitchell, who join Alexa Davalos and Stana Katic in disrobing—the movie might have been better titled Feast of Breasts). The usually excellent director Robert Benton leaves no aphorism unuttered. R. AARON MESH. Eastport, City Center, Lloyd Center.

Feel the Noise

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

The Final Season

Sam Gangee coaches a baseball team. It was screened for critics. But we couldn't find a critic willing to watch it. PG. Cinema 99, Division, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.

From Kilimanjaro With Love

[ONE DAY ONLY] The premiere of an Oregon-filmed action-adventure about a treasure hunt. Bagdad. 1 pm Saturday, Oct. 13.

The Game Plan

Do you smell what Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is cookin'? It's pretty pungent. The former WWF star's newest vehicle, The Game Plan, is the Jersey Girl of sports movies—a Disney-produced piece of cinematic poo that stings the nose like a burnt, sugar-coated baby turd. PG. AP KRYZA. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Oak Grove, Sandy, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Global Concern: Human Rights on Film

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, doctors tried in vain to treat patients for diseases they had no names for. Orphaned children scavenged for food among the rubble. White Light Black Rain director Steven Okazaki gives the survivors his camera's full attention as they tell their stories, wrought both with pain and the dark humor borne of helplessness and resignation. Okazaki is catching this generation as it slowly fades away, both from the responsibility of its government and from the eye of its nation. The opening scenes of the film have the documentary crew asking oblivious teens what happened on Aug. 6, 1945, setting the film up for the rote didacticism that is to be expected from films exploring atrocity. But what other way is there to prevent atomic war if our youth doesn't know its effects? JIM SANDBERG. Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Thursday, Oct. 11.

Good Luck Chuck

If voluntarily witnessing Dane Cook go down on a stuffed penguin with utter carnal desire is the last visual you'd find funny, then Good Luck Chuck is probably not for you. The story line is just entertaining enough to get away with crass, sexually charged fratitude. R. ELIANNA BAR-EL. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Division, Oak Grove, Sandy, Vancouver Plaza.

Hannah Takes the Stairs

Director Joe Swanberg's addition to the "mumblecore" corpus opens with a bright credit sequence set to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture being played by what sounds like a marching band on Quaaludes. This sets the tone for what follows, as Swanberg manages to pull some classic themes into the slight world of post-collegiate ennui. Hannah (Greta Gerwig) may not quite be an Emma Bovary or Hedda Gabler for her generation, but she shares the traits of being easily bored and smarter than the men around her. So she bed-hops her way through a series of boyfriends (including arch-mumbler Andrew Bujalski) before finding happiness—or at least shared trumpet-playing ability—with a TV writer (Kent Osborne). But even with a winsome performance from Gerwig, I'm not sure Hannah carries much meaning—except in its lesson that when you date a girl who complains of "chronic dissatisfaction," you shouldn't expect to satisfy her. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

The Heartbreak Kid

The Farrelly Brothers remake of Elaine May's honeymoon-gone-awry farce is misanthropic, mean-spirited and culturally insensitive. And God help me, I liked it. Ben Stiller's aggrieved shtick wore thin a decade ago—which makes it all the funnier that the Farrellys offer him not a shred of sympathy, even when he marries a blond sociopath (Malin Akerman) who sings along to "Muskrat Love." Stiller's greedy bastard is the butt of the jokes, Akerman has remarkable comedic timing, and there's a running gag involving an overenthusiastic mariachi band that is as hilarious as it is fatuous. A few moments overreach miserably (nobody needs another pubic-hair joke, and less than nobody needs to see the hair in question), but the malicious absurdity of Stiller as an illegal immigrant made me laugh. I'm sorry. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

IDA DocuWeek

[ONE WEEK ONLY] A slate of good ol' nonfiction filmmakin' includes one of the genre's better recent experiments: Jessica Yu's Protagonist, which follows the lives of four men—an "ex-gay" preacher, a bank robber, a German terrorist and a martial-arts obsessive—through the structure of Euripidean drama. Yes, that Euripides—the 5th century B.C.E. Greek playwright of Medea and Electra. Yu establishes her themes (the illusion of human certainty, mostly) with marionettes, and somehow it works, like an episode of This Hellenic Life. On the lowbrow end of the spectrum, Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone worshipfully follows the smut peddler turned free-speech advocate to his speaking engagements. Joan Brooker-Marks' movie is at its best when it tracks the nonsense spouted by Flynt's censors. ("When you attack Santa Claus," moans a prosecutor, "that isn't good dirty fun. That's attacking, through sex, everything decent in this country.") The trouble is that Flynt has said many things nearly as stupid, and the film allows itself to serve as his obedient mouthpiece. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre. Protagonist screens Wednesday-Thursday, Oct. 10-11. Larry Flynt screens Saturday-Thursday, Oct. 13-18. See Movietimes, page 71, for a detailed schedule.

In Between Days

Director So Yong Kim's first movie has a terrific sense of place. If only it had any other kind of sense. Kim follows a Korean girl named Aimie (Jiseon Kim) as she plods through the slushy streets of Toronto's immigrant neighborhoods with a boy she likes but can't express her feelings to. Oh, Aimie: What's she gonna do? Not much, it turns out: She and her almost-boyfriend (Taegu Andy Kang) steal radios from cars, hang out in soda shops and nearly experiment with sex. I recognize these characters are dazed by alienation, but the problem feels deeper: These two kids are Natural Born Mopers. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

In the Shadow of the Moon

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

In the Valley of Elah

Of all the commanding performances Tommy Lee Jones has delivered in a fine career, this may be his best—searching for his AWOL soldier son, he travels so completely into grief he never needs to provide an actorly demonstration. The movie needs him, though. In the Valley of Elah wants to be Deer Hunter for a new quagmire, but instead it plays as a very special episode of Law & Order (complete with Charlize Theron as Jill Hennessy, 1993-96). It's certainly ripped from the headlines: The murderer is revealed to be...The War. As the first drama to explicitly address Iraq, Elah feels designed to appeal to theoretical heartland audiences who have turned against the Bush cadre and want to see their worst fears confirmed. R. AARON MESH. Broadway, Cedar Hills, City Center.

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. Fox Tower.

The Jane Austen Book Club

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

The Kingdom

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

The Lives of Others

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

Lust, Caution

To answer the most pressing question about Ang Lee's Lust, Caution: Yes, there is certainly enough graphic sex in it to earn an NC-17 rating, but it's not the sort of sex that happy people will enjoy watching. The characters played by Tang Wei and Tony Leung have violent sex. Then they have acrobatic sex. This is followed by mournful sex. All of it is very solemn sex. The orgasms look like death throes, and whatever lust is on hand resembles a miserable imperative more than anything like eagerness. But Lee's movie has started going wrong well before Leung sticks his crouching tiger into Wei's hidden dragon. The 158-minute World War II espionage story has a promising opening hour, then fades into a tearjerker both sonorous and dull. Nobody is going to cry over Lust, Caution—except maybe people who get all misty when they read the Kama Sutra. NC-17. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.

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 the 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 longtime 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. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Fox Tower, Lake Twin, Lloyd Center, Moreland, Oak Grove, Sandy, Tigard, Wilsonville.

Mr. Woodcock

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

New World Disorder 8: Smack Down!

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Bicycles, smacking down. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Saturday, Oct. 13.

Once

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

Paprika

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

Reel Rock Film Tour

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Watching Billy Crudup look-alike Chris Sharma get his rocks off in King Lines is like sitting through porn with a plot. The whole time you're thinking, "Man, this would be more fun if I had an active part." And like many a story-driven skin flick, this film can't decide what it is—a full-fledged documentary on Sharma's ascent to world-class climber or a softcore travelogue on difficult rock-climbing destinations—so it does both halfass. What is fully realized is the cinematography, which captures the sheer magnitude of assorted rock formations in Caracas, Venezuela. But even with these visual clips of rock candy, as any horn-ball can attest, it's a poor substitute for the real thing. BRYAN VAN NORDEN. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Thursday, Oct. 11.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Milla Jovovich continues to survive the apocalypse without the aid of critics. R. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cornelius, Division, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising

Given The Seeker's immediate barrage of product placement—a montage of Motorola and Samsung—it's no surprise the filmmakers have little regard for the integrity of their material. The movie is based on Susan Cooper's 1974 fantasy classic, but you'd hardly know it. Characters have been deleted and transparent plot twists inserted, and all the magic and mysticism of Cooper's novel has evaporated. Even Will, the Seeker himself, has been mucked with. Replacing the book's innocent 11-year-old English Will is an angst-ridden 13-year-old American expat, who favors clothing with large and obvious brand names. If you've never read the The Dark Is Rising, The Seeker is just a very bad movie. If you have read the book, the movie a tragic gutting of wonderful story that may induce terrible fits of rage—and the urge to buy a new cell phone. PG. ETHAN SMITH. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Oak Grove, Sandy, Tigard, Wilsonville.

Shoot Shoot Shoot

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] Cinema Project presents the stateside premiere of '60s counterculture shorts from the London Film-Makers' Co-operative. Groovy! Look for review on wweek.com. New American Art Union. 7:30 pm Tuesday-Wednesday, Oct. 16-17.

Superbad

Seth Rogen has co-written an entire movie about two high-school seniors trying to buy alcohol in the firm hope that underage drinking will lead directly to underage sex. It ranks among the funniest movies ever made. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera play the unpopular guys who seek booze and babes at least in part to distract themselves from the fear of losing their friendship after graduation. R. AARON MESH. Cinemagic, Division, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub.

This Is England

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

Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?

We don't know, Tyler. For the tax benefits? Look for Paige Richmond's review at wweek.com. PG-13. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Division, Sandy.

The Unknown Soldier

Fundamentally, this German documentary is about a controversial touring exhibition of war crimes perpetrated by the Wehrmacht during World War II. The historians behind the exhibit question the "common sense" lingering in the German collective subconscious that "Grandpa is not a Nazi" and "orders are orders." Filmmaker Michael Verhoeven challenges his audience to consider both the struggle for German acceptance of their history and their need to break free from it. JIM SANDBERG. Living Room Theaters.

We Own the Night

Two questions dominate James Gray's cops-and-Russian-mobsters flick. First, will Joaquin Phoenix choose his unforgiving daddy (Robert Duvall) or his unbelievably boring girlfriend (Eva Mendes)? Second, will anyone care? Professional standards prohibit me from addressing the first question, but rest assured that the second answer is no. Gray directs one gripping car chase—a shotgun ambush in torrential rain—and Phoenix charts new territory in petulance and resolve, but the movie lacks a central conflict. All the big-name actors (Phoenix, Duvall and an often-comatose Mark Wahlberg) are fighting on the same side, which simply makes We Own the Night a matter of killing time, and Russians. Mendes, unfortunately, survives to pout another day. Leading to a third question: Is there another working actress with this much ability to drain the life out of a scene? R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DIRECTOR APPEARANCE] This excruciating pseudo-documentary about mankind's imminent demise gives itself away from the first frame: a warning reading, "This documentary is long and dense. Don't try to understand and integrate it all the first time through. Just let it work over you. And let yourself feel it." Feel what? Rage and despair, apparently. Director and narrator Timothy S. Bennett, doing his best to sound like David Sedaris on a really bad day, kicks off his panic fest, entirely cobbled together from stock footage, with a 15-minute angst jam (think "Howl," if Ginsberg were a suicidal conservationist) before interviewing his friends, neighbors and son about their shared belief that we are, like, so fucked. The problem, apparently, is not so much pollution and overpopulation as the agricultural-capitalist system, man. What a Way to Go's tone is so infuriatingly hopeless that the viewer instinctively writes off the opinions of the few experts who find their way in. There's little in the way of evidence in the film, and no conclusion about what must be done to change things—just another string of bad metaphors, quotes from The Matrix, and a call for a "vision quest for the collective unconscious." Mmm, no thanks. BEN WATERHOUSE. First Unitarian Church, 1011 SW 12th Ave., 228-6389. 7 pm Wednesday, Oct. 10. Director Timothy S. Bennett will answer questions following the screening.