Screen Listings

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. R. AARON MESH. 99 West Drive-in, City Center, Vancouver Plaza.

30 Days of Night

A gang of hungry vampires turns a small Alaskan town into an all-you-can-eat buffet just as the sun goes down for a month's rest. Basing 30 Days on his graphic novel of the same name, screenwriter Steve Niles is so enamored with this twist on vampire mythology that he has one of the vamps mention they should've done this a long time ago. Regardless of such self-congratulatory meta-dialogue, the movie is a fresh take on an old legend. Much as Danny Boyle did for zombies in 28 Days Later, Niles and director David Slade (Hard Candy) have re-envisioned vampires--as lightning-fast Eastern European nihilists. Some of the shots seem to be pulled directly from the graphic novel, and much of the dialogue is better suited to the word bubbles it emanated from, but for the most part, 30 Days of Night is a lot of fun, and more worthy of your nine bucks this Halloween than the latest installment of Saw. R. RYAN HUME. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Across the Universe

A dreamboat named Jude meets a sweetheart named Lucy, and they accompany her brother Max on a voyage through the Beatles songbook. This initially sounds like a spectacularly irritating idea (let's play Moulin Rouge! with the Fab Four!), but in practice it's often astonishing, and might have worked even better if director Julie Taymor had followed her literal notion to its logical end and simply made a Beatles opera. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place.

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. 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. 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. It could have been a masterpiece. Instead, it'll suffer the same fate as Robert Ford himself: briefly discussed, then utterly forgotten. R. AP KRYZA. City Center, Movies on TV.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

[TWO WEEKS ONLY] Blade Runner has been such a milestone of neo-noir sci-fi for 25 years that it's easy to forget just how big of an impact the film had on the genre. The rain-soaked streets, the apocalyptic future, the robots rebelling against their masters; hell, Blade Runner is now used as a reference point for a certain mindset, a tone that wouldn't exist without Ridley Scott's haunting, ground-breaking film. And seeing it all on the big screen, digitally remastered and expanded and buffed up and generally just looking fantastic, brings home again just how influential this film has been. Blade Runner: The Final Cut has been fleshed out with a few extra scenes of violence previously available only on a Criterion Collection laser disc that's long out of print; the voice-over narration from the original that was dumped for the 10th anniversary "director's cut" is still blessedly gone; and the polished visuals and sound are phenomenal, making the film look as vibrant as it must have in 1982. But through it all, I was struck not merely by how beautiful the film looks, but how the little tweaks are ultimately just flourishes on what is, underneath it all, one of the best sci-fi films of all time. It's a shame it took Scott 25 years to lock the thing down, but I'm glad it's finally here. R. DANIEL CARLSON. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, Oct. 26-Nov. 8.

The Bothersome Man

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), a man 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. PG-13. AP KRYZA. 99 Indoor Twin, 99 West Drive-in, Cedar Hills, Cinemagic, Movies on TV, Vancouver Plaza,

Broken English

As imagined by director Zoe Cassavetes (yes, the daughter of John), Parker Posey's Nora self-medicates the way real people do: She feels intoxicated because it's better than feeling something worse. 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.

BŸbiwulf

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] A women's studies professor by day, Hendrick Shooting Horse transforms in the moonlight into a werewolf who likes to fondle breasts. That's about as much plot as you're going to get from this juvenile, sophomoric and often extremely funny low-budget movie from the producers of the local cable-access show The vonHummer Hour. Filmed in Portland's east 'hoods, BŸbiwulf pokes broad (ahem) fun at academic sensitivities. "Perhaps, in time, this campus will come to see your penis as your greatest victimization," goes a standard line, "and the student body will rush forward to embrace your penis!" I can't exactly recommend any of this silliness, but I can't say I'd mind watching more of it. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Tuesday, Oct. 30.

Colma: The Musical

Two things to love about this laughably low-budget suburban San Fran musical: puppylicious actor Jake Moreno as the protagonist Billy, and perhaps the first musical number on film in which a character sings the lyric, "You can shove it up your cunt." The rest of director Richard Wong's feature-film debut goes skidding off the rails, if giddily so. H.P. Mendoza's screenplay and lyrics are high-fructose bubble-gum everyteen. Mendoza himself stars as Rodel, an angry and seemingly asexual Asian gay teen so damningly drawn and nastily portrayed that he earns no sympathy, even after a good gay-bashing from Dad. A deeply misguided film masquerading as comedy lite that sets queer cinema back at least a decade. STEPHEN MARC BEAUDOIN. Hollywood Theatre.

The Comebacks

David Koechner in a parody of sports movies that might be charitably described as "scattershot." These are dark days for David Koechner. Not screened for critics. PG-13. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Crossing the Line

In 1962, U.S. Army private James Dresnok crossed the landmine-ridden Korean Demilitarized Zone. Now, 43 years later, Dresnok is the last surviving American defector to North Korea. In Daniel Gordon's documentary, Dresnok recounts his transformation from cultural outsider to propaganda film star to integrated North Korean family man. Hulking and jowly in his communist-cut suits, smirking around a mouthful of gold teeth, Dresnok looks like a Bond villain. And given his treasonous defection to the communists, it'd be easy casting. But the truth is more complex. When he defected, Dresnok didn't hope to sell military secrets; he didn't know any. And it wasn't communist ideology that lured him. Dresnok simply decided a new life in North Korea couldn't be any worse than his old one in the States. Rootless, hopeless and angry, Dresnok just walked north. His reasons are, if not understandable, at least believable. But Dresnok's glowing praise of North Korea's government evokes skepticism. In 2004, Sgt. Charles Jenkins, who defected to North Korea in 1965, returned to America, condemning North Korea and accusing Dresnok of sadistically binding and beating him repeatedly. Jenkins' conflicting story underlines a theme in Crossing the Line: It's hard to know what to believe. ETHAN SMITH. Living Room Theaters.

Dan In Real Life

Two things make me automatically hate a romantic comedy. One is shitbag Dane Cook. The other is the presence of Pete Townshend's "Let My Love Open the Door." So why is it that, midway through Dan in Real Life, when Dane Cook sings the wretched song, it didn't make me hate the movie? Two words: Steve Carell. Carell's been on thin ice since the awful Evan Almighty, but with the surprisingly sweet Dan, he's back on track. As a milquetoast columnist and widower with three young girls, Carell's at his subdued, tortured best. Carell packs his girls off for a family vacation, reuniting in a cabin with the rest of his quirky family. It's on that vacation that Dan falls for his brother's girlfriend (the ever-stunning Juliette Binoche, inexplicably dating Cook), and spends the majority of the film with a case of blue balls while his family prods him to find romance. Director Peter Hedges (Pieces of April) grounds the film in reality, and instead of offering a lackluster dramedy, he keeps it real and heartfelt, focusing wisely on the family element and offering a simplistic, funny and touching film that skimps neither on the laughs nor the heart. PG-13. AP KRYZA. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

The Darjeeling Limited

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

The Devil Came on Horseback

When former Marine Captain Brian Steidle arrived in Sudan to monitor an ostensible cease-fire in 2004 —his job with the African Union, it turned out, was to photograph genocide —he expected to see ugly things. ("Welcome to hell," came the traditional greeting as Steidle stepped off a helicopter in Darfur.) His photos captured the atrocities firsthand, as Janjaweed —"devil on horseback" —gunmen slaughtered desert villages and refugee camps. What Steidle never expected was that the world would see his images in The New York Times and the United Nations, and respond with apathy. The Devil Came on Horseback rightly focuses on Chinese eagerness to supply the Sudanese government with the tools of death in exchange for (yep) oil, but directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg make their most direct appeal to Americans. "I honestly thought that if the people of America could see what I've seen, there'd be troops here in one week," Steidle says at the film's close. "They've seen it now. And we've still done nothing." It's a story no less shameful for being so familiar. AARON MESH. Cinema 21, Wednesday-Thursday, Oct. 24-25. Hollywood Theatre starting Friday, Oct. 26.

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. R. AARON MESH. Broadway, Lake Twin, Lloyd Center, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub.

Eco-Sicko

[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] Halloween approaches, and the NW Film Center and film archivist Jacques Boyreau have pulled out the big gun: Carrie, Brian De Palma's bucket-of-bloodfest with the vengeful scrawny girl. But what does Sissy Spacek have to do with ecology? Boyreau explains: "Carrie is the environment, a Raggedy-Ann uroboros, personally devouring us (and all our problems) in a telekinetic scourge." And we thought she was just a mixed-up kid hanging with a bad crowd. The Eco-Sicko series wraps up with the invasion-of-the-ants spectacle Phase IV, and The Road Warrior, which features the most dangerous threat ever to menace our fragile planet: Mel Gibson! AARON MESH. Whitsell Auditorium. Carries screens 7 pm Wednesday, Oct. 24. Phase IV screens 7 pm Saturday, Oct. 27. The Road Warrior screens 7 pm Sunday, Oct. 28.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Shekhar Kapur's sequel to 1998's Oscar-garnished Elizabeth is an overripe bodice-ripper, complete with gauzy images, a militaristic score and a ceaselessly swirling camera. It starts out bad, and swiftly descends into the stupefyingly awful. Cate Blanchett, having achieved a restrained hauteur the first time around, loses it all here —one minute she's screaming hysterically, the next she's rallying the British troops in a full suit of armor, red wig streaming down her cheeks, as if Kapur thought he was directing a Joan of Arc movie. As the English triumph and God saves the queen, a beatific white light beams upon Blanchett's features —not even Mel Gibson would sink to this level of crass hagiography. We are not pleased. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, Wilsonville.

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. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

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. 99 West Drive-in, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza, Wilsonville.

Global Concern: Human Rights on Film

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] It is rare to meet a political figure —or a person, for that matter —so indisputably good as Malalai Joya, who in 2003 stood in the Afghanistan parliament to denounce the continued influence of warlords, then two years later decided to run for office herself. In Enemies of Happiness, a brief, powerful documentary included the NW Film Center lineup, director Eva Mulvad follows Joya on the campaign trail —which is, in this case, literally a trail. While dodging assassination attempts, Joya fights to prevent the marriage of a child bride to an opium dealer, and spends time with an unlikely supporter: A 100-year-old woman who fought with the Mujahideen against the Soviets. "I have come here filled with hope," she says on election day. "My heart is heavy with grief." Joya has the perfect reply: "Don't cry, Mother. You have done what you could, and now we will go home." The world is a slightly better place because Malalai Joya is doing what she can. AARON MESH. Whitsell Auditorium. 8:15 pm Thursday, Oct. 25. Enemies of Freedom screens with Sari's Mother.

Gone Baby Gone

Ben Affleck's first whack at directing suffers from any number of problems, not the least of which is that Ben has tried to establish his brother Casey as a viable tough guy. Investigating the kidnapping of a little Southside girl, Casey Affleck makes his way into several hostile barrooms, where the regulars take one glance at him and appear to consider whether they should bend him in half and use him as a toothpick. The actor's plausibility isn't helped by having to star alongside Morgan Freeman as a police chief of the highest rectitude. This is the sort of role Freeman is regularly described as being able to perform in his sleep; the trouble is that he might actually be taking this as advice. But the movie, based on a Dennis Lehane novel —yes, the guy who wrote Mystic River —shares and even exceeds the earlier film's sense of place. Credit the Afflecks' Boston origins —but give at least as much acknowledgement to Amy Ryan (The Wire), who delivers a knockout performance as the world's least sympathetic mother. She abandons her kid for hours to snort coke, and when the child turns up missing she's less concerned for her child's safety than her own. She only looks worried at press conferences —while Ryan never discards the integrity of her portrayal to seek an audience's pity. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Sherwood.

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. Vancouver Plaza.

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.R. AARON MESH. Cinema 99, Division, Forest, Sandy, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub, Wilsonville.

Heima

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] When the Icelandic band Sigur R—s makes a movie, it would be comforting to know it includes at least one song performed "inside a derelict herring oil tank in the far West Fjords." And it does! Whew. Hollywood Theatre. 10 pm Saturday, Oct. 27.

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. 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. PG. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.

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. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinetopia, City Center, Fox Tower.

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. 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. Movies on TV, Sherwood, Wilsonville.

The Lives of Others

Gerd Wiesler (the late Ulrich MŸhe) 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. 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. NC-17. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.

Massacre at Central High

[ONE WEEK ONLY] We couldn't make it to a screening of this 1976 school-shooting allegory, which features a gory revenge by the nerds (and the alternate, even cooler title Blackboard Massacre). But one of our faithful correspondents recalled seeing it: "And ya know what? It's just a piece of crap, wherein Ônerds' become Ôcool,' then get killed for their unmitigated arrogance." Which doesn't sound so bad to us. R. Clinton Street Theater. Friday-Thursday, Oct. 26-Nov. 1.

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. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lake Twin, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Sandy, Sherwood, 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. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cinema 99.

My Kid Could Paint That

Documentary filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev makes several astute choices in tracing the highs and scandal-plagued lows of Mark and Laura Olmstead, a working-class couple in Binghamton, N.Y., and their adorable moppet daughter Marla, who may or may not be the sole artist of a series of fetchingly executed abstract paintings. No one directly asks Marla the big question: Are the large rectangular canvases, dense with curlicue smears in velocities of interlocking circles, actually her work? After a child psychologist implies it's all a fake (her rationale being that well-adjusted, button-cute Marla demonstrates none of a prodigy's odd behavior), the director splits the screen into panels, replaying an ever-changing collage of older and newer Marla paintings, so that we can see the comparison and draw our own conclusions. The Olmsteads are an intriguing study in parental ambition —he's a night manager at Frito-Lay; she's a pert, blond dental assistant. My sympathies were with her until a jarring sequence wherein she breaks into sobs, then —just like that —turns off the tears and stomps away with an enigmatic statement about "documentary gold." Bar-Lev must have been as stunned as I was, because he follows this with time-lapse shots of camera and sound equipment being unplugged, packed away —as if to underscore the staginess of "real life" as it plays in the Olmsteads' living room. PG-13. N.P. THOMPSON. Fox Tower.

The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D

Though it's hard to complain about seeing Tim Burton's collaboration with Henry Selick trotted out again, it's at least a little ironic that a movie about a guy tired of Halloween traditions is now a Halloween tradition. PG. Cinetopia, Lloyd Center.

Once

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

Oswald's Ghost

Those six seconds in Dallas get another 90 minutes on film —this time in a sleek, Kennedy-assasination-for-beginners package. The even-handed documentary is a perfectly acceptable crash course in the conspiracy theories and debunking that has swirled around Lee Harvey Oswald; it offers nothing new to the well-informed, but then it suggests fairly convincingly that few Americans are informed about Nov. 22, 1963, at all. The film's opening segment is the most compelling: The use of archival network-television footage conveys how the live assassination of a presidential assassin was "not only appalling, but uncanny." That mood dissolves somewhat after the Warren Report, as director Robert Stone (no relation, but speaking of uncanny...) lets the many theorists have their say. It speaks volumes about the wild speculation still surrounding JFK that the voice of reason in Oswald's Ghost is Norman Mailer. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre. Saturday-Sunday, Oct. 27-28.

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. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.

The Perfect Show: An Evening with Karl Krogstad

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] The Seattle filmmaker arrives at the NW Film Center with a collection of avant-garde works in tow. "All these films are strange," he declares. "Like good poems, all served on ice." And what's good poetry without a mixed metaphor? Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Friday, Oct. 26.

Rendition

Gavin Hood's tortuous torture picture opens with CIA analyst Jake Gyllenhaal's partner getting killed in a suicide bombing intended to assassinate someone else. The film has a different fate: It's in the wrong place at the right time. With new revelations of secret Bush-Gonzales torture memos emerging every week, the moment has never been more ripe for a movie about the United States' use of "extraordinary rendition" —shipping terror suspects to overseas prisons. But this is not that movie. Hood (Tsotsi) has directed a mess that manages to be simultaneously pedantic and confused as it follows a wrongly arrested engineer (Omar Metwally) and the conscience-stricken boy (Gyllenhaal) who watches his waterboarding. Hood takes great pains not to offend with his message, whether he's giving dragon lady Meryl Streep a speech about how government policy saves lives, or setting the wet work in the nation of "North Africa." But he still offends anybody who cares about plausible drama. Reese Witherspoon is reduced to pitching hysterical fits in congressional offices, Streep proves her mastery of accents by affecting several in the same movie, and Gyllenhaal manages to deliver a climactic, noble Shakespearean quotation after drinking himself to sleep for weeks. With the exception of an ill-used Peter Sarsgaard, the whole thing is about as credible as a Dana Perino press conference. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Milla Jovovich continues to survive the apocalypse without the aid of critics. R. Forest, Movies on TV, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub, Vancouver Plaza.

Saw IV

Jigsaw the insane serial killer does not torture people. He sticks to U.S. law and his international obligations. Not screened for critics. R. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sandy, Sherwood, 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. PG. ETHAN SMITH. Cinema 99, Movies on TV.

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. R. AARON MESH. Cinemagic, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub.

Syndromes and a Century

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul shares his memories of growing up with physician parents. Paging Dr. Weerasethakul! Not screened for critics. Living Room Theaters.

The Ten Commandments

The fall's truly inexplicable entry: A cartoon Moses story, which we're pretty sure was done nine years ago and called The Prince of Egypt. On the plus side: Ben Kingsley contributes vocal work. On the minus side: The computer animation appears to have cost $12. PG. Sandy, Cinema 99, Division, Movies on TV.

Things We Lost in the Fire

Early in Things We Lost in the Fire, David Duchovny walks in on his wife and daughter watching TV and crying. "Lifetime again?" he asks. The same question might be asked of Things We Lost, an Oscar bid gone awry. The film centers on Audrey (Halle Berry), a mother of two mourning the death of her husband (Duchovny, dead from first frame but alive in flashbacks). For atonement, she reaches out to her late husband's childhood friend Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), a former lawyer, now a heroin junkie. She cleans him up, lets him bond with her kids, lashes out at him —pretty much everything you'd expect from a Lifetime film, but with big stars. Berry, alternating between screaming and crying, further discredits her Monster's Ball Oscar win (which, it's arguable, was a "thank you for the nudity" present). Del Toro does what he can with the material, brooding and twitching through the motions. Danish Director Susanne Bier simply fills the screen with extreme close-ups and withdrawal montages. R. AP KRYZA. Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, City Center, Division, Movies on TV.

This Is England

The affable skinhead Woody (Joe Gilgun) takes ypoung Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) 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? Not screened for critics. PG-13. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Division.

Warren Miller's Playground

[TWO NIGHTS ONLY] Once, it really was his playground: In 1949 a man named Warren Miller started barnstorming the country with an annual ski-slopes movie, each year filming a new one by day while showcasing the finished products at night. (The titles all have a ragtag, earnest quality; my favorites include 1957's Anyone for Skiing?, 1961's Many Moods of Skiing, 1964's The Sound of Skiing and —by far the most direct —1973's Skiing's Great.) But Miller has retired, Jeep has stepped in as corporate sponsor, and the new installments have all the charm of an X Games recruitment video. Playground follows skiers, snowboarders, snowmobile riders and base jumpers as they travel around the globe to catch what I can only assume is wicked air. The stunts quickly grow monotonous, bringing on the unique boredom of watching other people exercise; the few spectacular shots are filmed from a long distance, as the tiny figures plunge into snow like ants dropped into baking soda. AARON MESH. Arlene Schnitzer Memorial Auditorium. 6:30 and 9:30 pm Friday, Oct. 26. 8 pm Saturday, Oct. 27.

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. R. AARON MESH. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Division, Hilltop, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, Vancouver Plaza.