Films

In 2001, filmmaker Bradley Beesley brought the strange subculture of bare-handed catfishing to the screen in Okie Noodling. Now he returns to his home state of Oklahoma to see how the sport has evolved over the last decade. Revisiting the colorful, original cast and meeting some new and eccentric fishermen en route to the largest noodling tournament in the nation, this film explores the legalization issues and commercialization of this once backwoods practice.

We return to the golden age of surrealism, Paris in the '20s, with out-there films by leading lights such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Dimitri Kirsanoff and Fernand Leger. Best of all, the shorts will be accompanied by a new free jazz group called The Free Collective.

The Fall is a vividly colored fantasia that draws on some of the world's most beautiful backgrounds for color. Tarsem, best known for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion.", wound up financing it himself, piggybacking his shoots on his commercial-directing work around the world. But for such a homemade project, it's a staggeringly polished and beautiful one. Pushing Daisies' Lee Pace stars as a film stuntman with a broken back. Confined to a hospital, he pretends to befriend a Romanian child who's also recuperating. Making up an elaborate fairy tale for her, incorporating personnel from the hospital and situations from his own lovelorn life, he earns her trust. As the plot develops, the story he tells her winds into their real-life situation, and Tarsem brings Pace's fable to vivid life onscreen. "The ideas are so ambitious, and the imagery is so flamboyant that it's easy to fall into Tarsem's over-the-top vision. It's the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's Brazil" (Tasha Robinson, The Onion A.V. Club).

The emotionally truthful, painfully funny and vibrantly alive Go-Getter is a near-perfect road movie. An Oregon teenager, played by Lou Taylor Pucci, hits the highway in a stolen car to track down his half-brother, Arlen, who doesn't know their mother has died. In concise episodes that brim over with the pleasures of the unexpected, Hynes deepens Mercer's encounters with characters played by the likes of Jena Malone, Nick Offerman, and Judy Greer. Pucci's chief inspiration is a cellphone left in the car by the owner, who keeps nagging and nurturing Mercer throughout the trip. The throaty voice belongs to Zooey Deschanel, whose larynx steals the show before the rest of her even shows up. "This one is alive with discoveries — of locations, characters, the actors who embody them, and even the medium" (David Edelstein, New York Magazine).

There's no froth like French froth. A relentless gold digger (Audrey Tautou of Amelie) mistakes a hapless hotel barman (Gad Elmaleh of The Valet) for a swell, and by the time she realizes her error, he's hooked. Bankrupted by her demands, he eventually becomes a gold digger himself, mooching off a wealthy middle-aged woman, and the young lovers' exploitative relationship warms into conspiratorial intimacy as they compare notes. Like Billy Wilder's The Apartment, this cynical 2006 French farce by Pierre Salvadori (Apres Vous) traces a romance that's both fostered and constrained by the lovers' moral compromises. The outcome is never much in doubt, but Salvadori artfully choreographs the endless table turning, and Elmaleh capitalizes on his striking resemblance to Buster Keaton with a similarly comic composure. "Priceless is a supremely satisfying confection — a French romantic comedy of the sort that ends with you standing outside the theatre with a dopey grin on your face" (Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle).

This lavish, beautifully photographed film is set in colonial India of 1937. An arrogant spice baron in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala has a grand scheme to build a road into the jungle, but it must be completed before the monsoon season. He is also carrying on a passionate affair with his beautiful and naive housekeeper Sajani (Nandita Das), who commutes from the village to work at his nearby ranch. One afternoon they are accidentally spied making love at a waterfall. The real story belongs to Moores' assistant, the British-educated local, T.K. who gets tangled in the affair and coverup, and whose ideals of Western culture are exploded. "Unforgettable. A hothouse of sensuality, empire, class and guilt" (Mira Nair).

Jack Hill was a classmate of Francis Ford Coppola — they worked together on student productions — and later both apprenticed with Roger Corman. Unlike Coppola, Hill continued making drive-in type movies, now worshiped by Mr. Quentin Tarantino. They include this week's selections: the blaxploitation film Foxy Brown (1974) featuring the amazing Pam Grier and Switchblade Sisters (1975) featuring girl fights, sex-starved reform school guards, and even African-American-Maoist-revolutionary-butt-kicking chicks.

See description for Switchblade Sisters.

This fascinating drawing-room war of the sexes takes place in the early 1820s, as a courtship unfolds that is really a duel. Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a French general who's like an angry, crestfallen lion, is wooing the Duchess of Langeais (Jeanne Balibar), a world-class flirt married to a man we never see. The two spiritual adulterers declare their devotion, yet the duchess won't take it any further than that. "Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art — beautiful, true, profound" (Manohla Dargis, N.Y. Times).

One night only! A rad collection of bike-themed shorts from around the world, pulled together by folks that live in Bike City, USA, Portland, Oregon.

Danny McBride stars as Fred Simmons, an oafish tae kwon do teacher, a brilliantly detailed grotesque capable of withstanding comparison to his most obvious inspiration, Ricky Gervais' Office boss David Brent. "This sleeper hit in the making is sweet and sour in all the right proportions, the best thing of its kind since Napoleon Dynamite" (Nathan Lee, N.Y. Times).

Taking Michael Moore's flair for entertaining and mixing in some scrupulous reporting, this is Christopher Bell's in-depth, yet intensely personal look at steroid use among athletes, yielding large insights into America's body-image obsession. Bell and his two steroid-pumping siblings all loved the WWF, worshipped Rambo, and transformed their genetically rotund physiques into bloated beefcake with steroids. Having avoided the havoc that the drugs wreaked on his brothers, Christopher sets out to interrogate the politics of "cheating" in sports, the disputed dangers of juicing, and the grotesquerie of the supplements and pharmaceutical industry, which has sprung up to exploit not just male inadequacy, but the grasping, relentless dissatisfaction of an entire nation. "Raucously funny and surprisingly insightful" (Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times).

This dashing, freewheeling debut feature is one of those rare films about writers where form matches content, with fresh insights about the literary world coming via a complex, liberating series of flashbacks, ellipses, and other bold flourishes. Trier connects deeply to the fluttering thought processes of two first-time novelists whose lives endure dramatic, crisscrossing twists of fate, spinning a what-if scenario about the fate of the two chums, before spooling back to tell what really happened. "Reprise is kissed with the breath of French New Wave sensibility, sweet with verve and a love of forward movement. The mood of joy in the midst of youthful pain is enhanced by the freshness of the first-time lead actors" (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly).

Harmony Korine's (Gummo) latest follows a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who is invited by a beautiful Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) to a commune in the Scottish Highlands full of other impersonators, including the Queen of England, Madonna, Sammy Davis Jr., and James Dean. In a parallel storyline, the incomparable Werner Herzog plays a Latin American priest who learns his missionary of nuns can literally fly. "Mister Lonely demonstrates that Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm. This is undoubtedly a small movie, but it's also more than that: it's a small, imperfect world" (A.O. Scott, N.Y. Times).

Mongol is a sweeping and quasi-mythical epic that recalls Lawrence of Arabia. Centered on the rise of Genghis Khan, the film 's gorgeous cinematography highlights a sprawling adventure saga with romance, family drama and riveting action sequences. Its re-creation of the bleak and expansive beauty of Mongolia in the 12th and 13th centuries is arresting. "Mongol is quality escapism: an exotic saga that compels, moves and envelops us with its grand and captivating story" (Claudia Puig, USA Today).

There are massive gaps in your film education, and it's time you filled them in. Ragtag 101 is a free class with a fun instructor, and you don't have to enroll. Just show up. Mostly we show a great film, usually on beautiful 16mm film, and then we discuss. Tonight we view Morgan! (dir. Karel Reisz, 1966, 97 min.), a wild and provocative comedy from the Swinging Sixties. David Warner stars as a gleefully deranged man whose eccentric behavior begins to take a turn for the psychotic. Morgan is also resolutely devoted, steadfastly professing his love to his ex, (Vanessa Redgrave) who is alternately enamored and infuriated by his elaborate pranks. Many film scholars place Morgan! under the same "angry young man" school of British filmmaking but Warner is mostly just charming and thoroughly nutty. Redgrave's role in Morgan! was a standout, earning her a Best Actress Oscar nomination for only her second film. The soundtrack features a collection of classic chilled-out loungecore tunes from a space-age bachelor pad. Don't be late! Because there will be fines!

This masterful and constantly surprising thriller involves a celebrated crime novelist (Fanny Ardant), her missing ghostwriter, and a serial killer, slyly exploiting and subverting audience expectations. "Roman de Gare is the rare trick film in which all the tricks reveal something amusing, involving or poignant about its characters" (Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun).

Can singing change history? This doc about Estonia's struggle to end Soviet occupation, shows that it already has. Under the Soviets, especially, Estonian culture was brutishly suppressed, but it welled up every five years in July, when Estonians gathered for a song festival in Tallinn, which often drew upward of 25,000 people. The emotion swells further when Estonians defy their occupiers by singing nationalist songs. This bold act reclaimed Estonian identity and set the stage for a series of increasingly daring rebellions. "Imagine the scene in Casablanca in which the French patrons sing La Marseillaise in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you've only begun to imagine the force of The Singing Revolution" (Matt Zoller Seitz, N.Y. Times).