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Sabrina
(1954) Audrey Hepburn plays the daughter of a chauffeur on a Long Island estate who for years has nursed a crush on the family's younger playboy son (William Holden), but the responsible elder brother (Humphrey Bogart) eventually turns her head. (RvB)

Sabrina (1995)
Full text review.
(PG; 124 min.) Once upon a time, Sabrina (Julia Ormond), the chauffeur's beautiful daughter, pined for David (Greg Kinnear), the handsome but worthless playboy, only to be distracted by David's older brother, Linus (Harrison Ford), rich in money but poor in spirit. The remaking of Sabrina 41 years after the original presents a number of difficulties, of which trying to outdo the indelible Audrey Hepburn is but one. The new version changes Sabrina, a mere natural aristocrat in the original, into an apprentice fashion photographer with more than a little money of her own. Ormond's Sabrina is more stunned rabbit than stunning nymph, and she leads an indifferent cast, of which Ford is the best. (RvB)

The Saddest Music in the World
Full text review.

Safety Last
(1923) The Boy (Harold Lloyd) leaves Great Bend and heads to the city. He sends back letters boasting of his accomplishments at a department store, but actually, he's a yardage clerk, and his efforts to hide this humble position get him into trouble. Having built this tower of lies, he ends up obliged to climb it. Hal Roach co-wrote Safety Last, and it has its crude side—more than a couple of black and Jew jokes intrude. But the gags about the maddeningly formal life in the early department stores are well observed—one wealthy dame is said to be shocked by the sight of Lloyd's shirt sleeves. And the finale is perhaps Lloyd's best-known scene—he's enlisted as a human fly and ends up dangling from a clock. Lloyd did the scene without effects and with only one and a half hands, since he had been maimed in a prop explosion years before. Silent, with organ accompaniment. (RvB)

Safety Last/Why Worry
(Both 1923) The Boy (Harold Lloyd) leaves Great Bend and heads to the city. He sends back letters boasting of his accomplishments at a department store. Actually, he's a yardage clerk, and his efforts to hide this humble position get him into trouble. Having built this tower of lies, he ends up obliged to climb it. Hal Roach co-wrote Safety Last, and it has its crude side—more than a couple of black and Jew jokes intrude. But the gags about the maddeningly formal life in department stores are well observed: one wealthy dame is said to be shocked by the sight of Lloyd's shirt sleeves. And the finale is Lloyd's best-known scene. He's enlisted as a human fly and ends up dangling from a clock. The clock has two hands, but Lloyd only had 1 1/2, since he had been maimed in a prop explosion years before. BILLED WITH Why Worry. Lloyd goes to South America for his health and winds up recruited by 1923's answer to the Shining Path. Silent, with organ accompaniment by Dennis James at the Stanford's Wurlitzer. (RvB)

The Safety of Objects
(R; 120 min.) Four suburban families emerge from "the safety of objects" to make human connections. Joshua Jackson plays a coma-bound patient cared for by his mother (Glenn Close). Dermot Mulroney is a workaholic lawyer who neglects his wife (Moira Kelly). Patricia Clarkson is a divorced woman with two kids. Directed by Rose Troche.

Sahara
(PG-13; 127 min.) Whatever the characters go through in this action-comedy run through Indiana Jones territory, it'll be nothing like what it took to actually get this movie made. It was originally supposed to begin shooting in 2001 with Hugh Jackman as the star. Then 9/11 postponed it, Jackman's X2 postponed it, Jackman dropped it, Tom Cruise was said to be starring instead and then didn't, then ditto George Clooney, and they ended up with Matthew McConaughey. (Ooh, that hurts!) Then in 2003, novelist Clive Cussler sued over this film, saying the filmmakers damaged his reputation by making a piece of junk out of his book. He tried to stop the movie's release, but apparently failed. Can you imagine if he'd won? Hollywood would have been bankrupt in about five minutes from all the lit lawsuits. By the way, Cussler's action-hero Dirk Pitt has appeared in a previous film, 1980's Raise the Titanic. (Capsule preview by SP)

Sloppily directed by newcomer Breck Eisner, who employs the shaking-camera and fast-cutting method of action filmmaking, this mind-numbing, incoherent adventure film explains why they don't make more movies from Clive Cussler novels. Relying on lazy coincidences rather than skill or logic, fortune hunters Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn scour the African deserts for a lost Civil War-era battleship loaded with treasure. Penelope Cruz plays a World Health Organization doctor whose quest to stamp out a plague takes her on the same path, providing an obligatory and chemistry-free love interest for McConaughey. Even the cosmically gifted William H. Macy, slumming in a supporting role, can't keep from looking bored. The brain-dead National Treasure tried harder than this. (JMA)

The Saint
Full text review.
(PG-13; 117 min.) Simon Templar (Val Kilmer), a.k.a. the Saint, is James Bond with better manners. A Russian billionaire named Ivan Tretiak (Rade Serbedzija) hires the freelancing Saint to steal a valuable formula from an American scientist, Dr. Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue). Naturally, Templar falls in love instead. Shue's Dr. Russell is more of a genuine ditz than an absent-minded scientist. She may possess the secret to an energy source that will save the world, but does she have to keep the formula stashed in her bra? This movie badly needed a rewrite, yet Phillip Noyce (Clear and Present Danger) directs The Saint with obvious love and a sense of interest. The opening is remarkable: a 20-minute sequence that links the style of the boy's-school entertainments that foaled Leslie Charteris' hero in 1928 with the more millennial tales of the superspies of the '60s. The Saint may not have a prayer at the box office, but it's worth acknowledging the charm of a movie, that, like its hero, is more interested in beguiling than killing. (RvB)

Saint Ralph
(PG-13; 98 min.) Many people wonder if this feel-good story of faith, courage, and more to the point, a 14-year-old attempting to win the Boston marathon in the 1950s, is a true story. Some have claimed there's no way it could be, as they can't imagine some Catholic school boy in Canada seriously training for the Boston marathon (the hook is that Ralph is told "only a miracle" can save his mother's life, and that his winning the race would be a miracle, and he puts the two together in a way that perhaps only kids can). Well, though the period feel is convincing, it's not actually based on a true story—it all came from the mind of writer/director Michael McGowan. But the twist is that in fact 14-year-olds have since finished the Boston Marathon with much better times than the adult winner of the 1954 race. There are a lot of reasons for that, sure, but next time someone tells you it's not possible for a kid that age to even compete, hit 'em with that little factoid. (SP)

The Salon
(PG-13) Barbershop with a sex change, and yet it's not to be confused—and how can it not be?—with Beauty Shop, the legitimately franchised girl version of Barbershop. Director Mark Brown, who wrote Barbershop, adapted this from Shelley Garrett's play Beauty Shop. It follows a day in the life of a Baltimore hairdo parlor where various customers toddle in and hang out. Proprietor Jenny (Vivica A. Fox) has already gotten her check from the utility company to compensate her for the bulldozing of the shop's building. She hasn't given up fighting city hall for her business and the jobs of her eight employees. These include the usual the sassy fat gal (Kym Whitley) and the token homosexual (De'Angelo Wilson), who even squeals and prances when he's being queer-bashed. Whitley and Wilson have some style that makes the dialogue stick, even if you've heard every joke and complaint before. Wilson even has to deliver the one about "I am more man than you'll ever be, and more woman than you'll ever have" for instance, Nevertheless, they can dozen, but the rest of the cast only make it up to three or so. Thanks awfully for the Asian stereotyping: "Mei Kim Amelican now!" Garrett Morris, of sacred memory, appears for about 30 minutes and makes every nothing little line resonate. By contrast, Terrence Howard has less than five minutes as a surly boyfriend. The Salon has dwelt in the vaults two years, as is demonstrated by up-to-date dialogue about the Bennifer affair and Halle winning the Oscar for Monster's Ball. "That's Hollywood," they sigh. Yes, and so's this thing. (RvB)

Sally of the Sawdust
(1925) D.W. Griffith directs W.C. Fields in the original version of the tale later remade as Poppy. "His lip adorned by his traditional and most unappealing clip-on mustache" (as film historian William Everson put it), Fields plays a carny named McGargle who adopts a judge's estranged granddaughter (Carol Dempster). The cast includes Glenn Anders (the sinister Grisby in Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai) and the noted stage actor Alfred Lunt. Silent, with organ accompaniment. (RvB)

Sandstorm
Full text review.

San Francisco Film Festival
April 25: Burning Dreams (2003; 75 min.; shows at 2pm), a profile of the Shanghai Dreams 52 Dance School, where 70-year-old Liang Yi instructs a new generation in the old dance steps. 4pm: El Alamein: The Line of Fire (2002; 117 min.; shows at 4pm). Director Enzo Monteleone's version of the North African tank battle, from the point of view of the Italian troops used as cannon fodder by the Nazis. After You (2003; 110 min.; shows at 6:30pm). Daniel Auteuil stars as a perhaps too-attentive waiter who saves the life of a suicidal stranger (Jose Garcia); the unfortunate doesn't know if he can live in a world without his girlfriend (Sandrine Kiberlain). Chouchou (2003, 104 min.; shows at 9pm). An African transvestite has madcap adventures in Paris. April 26: Manhole (2002; 108 min.; shows at 6:45pm). Out of jail after seven years, a convict looks for his high school sweetheart, but both she and the China he knew have changed drastically. Director Chen Daming makes his debut. Raghu Romeo (2003; shows at 9pm). Rajat Kapur's uneven but thoroughly watchable slapstick comedy/musical/thriller. A goodhearted Bombay boob with a bowl haircut (Vijay Raaz) works as the doorman at a shady gangster's nightclub. Sweety (Sadiya Siddiqui), one of the dancers there, loves Raghu wholeheartedly, but the backward doorman is fixated on a soap opera, and the star of the show, Neetaji, a long-suffering, tearful housewife. Hired as a driver by a butterball thug called Mario, Raghu unwittingly helps to carry out the hit on Reshma (Maria Goretti), the actress who plays Neetaji. Thwarting Mario, Raghu goes to the rescue, but the actress is no tender innocent and gives her would-be savior a lot of bruises for his troubles. Musical numbers range from Hindu hip-hop to the more trad Indian musical numbers. Actor Kapur (Monsoon Wedding) raised the money for this film outside the Bollywood studio system. Despite the plot, the film is much less confectionary than is typical for the Bombay movie. Direct social commentary seeps in between the two poles of the film: sympathy to those addicted to romance, a warning to those who take those romantic tales too seriously. In Hindi and English, with French and English subtitles. April 27: The Handcuff King (2002; 90 min.; shows at 6:45pm). Finland, 1976: a boy floats through his painful life with fantasies of Harry Houdini. Then and Now (2003; 130 min.; shows at 8:45pm). A sequel to Marilou Diaz-Abaya's 1982 Moral, following the same four friends dealing with changes in the Philippines. April 28: 7pm (2003; 90 min.; shows at 7pm). Chile's Gonzalo Justiniano directed this tale of 14-year-old Kathy (Manuela Marteli), an unhappy teenager with unfortunate role models: a sexually harassed mother and a convict father. Love Me If You Dare (2003; 94 min.; shows at 9pm). First-timer Yann Samuell's magical-realist story of a boy and a girl whose game of dares gets more extreme as they grow older. (RvB)

San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival 2004
Full text review.

San Francisco International Film Festival 2003
A selection of film from the famed festival screening in Palo Alto. Apr 27: At 1pm, Hard Goodbyes: My Father (2002). Penny Panayotopoulou's story of a boy losing his father. At 3:45pm, Our Times, female director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's documentary about the Iranian elections in 2002 and the women who made them happen (despite pressure from the men in charge). At 6:15pm, Happiness for Free (2002). Mimmo Calopresti's story of an Italian architect hit with a midlife crisis who ditches his family and friends in a vain search for freedom. At 9pm, So Close (2002). The Computer Angel is loose! She attacks an evil plutocrat named Mr. Chow—no relation to the restaurateur—with her cyanide-squirting sunglasses and auto-drill stiletto heels. The seemingly impossible assassination is all in a day's vengeance for the Angel, who is called Lynn, and her wacky lesbian little sister, Su, who chafes at being second-in-command in this two-woman organization. Enter a female cop (Karen Mok). Su and the copper cruise each other half to death, while director Cory Yuen (Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk) foretells tragedy by the mood-music playing of the Carpenters' egregious hit "Close to You." Many, many rounds of ammo are fired before the balance of good and evil is righted. This film, which does everything John Woo did, only backward and in high heels, recalls the golden age of Hong Kong mayhem. Makes Charlie's Angels and Bird[brain]s of Prey look like twin piles of dog meat. Shu Qi and Zhao Wei co-star. Apr 28: At 6:45pm, Dark Side of the Heart 2 (2001). Eliseo Subiela's follow-up to his Argentinian romance about a man who seeks a woman who can fly. At 9:45pm, Chaos and Desire (2002). Alice, a seismologist (Pascale Bussieres, who has the look and mannerisms of a female Robert Redford), is ordered by her bosses to return to her birthplace, Baie Comeau, Quebec, to investigate an unnatural case of low tide. In this apparently matriarchal village, the solitary Alice finds love and a meaning for her life. Playing an all-night waitress, Genevieve Bujold brings a layer of seriousness this film wouldn't have gained otherwise (what would the Canadian film industry be without Bujold and Christopher Plummer?). This would-be Twin Peaks story is certainly esoteric, but the wholesome explanation for the phenomena is disappointing. Slow, or in Quebecois, sleaux. April 29: At 7pm, The Sea Watches (2002) Akira Kurosawa's last screenplay is the source for this period-piece romance between a geisha and a young traveler. At 9:30pm: Piedras (2002) Ramon Salazar's Altmanesque investigation of a cluster of low-budget lives in Madrid. Apr 30: At 7pm, Girlie, A 17-year-old suburban girl (Dorota Nvotova) of Czechoslovakia looks for love in all the wrong places, in this debut by Benjamin Tucek. At 9:30pm, Jet Lag (2002). Daniele Thompson's follow-up to the popular comedy La Buche is a romance about a man (Jean Reno) and a woman (Juliette Binoche) trapped in the strike-immobilized Roissy Airport. (RvB)

San Francisco International Film Festival 2005
The festival includes a number of screenings at the Aquarius in Palo Alto. May 1: At noon: My Mother, the Mermaid (2004). Park Heung-Sik's variation on themes used by Delmore Schwartz in his short story "In Dreams Being Responsibilities" and (as critic Roger Garcia has noted) Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married. During a crisis in her parents' marriage, a Korean lady is allowed to witness the courtship of her parents as they were when they were young villagers. At 2pm: Hawaii, Oslo (2004). More unaccountable than hell freezing over: Norway's capital is hit with a heat wave, and an assorted group faces matters of life, love and death. At 5:30pm: King's Game (2004). A young and naive Danish newspaper reporter gets caught in a game of political intrigue. Directed by Nikolaj Arcel. At 8pm: Chokher Bali: A Passion Play (2003). Global love goddess Aishwarya Rai stars in this expensive Indian epic. The title means "Sand in the Eye," and it's based on a novel by Satyajit Ray's favorite author, Rabindranath Tagore. In 1902, as Bengal is about to be partitioned, old customs fall by the wayside—including the taboos about who is allowed to love whom. May 2: At 6:30pm: Of Love and Eggs (2004). In Indonesia, the Lebaran holiday is the most important feast of the year for Muslims; three different friends cope with unfinished business. Directed by Garin Nugroho. At 9pm: Champions (2004). In a particularly hopeless corner of the Czech Republic—the Sudetenland, site of Hitler's first land grab—local hockey-loving barflies discover a gift for prophecy in the most serious of the town drunks. May 3: At 7pm: In the Battlefields (2004). Danielle Arbid of Lebanon directs this fictional memoir of a Catholic family in Beirut in 1983—more specifically, the story of Lina (Marianne Feghali), who is journeying from childhood to adolescence. At 9:30pm The Riverside (2004) A party of Kurdish refugees run for the Iranian border; on the way a young bride is trapped, standing on the fuse of a landmine. The passersby try to keep her calm while help is summoned. May 4: At 7pm: Shepherds' Journey Into the Third Millennium (2002). In Switzerland, several part-time shepherds carry out the ancient job, which turns out not to be as sweet as the poets have made it out to be. Erich Langjahr directs. At 9:30pm: Days and Hours (2004). Bosnia and Herzegovina's official entry in the Academy Awards; a story of a family gradually getting back to normal after the recent wars in the Balkans. (Plays May 1-4 in Palo Alto at the Aquarius Theater; see www.sffiff.org for details.) May 4: At 7pm: Shepherds' Journey Into the Third Millennium (2002). In Switzerland, several part-time shepherds carry out the ancient job, which turns out not to be as sweet as the poets have made it out to be. Erich Langjahr directs. At 9:30pm: Days and Hours (2004). Bosnia and Herzegovina's official entry in the Academy Awards; a story of a family gradually getting back to normal after the recent wars in the Balkans. (RvB)

San Francisco International Film Festival 2006
A number of films from the festival will be screened in Palo Alto. Masters of Machinima. Texas-based video artists Rooster's Teeth demonstrate the art of cracking video games into personal statements (May 3, 6:45pm), Northeast. Great film festival catalog leads we have known and loved department, this year from SFIFF's Miguel Pendas: "Opening with a shot of a cow being slaughtered, Northeast demonstrates from the beginning it will be about life-and-death matters." Argentina's Juan Solanas directs Carol Bouquet in this drama about the poorest region of the Pampas (RvB)

San Francisco International Film Festival 2007
See story. Also playing: Mukshin (May 6, 1:15pm), Yasmin Ahmad's story of a 12-year-old Malaysian finding a new family. Vanaja (May 6, 3:30pm). Shot in Andhra Pradesh, it follows a fisherman's daughter who tries to become a great dancer. Directed by first-timer Rajneesh Domalpalli. Fabricating Tom Ze (May 9, 6:30pm). Pioneering mash-up artist and contemporary of Os Mutantes and Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian musician is profiled in a documentary by Decio Matos Jr. The 12 Labors (May 7, 9:10pm) isn't the first art work to use the Greek legend of the hero to explicate life in the slums—the Neville Brothers did it right in their tune "Hercules." Here, the Heracles is a motorbike messenger for Olimpo Express, and the route he runs through the incomparable sprawl of São Paulo is more like The Wages of Fear than a Pepsi commercial. Too bad the lead actor (Sidney Santiago) is so mannered—why does every actor have to do the "Are you talkin' to me?" bit whenever there's a mirror nearby? Too bad also about the point-and-shoot cityscapes. Amour-Legende (May 9, 9pm). Wu Mi-sen's fantasy/romance about a pair of lovers who end up in a strange South American kingdom. (Plays May 6-9 in Palo Alto at the Aquarius Theater; www.sffs.org.) (RvB)

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 1999
Full text review

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2000
Highlights: July 30: The Golem (1920), the Jewish Frankenstein story. Directors Paul Wegener and Carl Boese and photographer Karl Freund created this pioneering horror film about Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrueck) who created a lumbering servant from clay. The creature protects the oppressed Jews of medieval Prague, until a villainous servant uses it to his own ends. Also on July 30: Live music by Daniel Hoffman and his ensemble DAVKA. July 31: Madame Jacques sur la Croisette(1995)/One Day Crossing (2000)/The Return of Tuvia (2000), a program of shorts, beginning with Emmanuel Finkiel's study of a group of aged French Jews taking in the beach at Cannes; billed with One Day Crossing, a story of the Holocaust in Budapest, 1944, and The Return of Tuvia, the story of an odd relic of the past that refreshes 50-year-old memories in a survivor of the concentration camps. Aug 1: The Mystery of Paul (1999), Abraham Segal's investigative documentary about Saul of Tarsus, who, as St. Paul, helped put the fire and brimstone into Christianity. On a separate program: Genesis (1998), an allegorical version of the story of Jacob and Esau, filmed in Mali, and King of the Jews (2000), Jay Rosenblatt's remarkable collage film about growing up Jewish in America, lately seen at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Aug 2: Kurt Gerron's Karrusel (1999). The actor who originated the role of Mack the Knife in Threepenny Opera, Kurt Gerron, made more than 70 films. However, when the Nazis came in, Gerron catered to them by directing the propaganda film The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City (seen in execrable excerpt on the same bill). On a separate program: September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (1995), A concert film of modern-day performers (PJ Harvey, Lou Reed and Elvis Costello) performing the music of Weill. Aug 3: Vulcan Junction (1999), Israel, 1973: a group of rock musicians who hang out at the Vulcan Junction bar in Tel Aviv get a wakeup call with the Yom Kippur war. Directed by Eran Riklis; soundtrack by Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Jethro Tull. (For tickets call 925-866-9559, or check www.sfjff.org.) (RvB)

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2002
The 22nd-annual festival unreels at several theaters in the Bay Area. The screenings at the Park in Menlo Park include: In Search of Peace (Part One: 1948-1967), Foreign Sister, Qui Vive, God Is Great and I'm Not (Aug 4); Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House, Anna's Summer (Aug 5); Weintraub's Syncopators, L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin, Unfair Competition (Aug 6); Esther Kahn, Yellow Asphalt—-A Trilogy of Desert Stories (Aug 7); Blue Vinyl, Desperado Square (Aug 8).

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2003
The festival movies to Palo Alto for a screening of Asesino. Nurit Kadar's documentary about the dirty war in Argentina unravels evidence that Israel delivered weapons to the junta that killed 30,000 of its own citizens—2,000 of whom were Jews in that distinctly anti-Semitic South American nation. It is screening with Thunder in Guyana, U.S. director Suzanne Wasserman's account of a Chicago Jewish woman—Janet Rosenberg Jagan—who was elected president of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. (RvB)

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (2004)
Some selections from the festival continues. Aug 4, 2:30pm: Resist. The Living Theater's Julian Beck is profiled through the memories of his widow. 4:30pm: Sorry, Judas. Judas Iscariot's side of the story, billed with Jay Rosenblatt's short King of the Jews (read about Rosenblatt's brilliant collage, a necessary anecdote for Mel Gibson's bloody passion play). 6:30pm: The Fight. The Max Schmeling/Joe Louis fight and what it meant to America's Jews. 8:30pm: The Boat Is Full. Drama about the plight of refugee Jews at the border of Switzerland during World War II. Aug 5: 1:30pm: Mazel Tov: Lesbian and Gay Weddings, plus two shorts. 3:30pm: Behind Enemy Lines. Dov Gil-Har's documentary about the meeting of an Israeli police captain and a Palestinian journalist. 6pm: Tomorrow We Move. Chantal Akerman's newest is the story of an erotic novelist (Sylvie Testud) and her mother, a concert pianist. 8pm: Wonderous Oblivion. New one by Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor); a coming-of-age comedy/drama in London, 1960. See www.sfjff.org for complete schedule and details. (RvB)

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (2005)
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San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (2007)
The annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival includes the usual vintage rediscovery: Edgar G. Ulmer's 1943 My Son, the Hero (Jul 30, 2pm), starring Jewish boxer turned comic "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom, nightclub owner and light heavyweight champ. The fest also boasts the usual slate of documentaries: Hot House (Jul 28, 4:30pm) concerns the state of Israeli prisons; The Longing (Jul 30, 4:30pm) is about Jews of South America just as Ladino: 500 Years Young (Aug 1, 2:30pm) describes the survival of Spanish Jews after centuries of persecution. And in Praying With Lior (Jul 31, 4:15pm), a child with Down's Syndrome celebrates his bar mitzvah. Dani Levi's follow-up to Go for Zucker is My Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (Jul 28, 9:15pm), in which the world's most egotistical man comes down with an identity crisis. The Egyptian/Israeli Three Mothers (Jul 30, 6:30pm), which played at a series of local festivals, is back for those who want another look. Wanting something funnier, audiences could head for Making Trouble (Aug 2, 8:30pm), a study of female Jewish comics ranging from Molly Picon to Gilda Radner; truly, it's always something with these film festivals. (Plays Jul 28- Aug 2 in Palo Alto at Aquarius Theater; www.sfjff.org.) (RvB)

San Francisco Silent Film Festival
The annual festival comes to the Castro Theater July 12-13. This year's schedule includes a brand-new print of Buster Keaton and his leading lady Brown Eyes the Cow in Go West (1925) and Lon Chaney Sr. in the berserk thriller/horror movie The Penalty (1920). Oh, whatever happened to villains who worked for a living? Playing a legless maniac named Blizzard, Chaney is simultaneously (1) planning grisly revenge on the surgeon who wrongly amputated his legs, (2) seducing the surgeon's artsy-fartsy daughter, (3) organizing an anarchist army against San Francisco and (4) modeling for a life-size statue of Satan. Today, Kiefer Sutherland or Kevin Spacey kill a few measly victims and think of themselves as real multitaskers! Also on the program are Carmen (1915), directed by Cecil B. DeMille; Tepeyac (1917), a Mexican silent about the Virgin of Guadalupe; and King Vidor's The Crowd (1928). (RvB)

San Francisco Silent Film Festival (2004)
Full text review.

San Jose Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 2001
Full text review.

San Jose Jewish Film Festival 2000—Jew-Boy Levi
(1999) In Germany in 1935, a rural Jewish cattle salesman, assimilated and settled, becomes aware of the coming political persecution of the Third Reich. Based on Thomas Strittmatter's play. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival 2002
The festival concludes Nov 10 (at 4pm) with Florentene (1997). A popular Israeli TV series set in 1995 in Tel Aviv. It tells the story of some young people during a time of failing peace. Six 30-minute episodes from the first season will be shown. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival 2003
Full text review.

San Jose Jewish Film Festival 2004
Full text review.
Shalom Ireland (2003). Some 5,000 Jews lived in Ireland during the last century. Only about 1,500 remain. The diaspora from the island that has everything but money has included many Jews as well. Valerie Lapin Ganley's documentary includes Joe Morrison, host at the Jewish museum in Dublin; a man gifted with wit and two bushy eyebrows worthy of the Old Testament patriarchs. Ganley also records family history from retired dentist Joe Briscoe, son and brother to two separate lord mayors of Dublin. BILLED WITH Moving Heaven and Earth. Profile of the Abayudaya, a tribe living in Uganda, who happen to be Conservative Jews. (Plays Nov 17, 7:30pm.) Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust (2003). The Orthodox son of a Holocaust survivor reconnects with the Polish gentiles who saved his parents. (Plays Nov 21, 3pm.) Lost Embrace (2003). Escaping the financial shambles of his native Argentina, a Jew heads back to retrace the story of his relatives, lost in the Second World War. (Plays Nov 21, 5:30pm.) (All screenings play in San Jose at Camera 12; www.sjjff.org.) (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival 2005
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This week's screenings include: The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973) Vey iz mir! A Jew-hating criminal (Louis de Funès) is forced to impersonate a popular rabbi in this time-honored family movie. (Oct 30 at 1pm). The Ritchie Boys (2004) Christian Bauer's documentary about the birth of psychological war and the German Jewish refugees who helped pioneer it. Grouped at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, the soldiers prepared for the invasion of Germany; after the war, their own German accents made them sometimes unwelcome at veterans' groups, and few of them told their stories until recently. Guy Stern, one of the "Ritchie Boys," will speak after the screening. (Oct 30 at 5:30pm.) The Syrian Bride (2004) Eran Riklis' film is set in the summer of the year 2000. It concerns an arranged marriage in Majdal Shams, a particularly pro-Syrian Druze village in the Golan Heights. Majdal Shams' population is particularly restless since old President Assad has just died. The demonstrations over his death are complicating the wedding of Mona (Clara Khoury) and a fatuous TV star from Damascus. The problem is the border guards: the nemesis nations of Syria and Israel each claim the Heights, with the U.N. trying to keep the peace. Once Mona makes it into Syria she won't be allowed back to see her family. Mona's father is under pressure by both his Israeli watchdogs and the traditional elders of his town, who are angry at the way his grown-up children conduct themselves. Meanwhile, Mona's elder sister, Amal (the movie-stealing Hiam Abbass), is planning a small rebellion of her own. Despite the specific set of circumstances, it's a romance addressed to that something inside everyone, that doesn't love a wall. (Plays Oct 30 at 3pm and Nov 2 at 7:30pm.) (The festival screenings take place at Camera 12 in San Jose; see www.sjjff.org for details.)

The screenings continue. Ushpizin (Nov 9 at 7:30 pm) This sweet fable from Israel concerns a pair of Breslau Hassidic Jews of today's Jerusalem: Moshe (writer Shuli Rand) and his zaftig wife, Mali (Michal Bat Sheva Rand). As the holy week of Sukkot begins, the two receive a pair of strangers as guests for the festival. Unfortunately, the two are Moshe's nephew and his cell mate from prison. The results are as often distressing as comic. Salaam, Shalom (1999; Nov 13, 1pm) Director Vanessa C. Laufer visits the Jewish faithful of the Baghdadi, Beneh Israel and Cochini communities. A discussion follows the screening. Facing Windows (2004; Nov 13, 3pm, and Nov 16 at 7:30pm) Crossing over the Tiber, a couple stumbles across a well-dressed old man who has lost his memory. He calls himself Simone (Massimo Girotti), although he is later identified as Davide. The arrival of Simone changes the balance of life in Filippo and Giovanna's tiny, crowded apartment. Director Ferzan Ozpetek combines the working-class tragedies of a neorealist movie with the plushness of modern romance, and the machinations of soap opera. Forgotten Refugees (2004; Nov 13, 5:30pm) At the end of World War II, some 1 million Jews lived in North Africa and in the Near East outside Palestine. This is the story of how they left their ancient homes, often reluctantly. A panel discussion follows the screening. Until Tomorrow Comes/Chronicles of a Jerusalem Courtyard (2004/2003; Nov 13, 7:30pm) A beauty salon owner—Jewish, of Moroccan decent—faces life. Mother and daughter actresses Remond Abeksiss and Yael Abeksiss co-star. Shows with Chronicle of a Jerusalem Courtyard. In Jerusalem's Nachlaot neighborhood, a courtyard is shared by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, but the specter of redevelopment threatens this oasis of peace. (The festival runs through Nov 20 at Camera 12 in San Jose; see www.sjjff.org for details.) (RvB)

Screenings include: Facing Windows (2004; Nov 16 at 7:30pm). A couple stumbles across a well-dressed old man who has lost his memory. His arrival changes the balance in the couple's crowded apartment. Director Ferzan Ozpetek combines the working-class tragedies of a neorealist movie with the machinations of soap opera. Mixed Blessings: The Challenges of Raising Children in a Jewish-Christian Family (2004; Nov 20 at 1pm). Jennifer Kaplan profiles four mixed marriages in which the parents learn that the question of what religion to give the kids is more dismaying than they thought. BILLED WITH My Brother's Wedding, Dan Akiba's documentary about his brother's conversion to ultraconservative Judaism. Jewish life is full of a great number of wordless utterances, but an anonymous Jerusalem cab driver here makes the most eloquent groan in the entire film festival: "Your brother [the convert], did he take drugs?" Yes, answers Dan. "Groannnn." Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (2004; Nov 20 at 3pm). Daniel Anker's documentary is an account of both courage and gutlessness. Gene Hackman narrates the history of how the American film industry handled the rise of Nazism, and how in each succeeding decade it felt steadier about telling its evil history. But the question is, can any way be found to keep from trivializing the Holocaust, from turning it into Hollywood spectacle, or—perversely—from using it as a validation of the audience's goodness of heart? The study ends, naturally, with Schindler's List, and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, but Imaginary Witness proves a few things. First, that the independent filmmaker had a better shot at conveying the horrors of the Holocaust. Clips from Andre de Toth's 1944 drama None Shall Escape are still powerful; so are moments from one of the most daring American films of the 1960s, The Pawnbroker. Ultimately, it's individual actors that make Hitler's unimaginable crimes real: Charlie Chaplin's hideo-comic waltz with an inflatable globe, Peter Lorre squealing as he's hauled to his death in Casablanca; Rod Steiger's silent scream. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi (2003; Nov 20 at 3pm, a teen-screen event). In Israel, a 16-year-old finds himself the peacekeeper in his constantly feuding family. A Journey of Spirit (2005; Nov 20 at 5:30pm). A profile of Debbie Friedman, the singer/guitarist who has been trying to combine traditional liturgy with contemporary music. (Plays Nov 16 and 20 in San Jose at Camera 12; see www.sjjff.org for details.) (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival 2006
Go for Zucker (2004). Witty new German-Jewish comedy—quite marveled over in its native country, since being Jewish in Germany today is still not considered grounds for mirth. Jakob "Jaeckie" Zucker (Harry Hübchen) lost his cushy job in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down; having previously slipped God's leash, he finds himself forced to mend fences with his pious, haughty brother, a rabbi. The film has a broad Billy Wilder streak in it—like Sunset Boulevard, the film is apparently narrated by a cadaver. (Oct 25 at 7:30pm and Oct 29 at 3pm.) Plus Land of the Settlers (2005). Documentary director Chaim Yavin analyzes the Occupied Territories, to discuss hatreds on both sides of the line. Discussion follows screening. (Nov 1 at 7:30 and Nov 5 at 3pm.) Plus Melting Siberia (2004). Documentary director Ido Haar tracks down her father, a retired officer of the Red Army, who walked out on his daughter and child. Billed with A Green Chariot. A Soviet immigrant to Israel discovers he may not be genetically Jewish. (Oct 29 at 1pm.) (The San Jose Jewish Film Festival takes place at Camera 12 in San Jose; see www.sjff.org for details.) (RvB)

The First Time I Turned 20. Lorraine Levy's story of a 16-year-old Jewish girl who decides to join her school's jazz band. Lorraine Levy directs. (Nov 8 at 7:30pm and Nov 12 at 3pm). Sister Rose's Passion. On the church doctrine "Nostra Aetate" freeing Jews from the libel that they killed Christ. It was the result of a study done by a nun named Sister Rose Thiering. At the time of Oren Jacoby's documentary, Sister Rose was on an oxygen tank, but she was still doing her part to fight intolerance. Jacoby links Thiering's life with the ambient Jew-hatred of her roots. Billed with Holocaust Tourist. Jes Benstock's irritating short film profiles the tourist industry around Krakow and Auschwitz. Benstock has a point about the inappropriate behavior around the death camp—the authorities had to put up a pictograph reading "No Cones" to keep fools from lapping at ice cream while they tour the death chambers. But ultimately, the relentless commercial-style cutting treats people with remarkable inhumanity, just as the snazzy graphics turn Auschwitz itself into a computer game. (Nov 12 at 5:30pm). The King's Daughter. Inside the Mea Shearim, the more-kosher-than-kosher section of Jerusalem, an Israeli Broadcasting Authority team records the antique-loaded splendor of the wedding of a rabbi's granddaughter. Billed with Like a Fish Out of Water. A short rom-com concerning an Argentine immigrant to Israel involved with a religious girl; the misunderstanding parents believe him to be a fancy scientist when, instead, he works at a gas station. (Nov 12 at 7pm). The Journey of Vaan Nguyen. Vietnamese-born immigrants to Israel face the possibility of returning to their native land, 30 years after they arrived. Discussion to follow. (Nov 14 at 7pm). The Children's House. Director Tamar Feingold investigates the lives of former kibbutz children. Billed with The Kibbutz. The rise and fall of the familiar Israeli institution, which has gone the way of so many American communes. (Nov 15 at 7:30pm). (The films show in San Jose at Camera 12; see www.sjjff.org for details.) (RvB)

The Children's House. A documentary record of the "Togetherness" show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Curator Tali Tamir organized a show of artists reminiscing about the "Children's House" at many Israeli kibbutzes, in which children were taken from their parents and raised collectively, as if they were factory farms animal—or, that's the way it's looked at by the artists who obsessively re-create a children's house in the museum space. The narrative smugness of the propaganda films made to advertise these kibbutzes certainly support the sad reminiscences of these artists. This short film has the familiar limitations of the subjective documentary, and then some. We feel their pain, yesbut did this institution create nothing but pain? BILLED WITH The Kibbutz. The rise and fall of the world-famous communes. (Nov 15 at 7:30pm). Out of Sight (2005). Trying to discover the reason for her cousin's suicide, the blind Ya'ara takes a journey into the past. The documentary won Daniel Syrkin the best director in the Israeli Academy Awards, 2005. (Nov 19 at 3pm.) Isn't This a Time (2004). Impresario Harold Leventhal has a joke about the annual folk music concerts he presents at Carnegie Hall on Thanksgiving Day. Slated to perform, Pete Seeger (age 84) complained he wasn't in as good voice as he once was, and Leventhal answered, "That's OK, the audience can't hear as well as they used to, either." Highlights: Arlo Guthrie delivering "City of New Orleans;" Ronnie Gilbert and the reconstituted Weavers, dedicating "Sinner Man" to "the president who brought the Bible to the White House"; Peter, Paul and Mary asking the musical question "Have You Been to Jail for Justice?" The never-to-be-forgot Seeger himself has a brief senior moment as he temporarily forgets the English verse for "Guantanamera." Jim Brown's documentary is sedate, and so very much like A Mighty Wind, but it proves that the champions of the Great Folk Scare are still at it, and as scary as ever. Never underestimate the healing power of taking umbrage. (Nov 19 at 5:30pm.) (The films show in San Jose at Camera 12; see www.sjjff.org for details.) (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival 2007
Opening night: Brother's Shadow (2006) with live appearance by Judd Hirsch and director Todd Yellin. See review. (Plays Oct 14 at 3 and Oct 17 at 7:30pm.) Three Mothers (2006) Gila Almogar, nee starlet Gila Golan, stars in a florid drama about Jewish triplets from Alexandria who were blessed in their cradles by King Farouk himself. Very much the chick-flick, highlighted by a soundtrack of 60s Israeli pop. (Plays Oct 14 at 7:30pm) Nov 7, 7:30pm: Someone to Run With is a story of the lower depths in Jerusalem. Nov 11, 1pm: Sentenced to Marriage. Since 1953, Israel has used rabbinicial courts instead of civil courts to grant divorces. The mill of law grinds slow, and it grinds even slower when God's weight is on the millstones. Husbands can sadistically or pettishly prolong a divorce as long as they want; two of the women here wait five years for theirs. Hidden cameras show stacked-up files on desks; transcripts tell of a husband-raped woman being told by a rabbi, "He just wanted to have his way with you" (italics mine). Obviously, Israel needs the services of Judge Judy, pronto. Scholar Nitzhia Shaked leads a discussion afterward. At 3pm: Just an Ordinary Jew. Oliver (Downfall) Hirschbiegel's monologue film about what it means to be Jewish in modern-day Germany. At 5pm: Modigliani. Andy Garcia encounters the full gamut of 1920s artists from Rivera to Picasso. At 5:30pm: Steel Toes. A Jewish-Canadian lawyer (David Strathairn) has a tough case: he has to defend a neo-Nazi Paki-basher. At 7:30pm: Sweet Mud, a coming-of-age story. Nov 14, 7:30pm: Black Book. Paul Verhoeven's drama of wartime intrigue with plentiful toplessness. Rich, beautiful and talented Rachel (Carice van Houten) has a little problem. It's 1945 in Occupied Holland, and she's Jewish. Left in the cold, she possesses only a packet of diamonds and a wad of $100 bills. Later, during an assignment for the Resistance, Rachel is picked up on by a sensitive SS officer, Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch). She must make a decision: Will she prostitute herself for the Resistance? Maybe the universal appeal of the sex is supposed to leaven the references to today's occupations, as in this utterly subtle line when a Nazi officer congratulates the Dutch Gestapo: "You fight against the terrorists for our fatherland." As that line suggests, this Verhoeven movie is not anything to take seriously. It's simplistic, madly nostalgic and larded with romantic visions of the end of the war. (Through Nov 14 in San Jose at Camera 12; www.sjjf.org) (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—Chamber Quintet
Shai Avivi, Rami Heuberger, Keren Mor, Dov Navon and Manashe Noy are known as the Chamber Quintet: Israel's answer to the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, seen in their popular mid-'90s TV show. Rarely hilarious, more often cerebral, these comedians have some inspired sketches: a pair of absent-minded cineastés who can't remember Hitchcock's name or work; a fan buttonholing God at a cafe and getting the cold shoulder; and, in perhaps their most daring sketch, a rich parody of the documentary Shoah. However, these kinds of shows really make their most impact when they create returning characters. Due to the insufficient credits on the preview tape, I can't properly thank whichever member it was who plays "Fledermaus"—a whip-guilt Israeli politician of the older generation, always ready to sputter such dire rebukes as "Any minute now, the Arabs can throw us into the sea!" whenever thwarted. BILLED WITH Bat-Yam New York, a dramatic TV show in the form of video diaries. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—Desperado Square
(2000) In a bucolic corner of Israel, where nobody works very hard at anything, it's decided (after a prophetic dream) to reopen the long-closed movie theater. Director Benny Toraty's breezy but melancholy picture includes some elements that must elude the American viewer (why are the locals burning Charles DeGaulle in effigy?). But it's held together by the performance by the tragic faced Yona Elian, as Seniora, a woman who, once upon a time, was the cause of the rift that led to the closing of the cinema. Includes excerpts from the theater's reopener, the vintage Indian epic film Sangam, whose plot mirrors the story (and also seems to herald the new change of programming at the Towne Theater.) (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—The Discovery of Heaven
(2001) Really beyond the pale. An epic based on the novel by Harry Mulisch (who wrote the source book for the Dutch film The Assault). It concerns the friendship between an astronomer (Greg Wise) and a dithering aesthete (Stephen Fry, doing Oscar Wilde again), both representing "Science" and "Art" as clearly as if they had signs around their necks. In 1960s Amsterdam, the two—born on the same day in different locations—become fast friends and fall in love with the same girl, Ada (Flora Montgomery). When a child is born of this three-way union, he grows up to be a prodigy—and possibly a messiah. All this—along with the World War I and World War II and the Holocaust—turns out to be the work of scheming, manipulative angels who have been ordered by God to retrieve the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Director Jeroen Krabbe plays the most well-fed of the angels. The Discovery of Heaven certainly has expensive locations, for what that's worth, from the canals in Amsterdam to the Pantheon in Rome to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. And it has plot by the pound: characters are always getting into car accidents and going into comas, getting their throats cut by street ruffians or being hit by flaming asteroids or shouting each other's names to the skies or going into self-imposed exile and turning up years later with rheumy eyes, beards and limps. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—Foreign Sister
Dan Wolman's drama about the friendship between an Israeli professional woman and her servant. BILLED WITH Why Is This day Different?, a short about trying to celebrate Passover in New Zealand. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—Gloomy Sunday
(1999) In Budapest, before World War II, a love triangle unfolds: a Jewish restaurant owner, his girlfriend, and the pianist who plays there. The Nazi invasion brings matters to a climax. Rolf Schubel directs. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—The Hebrew Hammer
Adam Goldberg is Mordecai Jefferson Carver, "the circumcised dick," the Jewish Shaft: as his theme song goes, "the type who won't cop out / when there's gentiles all about." He's a man of action, but he who knows how to handle his women ("You want I should talk dirty to you?"). Yet he's also good to his nagging Yiddish mama, played by that handsome Nora Dunn. (Handsome and principled, too—remember she walked off Saturday Night Live for good because of the presence of the since-forgotten Andrew Dice Clay?) Writer/director Jonathan Kesselman tells a story of the new Santa Claus (Andy Dick), determined to muscle out Kwanzaa and Chanukah alike. His weapons includes cheap bootleg VHS copies of It's a Wonderful Life. The once-mighty Jewish/black alliance is rebuilt as Carver joins forces with the Kwanzaa Liberation Front's chief, Mohammed (Mario Van Peebles), to save the Festival of Lights from Christmas hegemony. Since he's clearly a writer first and a director second, Kesselman softens the impact of some of the cleverest jokes, such as a kind of carnival ride dedicated to the history of Jewish suffering. The Hebrew Hammer is stuffed with jokes Mel Brooks wouldn't touch with a 10-foot challah. The effect of watching this film can only be likened to noshing on too much chopped liver while listening to a stack of Mickey Katz albums. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—Today You Are a Fountain Pen
In Today You Are a Fountain Pen (2000), a boy's Bar Mitzvah looks like a frost when he doesn't get the bicycle he was hoping for, but then his grandfather, a concentration camp survivor, gives him a little perspective. Playing the grandfather is Seinfeld regular Len Lesser (a.k.a. Uncle Leo), who will appear in person at the screening. Directed by Dan Katzir. BILLED WITH The Secret (2001), Ronit Krown Kerstner and Neomi Schory's documentary about Jewish children brought up as Catholics during World War II, in order to hide them from the Germans. Interviewees include a Catholic priest who learned in middle age that his parents were Jewish. (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—A Trumpet in the Wadi
This week's screenings continue Oct. 29 (7:30pm) and Nov. 2 (3pm) with A Trumpet in the Wadi (2001) Directors Lina and Slava Chaplin put an interesting twist on Romeo and Juliet. The action is set in the Arab ghetto of Haifa, where it's always said that relations are the best between Jews and Palestinians in all of Israel. A well-blended mix of romance and political commentary, this shot-on-video drama is the story of a pair of sisters. The plain but sweet Huda (Khawlah Hag-Debsy, quite good) has just turned 30, with no prospect of marriage. Her smoldering little sister Mary (Raida Adon) is already sleeping with men. The two get a new upstairs neighbor: Alex (played by Alexander Senderovich), who, like Robin Williams, is short, hairy, friendly and often amusing. A half-pint who plays the trumpet, this Jewish arrival from Russia has no ideology and less Hebrew. The relationship turns out to be less of a big deal for Huda's family than it is for the world outside their apartment. Based on Sami Michael's novel, Trumpet in the Wadi is more indication that a vibrant new cinema is emerging in Israel from the midst of strife. BILLED WITH Haymishe-Viking, Lesley Sharon Rosenthal's short about chef Henrik Iverson, a mad Dane on a mission to update trad Jewish cooking into nouvelle (or, if you will, Jouvelle) cuisine; the chef, currently working at the Hyatt Grand Melbourne, Down Under, demonstrates his high-class variations on beloved old dishes. Iverson also reminisces about the challenges of working at the Hyatt Regency in Jerusalem, with an all Palestinian crew: "Motivating them to cook kosher food was a tremendous challenge." (RvB)

San Jose Jewish Film Festival—Welcome to the Waks Family
If you intend to have 17 children, best to have them in Australia, where there's so much room for them to run around. The Waks family, a group of ultratraditional Lubavitch Jews, are profiled here. The children range in age from 4 months to 21 years: they are the brood of a former Melbourne surfer who converted to this demanding strain of worship (it's American, revived by a charismatic rabbi from Crown Heights). While some may ponder the Waks' life and wonder if a life without movies is worth living, others may focus on Chaya, the eerily calm mom. A Lubavitch from Yemen, she not only raises the dozen-plus kids but brings in extra cash as a wig maker. BILLED WITH Longing, a 1998 Israeli film about a secular woman of Tel Aviv who begins to remember details of her orthodox upbringing. Directed by Amalia Margolin. (RvB)

The Santa Clause 2
(G; 98 min.) Tim Allen returns as the fat man of rampant capitalism.

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
(G; 98 min.) As overstuffed as a Christmas goose, the sequel trims the meat of the divorced dad/estranged son plot from the first two films and instead crams the screen with gratuitous subplots that distract blue-collar Santa Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) from his seasonal work: visits from his in-laws (Alan Arkin and, for grandpas in the audience, Ann-Margret) and plans by the nefarious Jack Frost (Martin Short) to freeze Scott out of the holiday. Short's musical number, "North Pole, North Pole" to the tune of "New York, New York," is a jaw-dropper worthy of his SCTV days. (DH)

Santa Cruz Film Festival 2002
May 8 (at the Santa Cruz Vets Hall): Above and Beyond the Call of Duty (noon) and Locals Only (2:30pm). May 8 (at the Del Mar) From the East (3pm), Personal Docs (5:05pm), Stalemate (7:30pm) and Blue Vinyl (9:55pm). May 9 (at the Del Mar): Sports Flicks (3pm), What Are you Laughing At? (5:30pm), Bomba—Dancing the Drum (7:15pm), Bee Movie Boogaloo (9:15pm). May 10 (at the Del Mar): Shorts (3pm), Aural Artists (5:05pm), Hip, Edgy, Sexy, Cool (7:30pm), Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (9:50pm). May 11 (at the Del Mar): Locals Only 2 (3pm), Strangers in Stranger Lands (5pm), The Business of Fancydancing (7:10pm), Home Room (9:30pm).

Santa Cruz Documentary Film and Video Festival 2000
Full text review.

Santitos
(R) This 1997 comedy from Mexico tells the story of a woman who, after seeing the image of a saint in her oven, goes on a search for her daughter, who died under mysterious circumstances.

Saraband
Full text review.
(R; 120 min.) After all the many reunions of estranged fathers and yearning sons the movies have been selling us, the honest mutual contempt between generations in Ingmar Bergman's Saraband is like air conditioning on a sticky day. Erland Josephson plays Johan, a psychologist retired to his country home. The view from the old man's window takes in the summer cottage where his son, Henrik, lives. Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) has the face and mannerisms of a weakling. A semiemployed music professor, he lives in troubled solitude with his daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). This standoff between father, son and daughter/granddaughter is ended by an unexpected visit from Henrik's former spouse, Marianne (Liv Ullmann). A coda to Bergman's 1974 TV series Scenes From a Marriage, the film shows the two with almost nothing left but each other. Freed from his sex drive, Johan desiccates himself in his music and his Kierkegaard; Marianne's patient female strength makes his pathetic viciousness all the more contemptible. Unlike Johan, Bergman has made progress. Saraband isn't a sad throwback to past greatness. Instead it's a serene, fresh work, assured and open-minded. (RvB)

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
Full text review.
(Unrated; 72 min.) She's such a Disney chipmunk. Silverman does a brilliant imitation of a person eager not to offend, as she wrings her shoulders and casts her eyes down. The Silverman character doesn't understand how a person can really be guilty of saying ridiculously offensive things, so long as they're well bred about it. As in the case of an ethnic who took offense at her: "He has to learn to love himself, before I can learn to stop hating his people." This live comedy show at North Hollywood's El Portal theater isn't a triumph of translation between the stage and the screen. A couple of musical sequences by Silverman and her band the Silver Men weren't quite there, though she looked very fetching dressed as Marlo Thomas. What's marvelous about Jesus Is Magic (besides the title) is Silverman's aptitude for the sugar-coated slur and the pornographic horror story, and for summing up the haziest ideas of history and life outside the United States. While never doing strictly political humor, she's expert at the self-righteous neoconservative corrective. ("Martin Luther King was a litterbug.") Before she performs "Amazing Grace" in three part harmony—the most rousing version of that song all year—she tells a particularly wicked joke with the punch line, "You can't smell yourself." Silverman's comedy is about a woman who can't smell herself. I can't blame walkouts, but I think it's clear that the barb of her humor is aimed inward, not outward. (RvB)

Sasayaki a.k.a. Gekko no Sasayaki
(1999) Schoolyard love, involving a lot of mortification including Nixon's old kid-days game of pretending to be a despised puppy. (RvB)

Satin Rouge
(Unrated; 91 min.) A single mom (Hiam Abbass) becomes involved with the dancers at a belly-dancing nightclub. Intrigued by the exotic entertainment and entertainers, she takes up dancing herself, changing both her clothes and her personality in the process. Raja Amari directs this Tunisian feature.

Saturday Night Fever
(1979) The disco working-class romance par excellence. Stars John Travolta as a Brooklyn hardware store clerk who falls for a climbing neighborhood girl (Karen Lynn Gorney), as the Bee Gees tear out their tonsils on the soundtrack. The 8 Mile of its day and a hit, though scorned by punk rockers who referred to the film's star as John Revolta. (RvB)

Saved!
(PG-13; 96 min.) At times, Brian Dannelly's satire bids fair to be the funniest comedy about unplanned pregnancy since The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. The promise fades into a comfortable teen-movie rut in the latter half, and that's too bad. But there's choice material here, even when it ebbs. In a backward suburb where Jesus reigns supreme, the born-again Virgin Mary (the geek's pinup girl Jena Malone) gets bonked on the head and thinks she hears Christ tell her to use her body to straighten out her gay boyfriend. It doesn't work. His parents send him for a year's straightening at Mercy House, and she ends up 17 and pregnant. This unplanned pregnancy lowers her standing with the "Christian Jewels," the princessiest clique at American Eagle Christian High School. Fortunately, Mary has friends who stand beside her: Cassandra, a riotously bad bad girl (played by the delicious Eva Amurri) and the suave, wheelchair-bound Macaulay Culkin, who seems to be getting a George Sanders vibe as he grows older. You have to figure that a child actor who was that apallingly famous, with all the too-much-too-soonness and so on, has seen a lot of the wickedness of the world. Mary Louise Parker and Martin Donovan add a little adult appeal to the story as lovers thwarted by religion. Donovan's Pastor Skip is a stitch, with his whassup-laden Christian hip-hop talk for kids. ("Good Christians don't get 'jiggy wit it' until they get married.") Saved! is more directly about America's personal relationship with Jesus then the entirety of Life of Brian. And damned if it doesn't end honestly Christian, promoting reconciliation, fellowship and agape all around. The most startling performance is by Mandy Moore as the cross-wielding queen bee of the Christian Jewels. Some critics said that Moore was the real thing after seeing the saccharine A Walk to Remember, and I thought they were loons. But Moore has a musical number here that both celebrates and mocks Christian pop, and it almost stops the show. She completely sells the song and sends it up at the same time; the young Streisand could do that, and who since? What's more admirable—that Moore chose this sacrilegious villainess part and made it the center of the film or that she carried it off so well? I'll happily see Saved! again; I'd have paid $100 to see it in a theater somewhere deep in the Bible Belt. (RvB)

Save the Last Dance
(PG-13; 113 min.) Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas hip-thrust life into MTV Films' tale of coming-of-age woes. Stiles, in her best performance since playing the teen shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You, stars as Sara, a once-aspiring ballerina who hangs up her toe shoes following the death of her mother. That is, until she moves to Chicago's inner city and finds new inspiration through her relationship with handsome hip-hop hipster Derek (Thomas, formerly of Cruel Intentions fame). Eye-rolling cynics have pigeon-holed the film as only suited for 12-year-old girls, but those willing to look past a thin plot and stereotypical characters will find a sweet story carried by an undeniable chemistry between the two stars, both on and off the dance floor. (MS)

Saving Face
Full text review.
(R; 96 min.) Michelle Krusiec plays Wil, a lesbian second-generation Chinese immigrant who works as a resident at a New York hospital. Wil falls for a dancer (Lynn Chen). Then Wil's mother (Joan Chen) turns up pregnant, kicked out of her home, with no man in her life. Ma and Wil are forced to share close quarters. An assured and good-looking feature film by San Jose's own Alice Wu, this charming romantic comedy breaks the rigid mold of ethnicity-of-the-week love stories. Though it is understated, there is far more ardor here than there is in the My Big Fat Greek Wedding genre. And though Wu shot on a very low budget, she still has a keenly developed since of color and surface. This home-grown talent is a director to watch. (RvB)

Saving Grace
Full text review.

Saving Private Ryan
Full text review.
(R; 170 min.) Steven Spielberg's latest is the most uncompromisingly ghastly WWII film ever made; his staging of the invasion of Europe in 1944 by the Allied Forces is dumbfounding—a literal blood bath. Here is Spielberg at his technical best, recreating D-day on Omaha Beach with no cinematic euphemisms whatsoever. The first 30 minutes are pure and horrible, from the vomiting privates in the landing craft to the final clearing out of a pillbox. What can follow this sort of beginning? Unfortunately, Spielberg goes with his worst tendencies: appalling sentimentality and manipulativeness. Tom Hanks plays Capt. Miller, who, having barely survived the storming of Normandy, is set on a new mission: to find one Pvt. Ryan (sensitive lummox Matt Damon). Miller, a soft-spoken civilian soldier, presides over a collection of Sundance wunderkinds, including Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Vin Diesel, Adam Goldberg and Jeremy Davies. Barry Pepper, a junior version of Christopher Walken, steals the show as an ace sharpshooter with a biblical bent. The mission to rescue Ryan is the heart in all of this killing; to make sure we get the point, Miller delivers a speech saying that finding Ryan is the one good thing they may be able to pull out of the war. Saving Private Ryan works as a historical recreation, but its moral simplicity shames its brilliant technology. The Germans are all lean, battle-hardened, slimy killers. Gen. George Marshall drops everything to get a boy out of combat; the boy refuses to leave, seeing a higher duty to his comrades. This essentially confused film leaves an audience not just crushed but bewildered, perplexed by images that say, we must never let it happen again, and a plot that says, but it was all worth it. (RVB)

Saving Silverman
(R; 91 min.) Often amusing slobbo comedy in the Farrelly Brothers realm, livened up by Jack Black (the cranky record connoisseur in High Fidelity) and the always reliable Steve Zahn. The two play Seattle boobs who lose their best pal (Jason Biggs) to a conniving psychiatrist—played by Amanda Peet, who, unlike a lot of good-lookers, really seems eager to act. A kidnapping plot follows—as in Ransom of Red Chief, you fear for the kidnappers, not the kidnapped. Biggs, nice enough, is like Zeppo Marx in the company of Zahn and Black. It's well known that Zahn's an ace portrayer of mealy-mouthed stoners, but Black makes seen to have undiluted Belushiness in a way not seen since the real John Belushi checked out. Black has the beetling aggro eyebrows, the frightening daintiness of Belushi at his best. In Black, as in Belushi, you can see the ballet dancer underneath that lard. Also starring R. Lee Ermey, the fierce drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, who has a final scene that must have taken more bravery than even the USMC requires. (RvB)

Saw
Full text review.
(R; 100 min.) At the beginning of Saw, the killer has immured a pair of men in an abandoned industrial washroom, last visited by one and perhaps several people with diarrhea. As if in some little-theater drama of existentialism, the two are chained up and uncertain of how they got there. One of them, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) gradually realizes that this ordeal is some kind of punishment for his own infidelity. Presently, they find a cassette tape left by the maniac, who tells the doctor that he's made hostages of Dr. Gordon's wife and child, and will kill both at 6 o'clock. The hostages—Mom is played by a skidding Monica Potter—blubber for their lives in a way destined to make the sensitive viewer think, "Aw, I can't bear it, put 'em out of their misery right now." The killer's thing is that people don't appreciate the preciousness of life until they're almost murdered. While director James Wan might have been laughing at the American movie business's yearning for the positive spin, he seems serious: Is "Jigsaw" really Deepak Chopra? There is a walking-wounded spirit lurking underneath the blood and the crap. And, worse, there is a Puritanical moralism: why, these men who cheat on their wives deserve to be tortured in a windowless basement! This undertone is more dismaying than any of Saw's deadly gadgets. (RvB)

Saw II
(R; 91 min.) The first Saw had online geeks buzzing about supposedly deeper meanings in all the viscera. The Jigsaw Killer never actually kills anyone! Torturing people helps them appreciate life! As if reading that crap wasn't excruciating enough, here comes the revolting twist: the filmmakers actually started to believe it. So they replaced the ambiguity of the first film with a second story that completely buys in to the mindset of the sick-fuck serial killer they originally created as an excuse to come up with ever-more gruesome mutilation set pieces. The result is the most fascist sequel since Death Wish II. Seriously, only Charles Manson or George W. Bush could truly appreciate the underlying message here that flawed people need to have their eyes gouged out and hands sliced off to return them to a state of worthiness. If it doesn't work, of course, kill 'em. To underscore the point, Jigsaw is portrayed as a soft-eyed cancer patient who just wants to promote father-son bonding. As with any sequel, everything's bigger: the execution is even more relentlessly artless, the acting is worse and the cops are—against all odds—even stupider than in the first film. A sawed-off barrage of twists at the end guarantees that if you guess two or three of them (which you will), you won't guess at least one. It's cold comfort for a movie that, while it might not be the worst horror film of the year (hello, Hide and Seek!), is certainly the most cynical and depressing. (SP)

Saw IV
(R; 95 min.) Remember how they used to say only the even-numbered Star Trek films are good? Well, I see a Saw urban legend developing in reverse: the odd-numbered films appear to be the keepers. Saw IV is the worst yet, a severe letdown after Saw III was the first of the films in the series to actually live up to some of the deeper meanings fans have read into them. Granted, Saw II was a cheesy and pointless gorefest, but at least it made sense. Saw IV is a headache, requiring a college-level course in the minutia of the franchise to make sense of scenes that appear to have been edited with a lawn mower. Worse, the series is just recycling twists at this point; without giving anything away, let's just say fans have been here, done that. However, it's half as expensive to get in to see the autopsy scene at the beginning as it is to get into the Bodyworlds 2 exhibit at the Tech Museum, and it's just as graphic, so hey, that's something. (SP)

Say Anything
(PG-13; 100 min.) Cameron Crowe directed this charming film starring John Cusack as lovable underachiever Lloyd Dobler and Ione Skye as the brainy beauty who falls for him against her better judgment. Lili Taylor plays Lloyd's dark, funny, terminally depressed pal.

Say It Isn't So
(R; 93 min.) Who knew the Farrelly brothers had such finesse? The sick-humor gurus only have producing credits on Say It Isn't So, and their comparatively subtle touch is sorely missed in this low-brow comedy about a head-over-heels young couple, Jo and Gilly (Heather Graham and Chris Klein), who have to cancel their wedding plans when they are told they are long-lost siblings. Writers Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow don't lack for creativity in gross-outs or insults—an accidental cow-fisting incident out-sickens even semen hair gel, and a more expansive list of epithets for, um, "sister molester" couldn't possibly exist. But director J.B. Rogers doesn't find the humor so much as he plays up the plain cruelty of every joke; lingering in each little meanness slows the film to an aimless crawl between shocks, although the strong cast does eke out a few solid laughs. Graham is as winning a wide-eyed heroine as Cameron Diaz's Mary and Klein complements her well as the wounded, slightly dopey hero. Sally Field chews the scenery with obvious relish as Jo's trashy, controlling mama and comedian Orlando Jones brings appeal to an otherwise awful one-joke character. (HZ)

Sayonara/Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1957/1958) In Japan, a Texas Air Force major (Marlon Brando) recuperating from battle shock falls in love with a Japanese dancer (Miyoshi Umeki) but discovers that his racist officers don't approve of the marriage to come. Consider the movie as a social phenomena—part of the normalization of relations with Japan after the war—and you'll understand why Umeki and Red Buttons (playing a more ill-fated lover) won Best Supporting Oscars. The always-underrated Ricardo Montalban, playing a Japanese Kabuki actor, may be a little harder to explain to audiences of 2004. At least it's not The Last Samurai. Josh Logan directs; the Kyoto cityscapes are by cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks. BILLED WITH Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Elizabeth Taylor stars as the Southern cat in heat Maggie, whose whiskey-soaked husband Brick (Paul Newman) can't respond to her embraces. Censorship made it hard to understand exactly what was eating Brick. But the heavy symbolism (impotence represented as a broken leg) pays off, and it's a dirty pleasure watching Taylor's Maggie sink her claws into her richly deserving no-neck relatives. Burl Ives plays the patriarch, a bit of vaudeville Faulkner. (RvB)

Scarface (1932)
Paul Muni stars plays the quintessential gangster in Howard Hawks surprisingly fierce crime drama. Also stars Ann Dvorak as Muni's sister, for whom the mobster holds an unhealthy obsession. Also features George Raft and Boris Karloff. (AR)

Scarface (1983)
Cynical, ridiculously self-justifying remake of the far more inventive and too-little seen Howard Hawks classic from 1932. Al Pacino plays Tony Montana, the lizard-eyed Marielista coke baron who takes over the Florida racket; Michelle Pfieffer is his blonde floozy, who gets scruples too late. It's basically a silly movie, although it looks great dubbed on Telemundo. (RvB)

The Scarlet Claw
(1944) Holmes, Holmes on the range: in Quebec, actually. He (Basil Rathbone) and Dr. Watson investigate the town of "La Morte Rouge," where the violence isn't confined to the hockey rink. When the case is closed, as it must be, Sherlock Holmes praises the Canadian virtues in a prose poem that's like an answer in advance to that Gordon "Scotchy" Sinclair essay about the goodness of us Americans (a piece recently given a second life on the Internet.) (RvB)

Scarlet Empress
(1934) Josef von Sternberg's delirious retelling of the life of Catherine the Great is a triumph of cinematography and set design. About the acting, however, audiences will differ. Marlene Dietrich mixes girlish breathlessness with a surprising dose of sexuality. John Lodge, as a Russian count, gives woodenness a bad name. Sam Jaffe goes completely nuts as Grand Duke Peter. If you believe that von Sternberg carefully orchestrated his ensemble for comic effect, you'll discern knowing satire; otherwise, the acting is merely cause for hooting. There is, however, no denying the extraordinary cinematography by Bert Glennon—the film is absolutely ravishing to look at. In one especially breathtaking scene, the soon-to-be-married Catherine is surrounded by layers of gauzy veils as her handmaids prepare her wedding gown. (MSG)

The Scarlet Letter
(R; 109 min.) Although this (the sixth) movie version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous novel offers a refreshingly firm endorsement of paganism (we're meant to root for the Native Americans lopping the cross off the colony's main gate, and I know I did), it has lost much dramatic impact in favor of pulp romanticism, and a preposterous happy ending. Director Roland Joffe has added some postcard nature photography and Indians to the story of Hester Prynne (Demi Moore) and her forbidden love for Car Culture. Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman). These natives lay hold of Hester's husband, who becomes a movie version of a Vietnam vet. As Mr. Prynne, Robert Duvall has the Old Testament spirit in him, and he's the most authentic thing in the movie. Joan Plowright plays a beaded, befeathered healing woman who, alone of her kind, doesn't know about the useful properties of the Black Cohash root, which could have helped Hester out of her jam. What can you say about Moore? "Spunky" isn't the word; it's like calling a Sherman tank spunky. Maybe only late Elizabeth Taylor has combined such voluptuousness with such almost shocking stridency. It's a bad old-fashioned movie tarted up with some New Age touches. (RvB)

The Scarlet Pimpernel/The Man Who Could Work Miracles
(1934/1936) In 1792, the French, overly excitable because of a diet deficient in beef and beer, stage a revolution. Across the channel, the Prince of Wales (Nigel Bruce) worries but can do nothing. However, one of the twittering fritillaries in the prince's circle—a mincing puppy called Sir Percival Blakeney, Bart. (Leslie Howard)—is in actuality that master of disguises, that lifeline to the noble émigrés, the Scarlet Pimpernel. (He takes his code name from "a humble wayside flower"—a pest in California gardens; we dirt scratchers can testify to the real pimpernel's guile and unkillability.) Meanwhile, the French ambassador, Chauvelin (Raymond Massey, the Canadian Karloff), tries to capture this mysterious counterrevolutionary. Howard, a slender matinee idol, appealed to between-the-wars audiences by appearing to be a man who had lost his happiness in the trenches. He had been invalided out of World War I as a shell-shock case and looked quite ghostly onscreen. The part of the witty cavalier is both grave and light enough for his talents; he's seriously regretful in the busted marriage scenes with his lady wife, Marguerite (Merle Oberon, beautiful and board-stiff), and he's a stitch posing as a fop, a Eustace Tilleylook-alike teasing the gouty old ruins in his club by reciting his doggerel: "They seek him here, they seek him there/ Those Frenchies seek him everywhere/ Is he in heaven or is he in hell?/ That demned elusive Pimpernel." BILLED WITH The Man Who Could Work Miracles. The Powers That Be, represented by a colossal hand with pointing finger, sportively decide to give the gift of omnipotence: their benefactor is a mild salesclerk named George Fotheringay (Roland Young). George becomes a Tudor-themed world dictator (I'd surmise the Renaissance Faire get-up was a way to recycle producer Alexander Korda's costumes from his Private Life of Henry VIII). But while he gets to boss around plutocrats and politicians (including a harrumphing colonel played by Ralph Richardson), the experiment doesn't go as planned. It's a laboratory of quaintly charming special effects—an orgy of them, "like orgies of another kind, grimly repetitive," thought Graham Greene. Still, we're all accomplished orgy-goers thanks to Lucas and his ilk, so this H. G. Wellsderived fable may beguile, in spite of its moral that the Powers That Be know best. (RvB)

Scarlet Street/Gun Crazy
(1944/1949) The hot-house title was inspired by Carmine Street in Greenwich Village. It's a remake of a Jean Renoir film titled La Chienne—the bitch in question is played by Joan Bennett, a ripe but dirty trull who picks up a grade-A, all-day sucker: a miserably married Sunday painter (Edward G. Robinson). She feeds off his talent and sucks him dry. Dan Duryea, a really nasty piece of work, plays her pimp. The film combines the forceful storytelling and mood of the German Expressionist silent pictures mixed with intimate, troubling details and a boldly tragic ending. It convinces you that if Fritz Lang had been a less irascible man, more willing to disguise his malice, his reputation would be as great as Alfred Hitchcock's. One of the black jewels of film noir, it's also Robinson's best film; the lore of the downtrodden artist must have stimulated him, since Robinson had an excellent eye for paintings himself (note how he's mentioned in Frida). BILLED WITH Gun Crazy The British actress Peggy Cummins stars as a cool psycho with a fascination for firearms who encounters a kind but troubled country boy (John Dall—the Ben Affleck of his day). The result is murder. This economical yet indelible crime drama ought to be double billed with Bowling for Columbine. Definitely worth a look on the big screen in a good print; the cinematography shows off the black-and-white aesthetic of late-'40s Hollywood to superb advantage. (RvB)

Scarlet Street/The Woman in the Window
(1944/1945) Two classics by Fritz Lang. Scarlet Street is a remake of a Jean Renoir film titled La Chienne—the bitch in question is played by Joan Bennett, a ripe but dirty trull who picks up a miserably married Sunday painter (Edward G. Robinson), feeds off his talent and sucks him dry. Dan Duryea, a really nasty piece of work, plays her boyfriend. The film combines the forceful storytelling and mood of the German Expressionist silent pictures with intimate, troubling details and a boldly tragic ending, convincing you that if Lang had been a less irascible man, more willing to disguise his malice socially, his reputation would be as great as Alfred Hitchcock's. BILLED WITH The Woman in the Window, a reunion of the powerful combo of Bennett, Lang, Duryea and Robinson. The last plays a gentle psychology professor who has some intellectual curiosity about what drives men to murder. In a frightening turn of events, he gets to learn about murder up close. Raymond Massey, that art-deco gargoyle, co-stars. Really, if you get a chance, check out some of Lang's other American movies: the primo 1944 spy thriller The Ministry of Fear (a better Graham Greene adaptation than the upcoming The End of the Affair); Clash by Night (1952), the best movie ever made in Monterey; Cloak and Dagger (1946), a proto-007 thriller (critics always referred to the Bonds as "cloak-and-dagger movies" when they first were released in the '60s). (RvB)

Scary Movie
Full text review.

Scary Movie 2
(R; 95 min.) With fewer penis jokes but plenty of potty humor, this sequel is up to (or would that be that down to?) the level of the original Scary Movie. The Wayans brothers' second spoof of the teen horror genre—and of roughly a dozen other assorted films—delivers big laughs that are strictly in the worst taste. For one thing, the film is awash in bodily fluids which go way beyond The Exorcist's mere dabbling in pea soup (although there's a tidal wave of that here too). And though it plays on a few familiar ideas taken from a handful of horror films, most notably The Haunting, don't even try to sort out the plot—its shameless disjointedness is part of the fun. Anna Faris winningly reprises her role as wide-eyed heroine Cindy Campbell, whose good-natured credulity makes her perfect ghoul-bait. Unfortunately, Shawn and Marlon Wayans must have been too busy penning all the film's poo-poo jokes because they don't give themselves, or perfectly cast perma-villain Tim Curry, enough to do. In any case, the film's highlight just might be the opening scenes, with James Woods and Andy Richter in cameo roles as priests getting into more than they bargained for in a parody of The Exorcist. (HZ)

Scary Movie 3
(PG-13; 90 min.) Pamela Anderson's genuinely scary breasts are the pretitle lead-in to this scatter-shot satire. Afterward, this David (Airplane!) Zucker film zeroes in on a pair of even larger, plumper pair of sitting ducks: the films Signs and The Ring, both whose (actually admirable) seriousness leave them wide open. (Parodying Scream, which was a satire already, never seemed like much of an accomplishment in the first place.) Scary Movie 3 is not what it could be. 8 Mile got it better and harder from Malibu's Most Wanted; The Matrix, which ought to have been nailed, only gets tickled. Still, Charlie Sheen does the choked-up loss of faith bit Mel Gibson was emoting in Signs, with Denise Richards in the flashback as the bisected wife, pinned to a tree by a car and spitting up a spark plug. Queen Latifah is "the Oracle" from The Matrix as a Miss Know-It-All who gets into a fracas with the three-dimensional "well-girl" from The Ring. The ghost in question is later gentled with the words "You were just a little girl once. You're still that same little girl, only more corpsy." George Carlin is "The Architect" from Matrix Reloaded, a voyeuristic letch. As the president, Leslie Nielsen steals a Simpsons joke (from the "Indian Casino" episode). But Anna Faris, already on the way up from her impersonation of a moron movie star in Lost in Translation (C—-n D—-z?), gets another career boost from this movie; her wide-eyed enthusiasm for the gags, good and bad alike, make her seem like a lovable hybrid of Goldie Hawn and Gracie Allen. (RvB)

Scary Movie 4
(PG-13; 100 min.) Like the Holy Roman Empire, kind of, in that it's neither scary, nor a movie, nor is it only the fourth time some of these jokes have been used. Once again, the scheme works thanks to Anna Faris, a blonde clown of distinction. So far she has played Drew Barrymore and Neve Campbell; here, she gets Sarah Michelle Gellar, Toni Collette and, I guess, Naomi Watts. It's no coincidence that the movie gets better with every appearance of Faris' pop-eyed and agog heroine, whose tiny head is in danger of being swallowed by the neck of her oversized turtleneck sweater. Here, her Cindy is menaced by alien "tri-iPods" and the caterwauling little ghost brat from The Grudge. Both films are mashed into Saw and The Village, with some other scraps chucked into the headcheese, such as the time Tom Cruise failed to curb his enthusiasm on Oprah. Like Cruise's fit, some of these targets are sitting ducks (such as the duck Leslie Nielsen seems to have slept with); others just demonstrate what director David Zucker has called "the flywheel effect": an audience laughing can be made to keep laughing by forward motion. Let's hear it for Craig Bierko's parody of the tedious family bonding scenes in War of the Worlds; a baboon driving a forklift; a bottle of Oblomov-brand vodka; the Elizabethan locutions in M. Night Shyamalan's village ("Jeremiah, ought not your tongue be held?") and a parody of Million Dollar Baby that would have been lethal if they'd just got the lighting right. (RvB)

Schizo
(Unrated; 86 min.) A Russian film set in Kazakstan. A teenager named Schizo gets involved in a brutal scheme to pay kids to allow themselves to be beaten.

Schizopolis
Full text review.

The School of Flesh
Full text review.

School of Rock
(PG-13; 110 min.) To pay off his mounting debt, frustrated rocker Dewey Finn (Jack Black) intercepts a phone call and assumes the identity of his substitute-teacher roommate. He lands in a upper-crust private school, where he schemes a way to win a local Battle of the Bands contest by converting his roomful of 10-year-old drips into rock stars. When he molds the kids to fit the proper (read: his) definition of rocking, it's pretty damn hysterical. Black takes the sweet elements he showed in Shallow Hal and mashes them together with the over-the-top histrionics of Tenacious D. School of Rock is Black's "Freebird" epiphany—all wild hair and awkward movements, spouting rock gibberish that somehow makes perfect sense. Two fists up and pumping. (TI)

Schultze Gets the Blues
Full text review.
(PG; 114 min.) Though it has a gentle underside to its saline humor, Schultze Gets the Blues is a comedy as bleak and dry as they come. Shooting with long lenses and long pauses, director Michael Schorr keeps even the happiest moments icy. I far prefer this to Napoleon Dynamite's own slothy comedy of depression, probably because the payoff is less winner-take-all. Schorr builds his situations, rather than just fading them into blackouts. Without coddling an audience, this movie makes its own warmth. (RvB)

Science Fiction Festival
Full text review.

Scooby-Doo
(PG; 87 min.) After a falling-out, the crew of Mystery Inc. reunites to examine strange goings-on at Spooky Island, an amusement park. Though the proverbial "meddling kids" expect to uncover yet another disgruntled employee under a sheet, the monsters turn out to be real and Lovecraftian for a change. The film may have been patently not worth making, but the result is not insufferable. Based on exhausted dreck to begin with, it had no place to go but up. The pace is quick enough, and Matthew Lillard's Shaggy is appealingly low-key. Freddie Prinze Jr. satirizes his own wooden acting as Fred. Sarah Michelle Gellar (as Daphne) is more cheerful than she's been on the last somber season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Linda Cardellini of the late-lamented TV show Freaks and Geeks plays the brainy one, Velma. Also appealing is Bill Boes' Pee-wee's Playhouse-style production design of Spooky Island (Boes also designed the novel sets for Monkeybone). Scooby-Doo is so unambitious it's hardly worth denouncing it as a waste of money. However, even the kids in the audience are starting to lose their fascination with farting and belching contests. (RvB)

Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
(PG; 85 min.) I have only one thing to say about this movie: We all know that the switch from fake monsters (the pull-off-the-mask-and-it- was-Old-Man-Jackass-all-along kind) to real monsters is what ruined Scooby Doo in the first place. What was cool about the original show (which, in case you never noticed when you were 7, was mostly just the same footage of the kids walking back and forth across the screen) was that it taught kids who were just learning that the world can be a scary place to be less afraid and more skeptical. It was also a great breeding ground for conspiracy theorists, and it was the only cartoon to address the importance of zoning and other land-use issues. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, these new Scooby movies suck. (Capsule preview by SP)

The Score
Full text review.

The Scorpion King
(PG-13; 90 min.) Can you smell the Rock's career heating up? The wrestling star reinvents the Conan sword-and-pectoral fantasy for a new century. Also stars Kelly Hu and Michael Clarke Duncan.

Scream
(R; 104 min.) Scream is a metaphor film, a movie about movies, and it's as enjoyable as a story about a masked killer of teenagers can be. The mayhem begins after Casey (Drew Barrymore in a cameo) is selected for a game of slasher-movie Trivial Pursuit. The attentions of the masked killer then turn to real heroine, Sydney (Neve Campbell). Scream intends to celebrate the genre and, at the same time, to avoid its pitfalls. Horror fans are mocked gently; Craven envisions the gore-hound audience, optimistically, as a high-spirited crowd of friends with popcorn and beer. Best of all is the staging of one attack, a palimpsest of the viewer and the viewed—we're watching characters watching characters watching characters. It's one thing to break the frame, but it's another thing to be able to repair it afterward. The film sums up director Wes Craven's career: too fine for his genre but not fine enough to leave it. Or maybe he doesn't want to—maybe he's decided, like Lucifer, better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. (RvB)

Scream 2
(R; 120 min.) Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven, the success of the Scream saga stems from its ability to gently mock the clichés of the slasher-movie genre as well as its fans. True to form, Scream 2 follows the strict rules of the slasher sequel by adding a higher body count and gorier death scenes. The smart storyline reunites the Scream survivors at a small Midwestern university two years after the Woodsboro incident. Tabloid journalist Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) has written a book which has been made into a movie appropriately called Stab. Three murders after the film's release, they realize it's happening again. With many cast members borrowed from prime time television, the characters immediately feel familiar; but audience favorite David Arquette steals the show as the boyish former-deputy Dewey Riley. This is an intelligent movie full of surprises, star cameos and wicked plot turns. Scream 2 is a fun, scary flick best viewed with a sense of humor and a friend. (SQ)

Scream 3
(R; 116 min.) Marketed as the concluding chapter in the Scream saga, director Wes Craven's Scream 3 plays its part well, but neither part two nor part three tops the original. The series revived the modern horror genre by putting its own clever spin on the tired, predictable clichés of its predecessors. Supposedly the last of the trilogy, Scream 3 follows the "rules" of a trilogy, citing Star Wars and The Godfather as examples. Set in the luxurious mansions and elaborate soundstages of Hollywood, Scream 3 presents a movie within a movie, telling the story of the filming of Stab 3, the third film in the fictitious Stab series, which is based on the Woodsboro murders. For every survivor of the Woodsboro murders is an actor playing that character in Stab 3. And killings start happening on the Woodsboro movie set. Scream 3 is dark and shadowy with blind camera angles that lend a tense feeling of suspense to the film. Its chilling, ghostly sequences are more dramatic and haunting than those in previous episodes. The new plot twists are intriguing enough, but there are lapses in the plot's consistency. Where Scream 3 languishes most is in its character development. The characters are almost incidental and are killed right and left with no motivation. The biggest crime is that Scream 3 has no Thelma and Louise-styled ending, and literally leaves the door for a sequel wide open in the final scene. (SQ)

Screamers
Full text review.
(R; 107 min.) A screamer is a small killing machine, or animal, or part animal-machine—I never got this part straight—that burrows beneath its victims and then bursts out of the ground, buzz-saw blades whirring. Screamers is a full cut above most entries in the technology-gone-bad genre. It's long on suspense and relatively short on mayhem. Director Christian Duguay has a spectacular visual sense, and weary hero Peter Weller is much more convincing in this kind of nonsense than Stallone or Arnold. The plot has bigger holes than the ones the Screamers suck their victims down into, but if you're going to complain about something like that then you're better off avoiding movies like this in the first place. (AB)

Screwed
(PG-13; 90 min.) Shock comic Norm Macdonald is a funny presence on late-night talk shows with his off-the-cuff and frequently bleeped-out remarks, a welcome break from the plastic movie plugging and trite McAnecdotes of most talk-show celebrity guests these days. But Macdonald can't carry a film and is a bore as the lead in the unfunny, dreadful Screwed, the directorial debut of the screenwriting duo of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Man on the Moon). Sick of being pushed around by his unsympathetic baked-goods-magnate boss (overqualified stage actress Elaine Stritch), an underpaid chauffeur (Macdonald) plots to get even by kidnapping the boss' cherished dog for ransom, with the help of his clumsy best friend (Dave Chappelle). But the scheme backfires, and the not-too-bright amateur extortionists' attempt to cover their tracks only makes things worse, leading to a series of convoluted plot developments that will confuse even the parents who have to take their 11-year-olds to this repugnant retread of gross-out gags from There's Something About Mary. The Farrelly brothers should sue. (JA)

Scrooged
(1988) A holiday classic of sorts. Bill Murray leads an eccentric cast that includes Carol Kane, Karen Allen, Mary Lou Retton, Jamie Garr and Robert Mitchum) in a variant telling of the Dickens tale. (MSG)

The Sea
Full text review.

Seabiscuit
Full text review.

The Sea Hawk(1924)/The Sea Hawk(1940)
The 1924 Sea Hawk is the silent version of Sabatini's novel about a nobleman turned pirate. Dennis James plays the Stanford's Wurlitzer. BILLED WITH the better-known remake, featuring Errol Flynn. The film is a thinly veiled piece of propaganda aimed at overcoming America's isolationism, urging the nation to support the arming of England against the Nazis, disguised as the Spanish Empire here. (Speeches by Flora Robson's Queen Elizabeth, saying that England will fight "to the last ship and the last man," helped make this a favorite movie of Winston Churchill's.) As a result of this epic's sense of purpose, it's a slower, waxier film than Flynn's earlier Captain Blood. Flynn is alert here; he wasn't a bad actor, just careless sometimes. The terrific second hour includes a brass-tinted sequence of a jungle ordeal in Panama and a mutiny on a galley ship. The finale is a lethal sword fight between Flynn and Henry Daniell, with the blades whistling and the furniture smashing; it's less a ballet than a dead-earnest brawl—and it's a high point of cinematic fencing. The cast includes Brenda Marshall, later William Holden's wife. She's a ravishing nonactress who, one guesses, must have been stunning in the still photographs. Robson, re-creating her role as Elizabeth from Fire Over England, looks nicely like Carol Burnett and seems to be very sweet on Flynn's Captain Thorpe. As the evil Spanish ambassador, Claude Rains is costumed in the widow's peak, pointed beard, black velvet doublet and honeycombed ruff of Lucifer in a French art-nouveau poster—presumably he was talked out of wearing goat legs for the role. (RvB)

The Sea Inside
Full text review.
(PG-13; 125 min.) Javier Bardem gives a warm and humane portrayal of a quadriplegic searching for a dignified death. Director Alejandro Amenábar (The Others) directed this true-life story of Ramón Sampedro, a ship's mechanic paralyzed after a dive in the ocean. For almost 30 years, Ramón—living in an upstairs room on his family's small farm—fought his relatives and the government of Spain for the right to end his life. His lawyer in the case, Julia (Belen Ruleda), takes a particular interest, as she too sufferers from a potentially fatal malady. The two are drawn to each other with a connection that goes beyond the upcomi