News:

Academy Awards! I don’t know what it is—no massively embarrassing contenders for best picture, a writer’s strike that successfully curtailed hysteria season, a colorful presidential primary—but I’m having trouble getting worked up about the Oscars this year. I’ll post my predictions tomorrow or Sunday afternoon, but for now, I give you this badly edited NYT forecast (why does Carr talk about Diving Bell randomly in a category it wasn’t nominated for?)—because he was right on Crash—and Jeffrey Wells—because it’s short.

And, just for the next couple of hours: If you’re doing a movie times search for a Landmark/Seven Gables theater (that’s the Crest, Egyptian, Guild 45th, Harvard Exit, Metro, Neptune, Seven Gables, and the Varsity), don’t use our site. We got some bad data, and I’m trying to fix it, but I’m not there yet. Here’s Landmark’s Seattle page for now.

Opening this week:

From On Screen: the Michel Gondry film Be Kind Rewind (Charles Mudede: “None of this makes sense, none of it is bad, and none of it is as impressive as Eternal Sunshine. What can we call this kind of movie? A very strange fish”), the teen movie Charlie Bartlett (Andrew Wright: “Writer Gustin Nash’s greatest coup may be in the creation of the title character, who comes off as a throwback to the genre’s glory days: smart without being preternaturally wise, cool without seeming forced, and endearing without skimping on the vaguely dickheaded tendencies that made the likes of Ferris Bueller and the kid brother from Just One of the Guys so iconic”), the political thriller Vantage Point (Bradley Steinbacher: “Vantage Point aims to add a little Rashomon to the standard template. It misses the mark badly, resulting in a clunky, unnecessarily complicated thriller that never earns the gimmick of endless repetition it forces the audience to sit through”), the Alabama period piece Honeydripper (me: “John Sayles is good at magnifying details until they look the size of legends, but he’s no good at lengthening moments until they feel like sweaty Southern afternoons, thick with insects and resentment. Honeydripper is long (over two hours), but it doesn’t feel spacious. It feels hopelessly crammed”), and the horror triptych The Signal (Steinbacher again: “You can’t help but wish the directors had abandoned the three-director stunt in order to maintain the near-perfection established in the first act”).

Limited runs:

At Grand Illusion, the Rural Route Film Festival (including the SIFF repeat Huldufolk 102) and the late-night sexploitation film Pets, for real this time; at Northwest Film Forum, the excellent The Cool School: How L.A. Learned to Love Modern Art and a documentary about the making of a piano, Note by Note; at SIFF Cinema, a bad movie about erotic cookery, Eden; at the Market Theater in Post Alley, a marathon festival of short films by and about women; and at Cinerama, the immortal Tron in 70 mm.

Also, at the Varsity, starting today and running through Thursday at 4:45, 7:15, and 9:20 pm (with an extra 2:30 show on Sat-Sun), Alice’s House:

The lovely, intelligent actress Carla Ribas plays Alice, a middle-aged manicurist living in a crowded São Paulo apartment with her three sons, her mother, and her philandering husband. To the continual hum of the television set and a beloved astrological radio show, Alice’s mother cooks and cleans up after her flock, pretending she doesn’t notice glaring evidence of her son-in-law’s misbehavior. The boys tussle with one another and hustle on the side, as a particularly brazen young lady stops by to ask Alice for potions to seduce married men. Meanwhile, Alice’s husband is constantly trying to put her mother in a nursing home, apparently oblivious to the fact that the old lady takes care of all his laundry. Documentarian Chico Teixeira’s first narrative film is casual but busy, and though it seems somewhat longer than its 90-minute running time, the quiet characterizations soon get their hooks into you. (ANNIE WAGNER)