Opening this week, and concerning a number of topics that tend to excite Slog commenters—Portland, skate parks, sexuality—is Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park.

Charles Mudede writes this loving review:

Van Sant hired Wong Kar Wai’s leading cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, and his protégé, Rain Kathy Li (Van Sant worked with Doyle a decade ago on a bad Hollywood project). In Paranoid Park, the photography, music, and editing (rather than the acting and writing) are mostly responsible for capturing the fleeting and timeless moments. The camera relentlessly searches for them, and when it finds them, the editing sacrifices the movement of the plot and the dialogue for a moment with someone’s soft lips, golden hair, knowing eyes, stride down the hall, drive through the rain, run across a bridge, ride on the side of a train, glide down a concrete wall, and walk toward a beach, toward the Pacific Ocean, toward the end of the world. We are imperfect but we have our shining moments.

In On Screen this week: David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels (me: “Every time this dismal story threatens to suffocate the movie, Green shifts back to one of the freshest, most adorable teenage seductions ever put to film”; I also have a Q&A with Green—only on the web), a fictionalized life story of Adam Carolla entitled The Hammer (Brendan Kiley: “It’s boilerplate—but it’s sweet, knowing boilerplate. The Hammer, like Carolla, stoops to conquer”), and Ira Sach’s Married Life (me: It’s a “sometimes amusing but more often wooden film about postwar adultery”). Last but not to be overlooked is the batshit crazy Water (me: “As far as I can tell, Water is being used to sell bottled ‘water with intention’ under the brand H2Om”), from one of the producers of What the Bleep Do We Know.

For further reading: my classic review of the “director’s cut” of What the Bleep Do We Know, “Dance, Ramtha, Dance!” And a Q&A with the one legit scientist who was featured in that film. There are none, as far as I can tell, in Water.

Also in the film section this week: Sean Nelson reports from SXSW Film Festival, where Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton premiered her new film, My Effortless Brilliance, starring and co-written by Sean, Basil Harris, Calvin Reeder, and Jeanette Maus.

And in Concessions, Lindy West wanders down to Pike Place Market during a Hollywood invasion.

There are a whole bunch of reviews hidden away in Limited Runs this week. Check out the Global Lens Series at SIFF Cinema (we’ve got reviews of Bunny Chow, The Bet Collector, and The Fish Fall in Love); Funky Forest: The First Contact at Grand Illusion; The Killing of John Lennon, The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, King Corn, and Senator Obama Goes to Africa at Northwest Film Forum; the relatively nuanced coming-out tale Shelter at the Varsity; and Vajra Sky Over Tibet at Seattle Asian Art Museum. Next week, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes shows at the Metro and the politico vampire doc Impaler returns to STIFF Nights at Central Cinema.