News:

Wee but savvy Picturehouse may merge with struggling distribution label Warner Independent Pictures.

Nicole Kidman is set to play Dusty Springfield in a biopic written by—uh oh—Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Evening).

Paul Verhoeven thinks Jesus was the product of a rape!

Opening this week:

You have precisely one week to see the following image on the big screen (at the Varsity):

Charles Mudede reviews Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s tribute to the beloved ’50s French film The Red Balloon, which recently got a handsome DVD release from Criterion. Charles takes advantage of this opportunity to write about why we go to foreign films: “The class of people who frequently watch foreign-language films must not be separated from those who frequently travel to faraway places to experience other worlds. The foreign-film lover is a species of this larger type, the tourist, with the sole exception that he/she doesn’t travel far to see strange things, wonderful places, bizarre habits.”

And in the print edition of On Screen this week, the no-good, very-bad rom com Made of Honor (me: “Do not make me address the abhorrent pun in the title”—though I kind of wish I had written: “Made of Honor is made of poop”), Helen Hunt’s directorial debut Then She Found Me (Paul Constant: “It’s hard to imagine anyone clamoring for Helen Hunt’s directorial debut [outside of Helen Hunt, of course]”), and—oh my goodness, this one isn’t excruciating—the dark pop musical Love Songs (me: “The film never fails to fascinate, if only for the exceedingly French way it deals with ethnic types, from comic lines about Ismaël the uncircumcised Jew and Erwann the gay Breton to self-consciously sober shots of more exotic immigrants passing silently in the streets”).

Only to be found online this week is Andrew Wright’s review of Iron Man (“The megabucks cinematic adaptation is pleasant enough, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of its almost obscenely qualified and willing cast”).

Also online only: The DVD column returns! For an issue. Here is the inimitable Michael Atkinson on the stop-motion auteur Ray Harryhausen: “Unlike CGIs, Harryhausen’s homely behemoths obey the same laws of movement that constrain the actors, and inhabit the same space, turf, gravity, and sunlight. Their three-dimensionality is not illusory, and their hesitant, abruptly animalistic, unblurred motions remain qualmy and loaded with frisson.”

Lindy West went to the Seattle Polish Film Festival last weekend, and found more stop-motion genius. Scarecrow Video would like you to know that, no matter what the Seattle Polish Film Festival asserts, they do have a copy of The Tale of the Fox. It’s PAL, though, so for region-free players only.

Tucked away in Limited Runs this week is every single movie playing at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival. Quite a few filmmakers are attending, and the info is noted in the film short—I’m told Everything’s Cool director Judith Helfand is quite entertaining. Also: Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Egyptian, NWFF’s Duel of the Cool—pitting the Jean-Paul Belmondo of Le Doulos against the Marcello Mastroianni of 8 1/2, the nutso Japanese creation Maiko Haaaaan!!! at the Grand Illusion, Four Sheets to the Wind and more in Northwest Folklife’s City Folk Film Series at SIFF Cinema, the “sweet, nostalgic” Graduation at the Varsity, Rawstock at ACT Theatre, Young Frankenstein at Central Cinema, and, starting again Tuesday, more United Artists films at SIFF Cinema, including Marty, In the Heat of the Night, and Night of the Hunter.

For all your movie times needs, use ours.