Alan Rudolph, Seattle Loves You!

Director Alan Rudolph is like the American Eric Rohmer--he's made a career out of making the films he can make, and whether you think of them as small, indie, or arthouse, they're almost always watchable, engaging studies of people in particular places.

Yet in his way, contra Rohmer, he's as stylized as Mamet--you can tell a Rudolph film by the emotional distance of the protagonists, their literate wit, the shellacked look of the men's hair. (In the first two instances, he's the cine-godfather of Whit Stillman.) Whatever genre he has chosen to work in each time, the results are best preceded by "off-kilter."

SIFF's "Next Stop Rain City" mini-retrospective this weekend brings six of Rudolph's films, with double-features on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at SIFF Cinema at McCaw Hall.

Friday is the "striking and indelible" noir Remember My Name starring Anthony Perkins as the sane one, plus Choose Me, a sex comedy and guide to falling for Geneviève Bujold. Saturday brings the thriller-ish Trouble in Mind and the slice-of-Scott-Fitzgerald The Moderns, and Sunday, Julie Christie and Nick Nolte heat up Afterglow and Bruce Willis stars in the "painful to watch" Breakfast of Champions.

The Moderns has, as a side benefit, a truly beautiful Paris jazz-inflected soundtrack. Cannily, SIFF has paired one of Rudolph's acknowledged personal bests, Afterglow, with the roundly panned Kilgore Trout vehicle.