Here we are at the last week of SIFF (*sniffle*). All of us at The SunBreak weigh in with our picks and pans of the festival films we saw this weekend.

MVB:  Based on Cell 211, it looks like somebody in Spain has been watching Oz. It’s a dark, brutal, bloody prison riot parable with Basque terrorist spice that left people stunned (today, 4 p.m. @ Neptune).  Imani is a walking-paced Ugandan movie, charting post-war life through three different story threads. Subtle, but it builds (June 11, 4:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit). I almost skipped The Tillman Story; now I’m very, very glad I didn’t. Feels like I finally got a real glimpse of that guy. Downside: complete disgust with U.S. military command. Ondine is a fairy tale about how directors like to cast super-hot Romanian girls to wear lingerie. Sigur Ros songs suggest artistic depth! Ireland looks nice, though (June 13, 11:30 a.m. @ Pacific Place).

Audrey saw three heavy docs this weekend: David Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman, about the overwhelming failure of the American public school system, is simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking.  Look for it to win the Best Documentary Oscar come next February.  The Tillman Story, about the search for truth behind the myth of the most famous man to serve and die in Iraq, was only slightly less of a well-made downer.  So by comparison, Garbo the Spy, about the greatest double agent freelance spy ever, was downright fun–yes, even though it culminates in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.  Thankfully, Meet Monica Velour was there to lighten the mood. It’s obvious to say that this awkward teen’s romancing of a washed-up porn star (played dead-on by Kim Cattrall) is cinematic cousins with Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, but there’s more to Keith Bearden’s film than just simple quirks.

Josh: Somewhat surprisingly, I think that my favorite film of the weekend was Leaves of Grass, another Edward Norton split personality triumph, that takes the themes of a a Greek tragedy and wraps it in the cloak of a pot comedy. Norton is hilarious in both roles, with strong folksy charm from Tim Blake Nelson (who also wrote and directed), Keri Russell, and Susan Sarandon. The film starts as a light comedic contrast between twin brothers with very different career paths, but things get more and more intense once the classics professor is tricked into returning to small-town Oklahoma, where he has to deal with unresolved family drama and gets wrapped up in a convoluted hydroponic marijuana operation.

Fans of the band are the most likely to relish Strange Powers, the Stephin Merritt documentary (today with Merritt in attendance, 4 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema). While the filmmakers aren’t able to pry too deeply below his famously cantankerous surface, the directors do a fine job of making a concert film that also chronicles the history, trajectory, and interpersonal dynamics that have made the Magnetic Fields so well-loved. Of local interest is the brief section on the infamous EMP Pop Conference “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah” rockist-racist blogger fiasco, complete with a mea culpa from Sasha Frere-Jones. Though the film necessarily required artist approval, it doesn’t come across as too sugar-coated and should make a nice companion to Stephin’s live performance this week during 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (June 9, 7:30 p.m. @ Paramount).

For so many beautiful people, Going South was a very broody beach movie. A mysterious pair of twins, a hitchhiker, and an older man on a personal quest hit the road, drive across France, and have trouble keeping their clothes on. Aside from the childhood flashbacks, most of it seems to occur under golden hour sunlight or near flattering firesides to provide ample eye candy to counterbalance the loose plot (June 10, 9:30 p.m. @ Egyptian; June 13, 4 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema).

Utopia in Four Movements acts as a melancholy monologue with live music in front of a requiem montage. Sam Green gave an effective talk about high hopes and failed ambitions clicking through a photo and video slide deck, while Dave Cerf hid out in the back of the theater manipulating the soundtrack to fit with the stories of invented languages, shopping malls, forensic anthropology, and revolution. Seeing a documentary presented with an in-person narrator invited reconsideration of the form and may have inspired some in the audience to put more effort into their next corporate presentation.

Garbo the Spy was a mind-boggling true story about a master of deception who helped win WWII, told over old a kaleidoscope of old war films, archival footage, and propaganda reels. The narrators are identified only halfway through and the story took dramatic and unexpected turns, keeping the audience off-balance and continually astounded by the ingenuity of the spy and the historic importance of his espionage.

Reykjavik-Rotterdam is a slow-burning, almost understated drug-running thriller. I can see why Mark Wahlberg is anxious to redevelop it for American audiences, though I can imagine that something might get lost in translation (today, 7 p.m. @ Kirkland Performance Center).  Meanwhile, every SIFF has to have its utter dud, and for me this was big-budget Agora, which sacrificed subtlety and sound editing for set design. The take-home message: like this this movie, angry Christian mobs are THE WORST.

Tony: Double Take marked my first outright disappointment with a SIFF presentation. It’s an odd experimental pastiche in which Alfred Hitchcock (starring via archival clips and a little bit of CGI trickery) faces his doppelganger amidst the Cold War. Its seams as a former short-film show: the Hitchcock and Cold War elements just don’t gel.