Friends, we have reached the point in the epic Seattle International Film Festival where the count of days left has entered the single digit. If you squint, you can almost see the finish line, but there’s still plenty of popcorn and cinema to enjoy. Before you dash off to your next screening, be sure to check the SIFF updates page to see which films are already sold out or are selling fast. Individual tickets for most films cost $11 for the public and $9 for SIFF members. Matinées are a bit cheaper ($8/$7) and those who are more willing to commit can consider all sorts of passes still for sale as well as slightly discounted packs of tickets in bundles of 6 or 20.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the films Team SunBreak has watched in the past couple of days as well as the films that we’re most looking forward to seeing over the next couple days. Note that this weekend the Festival celebrates having made it past the halfway point with a gala presentation of Service Entrance, in which a bourgeois French couple hires a Spanish maid who’s good at cooking eggs (Friday, 6:00 p.m. @ Egyptian + party following at the D.A.R. Hall) .

WHAT WE SAW:

MvB hopes you saw Bibliothèque Pascal already, because its festival screenings are past. Hungarian director-writer-actor Szabolcs Hajdu has created an exuberant work of cinema that somehow connects Ken Loach with Fellini–it’s at once a fable about the sex trafficking of Central European women, a profound critique of the use of story, and a picaresque exploration of “getting by” in Romania. Moments of visual delirium jostle with its unprejudiced perspectives on its all-too-human characters. Accept its leisurely pace, and you’ll be rewarded.

The Names of Love is actually even better than its screwball set-up suggests. Baya is an Algerian-French leftist who has decided to seduce right-wingers into gaucherie, realizing that rational argument gets you nowhere. But screenwriter team Michel Leclerc and Baya Kasmi find troubling real-world antecedents for Baya and her Jospiniste love, Arthur Martin, and use a stinging comedy to probe the old wounds that still disturb new France. (June 3, 1:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place).

Chances are very good that your heart would be thoroughly melted by Simple Simon, a Swedish film about a matchmaking young man with Asperger’s. Feeling responsible for his brother’s recent break-up, Simon designs a questionnaire and scours the town for his brother’s match (Must Like Aspies). Son of Stellan, Bill Skarsgård keeps Simon somewhat true to Asperger life, though the film’s plot does not–unless very hot, impossibly sweet Swedish women really do go for extra-socially withdrawn types, in which case, MvB’s flight departs in 3…2…1. (all screenings passed, but it’s so popular, it has to show up at an arthouse theater near you in the future)

The Russian Men of a Certain Age, Gromozeka catches up with three men who used to have a band in high school, in increasingly embattled middle age. One’s a taxi driver who thinks his daughter has quit college for porn, another is an adulterous surgeon, and a third is dead wood on the police force and also in his marriage bed. Sometimes intersecting, their stories define diminishing expectations, so that a resigned fatalism comes as a sort of uplift. (today, 4 p.m. @ Pacific Place; June 4, 8:30 p.m. @ Kirkland Perf. Ctr.)

The impact of The White Meadows, out of Iran, is hard to separate from the jailing of its director (Mohammad Rasoulof) and editor (Jafar Panahi) for being critical of the regime. Slow-moving and enigmatic, it’s an allegory for the constraints and persecutions of belief systems that not all may share. A man travels around the shores of a salty sea, collecting tears from people who live there, and observing deaths, sacrifice, and scapegoating. The surreal salt formations of Iran’s Lake Urmia are stunning, but it’s the film’s quiet outrage that leaves the theatre with you. (June 4, 6 p.m. @ Kirkland Perf. Ctr.; June 8, 4:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)

Tony: Flamenco Flamenco presents almost two-dozen performances by some of Spain’s finest flamenco guitarists, singers, and dancers. It was listed as a documentary on SIFF.net, but it’s really pure performance bliss. Carlos Saura directs with unobtrusive fluidity, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro shoots the performers with enough voluptuous beauty to induce swoons at fifty paces.

The slick and stylish German vampire flick We Are the Night grafts Near Dark or The Lost Boys with the Euro-chic sensibility of La Femme Nikita, as a young street urchin becomes a va-va-voom vampiress. It’s paced like lightning, incredibly entertaining, and done so well that some committee of U.S. hacks is sure to co-opt it for the requisite crappy Americanized remake.

Like Audrey, Tony also took in Shut Up! Little Man: An Audio Misadventure. The story starts out surreal and amusing, then dredges up a lot of interesting issues regarding intellectual property and the nature of art itself (is selling a Xerox of a foul-mouthed alcoholic’s death certificate through the mail art, just plain icky, or both?).

Yeah, you can pretty much label the Canadian import Vampire a horror movie, but it’s way more interested in the psychological workings of serial killer Simon as he lures already-suicidal girls into giving him their blood…all of it. This spiritual kin to George Romero’s underrated 1976 film Martin sports a surprisingly good performance by Gossip Girl’s Kevin Zegers at its center, and Japanese director Iwai Shunji covers the territory with leisurely artistry. That said, it contains one scene disturbing enough to allegedly clear half-a-house during one SIFF screening, though the SunBreak’s resident B-movie evangelist has seen much, much worse. (Sunday, 8:30 p.m. @ Admiral)

Serge Gainsbourg spent his childhood as a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France; achieved meteoric superstardom in his native land as a singer and songwriter; influenced a couple of generations of musicians; bedded one of the most mythically-beautiful women to walk the earth (Brigitte Bardot); and lived a life of quintessential excess. That’s plenty of fuel for the biopic fire. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life pretty much gives its subject the Cliffs’ Notes treatment, but Eric Elmosnino absolutely nails the title role, the period details are right-on, and the music remains unimpeachably cool. (today, 4 p.m. @ Admiral; June 7,  8:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)

You can’t accuse Bellflower of adhering to formula. Writer/director/star Evan Glodell’s debut feature throws slacker romance, laughs, Mad Max references, Memento-style chronological hopscotch, and bursts of sex and ultraviolence into one sun-bleached and fascinating package. Messy, riveting, and unpredictable stuff.

Finally, Alex Gibney of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room fame continues his documentary winning streak by co-directing Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, an immersive and slyly-engaging chronicle of the Sixties Counterculture’s hallucinogen-stoked birth on a psychedelic school bus. Stay tuned for more details in Tony’s interview with Gibney, posting soon. (Saturday, 4:15 p.m. @ Egyptian)

Josh: returned from Sasquatch Music Festival exile in time to catch a screening of Wasted on the Young, a hyper-stylized morality play. Existing in the heightened reality of an Australian private school apparently devoid of adult supervision, the film finds swim team stepbrothers on opposite sides of the popularity spectrum. The central conflict of arises at a loud party, booze, and date rape drugs at the sprawling house ruled by the swim captain brother. Consequences, maintenance of the social hierarchy, and prospects for vengeance play out in a fragmented narrative that hops seamlessly through time and fantasy elements. An interesting, if not entirely successful, take on the serious business of surviving adolescence in an era heavy with social media. (June 4, 1:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)

Roger: Last Saturday at Harvard Exit, director Richard Knox Robinson took the stage to introduce his SIFF entry, Rothstein’s First Assignment. “It’s an, uh, unconventional documentary, but stay with it,” he said. “It’s very personal to me.” Robinson attempts in this short film to recap the oft-told story of a Depression-era resettlement of several West Virginia families to make room for Shenandoah National Park. There is no doubt that this particular case, and that of the Tennessee Valley Authority resettlements, were handled in a way we now, with hindsight, bristle at. Robinson feigns outrage and starts swinging for someone to blame. The direction is spotty and the whole feel is amateurish, due in part to a vast misreading of intentions and sources. And why in heaven’s name is the director using scenes of Beverly Hillbillies? Are they to blame?

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:

Friday, June 3

• Route Irish Neither Irish nor routine! A former member of Britain’s elite S.A.S. fighting force discovers and seeks to uncover the particulars of a civilian murder in post-invasion Iraq and the suspicious death of his friend in an I.E.D. attack. (7:00 p.m. @ Admiral; Sunday, 11:00 a.m. @ Neptune)
• Project Nim Whenever you bring a monkey into your home — even if it’s for science — hijinks, hilarious and unsettling occur. A documentary on the 1970s experiment to see if raising a chimp like a child would turn it into a human. (7:00 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; Sunday,  1:30 p.m. @ Egyptian)
• Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life see above. (4:00 p.m. @ Admiral; June 7,  8:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)
• Salvation Boulevard Pierce Brosnan plays an evangelical pastor with real estate dreams. Ambitions of parlaying his mega-church into a mega-development get sidetracked with an accidental killing and zany attempts to pass the buck to Deadhead Greg Kinnear. (9:15 p.m. @ Egyptian; Sunday, 1:00 p.m. @ Admiral)
• Small Town Murder Songs Murder among the Mennonites as solved by a born-again sheriff, mysteriously estranged from his former community. (9:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit; Sunday, 1:30 pm @ Harvard Exit)
• Detention A high-school horror caper, featuring all of the required meta-humor, romantic polygons, and suspenseful intrigue. The description warns of bloody violence, nudity, and strong language, which sounds like a selling point for a adrenaline and comedy hungry Friday night at the movies. (9:30 p.m. @ Neptune; Sunday, 9:15 p.m. @ Egyptian)
• The Whisperer in Darkness is another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation from director Sean Branney. Branney’s excellent silent film Call of Cthulhu can be viewed on Hulu, and if Whisperer‘s half as good it could provide the Festival’s finest burst of Gothic retro magic. (Midnight @ Egyptian; Sunday, 9:00 p.m. @ Neptune)

Saturday, June 4

• Tornado Alley A timely look at the destructive forces that made Twister a hit and the American southeast a disaster zone. Narrated by Bill Paxton (of course) and presented in eye-popping IMAX. (11:45 a.m.; also: June  6, 7:15 pm @ Pacific Science Center)
• Fire in Babylon Cricketeers of the Caribbean! A documentary of the rise to prominence of the 1970s West Indies cricket team. (11:00 a.m. @ Neptune; June 6, 6:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)
• Norman Another shot at this story about a kid pretending to have cancer to solve all of his social and romantic problems.  (1:00 p.m. @ Neptune)
  
• Amador Another chance to see a desperate pregnant woman taking care of a dead man. Nods to Almodovar abound. (1:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place)
• Wasted on the Young (June 4, 1:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit).
• Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (Saturday, 4:15 p.m. @ Egyptian)
• Clink of Ice If you like the French OSS comedies, you might like this one about a guy who hangs around with the spirit of his cancer. Like Waiting for Godot with more metastasis? (4:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place; June 8, 6:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)
• Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre On Tour At SIFF last year, Kerthy Fix followed around Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields. She’s back this time with a documentary of Riot Grrl punk trailblazers touring the world in 2005. (9:30 p.m. @ Neptune; June 7, 4:30 p.m. @ Egyptian)
• PressPausePlay The digital revolution is changing art and making it more accessible, but no one’s sure whether that’s such a good thing. Explore within. (3:30 p.m. @ Kirkland; June 7, 9:15 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; June 10, 4:30 p.m. @ Neptune)

Sunday, June 5

• Killing Bono After you see U2 at Qwest Field on Saturday, look back at the story of the band’s beginning as “the Hype” and their crosstown rivals “Yeah! Yeah”. One band became one of the biggest on the planet, the other spawned this memoir. (1:30 p.m. @ Neptune; June 8, 9:15 p.m. @ Admiral)
• The Green Wave A multimodal document of the fallout following the 2009 elections in Iran that had people from all over setting their Twitter location to Tehran. (4:00 p.m. @ Harvard Exit; June 6, 7:00 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
• Snow White A modern ballet takes on the classic story of a girl, a prince, and her tiny housemates, all dressed up in Jean Paul Gaultier. (6:30 p.m. @ Neptune)
• Vampire (8:30 p.m. @ Admiral)