On this episode of the podcast, we speed through brief reviews of 18 summer movies, including the new film by M. Night Shyamalan called The Happening.

Like the wheels of a big rig, each of these films has a different size, shape, color, and decibel level. Some are clearly overinflated, some might benefit from an injection of air, and some have nails driven into them by rivals who are sick and tired of a driver who lets his speed fluctuate so wildly. Some are shaded by mud flaps with shapely women silhouetted in chrome, others by Yosemite Sam who urges you and yours to call an 800 number if you see the driver texting from the wheel, immediately, using your mobile carefully as you try to draft off of this erratic mofo. Some, frankly, have been reduced to flayed strips of rubber and stirred with unlucky, misshapen armadillos on the shoulder, but not by the likes of us.

Eighteen wheels from a thirty-ought-six, comin' straight at ya. Eighteen full and considered film reviews, conceived not at all hastily but presented as though they were, an illusion accomplished not with mirrors but by speaking at double the accepted conversational rate. Consider yourself forewarned.

Subscribe in iTunes and you'll get a program with the following chapter stops built-in for easy jumping, complete with links to the appropriate trailers:

0:00 Intro
1:35 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg)
10:07 The Happening (Shyamalan)
15:09 Kung Fu Panda (Foshko)
17:01 My Winnipeg (Maddin)
20:06 Mongol (Bodrov)
22:54 War, Inc. (Seftel)
24:49 Roman de gare (Lelouch)
28:37 Speed Racer (Wachowski & Wachowski)
31:03 Iron Man (Favreau)
35:21 Redbelt (Mamet)
38:24 Shotgun Stories (Nichols)
41:34 Son of Rambow (Jennings)
43:50 Reprise (Trier)
46:08 Three Films by Rivette, Breillat, and Assayas
49:47 Young@Heart (Walker)
55:18 Stuck (Gordon)
57:20 "The end is important in all things"
58:29 Outro

On this episode of the podcast, J. Robert Parks talks with filmmaker Errol Morris about his new film, Standard Operating Procedure, then we reconsider the film to see if our comments from Episode 16 hold up in light of the interview, a second viewing, and Morris's writings and public statements.

0:00 Intro
3:52 Interview: Errol Morris
20:13 Interview (continued): "I like trouble"
27:24 Interview (continued): "A problem with my art"
32:42 Rob's Second Viewing
38:12 Depicting Atrocities: Resnais, Lanzmann, Farocki
43:32 External Ideas: The Drop of Blood
44:58 Ambiguous Stance: Morris's Voice
48:36 The Title: Threading the Needle
49:54 Cynical View vs. Benefit of the Doubt
52:14 Give Me Thoughts, Let Me Think
57:01 The Distracting Beauty of Images
1:00:33 Outro

On this episode of the podcast, we're talking about three movies that are currently playing in theaters around the country: The Visitor, Stop-Loss, and Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, and we'll also hear a brief interview with the writer and director of The Visitor, Thomas McCarthy.

0:00 Intro
2:12 The Visitor (McCarthy)
9:31 Film Critic as Consumer Guide
12:37 Interview: Thomas McCarthy
20:59 Stop-Loss (Peirce)
27:32 Standard Operating Procedure (Morris)
45:40 Outro and Photo Caption Contest Winners

As usual, our takes on these movies should be considered definitive and absolute. Except, well, next time, we'll see if more recent events — J. Robert's interview with Morris in Chicago, Rob's re-viewing of the film in San Francisco, and Morris's essays and comments on the film — have changed our view of Standard Operating Procedure.

UPDATE (1 June 2008): Episode 17 features a followup discussion of Standard Operating Procedure, including an interview with the director.

I skipped last week's "Now Showing" because of the San Francisco International Film Festival, although I filed reviews of David Mamet's jiu-jitsu movie, Redbelt, and the British comedy Son of Rambow over at Paste. Opening in theaters this week is the garish, retro, futuristic, earnest, campy, swift, turgid, and exceedingly contradictory Speed Racer. I'm delighted that Paste no longer requires reviewers to assign a star rating to a movie or album; this one might have been tricky.

By delivering important information in aggressively brief bursts, Speed Racer seems to test the limits of human perception, and it's doing this to tell a dumb, insincere story and tickle the neurons of 8-year-olds. How best to boil that disjunction into a number? Don't know, not my problem. The negative reviews are the most fun to read (Hoberman, Edelstein, Lane), but Scott Tobias's torn reaction is closer to my own feeling. He gives Speed Racer a C.

My own review is one of four or five that could have been whittled from my post-screening notes. Here's an also-ran: I happened to see the film within a couple of days of watching Béla Tarr's The Man from London at the SFIFF.

No, really, you go on without me. I'll hang back at the camp with a good book.

On this episode of the podcast, we're talking about the films of Michael Haneke. He sometimes seems to be making the same film over and over with intriguing variations. His latest, Funny Games — the story of a family that is tormented for a few hours by a couple of white-gloved hooligans — has even fewer of those variations than usual, but the obvious repetition certainly fits among his usual obsessions.

0:00 Intro
2:58 Clip: Funny Games (2007)
3:47 Funny Games Remade
9:07 Caché (2005), Serge Daney on Perspective
17:37 Benny's Video (1992)
19:35 The Seventh Continent (1998)
21:03 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
23:18 Time of the Wolf (2003)
32:30 Time of the Wolf and Funny Games
36:16 Funny Games as a Loop
39:41 Examples of Rigor
44:05 A Different Kind of Watching
49:47 The Piano Teacher (2001)
50:17 Code Unknown (2000)
52:58 Places to Start

54:06 Revisiting Funny Games
56:52 Misremembering Movies
58:37 Revisiting Benny's Video
1:02:38 Absorbing Violence
1:06:13 Cleaning Up
1:08:42 What are we really like?
1:11:07 Outro

Coming Up: A discussion of Errol Morris's new film, Standard Operating Procedure and an interview with the filmmaker.

See below for a list of films currently in theaters, conveniently organized with the cream at the top.

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival opens Thursday night and runs for two weeks. It's a strong lineup this year, but just six weeks ago I was still a little uncertain.

On March 10 the Film Society announced the name of the film that would be the "centerpiece" of this year's festival and injected a little worry into the pit of my stomach, a sheep shank in my galley, you might say, especially if you're a fake seaman. In a city that prides itself on varied and voluminous film screenings all year long, the SFIFF is still the flagship. It's a large festival — the first on this continent, actually — and although it suffered a bout of acute melancholia at the turn of the century, it seems to have been set aright by festival director Graham Leggat. It's the standard bearer for the city's culture of cinema. San Franciscans who care about movies guard it jealously.

Which is all the more reason for a local cinephile to worry that the festival will somehow compromise its programming whenever the economy hits rough waters, perhaps by resorting to big, dumb Hollywood movies in a desperate need to sell tickets.

UPDATE: I've also filed Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed below.