Hanging and Banging

This year's festival literally begins and ends with a bang, as both the opening and closing features involve Jake "Donnie Darko" Gyllenhaal gettin' his groove thang on with an older woman -- Catherine Keener in Lovely & Amazing, and Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl. Just as any thinking man would pick the edgy Keener over the blandly charming Aniston, so too should you pick Lovely & Amazing of the two. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener's follow-up to Walking and Talking boasts Keener's best performance to date, and also features standout turns by Emily Mortimer, Brenda Blethyn and nine-year-old newcomer Raven Goodwin. Aniston's better than average in The Good Girl, but director Miguel Arteta doesn't seem to like any of his characters very much, and doesn't give us any compelling reason to do so either, though a full-frontal nude scene by Tim Blake Nelson may draw in those who find the man oddly sexy, and Zooey Deschanel makes the most of yet another thankless small role.

Screening out of competition is Lucky McKee's May, which stands as one of this year's best and is the festival's definite must-see. Best described as what might happen if Dario Argento got hold of a Todd Solondz script, it's a darkly comedic tale of a lonely veterinarian's assistant with a doll for a best friend and a knack for scaring human pals away when she allows too much of her natural weirdness to shine through. It all ends in blood, but not quite as predictably as one might expect. Depending upon one's own inherent idiosyncrasies (and tolerance of same in others), it's either tragically poignant or uncomfortably disturbing, and marks both star Angela Bettis (Bless the Child) and director McKee as true powerhouses of their generation.

Another of the year's best is screening in competition, and is about as different from May as you can get: The documentary OT: Our Town follows a group of students at Compton's Dominguez High School as they attempt to put on the school's first play in more than two decades. Parallels to the Thornton Wilder play being performed are inevitable, and babe-a-licious drama teacher Catherine Borak will cause you to never again question the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer or Jeri Ryan in similar roles. Though rough around the edges -- director Scott Hamilton Kennedy leaves his video camera on automatic exposure, which leads to lots of blown-out shots, and he's now apparently dating Borak, which doesn't exactly make him objective -- the drama surrounding this school's drama, not to mention what we see of the final production itself, is the most triumphant and human story to reach screens in a long time. The word bravura is often tossed around by aging and irrelevant critics like so many Hacky Sacks at a Dave Matthews show, but OT deserves it and then some.

While few of the films in competition are absolutely outstanding, virtually all have something to recommend. Inaccurately billed as a comedy, Ball in the House may beat a dead horse (the one about alcoholism being bad), but it does feature a potential breakout performance by Woody Allen pal Dan Moran. The Tunisian belly-dance-as-sexual-liberation movie Satin Rouge may be slow at first, but once it gets going, you'll be hooked. Meanwhile, Alfredo de Villa's Washington Heights transcends its Kevin Smith-ish template of an aspiring comic book writer (Manny Perez) working at a convenience store to create a vibrant portrait of the titular New York neighborhood.

Not seen at press time, but highly anticipated, is the animated Missing Persons, which blends an anime-style story line about an ex-boxer and his robot friend with Waking Life's dreamy computer-created style of animation. Another that'll be interesting to see is The Business of Fancydancing, the directorial debut of American Indian writer Sherman Alexie. Intent on shattering all the old stereotypes one story at a time, Alexie tells the tale of a Coeur d'Alene (Smoke Signals' excellent Evan Adams) who leaves the reservation, comes out of the closet and shacks up with a white guy -- the question is, which part of that equation pisses off his family the most? Alexie's Smoke Signals collaborator Chris Eyre will also be showing his latest film, Skins, filmed on Nebraska's Pine Ridge Reservation, at a special free show.