Opening Films

by Inlander Staff & r & & r & The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada -- The story of a murdered ranch hand and the journey to bring him back to his home village -- and bring his killer to repentance. Full of riotous laughter and calamitous sorrow, The Three Burials of Melqiades Estrada manages the full gamut of lunatic emotions without cheapening any of them. That's a hell of a feat. It's another triumph for Arriaga and the first in a long time for Tommy Lee Jones. (LB) Rated R





The Squid and the Whale -- The way writer/director Noah Baumbach uses Bernard to lampoon intellectualism as a pursuit not of knowledge or understanding, but of a certain status in life (large vocabularies; summers off; senseless, tawdry hauteur; corduroy blazers) is often unbearably funny. Like all the humor in the film, though, it's tempered with the realization that the jokes cut on deep emotional traumas. This is a sad, hilarious film of curious depth. (LB) Rated R





Doogal -- It's an animated comedy about a dog who must save the world from a madman with an ice age gun. The script has lots of references to Lord of the Rings, for some inexplicable reason. The cast, also inexplicably, includes the voices of William H. Macy, Judi Dench, Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon. Rated G





Running Scared -- Paul Walker gets gritty! Chazz Palminteri goes gangster! Right, that second one's nothing new, but the first is. This is supposed to be the mean streets tale of a gun gone missing. Charged with cleaning up the murder of a dirty cop, Walker loses track of the gun before he can properly dispose of it. Ultra-violence ensues. Rated R





Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion -- While the rest of America is glued to its seat by the tender gender-bender Transamerica, we're repulsed away from theaters by the crass cross-dressing preachiness of Tyler Perry. It's Diary of a Mad Black Woman 2, for all intents and purposes, which means you knew whether or not you were going to see it before you read this. Rated PG-13





Imagine Me and You -- Never mind that bit about being named Heck, dude's got real problems. Like, girl problems. Heck totally wants to marry Rachel (Piper Perabo), and we guess Rachel wants to marry him too. Or she did, until she met Luce, who seems to have caught her in a love-at-first-sight glance. There's a stereotypically British (that is misogynistic) brother as well. Identity crises ensue. It's like Closer, only funnier, more British and with lesbians! Rated R





Greece: Secrets of the Past -- Continuing their long tradition of making learning fun, the folks at IMAX bring us Greece, wherein you get to "see how the island of Santorini was formed and how the island's volcanic eruption, one of the biggest explosions in Earth's history, occurred. Follow a team of archeologists piecing together the puzzles of ancient history and learn how the field of archeology has progressed. Travel to Athens and see how computer graphic imaging can restore the Parthenon to its original glory. Trace some of our modern society's customs -- democracy, medicine, athletics and theatre back to their roots in the Golden Age of Greece." Unrated