After the Lights Go Down

*THE FAR SIDE OF THE MOON(Canada)

A movie nearly as impossible to describe as it is wondrous to behold, Canadian film and theater director Robert LePage’s The Far Side of the Moonis a deliriously clever, visually spectacular human-scaled epic about man’s eternal yearning to better understand his own place in the cosmos. In a dazzling dual performance that rivals Nicolas Cage’s in Adaptation, LePage plays two radically different brothers — one a vain TV weatherman, the other a neurotic graduate student — but the film is less a straightforward narrative than it is a series of interconnected musings on childhood, love, loneliness and the narcissism of space exploration. (ArcLight 14, Sun., Nov. 7, 3 p.m.) (SF)

QUIET AS A MOUSE (Germany)

Director Marcus Mittermeier and writer Jan Henrik Stahlberg’s mockumentary, about one untermensch’s vigilante crusade to apprehend and punish jaywalkers, shoplifters, turnstile-jumpers and even darker manifestations of a godless age, starts out a promising enough satire of German fastidiousness in observance of the social contract — any social contract — then, having run out of ideas, begins to rely more and more on a series of Gaspar Noé-ish shock effects. The movie plows ahead at a decent clip, taking cheap shots at stationary targets, but don’t expect anything resembling I Stand Alone’s formal or philosophical rigor. (ArcLight 12, Sun., Nov. 7, 6:45 p.m.; Wed., Nov. 10, 3:30 p.m.) (RS)

AFTERMATH(Denmark)

Danish actress Paprika Steen (Mifune, The Celebration) makes her directorial debut with this harrowing examination of loss. Taking a different tack from recent middlebrow weepies like In the Bedroom, the film presents a couple’s grief over the death of their daughter from the outside, as they become insufferable in their hypersensitivity, abusive in their single-minded pain. The broken life of the drunken driver who killed the girl (Karen-Lise Mynster) provides the film’s most sympathetic moments, while the parents of the dead girl find some catharsis in action, but little is resolved in this unrelentingly bleak film. (ArcLight 11, Sun., Nov. 7, 7 p.m.; Tues., Nov. 9, 3 p.m.) (JS)

DOWNTOWN: A STREET TALE (USA)

What happens when a young white couple from Texas (read: innocence personified) stumbles onto the stylishly distressed, bombed-out New York squatter’s lair of a multi-culti band of hookers, addicts, homos and their stuttering autistic mascot? In Rafal Zielinski’s Downtown, from a script by Joey Dedio, the result is a hackneyed, cliché-addled attempt at uplift and affirmation. The dialogue is dross, the performances are right out of an acting-school exercise, and everyone in the cast (save Geneviève Bujold) has a strained air of grit and/or nobility. The whole thing is undisguisedly inauthentic and, more often than not, unintentionally hilarious. (ArcLight 10, Sun., Nov. 7, 7 p.m.; Wed., Nov. 10, 3 p.m.) (EH)

BAD EDUCATION (Spain) (and Pedro Amodóvar tribute)

Having wobbled a few years ago through a handful of films, the great and hugely influential Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar returned to form with the wise, emotionally calibrated All About My Mother, a work that synthesized the outrageousness of his enfant-terrible stage (Law of Desire, What Have I Done To Deserve This?) with a newfound maturity. This tribute, which unfortunately doesn’t feature any of his brash early work, does include the films Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Live Flesh, All About My Mother and the Academy Award–winning Talk to Her. The centerpiece is Bad Education, starring international “it” boy Gael Garcia Bernal as a former Catholic schoolboy turned cross-dressing chanteuse and aspiring movie star. But nothing is quite what it seems in this noirish film of double identities, stories within stories and sexual one-upmanship. Almodóvar himself has said the film is his darkest since Matador, but it also vaguely evokes Law of Desire in its exploration of the damage done by a Catholic priest upon an angelic young boy, and the far-reaching consequences of thwarted love. Bernal gives a ballsy performance, one that cements his rep as one of the most fearless and interesting actors working today. Here, the diminutive heartthrob is teamed with one of the few modern directors who really knows how to capture male beauty, and the collaboration sparkles. (Bad Education, Cinerama Dome, Sun., Nov. 7, 8 p.m.;Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, ArcLight 10, Tues., Nov. 9, noon;Live Flesh, ArcLight 10, Wed., Nov. 10, noon;All About My Mother, ArcLight 10, Thurs., Nov. 11, noon;Talk to Her, ArcLight 10, Fri., Nov. 12, noon) (EH)

*RAHTREE: FLOWER OF THE NIGHT (Thailand)

“Thai phantoms aren’t like American ones,” growls a sorehead Bangkok landlady, whose tenants now include a blood-spattered, ghostly squatter. Onto a solid base of slangy urban farce this horror comedy adds layers of sly parody (skewering everything from The Exorcist to the 1999 Thai shocker Nang Nak) while also telling a surprisingly heartfelt story about a pretty scholarship student (Chermarn Boonyasak) who dies during a botched abortion and returns as a vengeful zombie. The vertiginous plot twist needed to extract even an ironic happy ending from this grim premise confirms writer-director Yuthlert Sippapak (Killer Tattoo) as a rising star of the Thai cinema renaissance. (ArcLight 12, Sun., Nov. 7, 9:30 p.m.; ArcLight 12,Tues., Nov. 9, 4 p.m.) (DC)