AFI Fest: A to W

Teresa Isasi/IFC Films

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More About

• Hollywood
• Kimberly Reed
• Andre Williams
• Takeshi Kitano
• Chris Taylor

 
WORLDS APART (Denmark) Denmark’s thoroughly respectable Oscar candidate has several near-impossible tasks to accomplish, and mostly pulls them off. Co-writer/director Niels Arden Oplev first introduces audiences into the world of Jehovah’s Witnesses without condescension or freaking anyone out, showing how someone who isn’t the stereotypical fundamentalist could find structure therein. Then it drags our heroine, 17-year-old Sara (Rosalinde Mynster), out of those confines and re-integrates her into society via First Love, overwrought-teen style, without making that seem equally obnoxious. All these things are accomplished in mildly absorbing fashion. What’s absent is any sense of passion or commitment; the Breaking the Waves approach is missed. (ArcLight Hollywood, Sat., Nov. 1, 9:45 p.m.; Sat., Nov. 8, 12:15 p.m.) (VR)

 
GO  THE WORLD WE WANT (USA) “We the People: Project Citizen” is a U.S.-sponsored program that encourages young people all over the world to become community activists — rabble-rousers, in effect. In this inspiring film, director Patrick Davidson tracks eight high-school-age groups from around the globe who each chose one burning issue in their community and then hit the streets to fix the problem, by organizing petitions and getting in the face of local officials. Their work, much of it astonishingly effective, includes an effort to get the Russian government to regulate out-of-control public gambling, and a 300-kid street march demanding clean ­water for a Senegalese village. Heroes all. (Mann Chinese 6, Sat. Nov. 8, 7 p.m., free) (CW)