AFI Fest, A to W

*CRITIC’S PICK*  A ROOM AND A HALF (Russia) Condemned under the Soviets to internal exile for “social parasitism” (more commonly known as poetry), Joseph Brodsky fled to the West in 1972 and never returned to his beloved St. Petersburg before he died at 55 in 1996. In this ecstatically fanciful film, Russian filmmaker Andrei Khrzhanovsky brings the acclaimed Nobel Laureate back home via his sonorous verse, his memories and a montage of archival footage, wickedly doctored photos, re-enactments and puckish animation featuring two crows and a very large cat. As placed by actor Grigoriy Dityatkovsky, a ringer for the impish writer, Brodsky bears witness to his life from his childhood as the only son of doting parents, through his youth under Stalin as a cocky dissident who scorned his country’s endemic Russian anti-Semitism, to his years as a fledgling poet hungry for Western literature, honing his craft while exiled to a freezing village. The almost unbearable final sequence imagines Brodsky upon his return, filled with wonder at the new Russia and sorrow at the empty, subdivided apartment that his parents had made into a warm nest. If A Room and a Half can be read forward as a break for intellectual freedom, it is most hauntingly understood backward as a wistful longing for the home and the parents Brodsky was so desperate to leave. The loss, Khrzhanovsky suggests, was not only his. (Mann Chinese 6, Fri., Oct. 30, 6:30 p.m.) (ET)

GO  THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (Argentina/Spain) A crafty, pulpy crime-thriller, The Secret in Their Eyes has a plot line seemingly lifted from your average Cold Case episode, but it’s a testament to director Juan José Campanella that the film (based on Eduardo Sacheri’s novel) feels so spry. A retired court officer (Ricardo Darín) remains haunted by the unsolved murder of a young woman 25 years ago. Writing a novel about the case, he revisits the crime in a series of extended flashbacks, while Campanella invests the conventions of the police procedural with dark humor and taut pacing, particularly during an exceptional chase sequence in the middle of a sold-out soccer arena. (Mann Chinese 6, Wed., Nov. 4, 4 p.m.) (TG)

Red Riding

Trash Humpers

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• Albert Barnes
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GO  SITA SINGS THE BLUES (USA) One of the unexpected dividends of watching Nina Paley’s gorgeous animated feature Sita Sings the Blues is that you come away from it with a somewhat coherent sense of what the bleep is going on in the ancient Hindu epic The Ramayana of Valmiki. Paley draws from a dozen traditions of animation, finds autobiographical significance in the story of Sita’s stubborn loyalty to her betrayed and exiled husband, and pulls in blues icon Annette Hanshaw as a de facto Bollywood playback singer. The movie is all over the place, and you’d swear it couldn’t possibly work, but the artist’s playful personality comes through in every frame and holds it all together. (Grauman’s Chinese; Tues., Nov. 3, 10 a.m.) (David Chute)

GO  SOMETHING’S GONNA LIVE (USA) What’s going to live on is the life’s work of three master production designers who met at USC in the 1930s and went on to create the visual motifs of such classic films as Vertigo, North by Northwest, In Cold Blood, War of the Worlds, The Ten Commandments and To Kill a Mockingbird. In this slightly meandering but deeply affecting documentary by Daniel Raim, those nonagenarians — Robert Boyle and the late Henry “Bummy” Bumstead and Albert Nozaki — revisit their old Paramount Studio digs and describe working with masters such as Hitchcock and DeMille. A must-see for true-blue movie lovers. (Mann Chinese 6, Mon., Nov. 2, 4 p.m.) (CW)

GO  TRANSCENDENT MAN (USA) Director Barry Ptolemy’s hot-button documentary on inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil pivots on his hugely controversial “Singularity” theory — the postulation of a not-too-distant future where man and machine merge to create a new civilization free of war, disease and even death. Kurzweil’s vision of technologically enhanced post-humanity is communicated eloquently via a collection of talking heads that includes noted scientists, journalists and, most significantly, Kurzweil himself. There’s not nearly enough time allotted to those arguing the dystopian potential inherent in Kurzweil’s notion of utopia, and some extremely complex concepts are by necessity boiled down to little more than sound bites, but this is still fascinating and immensely timely stuff. (Mann Chinese 6, Thurs., Nov. 5, 4 p.m.) (LG)

*CRITIC’S PICK*  TRASH HUMPERS (USA/U.K.) Greil Marcus’ notion of “the old weird America” takes on new permutations in this gleefully anarchic bit of street theater from Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy director Harmony Korine. Purporting to be the consumer-grade video diary of a roving band of shrieking, property-destroying, paraphilic senior citizens (played by younger actors in Halloween makeup), Trash Humpers — which has already been condemned by The New York Times as one of the worst movies ever made — is by turns a retirement-home Jackass and by others a taboo-shattering vaudeville à la Jack Smith and early John Waters, with Korine orchestrating all manner of unexpected segues into tap-dancing, spoken-word poetry (including a Gregroy Corso–worthy ditty about a world without human heads) and one of the more memorable family dinner scenes this side of Eraserhead. The trash humpers were, they tell us, “spawned by our greed” — a notion supported by the desolate suburban flatland they travel through, with its gutted-out homes, vacated storefronts and other signposts of recession-era U.S.A. Korine’s film may be engineered to offend just about everyone (what else did you expect?), but dare I say there is also something admirable, even endearing about watching these geriatric derelicts as they cast off the shackles of commodified society and make hay with our waste — proving that one man’s garbage is indeed another man’s gold, or at least his fetish object. (Mann Chinese 6, Tue., Nov. 3, 10 p.m.) (SF)