With tandem sitting-duck targets like President Bush and American Idol, it's nearly impossible to miss your mark. But Paul Weitz's baggy-pants farce in satire's clothing merely lobs spitballs where cannonballs are called for. In a story that promises to skewer the uniquely American tendency toward self-aggrandizement in both entertainment and politics — and the blurred line between the two — everyone is let off the hook. Even the terrorists are broadly drawn as bumbling Keystone Jihadists. Plenty of self-satisfied back-slapping will go around at the bravery of taking on the president and the war on terrorism, but Weitz hardly runs the risk of being blacklisted for giving noogies to fish in a barrel. (4/8, 7:00 R5; 4/9, 2:30 TB)

The opening shot of Black Night — a child emerging from darkness to view a skittering bug, while an industrial roar fills the soundtrack — is all that's needed to discern director Olivier Smolders' overriding influences. The unnerving style is textbook David Lynch, while the story leapfrogs between Kafka references. But Smolders' film, unlike the more personally achieved eccentricities of his idols, is self-consciously "weird" and rigidly, almost oppressively, formalistic. Set in a world of perpetual night, Night occasionally achieves a sense of dream-time, with repressed memories coming painfully to light, but more often simply smirks contentedly at its own grandiose production design. (4/9, 2:45 RE; 4/10, 7:15 TB)

Human intelligence is followed by human emotion, and the two live thereafter in an uneasy balance. Jean-Pierre Limosin draws that point out via a super-intelligent bonobo ape and her impact on a young man embarking on a new career and impending fatherhood. Limosin's clinical camera wryly observes the logic tests given to both man and beast, watching the man's competition for success with the detached eye of a Discovery Channel doc. But as emotional ties take a backseat to social climbing, man seems to become monkey as readily as the other way around. (4/7, 7:30 TB; 4/10, 9:30 R5)

Cute kid, stray dog, stern father: The universal story writes itself, even as remote from Disney turf as Mongolia. But the story is beside the point; as in Byambasuren Davaa's previous effort, Story of the Weeping Camel, the interest comes from watching the minute details of the family's daily rituals. Tending the herd, making cheese, playing with dung; it may not be documentary in the strictest sense, but it's endlessly fascinating. Basic assumptions about the "simple" nomadic lifestyle are challenged: Their yurt may look rudimentary from the outside, and disassemble in a hurry, but I wish my apartment were furnished so beautifully. (4/8, 2:30 RE; 4/9, 7:15 RE)

As its title suggests, this portrait of adolescence from French documentarian Antony Cordier is all about restraint. Mickael is a teenage judo champion whose star status at school and on the mat lies in stark contrast to his tumultuous home life. His irresponsible, alcoholic father is recently out of work, and financial struggles threaten to implode the family. Mickael relies instead on his girlfriend Vanessa. When a new wealthy student joins the team, Mickael and Vanessa befriend him. Sparks fly, leading to an afterschool ménage a trois. Unfortunately, Cordier fails to exploit the film's drama and though eminently watchable, Cold Showers is ultimately a little damp. (4/7, 9:30 RE; 4/8, 3:00 RE)

A Christian rocker with no interest in "Christian rock," Clarksboro, N.J.'s Daniel Smith is the paterfamilias of the Danielson Famile, a musical collective that combines off-kilter indie rock and school-play pageantry. (Most members are related by blood or marriage, although the band's lineup once included a pre-Michigan Sufjan Stevens.) J.L. Aronson's impressive documentary spans several years and a couple of continents, long enough to take Smith from the band's first inklings of cult success to rock-festival showcases; there's even footage of their first gig, assembled for Smith's Rutgers thesis project. As the Famile members start to have families of their own, Smith faces a genuine crisis (that "be fruitful and multiply" is a bitch), but Aronson sticks around until Smith finds his way out, courtesy of the Maysles brothers' Salesman and a giant tree costume. (4/9, 9:30 PMT*; 4/10, 7:00 CP*)

Despite the potency of its subject, Yonghi Yang's documentary never finds its way out of video-diary mode. Yang, whose parents emigrated from North Korea to Japan before she was born, clashes with her father, a longtime pro-North activist who longs for permission to return home (not least because his three sons already have, and are unable to travel outside the country despite promises to the country). Dear Pyongyang's glacial pace is forecast by the five-minute text crawl that opens the film, a token of Yang's failure to whip her material into shape. There's an intriguing subject here, but this is too much like watching someone else's vacation slides. (4/6, 12:15 RE; 4/8, 2:30 CP)

There's a fine line between appreciating outsider art and glamorizing mental illness, but Jeff Feuerzig's documentary threads the needle with room to spare. That Devil succeeds is even more astonishing since its subject is nearly absent from it, at least in the present tense. Johnston, now living a relatively stable life with his parents, is either unwilling or unable to discuss his past, but Feuerzig has access to a daunting archive of 8mm home movies, video and audio tapes to supplement his generally insightful talking heads. The film makes a compelling case for Johnston as a genuine visionary whose cracked, elusive love songs reveal a wealth of emotion just under their fragile surfaces, but it doesn't gloss over Johnston's often frightening manic episodes — he once chased an elderly woman he believed was possessed by the devil until she jumped from a second-story window; years later, inspired by a comic-book drawing of Casper the Friendly Ghost, he seized the controls of his father's private plane, nearly killing them both. Feuerzig covers the many incarnations of Johnston's career, including his more recent rebirth as a visual artist, though it stops short of his inclusion in this year's Whitney Biennial. (4/8, 12:30 RE; 4/10, 9:30 RE*)

The most original-looking animated feature since Waking Life, this Hungarian entry employs photorealist cut-outs whose not-quite tangibility is subtly and continuously unnerving; faces jump from position to position as if your eyes have gone on the fritz, and limbs float disjointedly as in an underwater nightmare. Though it tries harder to be disturbing, the movie's plot is less so: A group of teens from the wrong side of Budapest's tracks band together to make themselves rich by traveling back in time, burying a horde of wooly mammoths under the city's streets, then returning to the present and drilling for oil. Did I mention they have help from Osama bin Laden, or that their scheme draws the attention of Putin, Blair and George W. Bush? (Naturally, he takes an interest in any new oil-producing nation, but fortunately for the kids, his geography's a little shaky.) Director Aron Grauder falls back too easily on hard-R shock tactics — look! animated titties! — but the movie's look is shocking in more interesting ways. (4/7, 7:15 R5; 4/9, 2:30 PMT)

With the most self-explanatory title this side of Snakes on a Plane, Jake West's sci-fi splatter parody wastes no time establishing its visitors' motives and cuts straight to the (graphically depicted) anal probes. West takes the no-holds-barred approach of early Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, but brings nothing new stylistically while continually finding different and more efficient ways to chop bodies into mush. Everyone in the cast takes at least one blood spray to the face, chainsaws are wielded and genre references are dropped left and right, displaying more adoration and enthusiasm than competence. (4/7, 10:00 RE; 4/10, 5:00 TB)

Poor Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) is actually poor, at least compared to her friends, good mom Frannie (Joan Cusack), TV writer Christine (Catherine Keener), and overpriced dress designer Jane (Frances McDormand), who stops washing her hair to demonstrate her depression. The friends are married with kids and/or careers (or at least stuff to do that doesn't bore them silly), but former teacher Nicole Holofcener's third feature looks again at unfulfilled middle-class women, as they grapple with aging, fading dreams and what seem to be incessant misreadings — of each other, themselves, their male partners. While Olivia's housecleaning provides an obvious set of metaphors — secret lives (say, vibrators), transformed disorder, presumed privilege — the movie feels stuck in first gear. (4/11, 7:15 PMT)

The miners in Marc Brodzik's doc constantly repeat the term "rules and regulations" in tones that most people reserve for cockroach infestations. Northeastern PA's surviving anthracite mines are run by a select few families, who share war stories not of their risky lives underground but of their riskier dealings with the federal government. The incongruity of the bursts of legalese emanating from the soot-blackened faces in unrecognizable accents exemplifies the decades of struggling with these laws. The feds' refusal to participate makes this a one-sided affair, but who ever sides with The Man in these cases anyway? (4/8, 7:00 IH*; 4/9 5:00 PMT*)

Common horror-movie technique holds that keeping your monster hidden in the shadows amps the scare factor. That has to be doubly true when your beastie of choice is a mutant, armored, carnivorous cow fetus. The novelty factor ends there, however, as writer/director Billy O'Brien transports the Alien formula onto an Irish farm. The wriggly little proto-calves slink around under water and through ventilation ducts, stalking the scared young couple, the farmer and the principled vet he loves, and the amoral scientist who explains it all. Frankenfoods are still scarier to eat than be eaten by. (4/6, 9:45 RE; 4/10, 7:15 PMT)

Reuniting with his Vibrator star Shinobu Terajima, Ryuichi Hiroki films the similarly downbeat but marginally less engrossing story of a 35-year-old woman struggling with manic depression. Plotwise, there's not much more to the movie: She eats, drinks, wanders through Tokyo's streets snapping digital photos for her blog, and meets up with various men: a diminutive pervert, a baby yakuza, an old school classmate and his lovestruck friend, and her callous, insensitive cousin. Dealing with the deaths of her parents, a friend and (possibly) a lover, she ascribes their passing to various natural and man-made disasters, but really, it's her grief that's cataclysmic, making her feel as if "my nerves are full of static." Without the bittersweet humor of What Time Is It There? or the transcendent compositions of Café LumiÈre, the aptly titled It's Only Talk sometimes feels a little flat. But Terajima's knife-edge performance alone is worth the trip. (4/6, 5:00 RE; 4/7, 12:00 RE)

All that Oscar attention for Monster's Ball only served to encourage scripter Milo Addica's more self-important tendencies; even Gael Garcia Bernal and William Hurt can't save this ridiculous thriller from collapsing under its own portentousness. Bernal is pastor Hurt's long-lost illegitimate son, who tracks down and insinuates himself into the family with disastrous results. His blank-faced turn is fine but keeps his motives bafflingly obscure, while James Marsh's hands-off direction offers no clues. Seemingly attempting to question the limits of Christian forgiveness and redemption, King ends at just the point where it might have to answer some of its own loaded questions. (4/7, 7:45 RE; 4/8, 5:00 RE)

Appropriately magnificent as London drag queen Lola, Chewitel Ejiofor first appears framed by the dark ground where Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton) has landed following his Samaritan effort to save her from thugs in a Soho alley. Charlie's visiting from Northampton, following a bad start taking over his recently deceased father's shoe business. Unable to sell enough Oxfords to keep his workers paid, Charlie stumbles on the idea of making sturdy footwear for drag queens, who typically teeter on fragile women's heels. Charlie's subsequent education, via Lola, leads him to reject his materialistic fiancee (Jemima Rooper), embrace his working-class employees (including the plucky and lovely Sarah Jane Potts) and appreciate the extravagant wonders of gender-bending. It's very nice for Charlie to learn these lessons, but the film offers little in the way of insights or surprises, except for Ejiofor's wonderful performance. (4/6, 7:00 PMT; 4/7, 5:15 RE)

A Wifi-enabled Funny Ha Ha, Joe Swanberg's second feature (following the mini-scandalous Kissing on the Mouth) ponders the romantic unwisdom of three men in their early 20s. Alex (Kevin Bewersdorf) is an electronic musician whose virtual attachment to online pinups blinds him to the real-life girl (Tipper Newton) pursuing his attentions; Chris (C. Mason Wells) unsuccessfully tries to persuade his long-distance girlfriend to have phone sex or e-mail him racy photos; and Tim (Swanberg), who actually has a flesh-and-blood girlfriend (Brigid Reagan), is too attached to his Powerbook and cellphone to pay her much mind. Ah, the disconnected youth of today. Developed collaboratively with the cast (and drawing on all kinds of real-life parallels with the actors), LOL is sharply observational, but that's often all it is — the movie never gains enough perspective to advance past the same-as-it-ever-was realization that young people are frequently unhappy and unsure of how to talk to each other. The behind-the-scenes tidbits on the movie's Web site add a layer of meaning the stand-alone feature lacks, which both proves the movie's point and invalidates it. (4/7, 7:30 CP*; 4/9, 5:00 CP)

The problem with Krzysztof Krauze's portrait of Poland's famous outsider artist is in the "my": Rather than attempt to get inside the mind of the elderly Nikifor, the film passes the buck to Roman Gancarczyk's struggling painter, effectively reducing its ostensible subject to an eccentric ornamentation. Playing a grizzled old man with faux stubble and a minimum of dialogue, actress Krystyna Feldman thankfully avoids stunt-casting tics, but she's still stuck playing a Gump-ian wisdom dispenser. (4/7, 12:30 RE*; 4/10, 2:15 RE)

There's a joke to be made here about dying young in Marcus Hook being preferable to the alternative, but Barry Stringfellow's script bears its local pedigree proudly, as characters refer to "The Hook" with irritating frequency. When Michael Angarano's teenaged cancer victim uses his charity wish for a weekend with a burnt-out supermodel, the outcome is weepy uplift for him, easy redemption for her and aggressive heartstring-tugging for the audience. Under Alex Steyermark's TV-safe direction, cynical humor almost immediately gives way to sentimentality, with a spiritual agenda hovering on the fringes. Just once, I'd like to see the atheist be proved right. (4/8, 7:30 PMT*; 4/9, 5:00 R5*; 4/10, 2:30 R5)

Eva Urthaler's debut imagines a worst-case-scenario outcome for bored teens with absent parents and sublimated sexualities. A lot of moral debate is thrown around between the two young boys and their female kidnapping victim, but this is essentially a coming-of-age tragedy in hothouse conditions. Unrelentingly violent and dour, Urthaler takes a long, dreary slog to get to the inevitable outcome. The blame-society message offers too little in the way of alternatives to be very convincing, while the final triumph of hetero sex absolves overmuch while condemning for wrongheaded reasons. (4/7, 9:45 TB; 4/9, 9:30 RE)

Well-meaning, colorful and cute, Mitra Sen's lesson on tolerance zips along at under an hour and delivers its moral with the painless, all-smiles didacticism of Saturday morning TV. This strictly-for-the-kiddies piece isn't the place for detailed discussion of religious differences, so Sen focuses on the surface trappings of holiday celebrations. Two Canadian girls — one Muslim, one Christian — can't understand why their parents are nervous about joining in each others' festivities, but the adults may have a thing or two to learn from these youngsters. See how easy that is? (4/8, 2:30 PMT; 4/9, 2:00 IH)

The prototypical story of star-crossed lovers, La Petite Jérusalem fails to deliver a fresh angle. Laura is a French-Tunisian Orthodox Jew who lives with her mother, sister and her sister's family. A university student, Laura is passionately drawn to philosophy and scorns both her family's religious beliefs and their attempts to fix her up with a nice Jewish boy. Instead, she harbors a crush on an Algerian co-worker which eventually leads to locker room make-out sessions. But even the lovers' smoldering passion is dulled by the film's lumbering pace and obviously drawn characters. (4/6, 7:30 RE; 4/9, 12:30 RE)

"After a while you get used to the confusion." That bit of onscreen advice applies equally well to the collected curiosities of the Brothers Quay. The twins' decade-in-coming second feature has a central European storybook feel, like a dusty children's tale rewritten with the unarticulated, unresolved tension of Kafka's incomplete novels. The narrative, apparently compromised by contractual demands, drifts and circles with the logic of a dream, revealing glimpses of little mysteries with no concern for solving them. Mad doctor/frustrated composer Gottfried John is the ostensible villain, but given his lovely automata and his desire to conduct human beings like music, he may lie closer to the Quays' hearts than the tragic young lovers. (4/7, 5:00 R5; 4/8, 9:45 TB)

Written by Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat (Ghosts… of the Civil Dead), this Aussie oater isn't so much an anti-Western as antimatter, hell bent on destroying the genre that spawned it. Set at the end of the country's bushranger era, the unrelentingly grim and humorless story stars Guy Pearce as a sad-faced outlaw presented with a gruesome choice: Either hunt down and kill his murderous older brother (miscast-as-always Danny Huston), or his younger brother (Richard Wilson) will be put to death. The ambiguity that underscores the best revisionist Westerns is nowhere to be found: Ray Winstone's lawman may not be the worst of the movie's villains, but he's so conflicted and ineffectual it makes no difference. The murder-ballad swagger of Cave's songs is likewise absent, replaced by a dour, one-note thrum. Even John Hurt's memorably cuckoo cameo can't pull The Proposition out of the muck. (4/6, 9:30 R5; 4/7, 5:00 RE)

With no-holds-barred honesty, director Alberto Rodriguez gives us a weekend in the life of two troubled Spanish teenagers. Tano gets a 48-hour break from reform school to attend his brother's wedding. Back out on the streets with his thuggish friend Richi, he picks up where he presumably left off: thieving, fighting, drugging and sexing up his girlfriend Patri. Tano, of course, is not quite as tough as he looks, and we learn that he is more ambivalent about his self-destructive choices than he initially lets on. Tautly paced and deeply felt, 7 Virgins stands out among the festival's many international coming-of-age dramas. (4/8, 12:15 R5; 4/9; 7:30 RE)

Director Lee Sung-gang seems to have left out more than he's included in this love affair/ghost story. By night, photojournalist Min-woo (Kim Yoon-tae) watches a crime lord's apartment from afar. By day he dwells in his own past, carrying on a strictly sexual affair with a now-married ex-flame and being haunted by the former occupant of his new apartment. "We are all the product of our fantasy," he claims, hinting that perhaps the key to his story lies in the accumulation of details real and imagined. Stubbornly elliptical, Texture still resonates, giving the impression of memories already faded to their most tactile essence. (4/8, 2:30 TB; 4/9, 9:30 R5)

For its first hour, Tokyo Zombie is relentlessly silly, and often hilarious, slapstick, the rise of the undead a mere annoyance to the dumb and dumber pair of Sho Aikawa and Tadanobu Asano (in bald cap and afro wig, respectively). At that point, with an animated interlude pushing the story ahead five years, it turns into a parody of George Romero's Land of the Dead for a sweet-natured reunion between its two leads before heading into the final punch line. Sakichi Sato's directorial debut resembles Chuck Jones more than sometime collaborator Takashi Miike, demonstrating with cartoon precision how many ways there are to wring laughs from a beheading. (4/8, 10:00 PMT; 4/9, 9:30 CP)

Despite being a musical with a titular reference to its transsexual lead's problematic endowment, 20 Centimeters bears little actual resemblance to Hedwig. Here, the musical numbers (including tunes by Queen and Madonna while paying homage to everything from Jacques Demy to Marilyn Manson) are segregated from the grittier surrounding story, a product of the hero(ine)'s narcoleptic lapses. Starting with the title, writer/director Ram—n Salazar is obsessed with bodily excess, surrounding eccentric-looking star M—nica Cervera with dwarves and corpulent women out of Goya or Diane Arbus, throwing the bland attractiveness of Cervera's love interest into even greater relief. (4/8, 9:30 RE; 4/9, 5:00 RE)

The nine credits that Paige Carl Griggs gives himself is evidence enough that this is amateur hour, though the clumsily executed black-and-white DV look never leaves that in doubt. A rehash of noir tropes, Two Days teeters uneasily between poetry and parody, managing neither very effectively. Griggs casts himself as the brooding poet drawn into a series of murders by the requisite femme fatale, but then fills out the cast with cartoon characters and a wandering philosopher who spouts pretentious dialogue while thumbing a ride, most likely returning from Bonnaroo to his smoke-filled dorm room. (4/8, 7:00 CP*; 4/10, 9:30 PMT*)

Iranian writer/director Tahmineh Milani has been jailed in the past for her films, so perhaps it's understandable that she would try to bury her pro-feminism message under layers of melodrama. All of the histrionics tend to make for little more than narrative clutter, but though the twists that get Marila Zarei to the point where she sympathizes with and aids an escaped killer are contrived, the abuse she has had to suffer up to that point harshly illuminates Milani's point that the subjugation of women undermines the country's whole social structure. (4/9, 12:15 PMT; 4/10, 5:00 R5)

Family dysfunction reaches unprecedented extremes in this brutal comedy from Belgian director Dominique Deruddere. Sophie and Mark have exchanged rings and are sitting down to lunch at a rural inn with their families when Mark's father Hermann gets into a heated confrontation with the restaurant's chef/owner. Spoiled shrimp leads to cruel accusations; hostages are held, arms are brandished and as the fight escalates into a full-blown war, the film's comedy gives way to an utterly bleak vision of human nature. Based on a comic book, The Wedding Party is a wicked, cartoonish fantasy of overblown ego and unfettered machismo. (4/8, 7:30 TB; 4/9, 2:45 RE)

Though you'd think is was rhetorical, the title of Peter Rosen's documentary actually has an answer: curator Henry Geldzahler, whose epic 1970 show at New York's Metropolitan Museum helped put postwar American art on the map for good. An early adopter of painters like Frank Stella and Larry Poons, Geldzahler was as much cohort and co-conspirator as cultural mandarin, taking part in Claes Oldenburg happenings and phoning Warhol several times a day. Championing pop art's cheery facades over the tortured-artist routine of abstract expressionism (and earning contempt from critics like Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer along the way), Geldzahler packed a decade's studio-trawling into three dozen of the Met's galleries, literally displacing roomfuls of 18th- and 19th-century art. Although "Henry's Show" was savaged by critics, a host of painters attest to the soundness of his choices. Quoth David Hockney: "He was always right." (4/7, 5:00, PMT; 4/9, 9:15, IH)

Patrick Creadon's crossword-culture doc is a giddy enjoyment for anyone who's ever put pencil to newsprint, though pen-and-ink solvers may find it stops just short of nirvana. Only tangentially engaging the puzzles themselves, Creadon focuses on the people who make and solve them: New York Times editor Will Shortz, Inquirer puzzlesmith Merl Reagle, and celebrity puzzlers like Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, Ken Burns and the Indigo Girls. Though crosswords are by nature a solitary ritual (unless you're Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina, who gets his teammates to help out), Gordon cuts together footage of solvers sitting down to the puzzle we've just seen Reagle compose at his dining room table, a perfect tribute to a ritual that is at once solitary and communal. Though Wordplay sometimes plays like an infomercial for the Times puzzle, its real stars are the handful of elite solvers who compete in the annual championship. (4/9, 5:00 RE*; 4/11, 7:15 RE*)

Based on a true story, this popular Korean melodrama chronicles the romance between country bumpkin Seok-joong and Eun-ha, the employee of a local coffee shop that doubles as a brothel. Their unlikely romance begins with casual sex but develops into something deeper despite her cynicism, his naiveté and the suspicions of their friends and family. Just as it takes off, though, Eun-ha's past, in the form of a jilted lover, comes back to haunt them, and the film takes an unexpected, dark turn. Overblown, overlong and oozing with schmaltz, You Are My Sunshine is nevertheless surprisingly poignant. (4/6, 12:30 TB; 4/9, 12:15 RE; 4/10, 7:00 RE)