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The 3rd I South Asian Film Festival continues through Thursday. The San Francisco International Animation Festival opens Wednesday for a five-day run.

A- Skin, Clay, Shattuck, Guild, Rafael, opens Friday. Sandra Laing (an actual, living person, played here by Sophie Okonedo) was born to white parents in South Africa in 1955, but by all appearances was what the apartheid system called colored (mixed-race). Needless to say, she had difficulty finding a place to fit in. Screenwriter Helen Crawley and director Anthony Fabian do an admirable job compressing a story that spans nearly four decades into a running time of less than two hours, without making it feel rushed or episodic. But the real credit for Skin goes to Okonedo, who carries the film as if she was born for the part.

A Manhattan, Rafael, Sunday, 7:00. Made immediately after Annie Hall,   Manhattan doesn’t measure up to its predecessor, but it’s still one of Woody Allen’s best. A group of New Yorkers fall in and out of love, cheat on their significant others, and try to justify their actions, all in glorious widescreen black and white and accompanied by Gershwin. In light of Allen’s personal history since Manhattan was made, his character’s relationship with a 17-year-old girl feels both unsettling and more revealing than he originally intended. Preceded by a lecture on the history of film formats by Rob Hummel.

B+ Dog Day Afternoon,  Castro, Thursday. Two likeable but incompetent robbers (Al Pacino and John Cazale, both fresh from Godfather II) try to hold up a bank in one those rare comedies based on a real-life incident. The result is touching, tragic, and very funny. On a double bill with Scarecrow, which I liked in 1973 but scarcely remember, as part of the Castro’s four-day tribute to early Pacino.

A Spirited Away, Clay, Friday and Saturday, midnight. Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece is a beautiful, complex, and occasionally scary tale of a young girl cast into a strange and magical world. The intriguing and imaginative creatures, not to mention the moral dilemmas, are beyond anything that Dorothy never had to deal with in Oz. I don’t know if this will be the dubbed of subtitled version.

B Ninotchka, Stanford, Tuesday through Thursday. Garbo’s first comedy and penultimate film is sweet, charming, romantic, and very funny. It also nails perfectly the absurdities of Communism–still well respected by many Americans in 1939. As Garbo’s character points out, “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.” But what else would you expect when Ernst Lubitsch directs a screenplay by Billy Wilder? On a double bill with To Be or Not to Be, which i haven’t seen in a very long time.

Last Year at Marienbad, Pacific Film Archive, Friday, 6:30. I saw Last Year at Marienbad once, in college, a long time ago. The teachers didn’t tell us what to expect, they just gathered several classes together in the auditorium and screened this “important film.” I found it deathly boring. We all did. One friend said it needed a pie fight. The teachers were shocked at our response. Perhaps it’s time for me to give it a second chance.

The 3rd I South Asian Film Festival opens Thursday for a four-day run at the Roxie and the Castro.

French Cinema Now also starts Thursday for a seven-day run at the Clay.

In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles
with The Lady From Shanghai, Rafael, Monday, 7:00. The Lady from Shanghai is not one my favorite Welles films by a long shot, but this evening is much more than 35mm archival print of yet another of Welles’ many attempts to get back into the good graces of Hollywood. It’s a chance to meet his daughter, Chris Welles Feder, who’s currently hawking a book about her father.

A Standard Operating Procedure, Pacific Film Archive, 3:00. We all know Lynndie England–or we think we do. She’s the young, seemingly carefree soldier photographed taunting prisoners in those infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos. Errol Morris wants you to see England and many of her former companions in a different light. He interviews them extensively in Standard Operating Procedure, shows us the letters they wrote home, and uses actors to re-enact some of the most gut-wrenching scenes they witnessed and committed. The result isn’t an easy film to watch; it has you squirming in your seat, trying not to turn away your eyes. It also forces you to ask yourself some very tough questions. See my full review. Part of the series Watching the Unwatchable: Films Confront Torture. This will be followed by another film in the series that looks interesting–Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment. Separate admission required.

A Double bill: The Adventures of Robin Hood & Singin’ in the Rain, Stanford, Friday and Saturday. What a strange double bill—an action flick and a musical comedy. On the other hand, they were both shot in three-strip Technicolor, they were the first two films restored with Warner’s Ultra-Resolution process, and (most importantly) they’re two of the most entertaining escapist works ever to come out of Hollywood. Maybe it’s not such a bad double bill, after all.

A Double bill: The Bad and the Beautiful & Sunset Blvd., Stanford, Tuesday through Thursday. Sunset Blvd., Billy Wilder’s meditation on Hollywood’s seedy underbelly, is the flip side of Singin’ in the Rain (now that would make a great double bill). Norma Desmond is very much like Lena Lamon…after twenty-two years of denial and depression. And in the role of Norma, Gloria Swanson gives one of the great over-the-top performances in history. The Bad and the Beautiful (which Vincente Minnelli directed the same year he made The Bandwagon) isn’t that good, but it’s as realistic a look at how Hollywood changes and corrupts people as tinsel town has ever dared to make.

Ready, Set, Bag!; Elmwood, Tuesday & Wednesday, 7:00; Cerrito, Thursday, 7:00. A documentary on the National Grocers Association’s Best Bagger Contest, and a benefit for the Alameda County Community Food Bank (Elmwood) and the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano (Cerrito). The filmmakers will be there in person.

Frameline continues through the week.

A Katyn, Kabuki, Rafael, opens Friday. In the spring of 1940, Soviet special forces  massacred over 15,000 Polish prisoners of war, including the father of future filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. After the war, Stalin’s government insisted that the Nazis were to blame and suppressed the truth. Wajda tells the story of the crime and the cover-up through a handful of fictitious characters in this visually gorgeous yet emotionally shocking historical epic. The second half, set mostly after the war, sags through too many characters you haven’t really gotten to know, but it’s still an amazing recreation of a largely-forgotten atrocity. Katyn made my list of The Best Films You Couldn’t See in 2008; I’m glad it’s reappearing in 2009.

B The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Rafael, Saturday, 7:30. I haven’t seen the musical, but the original silent Phantom is a tough one to beat (despite some pedestrian passages). The demasking scene will stick in your memory for life. The newly-restored print recreates the original tints, 2-color Technicolor, and painted stencil colors. Accompanied live by the Alloy Orchestra, who also performed the last time I saw it, at a San Francisco International Film Festival event in 2005.

An Evening With Les Blank, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Friday, 8:00. The anthropological documentarian (and East Bay resident) will screen some of his films (including "Garlic is as Good as 10 Mothers"), then answer questions from the audience. Part of the Museum’s June series on Local Independent Production.

A Raiders of the Lost Ark, UA Berkeley, Thursday, 8:00. Steven Spielberg directed it, and the bad guys are Nazis, but it’s as far from Schindler’s List as a great movie can get. What else can I say? If you object to mindless, escapist action flicks on principle, you won’t see it anyway. If you don’t, you probably already love it.

A A Hard Day’s Night, Rafael, 8:30, free. When United Artists agreed to finance a movie around a new British musical phenomenon, they wanted a picture fast and cheap. Reasonable demands, as The Beatles’ popularity was limited to England and Germany and could likely die before the film got into theaters. Turns out UA had nothing to worry about. A special, outdoor, sing-along screening.

A Bringing Up Baby, Stanford, Friday through Monday. How does one define a screwball comedy? You could say it’s a romantic comedy with glamorous movie stars behaving like broad, slapstick comedians. You could point out that screwballs are usually set amongst the excessively wealthy, and often explore class barriers. Or you could simply show Howard Hawks’ frivolous and hilarious tale about a mild-mannered paleontologist (Cary Grant), a ditzy heiress (Katharine Hepburn), and a tame leopard (a tame leopard). On a double-bill with Holiday, which I saw too long ago to have an opinion about.

A Pulp Fiction, Clay, Friday and Saturday, midnight. Quentin Tarantino achieved cult status by writing and directing this witty mesh of interrelated stories involving talkative killers, a crooked boxer, romantic armed robbers, and a former POW who hid a watch in a very uncomfortable place. Tarantino entertainingly plays with dialog, story-telling techniques, non-linear time, and any sense the audience may have of right and wrong.