Ifc Films

Must-sees Race to Witch Mountain: *** The nonstop sci-fi chase involves child aliens who bring out the combat skills and fatherly virtues of a good-hearted Las Vegas cabbie with useful auto-racing experience (Dwayne Johnson). To ensure the survival of Earth as we know it, this unlikely trio must outmaneuver some grim avengers. Duplicity: *** A pair of high-powered spies (played by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen) can't help testing their powers of deception even after they team up as lovers and partners in a high-stakes masquerade.

Girls Will Be Girls is plenty outrageous. But is it funny? Well, yeah. Kind of. Sometimes. But more often than not, it thinks outrageous will suffice. And after a while, it doesn't. Which makes even a 79-minute film seem interminable. The central joke of Girls is that it stars nothing but men, three of whom play women. There's Jack Plotnick as Evie, the world's worst actress and possibly its worst human being; Clinton Leupp as Coco, an unmarried woman of indeterminate age who longs for children, companionship and passion, not necessarily in that order; and Jeffery Roberson as Varla, an innocent young Southern belle longing to make it big in Hollywood, especially after her mom failed while attempting to do the same.

Friends of 'Camp' You couldn't fill an evening with more warm fuzzies than they did at the Camp benefit screening and party. First, you had a packed house of 485 in the Charles Theatre to watch the Baltimore IFC Films premiere of the heartwarming independent flick about a summer drama camp. Next, it was all to raise money for three organizations close to the heart of most of those attending -- the Baltimore School for the Arts, Carver Center for Arts and Technology and the Maryland Film Festival.

A 78-year-old gay anthropologist from New York, having endured two hip replacements and suffering from Parkinson's disease, journeys to a remote part of the Peruvian jungle that's only been brushed lightly by western civilization. Sounds like a documentary worth seeing. But that's only half the story behind "Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal's Tale," a remarkable film about a remarkable man who's lived the kind of life usually reserved for adventure novels and pulp fiction.

The Secret of the Grain brings audiences into the bosom of an extended clan of first- and second-generation Tunisian French in the Mediterranean port town of Sete. It makes viewers feel, in turn, fond of them and annoyed by them. How bracing it is to see a humanist film that disdains art house conventions or amenities! This movie comes at you all at once, with a force that's bewildering, engulfing and sometimes claustrophobic. Only at the end, when you catch your breath, do you realize that without even trying, the writer-director, Abdel Kechiche, has wrought a definitive statement on how it feels to live in a subculture.

HOLLYWOOD - Reality television may not be ready for its big-screen close-up, if weekend box office estimates are any indication, but there's still life in the hoary old mystery. The Real Cancun, from the producers of MTV's The Real World, failed to bring in large audiences in its debut weekend despite considerable pre-release publicity and attention in entertainment news media. While New Line Cinema projected Cancun would come in at the No. 10 spot with $2.3 million, other studios calculated that it had tied with Disney's Bringing Down the House at $2.1 million.

Camp, about a group of budding actors and the summer camp designed especially for them, gets its emotions right. If only the same could be said about its story line. The setting is Camp Ovation, a summer program geared to the performing arts. Sent there for the summer are young men and women who freely admit to being misfits, the kids who are always at the wrong end of fights, jokes and awkward social situations. The opening sequence, in which we see a girl forced to take her brother to the prom, a boy who gets beaten up after attending his prom in a dress, and an overweight girl whose frustrated parents have her mouth wired shut, draws us into the lives of these kids immediately.

Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments is as magical as it is realistic, because Troell has his own particular gift of second sight. As he demonstrated in three epics, The Emigrants, The New Land and The Flight of the Eagle, Troell's ecstasy for the physical world imbues it with a spiritual dimension. The people in his movies - vital, sensual figures - carry an illumination that emerges from within and joins with sun, rain, ice and snow. What makes him a theatrical artist and not some grueling naturalist is that supernal glow.

Cinematic tributes to great cities used to be called "symphonies of the street." Cedric Klapisch's "Paris," a multicharacter tapestry of the City of Light, is more like an eclectic pops concert. It pulls together diverse residents of the city, from produce vendors to academics, and trains a loving eye on their unique environments and the urban landscapes they all share. The old symphonies of the street often stayed in the street. Klapisch takes us inside a savory bakery, a bristling open-air market and an august yet inviting academy, as well as chic and untidy flats, hospital rooms, terraces and plazas.

In the beginning of "In the Loop" is the word, and the word is "unforeseeable." This British movie, set in London, Northampton and Washington, is an incredibly busy, erratically brilliant satire about the devious ways democratic governments can ramp up toward war. Its funniest joke comes right at the start and doesn't lose its snap after a dozen repetitions. A minor British official, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), "Minister for International Development," hastens a trans-Atlantic rush to action simply by telling a radio talk-show host that an American war in the Middle East is "unforeseeable."