Screen Picks

First Person Festival (through June 12) Last year's bargain-basement Tarnation put the first-person essay film back on the map, and though none of the four films in this year's First Person Festival take similar risks with the form, they've all got stories worth watching. The most engrossing is Ivy Meeropol's Heir to an Execution (Tue., June 7, 7 p.m., Free Library), which recounts the filmmaker's attempt to come to grips with the execution of her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (see feature here). Self-focused but not self-centered, Heir returns frequently to shots of Meeropol pounding the pavement, whether she's digging through government archives or tracking down the residence of Ethel's brother David Greenglass, who confessed in 2001 to manufacturing evidence of his sister's guilt. (The potential confrontation never occurs.) Meeropol does some impressive investigative work, and doesn't shy away from evidence suggesting that Julius did indeed spy for the Soviet Union, even if he was innocent of the specific charges for which he was executed. But the movie is at its most revealing and most moving when it focuses on familial issues, most critically the double-edged issue of Ethel's innocence. If she was, as it now appears, wholly innocent, why didn't she turn on her husband for her children's sake? Or, as Ivy puts it in a desperate moment, "What did they die for?" Historically compelling and emotionally convincing, the movie's answer belongs in history books as well as DVD players.

The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt (Fri., June 10, 7 p.m., International House) offers no such closure. Karin Hayes and Victoria Bruce's documentary was intended to be a profile of a defiant Colombian presidential candidate who spoke out fearlessly against the rebel FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and their practice of kidnapping prominent Colombians to advance their aims. But the week before Hayes and Bruce, who will attend the screening, were to fly to Bogotá, Betancourt was kidnapped by the FARC, and the portrait became a silhouette. In Colombia, political kidnappings have become so routine (or, as one journalist puts it, "not a big deal") that candidates are allowed to run in absentia, which leads to the surreal, almost tragicomic, sight of Betancourt's husband toting a cardboard cutout of her to polling places on election day. Kidnapping focuses so squarely on its subject it sometimes loses sight of the bigger picture; when demonstrators protest the scant attention given to another FARC kidnappee, it's the first we've heard of it as well. But as filmmaking and as activism, The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt makes a mark.

Also on the schedule for the First Person fest: the drag doc Venus Boyz (Wed., June 8, 7 p.m., The Rotunda) and the orgasm-at-any-age profile Still Doing It (Sat., June 11, 7 p.m., Graduate Hospital).

Six Feet Under (premieres Mon., June 6, 9 p.m., HBO) The Fisher family is back, and as usual, they're not too happy about it. The first episode of the HBO drama's fifth and final season is packed with so many misfortunes it has to use flashbacks to fit them all in: Ruth's husband George has had shock therapy to combat his psychosis; Brenda miscarries on the day of her wedding to Nate; Claire's relationship with Brenda's unbalanced brother Billy is headed for the rocks; and divorced Rico's need for companionship severely clouds his judgment. You know you've gone over the top when the most mundane subplot is David and his partner Keith shopping for surrogate mothers. Rather than running out of ideas, it seems as if Six Feet's staff have decided to cram them all into its first few episodes. It's enough to make anyone envy the corpses.

Not on the Lips ($26.98 DVD) It's become de rigueur to bemoan the fact that Alain Resnais' first movie in six years has gone straight to video, and far be it for us to demur. But allow us to, as the French say, preciser un peu. It's not that Resnais' new wave credentials entitle him to a get-into-theaters-free pass for all eternity, but that Not on the Lips is a vibrant, enjoyable, and even commercial piece which would have lit up the inside of a movie house like a cheap jukebox. Resnais' adaptation of a 1925 comic operetta (previously filmed in 1931) practically begs to be written off as a trifle, but Resnais salutes the material's frivolity rather than undermining it. Set in a wealthy manse upholstered in rich colors and laid out like a stage set, the plot centers around Lambert Wilson's ugly American, whose ingratiatingly grating accent masks a fear of bouche-to-bouche contact. ("Anywhere else is fine," he notes in song.) Apart from Wilson, the heavy lifting is done by Resnais' cast of deliriously frivolous femmes, notably Sabine Azéma's high-strung bigamist and Audrey Tautou's virginal man-hunter. Resnais' trademark tracking shots curlicue through the proscenium world, characters deliver asides to the camera as if they can't believe this nonsense either, and everyone ends up more or less happy at the end. What more could you ask for?

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