For Your Consideration: This Week at SIFF

Memorial Day weekend is finally behind us, so it's time to settle into SIFF. Yes, it's absolutely lovely outside, but Seattleites can only handle so much sun. Get away from all that UVA/UVB exposure and spend your time in the theaters' comfortable darkness.

This week brings the opening of SIFF on the Eastside, starting Thursday at the Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue. And tomorrow night, Anthony Hopkins is in town to pick up his SIFF Lifetime Achievement Award, so this is your chance to either offer up your liver (with fava beans and a nice chianti) or heckle him for having the audacity to play a "passing" black man--for shame. All the advance tickets are sold out on that one, so show up early to try for rush tix.

Seattlest applies our well-honed knowledge of all things cinema to the SIFF catalogue in order to point out some notable films playing this week:

· The Price of Sugar Globalization is bad, mmmmkay? (tonight, 4:15pm @ Harvard Exit)

· Manufactured Landscapes This documentary features the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, who traveled to Asia to capture images of factories, dumps, and strip mines. Oh glorious world of destruction. (tonight, 4:30pm @ Pacific Place)

· The Year of Living Dangerously In mid-60s Indonesia, a young journalist finds himself in the midst of a maelstrom of corruption and turmoil in the country's political upheaval. Peter Weir's 1982 drama stars Sigourney Weaver and a pre-crazy Mel Gibson. (tonight, 6:45pm @ Harvard Exit)

· Never on a Sunday Given last year's acclaimed trio of Babel, Pan's Labyrinth, and Children of Men, right now Mexican-made cinema is muy caliente. Check out this black comedy about one unlucky man's vain attempts to bury his uncle's body. (tomorrow, 4pm @ SIFF Cinema; Monday, 7pm @ SIFF Cinema)

· The Devil Came on Horseback This harrowing documentary follows a former Marine Captain who became a firsthand witness to the genocide in Darfur. The film captures his attempts to bring evidence to the American government and convince them to take action. Never again? (tomorrow, 7pm @ Harvard Exit)

· Crazy Love This year at Sundance, we heard a pack of middle-aged women, long-term vets of the fest, proclaim this documentary about a decades-long obsessive romance to be the best film they had ever seen in all their years in Park City. High praise to be sure. (tomorrow, 9:30pm @ Pacific Place; Friday, 4:30pm @ Pacific Place)

· Outsourced Alright, we get it, globalization is bad! And occasionally funny. (Thursday, 7pm @ Lincoln Square; Sunday June 3rd, 7pm @ the Neptune)

· Eagle Vs. Shark To us, this quirky romance looks like a New Zealand rip-off of Napoleon Dynamite, but that's still going to make for a lot of happy filmgoers. (Thursday, 7pm @ the Neptune; Friday, 4pm @ the Neptune)

· Strange Culture Including both dramatic recreations and first-person interviews, this documentary examines post-9/11 paranoia and restriction of civil liberties via the story of artist and college professor Steve Kurtz. After his wife's sudden death, Steve becomes a suspect because of his politically-charged art, and is ultimately arrested as a terrorist. The doc follows his hellish experience that ain't over yet, as nearly three years after the fact, the charges against Kurtz have neither been dropped, nor has the case gone to trial. (Thursday, 7pm @ Northwest Film Forum; Saturday June 2nd, 3:30pm @ SIFF Cinema)

· Black Sheep Who don't wanna see this campy horror flick about mutant killer sheep? (Thursday, 9:45pm @ Lincoln Square; Saturday June 2nd, midnight @ the Neptune)

· Angel-A Life is beautiful when an angel saves a con man from killing himself in what may be Luc Besson's final film. (Thursday, 9:45pm @ the Neptune; Monday June 4th, 4:30pm @ the Neptune)