This Week in Seattle Cinema: School's In

With Labor Day weekend come and gone, the glut of America's summer vacations are now but loosely collated photo albums to pester your Facebook friends with. Now is the time the nation's adolescents are to be funneled back into our embattled learning institutions to prepare themselves for lives of infinite, summerless toil and the unheralded death of their creative spirit. This week, celebrate the renewed misery of countless teenagers with these two documentaries and a (kind of) historical thriller.

The Whale
SIFF Cinema (9/10-9/15)
Like whales? Like Ryan Reynolds narrating things? The stars have aligned for you, my friend! SIFF Cinema has launched back into full swing after its own summer vacation with this neat doc on Luna, a charming Orca whale that ended up just off the coast of Vancouver Island after losing track of its family. Marvel as the killer whale cleverly befriends the human element of Nootka Sound only to turn them against each other in deciding the adorable cetacean's fate. Well played, Luna. Well played. As an added incentive, the film's directors, Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit, are expected to attend certain screenings over the weekend. Check out Seattlest's stirring interview with Chisolm here.

The Debt
Seven Gables Theater (9/10-9/15)
This compelling political thriller is the star-studded Hollywood update of a 2007 Israeli film, tracking three former Mossad agents as they grapple with repercussions from the high-profile mission that thrust them into fame and public adoration, over forty years after the fact. Featuring Helen Mirren (Gosford Park, The Queen) and Sam Worthington (Clash of the Titans, Avatar) under the direction of Tom Madden (Shakespeare in Love, not much else), this drama manages to keep itself pretty taut as it swings back and forth between 1966 and 1997 to track the three agents' Nazi war-criminal prey. It isn't perfect, with a final act that has apparently caused some pretty terminal cases of eye-rolling -- but if you're anything like me, you've probably sat through much worse to watch either Mirren or Worthington kick some ass.

American Grindhouse
Grand Illusion Cinema (9/12-9/15)
Here's something to please every die-hard fan of the genre that consists almost entirely of mindless action, unrestrained pathos and graphic sex: a documentary! American Grindhouse takes a look at the dawn of exploitation films (which, none too surprisingly, begins pretty much immediately after the dawn of film itself) from Thomas Edison's "salacious" early shorts and the oppression of the Hays Code to the bloody, race-gender-or-sexual-orientation-baiting fun that we know and love. I realize this one is sort of a hard sell, seeing as how the movie itself is available in its entirety on Hulu for free as I type this, but a larger-than-life cast of cult heroes like Fred Williamson or Robert Forster and prolific, geek-beloved directors like John Landis or Joe Dante keep this cheeky chronicle of film history cinematic enough to deserve a full night out.