Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: Soccer-mad Iranian girls go "Offside"; an Iraqi journalist's hellish ordeal; redeeming "Sacco and Vanzetti"; revisiting the Falklands in "Blessed by Fire"
Another picture that deserves more love than I can show right now is "Offside," the latest work of semi-guerrilla filmmaking from Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Shot in and around the Tehran soccer stadium during an actual World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain, "Offside" dramatizes the plight of the dozens of teenage female fans who disguise themselves as boys to get into games.

There isn't much to it, plot-wise: A bunch of plucky, likable Tehran tomboys get into trouble and have to get out of it. As with other Panahi films like "The White Balloon," "The Circle" and "Crimson Gold," there's a commitment to half-improvised, ground-level realism that lends the picture news value and an obvious urgency. Here's some irony, or at least some stupid synchronicity: Panahi is no friend to the theocratic regime in Tehran, which has barred almost all his films from any domestic exhibition. Yet at this writing he can't get a visa to visit the United States either, despite the seemingly obvious propaganda value: We are the defenders of free expression, blah blah. I am shocked, shocked, to report that when it comes to genuine questions of liberty, the Bush administration and the Iranian mullahs are on the same side. (Opens March 23 in New York and Los Angeles, with other cities to follow.)

I was a pretty big fan of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's documentary "Gunner Palace," which was really the first film to capture the surreal, deepening madness of post-invasion Iraq. Their follow-up, "The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair," follows a single Iraqi detainee, whom Tucker had noticed during his first tour as an embedded journalist. He's a man named Yunis Abbas, who stood out immediately as an English-speaking freelance journalist. He was arrested, beaten and imprisoned for seven months in Abu Ghraib, accused -- apparently in all seriousness -- of hatching a plot to assassinate British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

This far more modest picture offers a miniature portrait of the military occupation at its most sinister and comically inept, and the mild-mannered Abbas himself makes a wry, fatalistic protagonist (after the fashion of many Arab writers and intellectuals). It's a pretty anti-cinematic experience, since mostly what we see are halting interviews with Abbas and comic-book-style re-creations of his grim tales of arrest, incarceration and interrogation, all purportedly supported by evidence.

If you're already inclined to view the entire occupation as a buffoonish disaster that would be funny if not for all the dead people, you may not be surprised by anything here. On the other hand, if you're already warming up your typing fingers to ask me how I know this guy wasn't a nefarious terrorist planning to kill Blair, let's just move on. (Opens March 23 at Cinema Village in New York and E Street Cinema in Washington; March 30 in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Austin, Texas; and April 6 in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.)

Peter Miller's by-the-numbers documentary "Sacco and Vanzetti" clearly lays out what is now pretty well understood about the early 20th century's most famous court case, in which a couple of Italian immigrants with anarchist leanings were convicted of a robbery-murder they clearly did not commit. The 1921 trial and 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti set the template for a certain kind of American confrontation between authorities and radicals, one inevitably tinged with political repression and racial bigotry. The pattern has repeated itself over and over, with Angela Davis and Huey Newton, with John Sinclair and Leonard Peltier and Mumia abu-Jamal. A bit pedantic, but thorough and interesting throughout, a must for history buffs. (Opens March 30 at the Quad Cinema in New York and April 6 in Los Angeles. Other engagements may follow.)

Finally, for those of you in New York, the morbid and gripping war film "Blessed by Fire," from the Argentine filmmaker Tristán Bauer, is well worth a look. (It won the Best Narrative Feature award at Tribeca last year.) Based on an influential novel that rocked Argentina's nostalgic-amnesiac view of the Falkland War of 1982, this is the first film to explore how the country's vicious military dictatorship drummed up nationalist fervor into an unwinnable war against Britain over some meaningless rocks in the South Atlantic. (It's also the first Argentine film production to be allowed access to the Falklands since the war.)

When a journalist named Esteban (Gastón Pauls) gets a phone call from the wife of an old army buddy who's tried to kill himself, he's launched into a wrenching series of flashbacks. His memories of "las Malvinas," as the islands are known in Spanish, are of cold, hunger, deprivation and the slow-dawning realization that Argentine forces have been abandoned out there to be killed or surrender when the British finally show up. It was a tiny, old- fashioned and stupid little war, but no less ugly than most for those who were forced to fight it. (Now playing at the Pioneer Theater in New York.)

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