Moviegoing turns 100 this year, and the Three Rivers Film Festival is celebrating with something old and many things new.

The old, which in this case also means treasured, will come in the silent films "Beyond the Rocks" (with Philip Carli accompaniment) at the Byham Theater and "Blackmail" (with Alloy Orchestra music) at the Regent Square Theater. Carli also will serenade short films during an afternoon at the Harris Theater designed to re-create the nickelodeon experience, down to the five-cent admission.

		3 Rivers Film Festival schedule

Space and time don't permit reviewing every festival entry but here is a sampling. Some movies, notably "The Squid and the Whale," "Pride & Prejudice" and "SQUONKumentary" are getting sneak previews, with regular Pittsburgh runs to follow.

For information, see www.3rff.com or www.pghfilmmakers.org.

'SQUONKUMENTARY'

The world in general -- the U.S. Senate, in particular -- would be a much better place if it contained fewer Republicans and Democrats and more Squonkers.

Squonk Opera, the most deliciously bizarre performing troupe ever to come out of Pittsburgh, is the short-awaited (but long-deserved) subject of director Peggy Sutton's delightful "SQUONKumentary," which follows that group from its three-month run at P.S. 122 in New York through its monumental and not entirely successful efforts to relocate on Broadway.

In the process, we're treated to fine samples of the surrealistic audiovisual humor that makes those zany troubadours so enjoyable: fantastic Dadaist images, combined with equally offbeat but often truly beautiful and soaring music.

It's a longer distance and harder trip from P.S. 122 to Times Square than you'd think. But you'll have a hell of a time not getting there. And another helluva good time if you attend the sneak preview Friday night with the added attraction of a live Squonk performance.

-- Barry Paris,

Post-Gazette film critic

---

'PRIDE & PREJUDICE'

Mrs. Bennet's life is dedicated to one pursuit for five reasons: landing a husband for each of her plethora of daughters. They range from diffident Jane (Rosamund Pike) to silly Lydia (Jena Malone), but the problematic one is Elizabeth, our strong-minded heroine -- wonderfully played by Keira Knightley in this wonderful rendering of Jane Austen's most popular novel.

"Pride & Prejudice" purists may quibble over some cuts and characterizations, but there's not a false note in the musicality of Joe Wright's direction (or the actual music of Dario Marianelli's score), and the supporting cast is excellent. Matthew Macfadyen is exactly right as mysteriously morose Darcy, the prejudiced object of Lizzie's prideful affections. Dear old Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn as the girls' delightfully mismatched, long- and short-suffering parents, respectively, are fun to watch.

There ain't nothin' like that Dame Judi Dench, chewing up the early 19th-century scenery as Lady Catherine. And there's plenty of that scenery to chew or, more properly, just savor in Roman Osin's exquisite cinematography.

Knightley reveals greater depth than anyone could have predicted. This PG movie goes to the head of the class-conscious English literature it depicts: as beautiful as any page-to-screen adaptation you (or at least I) could want to see.

-- Barry Paris

---

'THE SQUID AND THE WHALE'

He's pompous, she's promiscuous, and their boys, ages 16 and 12, are caught in the riptide of their separation. The waves are pulling them out to sea, farther and farther from the comfort of their Park Slope home in 1986 Brooklyn.

Bernard and Joan Berkman (Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney) devise an elaborate joint custody arrangement that even involves toting the family cat from house to house. But the older boy (Jesse Eisenberg) takes his father's side in the split, while the younger son (Owen Kline) sees things his mother's way. Both, however, are lost in ways their parents cannot comprehend.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach is a child of divorce who says the story is fictional but the emotions real. And it seems that way, with a messy mix of tears, confusion, anger, self-deception and an argument about cat food -- she buys Purina at her house, he sticks with generic at his -- that isn't really about cat food.

As Bernard (an excellent Daniels, whose character manages to be selfish, snobbish and yet occasionally sympathetic) tells someone of marriage: "The whole thing's very complicated." No one would argue with him, especially after watching this wrenching film.

-- Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette movie editor

---

'REEL PARADISE'

In July 2002, indie film guru John Pierson (among his claims to fame is pronouncing Spike Lee the future of cinema after seeing a rough cut of "She's Gotta Have It"), his wife and children moved to Fiji for a year-long adventure. He would show movies, for free, at the 180 Meridian Cinema, a 50-year-old theater that seats 288, and the couple's teenage daughter and son would enroll in a local school on a remote island.

Filmmaker Steve James ("Hoop Dreams," "Stevie") spent the last month with the family, documenting their experience. I felt the absence of those first 11 months but better the end of the journey, with its reflection, than the beginning.

"Reel Paradise" is about more than Fijians hooting and hollering at Buster Keaton and "Bringing Down the House" or what happens when the projectionist gets drunk on grog. James captures culture clashes, teen rebellion, thorny family dynamics and the everyday challenges of dealing with a cloddish landlord, break-ins and a case of Dengue fever.

You can run, it turns out, but you can't hide from the real world. Nor, in this case, would you want to.

-- Barbara Vancheri

---

'DUMPSTER'

Jim, a college maintenance worker, is often treated as if he's invisible. Francis, a long-in-the-tooth frat boy, would like to be invisible at times. He can't escape the ghost of a suicidal roommate, an old girlfriend now noisily cavorting with a frat brother, and the financial tethers of his parents back home in Princeton.

"Dumpster," written by Jim Ray Daniels and directed by John Rice, almost seems like a two-man play, with David Conrad as the frat boy and Jeffrey Carpenter as the laborer who is living with a divorced waitress and her son and trolling for treasures in the Dumpster where Francis seeks solace.

Shot for roughly $10,000 in five days on CMU's campus, "Dumpster" doesn't stint where it counts -- in the dueling dialogue that crawls into two worlds (working class, privileged college student) and unearths some treasures of its own.

If its references to Mario Lemieux, Mount Oliver and "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" weren't enough, it closes with a song by Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers. It's called, perfectly, "Shot of Salvation."

-- Barbara Vancheri

---

'THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG'

It's unclear how much Im Sang-Soo knows about his nation's history, which parts of "The President's Last Bang" are true, which are fairly fictionalized, which are made up to fit an agenda, and which are made up to make a good movie. This we know is true: By 1979, South Korean President Park Chung Hee had near dictatorial control of his country, and he was assassinated by the head of South Korean secret service. It's also true that Im's "The President's Last Bang" is so controversial that the South Korean government censored some scenes from this film.

Something between a farce and a thriller, Im's film casts the president and his cronies as lecherous and incompetent, and the security service assassins as bumbling thugs. If "The President's Last Bang" is a factually based Korean "All the President's Men," it's fascinating to learn the tiny personal details that contributed to the making of history: an official's bad breath, an inconvenient friendship with a presidential guard, security officers without bullets, a consort's relationship with the president, and many more. But if all that minutia is merely a series of invented literary devices used to weave few hard facts into a feature-length movie, then "The President's Last Bang" is little more than an entertaining Korean "JFK."

-- John Hayes,

Post-Gazette staff writer

---

'DAS BUS'

Public transportation riders and internal-combustion engine commuters live in different worlds. Certainly, an urban documentary examining bus culture should articulate the differences and shed light on the secret lives of public transportation users.

Ben Meade's look at the Kansas City bus system, however, relies too much on superficial video effects and irrelevant archival footage. "Das Bus" mixes poorly scripted staged scenes, footage from an old news documentary, shallow interviews with drivers, riders and non-riders, and some mediocre folk songs. Granted, some of the stories are fun, but it never congeals into a cohesive examination of what drives the drivers and whether the riders are seeking something more than a ride.

-- John Hayes