Ty's movie picks for Friday October 12

Festival, festival, pick a mini-festival. They're happening all over the Boston area this weekend. At the Brattle is the fifth annual Boston Fantastic Film Festival, a collection of horror, sci-fi, and general dementia you won't find anywhere else.

The Boston Latino Film Festival kicks off tonight at the Harvard Film Archive with "Imitation," about a Mexican woman (Vanessa Bauche of "Amores Perros") looking for love and meaning in Montreal.

Other BLIFF screenings will be held at the Coolidge, and BU's Thurman Center. Further information at the festival's homepage.

The other big news is the Michael Haneke retrospective at the MFA and the HFA: a week of brilliant, discomfiting cinema capped by an appearance next Friday night of the man himself (in photo above). He'll be bringing along a print of "Funny Games," the U.S. remake of his harrowing 1997 drama about violence, cinema, and audience culpability. The new version -- to be released in February 2008 -- stars Nicole Kidman, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt, and it promises to be a lot more than Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot recreation of "Psycho." (You can catch the original "Funny Games" October 20 at the MFA.) Wesley weighed in on the series recently. If all you've seen of Haneke's work is "Cache" or "The Piano Teacher," you need to check this out, but fasten your seatbelts -- this director doesn't play nice, fair, or easy. "Time of the Wolf," in particular, is one of the great end-of-civilization experiences. (It's screening at the MFA on Halloween, appropriately.)

If you're up near the New Hampshire seacoast, the 7th annual New Hampshire Film Festival unspools in Portsmouth. The excellent documentary "Row Harder No Excuses," about a cross-Atlantic rowboat race, plays tonight at 6:00 p.m.

Fairly slender pickings in the multiplexes, although if you haven't yet seen "Michael Clayton," get thee to a multiplex -- the film expands from the Boston Common to suburban markets this weekend. The more I think about this movie, the more impressed I am with its quiet, compelling craftsmanship. They don't make them like this anymore, and they should.

Among new films, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" is worthwhile eye-candy for those who look forward to the Oscars for Best Costume and Production Design, but it's a little distressing to watch Clive Owen turned into a lovesick swain out of a romance comic. Blanchett's fine, as expected.

Neat little documentary playing at the Kendall and the West Newton: "My Kid Could Paint That," about a four-year-old girl whose paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Prodigy? Fraud? The movie considers all the possibilities and leaves the ball in your court, which isn't such a bad thing. The wife and I watched this with our daughters and had a great conversation afterwards about creativity, kidhood, and parenting.

Of course, you may not even make to the movies this weekend, right? Go Sox.