Aviva, cousin of the late Dawn Wiener (don't ask), gets knocked up by a friend of the family.  After her mom (Ellen Barkin) forces her to get an abortion, Aviva runs away from her New Jersey home and has quite an exciting little adventure.  Some of it involves a woman who collects freaks like Tod Browning, shaping them all into a tight pop outfit that sings religious songs when she isn't serving up heaping piles of Freedom Toast.

Aviva's name and her voyage are both palindromes -- the same thing forwards and/or backwards.  But that's not what makes Palindromes exciting.  The genius part of the film is the casting of Aviva, who is played by eight different actors.  And I mean different.  Some look like normal 12-year-olds.  One is a morbidly obese black girl.  One is a boy.  Another is Jennifer Jason Leigh (her third festival performance).  It's jarring, but each actress makes us feel and respond to Aviva in completely different ways.  As expected, Solodnz uses a cast comprised of mostly inexperienced acting talent, yet is able to mold their performances into intentionally awkward masterpieces.  This could be his best film yet.  It's certainly the edgiest, and the most likely to piss people off.

Mysterious Skin – I wouldn't say I was a huge Gregg Araki fan, but his films are certainly entertaining and provide viewers with plenty of things to talk about.  That is, until Araki finished his apocalyptic trilogy of Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere.  Since then, Araki stunk up the joint with Three's Company-meets-'30s screwball comedy Splendor, and there's a lot more stinking coming from the direction of Skin, a slow, see-through drama based on a novel by Scott Heim.

Brian and Neil were teammates on a rural Kansas Little League team when they were little kids.  Brian (Brady Corbet) talks about missing time, alien abductions and get nosebleeds and blackouts.  Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) becomes a playground rent boy after being sexually violated by the baseball team's pedophile coach.  See where this is going?  Nowhere fast.  Actually, nowhere slow.  Gregg Araki?  More like Gregg Hack-raki.  Sorry -- it's late and I'm punchy.

9 Songs – Most of Michael Winterbottom's Songs takes place via flashback as Antarctic-stranded Matt (Kieran O'Brien) mind wanders through a brief fling with a 21-year-old American girl named Lisa (Margo Stilley -- thing Maggie Gyllenhaal).  They had a lot of sex, and they went to a lot of shows at the Brixton Music Academy.  The sex and the music comprise about 80% of Songs' lean 65-minute running time, with the rest revolving around normal day-to-day activities, like snorting coke, dancing, fighting and drinking coffee.

The music includes live performances from bands like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Super Fury Animals and Primal Scream.  The sex includes scenes depicting full penetration of two holes, a bathtub foot job (which made me long for the days of Jase and Scott on Big Brother 5), role playing, some light BDSM, sex toys, and a money shot that you can actually see (take that, Brown Bunny!).  Winterbottom shoots it all with dark, grainy digital video, which makes some images practically indecipherable, and others completely drenched with saturated colors.  At 65 minutes, you can't afford to not see it.

Kung Fu Hustle – I'm a little leery of movies that sound cool, especially if the title suggests violence and some kind of dancing (yeah, I'm still a little burned about Assassination Tango).  If there was one person who could come satiate my cravings for bloodshed without mucking the works up with foo-foo two-steps, it'd be Stephen Chow, the absolutely insane force behind films like Shaolin Soccer and The God of Cookery.  Friends, Mr. Chow comes through like you wouldn't believe.

Hustle is set in 1930s Shanghai, where violent gangs control every neighborhood except the ultra-shabby Pig Sty Alley.  When Chow's gangster wannabe poses as a member of the powerful Axes to get his friend a free haircut, the real Axes show up, yet are humiliated by three surprisingly powerful everyday workers.  This doesn't make the Axes feel too good, and they eventually kill the three insurgents.  The fun doesn't end there, of course, as more residents of Pig Sty Alley turn out to be great martial arts heroes.  There's the big battle and the end, a little romance thrown in, too.  And the funny.  Lots and lots of the funny.  Chow masterfully blends and bends genres like no other, and Hustle is no exception.