by Kam Williams

For movies opening November 3:

Big Budget Films

"Borat" ("R" for pervasive profanity, crude sexuality, and graphic nudity)
Sacha Baron Cohen stars in the title role of this zany comedy as a journalist dispatched to the U.S. from his native Kazakhstanto to make a documentary about America.

Cast includes Pamela Anderson, Pat Haggerty and Ken Davitian.

"Flushed Away" ("PG" for crude humor and mild epithets)
Class-conscious, claymation animated adventure about a pampered pet mouse (Hugh Jackman) living high on the hog in a posh, penthouse apartment who gets an instant lesson in how the other half lives when he’s accidentally flushed down the toilet and ends up among the hoi polloi on the streets of London. With character voice-overs by Kate Winslet, Jean Reno, Bill Nighy, Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis.

"The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause" ("G")
Tim Allen reprises his role as Scott Calvin, a.k.a. Saint Nick, now a newlywed with a pregnant (Elizabeth Mitchell). This adventure has Santa matching wits with his nemesis Jack Frost (Martin Short) who is trying to appropriate the Christmas holiday.

Independent and Foreign Films

"As the Call, So the Echo" (Unrated)
House call documentary traces the trail of Dr. Alex Moreano from Albuquerque to Vietnam, where the eye, nose and throat specialist attends to poverty-stricken patients at an understaffed hospital in Hue. (In English and Vietnamese with subtitles)

"Commune" (Unrated)
Free love documentary revisits Black Bear Ranch, a presumably utopian community founded by hippies in an abandoned gold mine in Siskiyou County, California in 1968. Featuring archival footage and present-day interviews with former commune members (including actor Peter Coyote), revealing reminiscence candidly examines conflicts, which complicated life at the virtual nirvana.

"The Great Warming" (Unrated)
Cautionary documentary, based on the best seller "Storm Warning: Gambling with the Climate of Our Planet" by science writer Lydia Dotto, explores how global warming trends are affecting the lives of people all around the planet.

"Hood of Horror" ("R" for sex, expletives, nudity, gore, and pervasive graphic violence)
A trio of hip-hop horror flicks narrated by Snoop Dogg involving depraved denizens of a haunted inner city neighborhood. Cast includes Snoop, Pooch Hall, Ernie Hudson, and Sydney Poitier, daughter of Sidney.

"Romantico" (Unrated)
South of the border bio-pic about a middle-aged mariachi musician (Carmelo Muniz Sanchez) struggling to decide whether to stay with his family in Mexico or to migrate to San Francisco, where he can make a lot more money. (In Spanish and English with subtitles)

"Unknown" (Unrated)
Amnesia mystery about five men (Greg Kinnear, Joe Pantoliano, Barry Pepper, Jim Caviezel and Jeremy Sisto) who wake up locked inside an abandoned, chemical warehouse with no memory of who they are or how they got there. The puzzled quintet must figure out which among them is the kidnapped if they are to survive.

"Volver" ("R" for sex and expletives)
Pedro Almodovar directs this surrealistic, skeletons-out-of-the-closet melodrama about a deceased matriarch (Carmen Maura) whose ghost returns home to help her daughters, one (Penelope Cruz), a hard-working mother married to a lazy bum, the other (Lola Duenas), an eccentric hairdresser, deal with the dysfunction in their lives.

"Wondrous Oblivion" (Unrated)
Set in London in the ’60s, this cross-cultural drama revolves around an 11-year-old Jewish boy (Sam Smith) who befriends his new next-door neighbor (Delroy Lindo) from Jamaica in spite of the racist behavior of bigots on the block. (In English and Hebrew with subtitles).