Ah, dreary holiday weekends. Just the sort of thing that makes you happy to be in the opening days of a gigantic film festival. A couple of suggestions for tonight:

• Wordplay [siff] was originally conceived as a documentary about Will Shortz, the beloved puzzle editor of beloved New York Times crossword. Along the way, Shortz convinced director Patrick Creadon to visit his American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut. There, he found a collegial dysfunctional family of crossword enthusiasts and a cast of characters to profile in the lead-up to the 2005 competition. As engaging as these extraordinary (solving Sunday puzzles in under 10 minutes) citizens are, their stories are not quite compelling enough to sustain an entire film. Rather than stretching their material into the Spellbound mold, Creadon wisely fleshes out the picture with crossword history, conversations crossword luminaries (Shortz and puzzle writer Merl Reagle), and interviews with celebrities. Bill Clinton makes the crowd long for the days of an eloquent newspaper-reader in the White House, Jon Stewart provides a hilarious take on facing the crossword, Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina analogizes team play to team crosswording, and the Indigo Girls reflect on similarities between songwriting and working through a series of up and down clues. Reagle takes us through the process of creating a puzzle from scratch, which the celebrities later face when it is published in the Times. The movie’s graphics are innovative and effective — we see what it looks like to solve an entire puzzle in two minutes, and follow along as the characters work through the clues. All of this contributes to the seemingly impossible realization of turning a solitary activity into the material of a highly dramatic nailbiter finale. This feels tailor-made for a Seattle audience. It screens tonight at 6:30 (Neptune) and will return later in the summer for wider release.
• The expression on Romain Duris’s face as his character meets and falls in love with his new housemates in L’auberge espagnol is one of my favorite moments on film. I haven’t yet seen Russian Dolls [siff], the sequel which picks up with the Erasmus students five years after Barcelona, but if it’s even half as enjoyable as the original it is a safe bet for your Sunday night movie. It also has the advantage of having a title that is easier to pronounce. (9:15 at the Egyptian)