Some movie about some Marvel comics superhero opens today but franchi$e sequels aren’t your only option for film fun around town: eighties nostalgia, French farce, whiskey smuggling and inspiration play out on Seattle screens this weekend.

• Northwest Film forum [site] hosts a film about Tibet, that often over-romanticized place. Dreaming Lhasa, takes a more clear-eyed look in a film about a Tibetan filmmaker from New York named Karma who travels to Dharamsala to make a film about former political prisoners. As she listens to the stories of courage and suffering from her interviewees, Karma is drawn into a voyage of discovery about Tibet and her own self.
• The evening show for the Egyptian [site] is The Valet, a French farce by Francis Veber The Closet, The Dinner Game) in which a billionaire must convince his supermodel mistress and a parking valet to feign a romance.
• Midnight at the Egyptian brings The Goonies, a movie everyone in the world (it seems) but me has seen. (I will note that the Cyndi Lauper theme song is still a favorite for me years later.) Thrill to the adventures of a bunch of young kids (including a pre-Hobbit Sean Astin) on a quest for buried treasure to save their home.
• Swing over to the Metro [site] for Disappearances (Kris Kristofferson becomes a whiskey smuggler in Prohibition-era Vermont) and/or Civic Duty in which an unemployed accountant decides to take action against the terrorist (or so he suspects) next door.
• When I was a little girl in the early 1970s, my favorite cartoon was Rocky and Bullwinkle, the only cartoon the adults in my life seemed to like. Years later in the late 1980s, I went to the Grand Illusion [site] for a showing of Bullwinkle cartoons and realized that the grown-ups were getting all kinds of jokes that hadn’t even registered in my younger self’s brain. Those of you who were little kids in the 80s probably aren’t going to get the same sort of revelations from the Grand Illusion’s showing of He-Man & She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword at 11 pm on Friday and Saturday, but the humor potential is so high it can’t even be calculated.

Isn’t it almost time for outdoor cinema?