By Design 09 is NWFF’s annual program of film selections that explore design and the moving image. This year’s event kicks off Friday night with a free opening night reception that includes audio-visual performances by digital artists including Kamran Sadeghi, Scott K. James and more. Also on Friday night is an in-person appearance by MK12, a film collective from Kansas City making innovative short films and the first night of a documentary about noted architect Rem Koolhaas. The series also features a screening and panel discussion with local motion graphics designers, two collections of creative new short works and a documentary about Milton Glaser, often considered the personification of American graphic design.

Over at SIFF, it’s a revival of Five Easy Pieces starring Jack Nicholson as a gifted pianist who rejects life as a concert musician to live as an “ordinary Joe” working on an oil rig by day and going bowling and hanging out with his girlfriend at night. Everything changes when he finds out his dad is dying–he hightails it back to Washington state where he reunites with his unusual old man, a musical genius who raised his family in a Socratic style on an isolated island in the beautifully filmed San Juans.

Saturday morning at SIFF is a Filmf4Families screening of Babe, beyond a doubt one of the most charming and good-natured films about talking animals ever made. (Word to the wise: if your post-film giddy mood tempts you into renting the sequel, slap that temptation down: the second Babe is exactly as horrible as this original film was wonderful, which is very much.)

It took 23 years to film The Betrayal, opening Friday at Grand Illusion, and the story is every bit as epic as you imagine a two-decades in the making film would be. It’s also a very intimate story, the tale of the Phrasavath family who escaped from Laos after the US abandoned the Laotians recruited for its secret war in Laos, fought parallel to the then-ongoing Vietnam conflict. Hoping for safety in America, the Phrasavath family found themselves fighting yet again for their survival. The Academy Award nominated documentary was directed by Ellen Kuras in colloboration with one of its subjects, Thavisouk Phrasavath.

Late night at the Grand Illusion: The Black Gestapo, a freaky “blaxploitation” flick very, very loosely based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Teenaged Jason Schwartzman and jaded tycoon Bill Murray are first unlikely friends then even unlikelier rivals for the affections of a lovely young widow in the off-kilter comedy Rushmore, this weekend’s Midnight movie at the Egyptian.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice has been one of my favorite literary characters ever since I was a wee lass and I’ve always been interested in the different ways Alice and Wonderland are used in other artists’ works. Sometimes the results are disappointing, but sometimes they’re brilliant. Phoebe in Wonderland, starring young Elle Fanning as a girl whose casting in a school production of Alice in Wonderland triggers her retreat into a Wonderland-inspired fantasy, could go either way, but here’s to hoping it’s on the brilliant side. At the Neptune.

Central Cinema celebrates kitschy superheroes with a double feature of Batman and The Toxic Avenger.

Do you have tickets for Watchman? It opens officially Friday and many local shows are sold out as there are many, many people eager or anxious to see how this highly-anticipated, highly-hyped film turns out. I’m one of them but I won’t be able to make opening weekend: if you see it, do let me know what you think.