NWFF presents Crips and Bloods: Made in America, the new film by director Stacy Peralta. Fond as I am of Peralta’s previous two films, Dogtown & Z-Boys and Riding Giants, when I first heard about this project I considered him an unlikely choice for this topic. It turns out he was the perfect fit: the history of South Central LA and the blend of complicated factors that transformed post-World War II social clubs into post-Vietnam War gangs is presented in a thoughtful, nuanced way with enough passion and energy to prevent “talking head syndrome” without taking away from any of the seriousness of the story. Narrated by Forrest Whitaker, Crips and Bloods features actual street-level video collected by Peralta from a wide variety of sources as well as interviews with key figures in the South Central story and experts of all sorts on the issues of poverty, racism and violent crime. The entire film is engrossing and provocative and all of the people introduced on film, no matter how briefly, are interesting and well spoken, but it’s most specifically during the interviews with current and former gang membes that director Peralta, always sympathetic to the plight of young urban men, truly shines, showing the humanity in people whose life stories and actions are so very often far from humane. Through Sunday.

Also at NWFF: The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s classic film about a group of aging bandits out to make one last stand; make a whole evening of it and see this with Paint Your Wagon, the Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg-starring musical Western.

SIFF Cinema joins the PNWB in a tribute to Broadway by presenting a short series of films based on Broadway shows: On Your Toes (Friday) features a young Eddie Albert as a songwriter (whose compositions are actually by Rodgers and Hart) who falls in love with the prima donna who takes a starring role in the production he’s written for the Russian Ballet. Saturday sees Carousel, the charming story of down-at-the-heels Billy’s last shot at making something of himself and his love Julie and Sunday is West Side Story, perhaps the most classic of all movie musicals.

Midnight at the Egyptian: Bruce Willis tries to save the world while Milla Jovovich wears some seriously awesome costumes in The Fifth Element, a film I’ve always thought contained way more style than substance–but oh, what style!

Sexy Czech Marcela is caught up in all sorts of drama and torn between her husband and her lover, a man she met after her husband was arrested for stealing her car. Sexy and complicated, Beauty in Trouble plays one week only at the Varsity.

Central Cinema screens Carmen Jones, a 1954 retelling of the Bizet opera, set here in an all-black army camp. Sexy, sexy Dorothy Dandridge stars as the lucious title character whose insistence on sinking her claws into good boy Joe (Harry Belafonte) leads to tragedy for them both.