LAKE OF FIRE

**** out of four stars

Unrated; graphic documentary violence, nudity, mature themes.

Theater: Bell Auditorium.

Only zealots could view this emotionally wrenching, thought-provoking documentary epic and emerge with their opinions on the abortion debate unshaken. Shot over a period of 16 years by Tony Kaye ("American History X"), it is the best kind of film journalism, one that examines all sides of an issue with penetrating intelligence, raises provocative questions and allows viewers to come to their own conclusions. There are voices of fanaticism and reason in both the abortion-rights and antiabortion caucuses represented here. Kaye doesn't spare us horrific images of abortion remains, nor of murdered abortion-clinic physicians, lying in pools of their own blood. But there's more to the film than shock value. He gives us remarkable human stories, too; the subsequent life of Norma McCorvey, aka "Jane Roe," is too astounding to reveal here.

The film is photographed in limpid black and white, a sound decision. The gore would be unbearable in color, and the absolutist arguments at either extreme of the debate finally mute into a perplexing palette of grays. Attorney Alan Dershowitz sums up the dilemma with the parable of the rabbi who counseled a furious couple. The husband told his version of what was wrong with the marriage, and the rabbi said, "You're right." Then the wife told her side of the story and he said, "You're right." When an onlooker said, "Rabbi, they can't both be right," he replied, "You're right."

-- Colin Covert

BELLA

*** out of four stars

Rated: PG-13 for thematic elements and brief disturbing images.

A slight but tender and novel romance, "Bella" follows a handsome restaurant chef and a lovely waitress through a day of walking and talking around New York City. The film releases its information about them in a slow leak -- are they a couple? Is she with someone else? -- teasing our curiosity agreeably. Jose (Eduardo Verastegui) and Nina (Tammy Blanchard) spend the day side by side, coming to terms with her unplanned pregnancy, talking through her misgivings and his old traumas.

There's not much more happening here than two people getting to know each other as we come to understand them both, yet that's a story we never tire of, so long as it's told well. And here, it is. Writer/director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's film is utterly touching and captivating, wisely humanist in refusing to cast even the most unpleasant characters as cardboard villains. A loving testament to the beauty of family, "Bella" won the People's Choice Award at last year's Toronto Film Festival. Rarely are crowd-pleasers so effortlessly artful.

-- Colin Covert

WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY

*** out of four stars

Rated: R for language and disturbing content involving suicide.

Theater: Lagoon.

In this engaging indie comedy, a drab afterlife is reserved for those who commit suicide. Young Zia (Patrick Fugit, "Almost Famous") kills himself after being jilted in love, only to discover that his existence in death is surprisingly lifelike, "but a little bit worse." Stuck serving greasy food at Kamikaze Pizza, saddled with a complaining roommate, he occupies a world of futility and purposelessness.

When he learns that the girlfriend he snuffed himself over also has arrived, he and nihilistic Russian rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham) hit the road to find her. They pick up Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) along the way, a headstrong young woman who insists on finding and having a word with whomever is in charge. She is convinced that she is here only because someone has made a mistake.

Writer/director Goran Dukic sets a mischievous course in adapting Israeli writer Etgar Keret's novella, notably rejecting fancy film palettes in favor of using the crummy settings of everyday life. Dukic makes the most of very little, allowing power stations, truck stops and dry scrub to serve as his squalid landscape of eternal ennui.

It's in this dry desert where lava-throated Tom Waits rules a trailer park of outcasts and dithers among meaningless miracles while seeking his lost dog. Zia and Mikal's quests both end here, in the nearby camp of a messiah promising deliverance.

GIANNI TRUZZI

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Joe Strummer: the future is unwritten

*** out of four stars

Not rated; language.

Theater: Lagoon.

Julien Temple has the credentials to make "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten." He was there from the beginning. The striking opening scene of "The Future Is Unwritten" comes from footage he shot in 1976 of Strummer, singing the throat-stripping "White Riot" from one of the Clash's first recording sessions.

Temple and Strummer were friends, but "Future" is no hagiography. Strummer, who died in 2002 of a heart defect, possessed a head-scratching host of contradictions. Generous and thick-headed, ambitious and lazy, possessing a genuine concern for the planet as well as a stadium-sized ego, Strummer could be inscrutable even to those closest to him.

There aren't any great revelations. What does stick is just how shell-shocked Strummer was after the Clash disbanded and the long shadow the band's legacy cast over the rest of his life.

Strummer himself is heard throughout the film in excerpts culled mostly from his late-'90s BBC radio program. It's a voice that is sorely missed, making "The Future Is Unwritten" a great gift for those longing to revisit the groovy times of a punk rock past.

GLENN WHIPP

LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS

FOREVER

*** out of four stars

Unrated; some subtitled French.

Theater: Oak Street.

"Forever" proves once and for all that there is life after death, but not necessarily for the dead.

We see that postmortem vitality among those who come to honor the departed at the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The memorial park is best known as the final resting place for the likes of Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Frederic Chopin and Jim Morrison. But the graveyard is also filled with lesser-knowns whose passing is marked by headstones ranging from ornate and well-tended to faded and almost keeling over.

What we see in Heddy Honigmann's understated, touching documentary are the ways that people reach out to the abstract, mentally embracing their memories or, in the case of those coming to see the graves of the famous, finding closure or affirmation for their appreciation, admiration or adulation.

Among the latter group, there are the travelers from Slovenia who come simply to pay their respects to Proust, and the woman of indeterminate nationality, carrying a pink rose and a cemetery map, who asks the film crew in heavily accented English, "Jim Morrison?" This cemetery isn't a place merely to meditate on death; it's also a place to celebrate life.

DESSON THOMSON, WASHINGTON POST