Devastating doc, Zhang's martial-arts extravaganza highlight week's movies

MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH Who owns this devastating documentary portrait of domestic misery in early-1960s suburban America? Charley, the angry, tidiness-obsessed father whose careless updates about his multiple infidelities to his wife, Allis, sound less like confessions than salt rubbed carefully into the wounds of her alleged insufficiencies? Allis, who is heard confiding her escalating unhappiness into a crackly Dictaphone originally purchased to narrow the gulf between her and the husband whose work took him away from home for long stretches? The shrink, who bullied and tranquilized her into taking the blame for her husband's peccadilloes and her children's difficulties? Or the couple's grandson, filmmaker Morgan Dews, who juxtaposes Allis' high, querulous and increasingly desperate recorded voice with the pitifully banal home movies that show Charley, an unlikely Lothario in specs and a bald pate, posing or roughhousing with the grinning kids we know to be sliding into depression and dysfunction? An artful arranger of evidence, Dews tacitly shifts the balance of domestic pvower to his grandmother. Honoring both her shocking vulnerability and the rebellious spirit that her domineering spouse never fully quashed, Dews helps Allis hold out a gendered posthumous snapshot of an era whose smug surface, barely masking oceans of suffering, makes Revolutionary Road look like a tea party. —Ella Taylor

(Note: In an innovative release strategy, the film is being made available for digital viewing online by Gigantic Digital on the same day as its New York theatrical release, starting 9 a.m. Friday. The streaming will be up to HD quality and commercial-free, and a three-day unlimited viewing ticket is $2.99. Full details can be found at giganticdigital.com.)

HERO If you've never seen Zhang Yimou's 2002 martial-arts drama on the big screen, you're losing out on a visual symphony composed in color so lush and saturated that each image seems freshly painted. Jet Li plays Nameless, an invincible warrior who has defeated three assassins bent on killing a warlord (Chen Daoming) who means to conquer and unite China's squabbling provinces. As he relates his story to the warlord, color-coded flashbacks—each told from a different viewpoint, in Rashomon fashion—place drastically different spins on his victory. Even if the celebrated cinematographer Christopher Doyle had never shot another movie, this portfolio piece would place him among the art's highest ranks: A gravity-defying swordfight between two women in billowing blood-red robes amid swirls of golden autumn leaves has a visual richness so intense it almost stings. It doesn't hurt that his opalescent canvas is the face of Maggie Cheung, who plays the most committed of the assassins. It's odd to see Zhang, maker of the initially banned Raise the Red Lantern, directing an apparent ode to enlightened despotism: comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl's triumph-of-the-will pageantry are not inapt, and the ending faintly suggests a unified-Europe epic with Hitler as the hero. But it's easy to see why he got the gig directing the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. In Mandarin with subtitles. —Jim Ridley (Screens free and open to the public Friday, Feb. 20, at Sarratt Cinema, Vanderbilt)

FIRED UP Getting high and mighty on teen-sex comedies is a sucker's game, but it's worth noting how particularly abhorrent a movie like Fired Up is. Not content to be just another dumb high school flick, it's actually teaching young, virginal viewers to treat women like stupid, submissive slut-cattle for the rest of their lives. Bored of banging every last chick in school, horny football studs Shawn (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) ditch their team for a couple weeks of cheer camp, where they will be the only straight dudes in a sea of 600 tits, er, 300 cheerleaders. They're basically the same insipid conquistador, except Nick is the more officious schemer, and Shawn is the science whiz who helps all the (brainless) girls with their homework. Learning a few cheers, but never punished for their piggish insolence (the third-act inspirational speech, literally: "Be a cocky asshole"), Nick eventually wins over an older coach (Molly Sims) with his secret poetry, and Shawn falls in love with squad leader Carly (Sarah Roemer) because she's the only girl who didn't want to whore around on first sight. We're light years away from Animal House, sure—but who ever thought we would long for the richer, funnier dignity of American Pie? —Aaron Hillis (Opens Friday)