W. As much edited as it is directed, Oliver Stone's psycho-historical portrait of George W. Bush has all the queasy appeal of a strychnine-laced acid flashback. Its patchwork chronology centers on the run-up to the Iraq War and the ensuing search for the missing weapons of mass destruction, while pushing two theses regarding the nature of its eponymous antihero: One, that the younger Bush (played crudely by Josh Brolin) became president to take revenge on the elder, and two, that Dubya actually has a powerful insight into American politics. Cable news won't be able to resist the movie's most outrageous scenes, and such blatant Bush bludgeoning should compel a few Republican pols and right-wing pundits to rise to their maligned leader's defense. Many more people will see W.'s choice moments as de facto campaign ads on TV or YouTube than will ever sit through the movie. Scripted by Stone's buddy Stanley Weiser, W. may be opening at a good time, but it doesn't exactly promise one. Stone omits the stolen 2000 election, stops short of the 2004 campaign and spares us the second term, but this is still a painful movie to endure. I blame history more than Stone for that—it's a shame that when the filmmaker contemplated the nature of imperial hubris four years ago, the gods decreed he should unleash Alexander rather than this. Back then, W. might actually have made a difference. —J. Hoberman (Opens Friday)

THE ORDER OF MYTHS "I think you'll learn a lot of history," says a grim-faced dressmaker (black) to Mardi Gras queen Helen Meaher (white) early in The Order of Myths. Mobile, Ala., has two separate Mardi Gras carnivals—one white, one black—and if Meaher is aware that her ancestors brought in the very last American slave shipment to Mobile in 1859 (including her black Mardi Gras counterpart's ancestors), she's not letting on. No one in the film admits to learning anything they haven't known for years; Margaret Brown's documentary zeroes in on the ways words like "culture" and "tradition" can become poisonous euphemisms—the defense for Mobile's last true bastion of segregation. But Brown, who directed the Townes Van Zandt doc Be Here to Love Me, hasn't made agit-prop or a heavy-handed exposé of the obvious (viz., Southern racism is alive and well, just more genteel and better-disguised). Quietly shocking, The Order of Myths is a deft, engrossing cross-section of Mobile life, heavy on local color and insight—from the old-fashioned debutante balls of the white Mardi Gras and the rowdier black dance all the way down to the Mobile Mystics, a group of Larry the Cable Guy look-alikes whose idea of a proper greeting is throwing beer cans at their president. —Vadim Rizov (Runs Oct. 19-23 at The Belcourt; director Brown will be in attendance Oct. 19 for a post-film Q&A.)

I DON'T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE Led by a magic flute that not all can hear, avant-pop marches on: Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is an enigmatic, largely wordless ritual performed over the often comatose body of the filmmaker's alter ego, Lee Kang-sheng. Lee plays two manifestations of the same person, identified in the credits as Paralyzed Guy and Homeless Guy. The Paralyzed Guy is introduced lying in a hospital bed as the Homeless Guy wanders through the streets of Kuala Lumpur, getting himself beat up when he inexplicably tries to hustle a gang of hustlers and then getting himself rescued from the pavement by a Bangladeshi guest worker. Tsai's eighth feature is his first to have been shot in his native Malaysia and, stylized as it is, it draws substantial human interest from Kuala Lumpur's urban locations—most spectacularly, a vast, flooded construction site. As this is a Tsai picture, sex inches ever closer, as does urban disaster, in the form of a mysterious haze somehow connected (or suspected of being connected) to the city's multi-ethnic foreign workers. Albeit closer to ballet than drama, this urban nocturne is one of Tsai's most naturalistic films—at least in terms of its rich, humid, almost viscous ambience. The narrative, however, is pure fable. In Taiwanese, Malay, Mandarin and Bengali with subtitles. —J. Hoberman (Screens 7 p.m. Friday at Sarratt Cinema; Peter Lorge, Vanderbilt senior lecturer in history and East Asian studies, will introduce the film.)

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES From its attention-grabbing B-movie beginning, The Secret Life of Bees, a family drama based on the best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, chugs pleasantly into a television special tailored for the crossover female market, while dropping tantalizing hints that it has more on its mind than a benign tale of substitute mothering across the color line. The ever-capable Dakota Fanning plays Lily, a motherless teenager who flees her bullying father (Paul Bettany, channeling Brad Dourif) to find safe haven with three black bee-keeping sisters more solidly equipped for life than she. Writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) bathes them in a honeyed glow and tempers the soundtrack's jaunty Motown music with a soft guitar when Southern racism pokes in its unwelcome head. Stately black actresses approaching middle age always run the risk of getting locked in as the face of Black Equanimity, and as August, the oldest sister whose job it is to teach Lily how to live a good life, Queen Latifah has no choice but to succumb. Only near the end does this likable but saccharine movie fleetingly complicate the Gone With the Wind–fed delusion that the love of poor, black nannies for their white charges was undiluted by bitterness. Is that Hattie McDaniel I hear, whooping for joy from beyond the grave? —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday)

MOMMA'S MAN Thirtyish guy—bit of a schlub but married, with a newborn baby—comes back from California to visit aging parents in New York and, overtaken by a mysterious lethargy, moves into his tiny childhood room. Momma's Man, directed by Azazel Jacobs from his own screenplay, is one of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote. That Mikey (Matt Boren) grew up in a pre-gentrification, tin-ceilinged, wooden-floored lower-Manhattan loft with parents who were unreconstructed Jewish bohemians gives Momma's Man more than a dollop of local color; that Mikey's parents are played by the filmmaker's own, the artists Ken and Flo Jacobs, and the loft is the place where he actually grew up provides the film with considerable emotional resonance. Momma's Man is highly specific, evoking not only the filmmaker's lost childhood but also the heroic New York art scene that had already begun to fade when the now 35-year-old Azazel was a boy. But it's even more powerfully universal. Much comic pathos arises from the realization that Mikey has no perspective on his parents; they are as mysterious in their idiosyncrasies as anyone's. His prolonged visit is not so much a regression as a blissful immersion in some pre-analytical Eden. Cluttered with charged objects, the magic loft is an image of childhood in itself. —J. Hoberman (Opens Friday at The Belcourt)