Yes, Virginia, there is (sic) a Spike and Mike. Rock musicians and counterculture characters Craig "Spike" Decker and the late Mike Gribble started showing cartoons interspersed with their band performances. The animation fascination became a full-time gig, and in 1977, Spike & Mike started compiling and presenting breakthrough work by the likes of Nick Park (of the UK animation studio Aardman), Bill Plympton, Mike Judge and a few kilobytes of Pixar artists. Spike & Mike shows have attained a reputation as animation tastemakers. Or tastelessmakers, in the case of their other product, the Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation, which started in 1990. One wonders how much street cred S & M retain mainly due to this, their dark side, wherein falls the noxious, profane, scatological, obscene and ultra-violent stuff — but no racism in the 2006 touring edition. I guess that would be bad.

Much of the current roster, now on tour, appears concocted by, well, mainly students at CalArts. Okay, not all contributors are art-school brats, but the undergrad frat-boy aesthete prevails, even in No Neck Joe, a cycle of short-shorts by Craig McCracken (creator of the Powerpuff Girls, whose retro style is instantly recognizable) about the outcast pain and ultimate triumph of a poor guy who just doesn't possess a neck. John Goras' Chirpy depicts every sexual position conceivable between a stud horse and a nympho little yellow bird. 2 in the AM PM, by J.G. Quintel, is a drug skit inspired by Kevin Smith's Clerks, or is it inspired by Smith's own short-lived Clerks cartoon? Perhaps "inspired" isn't the right word. Raggot is that urban legend about the gay guys and a gerbil, not gaining much in the cartoonicization. The Barbie-and-Ken stop-motion dating nightmare Love and Limbs claims factual basis. I can believe it.

The two bust-a-gut funniest shorts aren't really animation at all. Washington is a heroic rap ode to the Founding Father over a succession of cunningly crude panel drawings, while the gory Teddy Bear's Picnic is basic stuffed-animal puppetry (and evisceration). Hilarious or not, is any of this art? The musical Don't Fuck With Love may have one foot in pop-rock-video hell, but its imagery and wicked sense of humor score. And How to Cope With Death, from the UK, dresses its one joke in terrific hand-drawn technique that heralds a real talent in one Ignacio Ferraras. South Park would be an archetypal Spike & Mike Sick & Twisted pick, and very close in tone here are three "Dr. Tran" shorts by Breehn Burns and Jason Johnson, starring a non-sequiter protag, a little Asian boy doctor action-hero, who doesn't appear to practice medicine or like action. Each daft installment is utterly different from the last, and the variety makes it work. More variety would have made Sick & Twisted work a little better for me, but by now Spike & Mike's countless S & T fans know what they're getting into.

— Charles Cassady Jr.

Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation 1/2

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque

At 9:30 p.m. Friday, January 12; 8:40 p.m. Saturday, January 13; and 7 p.m. Sunday, January 14

Children of Men 1/2

A dystopian vision of the not-so-distant future, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The fact that the movie's 2027 U.K. setting doesn't look all that different from today only enhances the creepy, bone-chilling sense of palpable dread permeating every frame. And when one character cynically remarks, "Every time one of our politicians is in trouble, a bomb goes off," it's tough not to shake your head in post-9/11 agreement.

Clive Owen plays Theo Faron, a political activist turned government apartchik who gets kidnapped by a London-based terrorist group. Julian (Julianne Moore), the resistance movement's steely leader, is Theo's ex-lover, and she uses their messy personal history to get him to secure transit papers for an illegal immigrant they're trying to shepherd out of the country. What makes this particular refugee, uh, unique is that she's eight months pregnant. Since the world is in the grip of an infertility epidemic, it would be the first human birth in 18 years. Not surprisingly, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) has become a hotly contested prize for the fascistic civil authorities, dissident members of Julian's splintering cell and a shady offshore research organization called The Human Project.

Like the Wachowski Brothers' V for Vendetta, Children of Men succeeds as both contemporary-dress futuristic thriller and timely political allegory. It also contains the most throat-clutching action set pieces since Paul Greengrass' The Bourne Supremacy — another chase film that gained documentary-like immediacy from vertiginous handheld camerawork. The cast is uniformly first-rate. Besides Owen, Moore and exciting newcomer Ashitey, there are juicy supporting turns by everyone from Michael Caine (wickedly funny as a sage, pot-growing old hippie) to the currently ubiquitous Danny Huston. But like all Alfonso Cuaron movies, this is a director's film first and foremost, and Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is one of the most staggeringly versatile and accomplished auteurs working today.

— Milan Paurich

Curse of the Golden Flower 1/2

Hell hath no fury like a woman poisoned. That's the case in Zhang Yimou's (House of Flying Daggers, Hero) latest film, a story about an Empress (Gong Li) who tries to seek revenge on her Emperor husband (Chow Yun Fat) for making her drink a toxic tea that will cause her to lose her mind. It's even more complicated than that. The Emperor is upset because his wife has carried on an affair with his son (her stepson), the Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye). This family's dysfunctions don't end there, either. The Empress is also interfering with Wan's attempts to court the Imperial Doctor's daughter (Li Man) and is trying to manipulate her other son into backing her coup against the Emperor. The whole thing's a bloody mess, figuratively and literally.

These tensions are all a prelude to a climactic battle between the Emperor's forces and those assembled by his wife, who has given her troops a Chrysanthemum (hence the film's title) to distinguish them from the Emperor's army. In typical Yimou fashion, the clash between the two armies is a magnificent (if gory) battle that leaves the fields of yellow flowers drenched in red blood and features stunning displays of martial arts skills. Suffice it to say, things don't turn out well for either the Emperor or the Empress. Aside from being a visual marvel and well-acted (Li and Fat are terrific), the film's compelling because its story line about the complexity of relationships is timeless and contemporary, even though it's set in ancient China. — Jeff Niesel

Opens Friday areawide

Stomp the Yard

For those of you unfamiliar with the term "stomping the yard," it's essentially a high-energy form of dancing that flirts somewhere between gymnastics, cheerleading and gangster rap — and also appears to force the participant to make really strange faces. What's even more amazing is how captivating it is to watch and how well this subculture is captured in Stomp The Yard, a film that's informative enough at times to pass as documentary. The movie follows DJ Williams (Columbus Short), a Los Angeles battle dancer who is transplanted to Atlanta after his brother is killed by a bunch of gang-bangers-turned-break-dancers who they hustled. While in Atlanta, he attends the fictional Truth University and is recruited by an underdog fraternity to compete in an annual "stepping" competition curated by MTV's Sway. Oh, then there's April (Meagan Good), the provost's daughter who is dating Williams' new arch rival from the right side of the tracks.

Although Stomp The Yard occasionally wallows a bit too long in Horatio Alger underdog clichés, it more than makes up for this via its expert cinematography and subtle sense of humor in the dialogue. However, the real draw is the dancing, in which these athletes defy gravity and synchronize so tightly that they remind one of a mix of LeBron James and In Living Color's Fly Girls. If you ever wondered what Friday Night Lights would be like if it took place on the dance floor instead of the football field, here's your answer.

— Jonah Bayer

Opens Friday areawide