Standing outside the ticket booth, flanked by balloons, Mayor Mike McGinn was one of the demi-celebrities attending SIFF's gala reopening of the Uptown last night. SIFF even rented klieg lights to celebrate the occasion, though renovations aren't yet complete on the renamed SIFF Cinema at the Uptown. In fact, a construction crane loomed above our mayor, as workers were still fussing with the conspicuously blank marquee. McGinn looked a little nervous, as if a wrench might be dropped on his noggin. Inside, before the inaugural screening, technical issues continued to dog him . . .

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Visiting town during the first week of SIFF with Beginners, which opens today at the Harvard Exit, writer/director Mike Mills and his star, Ewan McGregor, tried to assess how the institution of marriage has changed from the World War II generation to today. Once upon a time, as it was for Mills' parents, you got married young and you stayed married! Until, as incorporated into the plot of Beginners, his newly widowed father shrugged off the old marital template after 50 years and declared himself gay.

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Not to be confused with the Jesse Eisenberg-as-Hasidic-Jewish-drug-dealer Holy Rollers from SIFF last year (though both involve conflicts of faith), this world-premiere documentary has strong Seattle connections. Two local churchgoing dudes, Ben Crawford and Colin Jones, now the film's co-producers, decide to start a blackjack card-counting crew. Since one of the biggest risks to the all-cash racket--apart from getting booted from casinos, a regular occurrence--is theft, they build their squad entirely out of fellow young evangelicals. Who better to trust, right, than fellow bros in Christ?

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When will the Spanish Civil War end? World War II, we'll grant you a few more years and movies. But Franco and fascism? Basta! A memory piece, this romantic triangle alternates between the aged perspective of Jacobo, a piano tuner long married to Helena, during 1939 and what appears to be the '80s. Their happy household, it seems, is built on a foundation of lies. As in modern Spain itself, there are dark secrets in the basement: illicit bargains and secret arrangements. Something has been repressed; and something keeps Jacobo's pianos out of tune.

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With more faces than story to recommend about it, this Queens-set indie ends--and this is no spoiler at all--with Jackson Browne's famous '70s FM ballad "The Load-Out." Because if you're going to make a drama about a 40-something roadie who's squandered his youth lugging amps for Blue Oyster Cult, there's really only one way to end it. The roadie (TV mug Ron Eldard) returns home under false pretenses, unwilling to admit to his aged widow of a mother (the great Lois Smith) that he's a complete and utter failure.

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"I really dislike music," says a cop ironically named Amadeus, and this ingenious Swedish comedy soon makes it clear why. His younger brother is a pompous, famous symphony conductor; his father is an overbearing musician, too; and poor Amadeus is tone-deaf. For him, then, the worst possible case to investigate would be a rogue gang of percussionists who make the whole city a venue for performances that the authorities call terrorism. Sneaking into a hospital, they commandeer an OR, then use the oxygen machine, beeping heart monitor, surgical steel, and a patient's bulbous gut to play a delightful conga. Taking their rhythmic anarchism even further, they steal road-construction machinery and perform a symphony for jackhammer and wrecking ball.

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Self-consciously striving to avoid every Bollywood trope and trace of Satyajit Ray, this Indian slum fantasia owes more to American gutter-punk tradition. You could call it Last Exit to Bengal. There, in Kolkata, former video and commercials director Q frames his story in stark black-and-white. Gandu is about 20, fatherless and resentful of his mother's lover. When the latter two have sex, Gandu crawls across their bedroom floor like an insect to steal some cash. Out on the street, he throws down Bengali hip-hop rhymes ("My heart is a crematorium . . . ") and posts his graffiti tag in dilapidated alleyways.

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In the age of Inside Job and The Big Short, you'd hardly expect to see a sympathetic portrayal of unfettered capitalism, but that's exactly what Something Ventured is. Very well crafted by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Ballets Russes), the documentary intersperses new interviews with old stills and archival footage to write a short, punchy history of Silicon Valley from the venture capital side. It's a nimble overview of the origins and IPOs of companies like Atari, Oracle, Cisco Systems, and Apple (sorry, no Steve Jobs interview), but it's also inherently self-serving, almost an infomercial.

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Romeo and Juliet in contemporary Athens? Not exactly. Director Christos Nikoleris adds street racing, MTV cutting, Greek hip-hop, and elements of The Odyssey to his tale of young love and rival clans, but the cocktail tastes flat despite his very polished glass. Some of the modern updates, however, translate nicely from Shakespeare's original. When this Romeo, a bookish Russian immigrant actually named Goran (Antinoos Albanis) climbs the famous balcony for a kiss with Albanian 17-year-old Julia (Georgina Liossi), he then falls onto a parked car below, setting off a wailing alarm.

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Proceeding by dream logic across the Spanish countryside on an old pilgrimage route, Finisterrae features two ghosts--figures wearing white bed sheets with eyeholes--who could be refugees from a Beckett play. The two deceased brothers are deadpan clowns, not ghouls, and they certainly haven't much to say. (Director Sergio Caballero added the dialogue later, to suit the images.) Encountering a herd of tame deer in the snow, the shorter ghost serenades them with a stick flute...

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