We've seen tons of movies about both John Lennon and The Beatles. One focused on the early days of the band; another focused on the killing of Lennon. Documentaries galore displayed the artist's life and/or career, comprehensively or specifically. And, of course, Lennon and his band mates have starred in their own movies. But how about a dramatic telling of little Lennon, the kid who would grow up to be one of the most famous men of the 20th century? Last week, a film titled Nowhere Boy, based on the book "Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon," penned by one of Lennon's half-sisters, Julia Baird, received funding from the UK Film Council, and is therefore on its way to your Beatlemania collection in only a matter of time.

The most exciting thing about Nowhere Boy, the thing that makes it more than just another movie about Lennon, is that it's being scripted by Matt Greenhalgh, writer of the phenomenal Ian Curtis biopic Control, who was attracted to the book's psychological insight into Lennon's character. Baird's telling is not without controversy, mostly due to its portrayal of Mary "Mimi" Smith, the aunt who raised Lennon from the age of 4 (and who Baird did not live with). Because it's about the childhood of a person idolized by millions, there are sure to be other criticisms and controversy once the movie is released. Will it be permitted, though, or even necessary to feature any of Lennon's later music, either from The Beatles or solo?

The Killing of John Lennon puts the viewer squarely inside the mind of Mark David Chapman -- you should know that before going in, since many reasonable viewers might consider that a completely useless journey to take. The choice of director Andrew Piddington is to treat Chapman as though he's important enough to not only have his own biopic, but one that uses his words exclusively and takes its visual and dramatic cues from Chapman's own insane mental tics, such as fancying himself a modern day Holden Caulfield who can't stomach phoneys and has a personal date with infamy. In Piddington's defense however, the assassination was so meaningless that going down this path is probably the only way to film this story, unless you want to do it like Emilio Estevez's Bobby and focus on a lot of non-Chapman characters who just happen to be there when the maniac tornado blows through. Come to think of it, that might have been the more interesting choice, since The Killing of John Lennon is ultimately something of a bore.

Piddington has gone on the record to point out that he directed this film without seeking out Chapman's involvement -- I'm sure Chapman had the free time to be interviewed -- so that further muddies the question of exactly what Piddington was trying to accomplish with the project. Did he delude himself into thinking that making an exhaustive portrait of the inner workings of Chapman's mind would somehow come across as less celebratory of the man's life if he didn't consult Chapman himself? And when I use the word exhaustive, I'm using it from my perspective. This film's understanding of Chapman's inner world is fairly narrow -- his hatred of John Lennon is more or less summed up in his (Chapman's) assertion that Lennon "told us to imagine no possessions, but he has yachts and country estates." The bastard! His other musings on life are sometimes nothing more than quotations from movies he's seen, such as when he tells us "I don't think one should devote oneself to morbid self-attention. One should try to be a person like other people."

At once a mainstream and experimental film, The Killing of John Lennon traps itself (and the audience) inside the warped psyche of culture-assassin Mark David Chapman, keeping the camera on him pretty much from start to credits. Only his on-the-record words are used as dialogue, as his aimless obsession with outing 'phoneys' and seeking notoriety leads him all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he will collide with history by blowing away John Lennon. Making Chapman interesting proves to be a tall order, since his murder of Lennon is generally accepted as having no political or other external motivation -- only the motivation derived from his own diseased mind. Is watching a crazy person rant and rave entertaining? Sure, it can be, but The Killing of John Lennon is only marginally entertaining, dragging on too long for its own good and continuing past the logical stopping point -- the killing -- and moving into Chapman's introduction to prison life, where his only joy will be playing pointless cat-and-mouse games with his analysts.

As played by newcomer Jonas Ball, Chapman is a highly functioning sociopath who see-saws back and forth between lucid, on-point observations and hateful, juvenile blather about feeling betrayed. Early on he says: "I don't think one should devote oneself to morbid self-attention. One should try to be a person like other people." Then, presumably with mental illness creeping in, he ignores his own advice and begins to vocalize a childish hatred of Lennon derived from a selective reading of his song lyrics. "He told us to imagine no possessions -- but he has yachts and country estates," he says, not bothering to take this internal debate any further before condemning Lennon to death. Chapman's mind eventually focuses on Salinger's infamous book The Catcher in the Rye, engaging with it almost like Jim Carrey in The Number 23 -- as if the book was written specifically with him in mind, and acting out its plot in the real world will somehow unlock some higher plane of reality. In other words, Chapman is a nut who wasn't diagnosed before he was allowed to act out.

After a Tribeca screening of The Killing of John Lennon at Pace University last week, director Andrew Piddington hung around to answer some questions from the crowd. The biggest question, which someone finally dared to ask, was how come when we see Mark David Chapman visiting New York City, it's unambiguously the New York City of 2007? We clearly see Chapman pass by Planet Hollywood, Toys R' Us and every other Times Square fixture you could possibly imagine. Piddington's answer? He needs more money to CGI that stuff away, and hasn't raised it yet. Other questions during the talk touched, of course, on Chapman's motivations, the whole conspiracy angle, the central performance of Jonas Ball, how Piddington went about casting Lennon and Ono, whether he actually met with Chapman and a number of other issues.


Crowd: Talk a little about the research and the casting process for the film.

AP: Considering research and casting, the gestation for this movie began four years ago -- it's taken four years to make. I first came across a book by Fenton Bresler called Who Killed John Lennon? This was a conspiracy book that set out to prove that Chapman was a Manchurian Candidate. There was a lot of evidence in it, but no proof. What it did have was a lot of depositions and transcripts, court information, all of which was public domain. And once I started to read the psychiatrist reports I became fascinated by the actual character. That was what drove me, and that's what started it. I then went onto the Internet and you can imagine the sort of stuff that's on the Internet. It's full of very difficult things to believe, and so therefore I then went to Ebay, and over the course of a year, I purchased nearly every single newspaper that was published during that four or five month period. That became my prime research material.

My instinct was always to cross-check three times and if the same information came through, then for me that was valid, and that's how I built up the screenplay. The screenplay took a while to write, and the film took four years to make. Jonas Ball, who I believe gives a magnificent performance in this film, the fascinating thing about Jonas Ball is that he is very young -- he hasn't done a great deal, but everything up there is very real and very solid and very mature. The great thing about any movie actor is the ability to hold the camera -- to have this relationship with the lens -- it's a cliche, but it's true -- and Jonas Ball has that. If an actor can carry a big close-up and give you the emotion that you require, that's a marvelous tool to have, and it's great for a director to use that tool. So I think he's gonna do really well. It's his first film, and he can't be here tonight because he's working, so that's good.

I hate to borrow material from another film critic, but a colleague of mine offered the following words after we finished watching Chapter 27: "It's like a feature-length version of De Niro's 'You talkin' to me' speech from Taxi Driver -- only without Scorsese, Schrader or De Niro." I repeat that sentence because it perfectly encapsulates my own opinion on the deadly dull and seriously dreary Chapter 27, a movie that promises to offer some insight into why Mark David Chapman, on one chilly night in 1980, shot the beloved John Lennon to death. But after 90-some minutes of J.P. Schaefer's writing/directing debut, I was no closer to understanding Chapman's motivations than I was 90 minutes earlier. I know it has something to do with J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, but any other specifics are lost beneath waves of babble, tedium and pretense.

Lead actor Jared Leto earned himself a producer's credit on Chapter 27, and it's blatantly obvious from the first few frames of the flick that the young actor really, ahem, beefed up for the role. And Leto wants you to know it, which is why we see Chapman parading around in his tighty-whities for two or three scenes. Jared might as well look directly into the camera lens and scream "Look how much weight I gained for this role!" To make matters worse, Leto (who, to be fair, has done some excellent work in movies like Panic Room, American Psycho and Requiem for a Dream) opts to brandish a rather nasally high-pitched squeak of a voice, which makes Chapter 27 feel like a straight-faced parody of Capote. And I don't think that's what Leto and Company were going for.

If you don't live in a big city or attend a big film school, the availability of most art films to you is next to nothing. And when I say art films, I don't mean Little Miss Sunshine; I mean Man Ray's Emak-Bakia and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film. Okay, so those might show up at your local museum, but what about avante garde films by John Lennon and Yoko Ono? Stan Brakhage? Joris Ivens? William S. Burroughs? Rather than trying to rent these experimental films from Netflix or buying whole collections from Amazon, you can go the digital route and watch them on your computer for free. Cinematical's sister-site DV Guru has discovered UbuWeb, which features around 100 different artists, each with one or more films available to download. So, if you haven't seen Ballet Méchanique or, God forbid, Un Chien Andalou, now you have no more excuses.

For less high-brow material, you can also always go to Jonhs.net, which streams (no time-consuming downloads) films that have fallen out of copyright, or for some other reason are available for free. There you can watch everything from silent films by Buster Keaton, classics like It's a Wonderful Life, recent films like Steal this Movie, cheap B-movies, training videos, undistributed documentaries, and more. If you don't see anything you like now (how is that possible?), keep going back, as the site is constantly getting new stuff in daily. And sometimes what is there today may be gone tomorrow. I just watched Death of a President on the site Tuesday, and now it has been removed.

Be warned: you might not leave your computer for awhile.

When I compile lists of films that were never made and that I wish I could see, I always think of Up Against It, the script that British playwright Joe Orton rewrote for a Beatles movie, which allegedly was too racy for the band's then-wholesome image. According to Prick Up Your Ears, the Orton biography by John Lahr, Up Against It would have had The Beatles' characters "caught in flagrante, become involved in dubious political activity, dressed as women, committed murder, been put in prison and committed adultery." Can you imagine the possibilities? Instead, we have to satisfy ourselves with the zany Richard Lester movies featuring The Beatles in clean-cut situations, A Hard Day's Night and Help! (There's also Magical Mystery Tour, but I've never been able to sit through the whole mess of a film.)

The above image is from the credits of A Hard Day's Night -- of course, that's John Lennon, who was born on this day in 1940. A Hard Day's Night is still considered by many to be a comic masterpiece, but I fear it hasn't dated well over the years. In high school, I loved watching, reading about, and listening to John Lennon, but I'm not as blind to the film or the musician's flaws these days. The last time I saw the 1964 film, I felt restless and bored in spots. The non-Beatles actors aren't particularly interesting, and the "frenetic pace" is old hat for contemporary viewers. But the music is great and the guys are fun to watch as they race around mischievously parodying themselves, or titillate audiences of packed girls with their energetic musicmaking. It's the best chance we have these days to visualize The Beatles at their peak, when they were practically idolized by their followers.

You won't believe the number of special screenings and movie-related events in Austin this week, so let's just jump right into the list:

• The Pedro Almodovar retrospective Viva Pedro finally hits Austin this week, at last, at the Arbor for a two-week run. Friday through Monday, you can catch Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother. Tuesday through Thursday, the theater is showing Talk to Her and The Flower of My Secret. The ones I'm looking forward to most are next Friday through Monday: Matador and Law of Desire, both of which feature a young Antonio Banderas. It's practically a whole film festival.
• On Saturday night, you can enjoy a great movie with some special guests ... all for free. Movies in the Park is screening Rock 'n' Roll High School at Waterloo Park at dusk, and actress P.J. Soles will be there too. Also, The Mullens will perform before the movie.

John Lennon may have believed in the idea of peace, but he wasn't exactly a peaceful man. He had a stormy temperament and was famously quick to boil. One of the most revealing moments in the new documentary The U.S. Vs. John Lennon is a replay of the Montreal bed-in confrontation between Lennon and New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson. She pushes past the flowery, junket-like atmosphere and takes aim, accusing him of being more or less a stooge of the anti-war movement. Lennon's gut response is to turn nasty. His small eyes become fixed and feral, his shoulders hunch over, as if he's preparing for a roll in the Liverpool dust of his youth. It's the kind of scene that would be at home in a truly critical look at the man behind the music. Unfortunately, the makers of this film had something different in mind. Directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld have clearly cut a devil's bargain here, accepting a 'Yoko-approved' stamp on every frame of their film in exchange for unfettered usage of the Lennon catalog.

The trade-off has some benefits. Even if you're turned off by the hagiographic nature of the doc, which makes hero-worshipping hay out of some Watergate-era chicanery to get Lennon's U.S. visa revoked -- surely the least of the Nixon's regime's misdeeds -- you can still sit back and relax to a generous sampling of Lennon's post-Beatles hits. Instead of interviews with family members, old band mates and friends, the filmmakers have assembled a collage of notable radicals from the 1960s. Some are dead, and some are living. There's Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers founder who encouraged his minions to use food money to buy "a gun a week." He seems to have spent the last 30 years near a McDonald's drive-in. Famed burglar G. Gordon Liddy is on hand, along with his mustache, to contribute his two cents on the Lennon mystique. The saga of activist Fred Hampton is revisited; Noam Chomsky makes a brief appearance to accuse the F.B.I. of having murdered him. You get the idea.

I finally, at long last (and after an irritating technical snafu involving a DVD that suddenly acted like it was possessed just as I was really getting into it), got to see the documentary Who is Harry Nilsson? And Why is Everybody Talkin' About Him?. What's that, you say? Who the hell is Harry Nilsson, and why does this film have such a long title? If you're around my mom's age, chances are you already know who Nilsson was. Harry Nilsson was one of the most prolific singer-songwriters to come out of his generation, and the title is a reference to the song "Everybody's Talkin'" from Oscar-winning film Midnight Cowboy. Nilsson sang the song (which he did not, in fact, write) for the film, and won a Grammy for it. His album Nilsson Schmilsson was nominated for just about every Grammy it could have been.

This documentary about the singer-songwriter with one of the best voices of his generation has all the elements of a fine narrative film: A boy, abandoned by his father; a childhood and adolescence spent living with various relatives; that lucky first break that led to more; the son he later abandoned himself, as his father did before him; the redemption he found later with his second wife and their kids. This isn't a fictional tale though, it was Nilsson's life. Like a lot of artists, Nilsson used his art as a means to express his feelings and talk about his life. One of his better-known songs, "1941", chronicles his history with his father: