A look at AIDS’ youngest victims

A remarkable story rooted in Africa’s AIDS pandemic, the documentary “Angels in the Dust” details the lives of a fiercely devoted woman and more than 500 children who depend upon her for their survival. Marion Cloete, along with her husband and daughters, established the village of Boikarabelo (formerly Botshabelo) in South Africa to clothe, feed and educate children who have lost their parents to the virus or are HIV-positive.

The saintly Cloete and her family gave up the good life in a well-to-do Johannesburg suburb to dedicate themselves to helping the youngest victims of the AIDS crisis. Writer-director Louise Hogarth shrinks an enormous issue down to human terms in documenting life at the orphanage. In intimate detail, the children calmly recount the horrors visited upon them as Cloete provides a hands-on tour with running commentary. Although surrounded by death, the children are helped in dealing with it by Cloete, a university-trained therapist, and they have surprisingly cheerful dispositions, infusing the film with an uplifting subtext.

As inspiring as the film is, Hogarth and her subjects never let the audience forget the tenuous position of the village’s young residents. The school offers them a chance to better their lots, but they are constantly on the brink of being pulled back into a cycle of poverty, violence and disease.

The film’s power lies in its ability to synthesize these complex emotions while drawing much needed attention to the continent-wide catastrophe.

-- Kevin Crust

“Angels in the Dust.” MPAA rating: Unrated. In English and local dialects with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.

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Animal cruelty’s many facets

Curt Johnson’s objectively impassioned documentary, “Your Mommy Kills Animals,” is necessary viewing for anyone who assumes an animal shelter owner, someone screaming at a medical research facility and a PETA representative feel the same way about animal rights. Ending institutionalized cruelty toward the furry and four-legged may be the constant among activists, but thorny, divisive issues of domestication, mercy killing, public shaming, and law-breaking tactics give the movement a moral complexity and provocativeness that Johnson explores rigorously through his opinionated spectrum of interviewees: calm sanctuary proprietors, outspoken critics, fiery liberation proponents and those who have been branded the worst kind of danger by our government. Ad-savvy PETA (responsible for a cheeky, comic book-style tract that gives this movie its name) undergoes its own kind of vivisection from Johnson’s more vociferous sources, who deride the group’s hypocritical, celeb-based marketing techniques and rarely advertised, astonishingly high euthanasia rate (85%, as one document shows) for its supposedly rescued creatures. But perhaps the greatest service Johnson does is to turn the event that spurred him to make the film -- the FBI labeling animal rights activists the top domestic terrorist threat -- into a crucial dialogue, using his many collected viewpoints to create a cross-cutting debate about terrorism, free speech and the intersection of the two in this turbulent political era.

-- Robert Abele

“Your Mommy Kills Animals.” Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes. At Laemmle’s Grande, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown L.A. (213) 617-0268.

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Dad may be dying, but who cares?

If your idea of fun is sitting around waiting for an old man to get out of bed, then “Raising Flagg” is the movie for you.

After a court proceeding between cranky rural handyman Flagg Purdy (Alan Arkin) and lifelong friend/competitor Gus Falk (Austin Pendleton) over something to do with a water pump and sheep urine, an ostracized Flagg takes to his brass bed and childishly announces he’s dying. His otherwise sensible wife, Ada (Barbara Dana), plays along and summons their six, mildly dysfunctional adult children to Flagg’s pity party.

For some reason, they show up. Unfortunately, the Purdy offspring (played by Lauren Holly, Glenne Headly and Matthew Arkin, among others) are a colorless bunch and director Neal Miller, who co-adapted the scrawny script with Nancy Miller and Dorothy Velasco from John D. Weaver’s short story, spends too much time introducing them. What’s left feels cribbed from every other family dramedy we’ve seen. The film’s not helped by its corn-pone vibe, which makes the Oregon-shot picture seem doubly creaky. The competent cast does what it can, but this one’s such a slog it should have been titled “Daddy’s Dyin’, Who’s Got the Willpower?”

-- Gary Goldstein

“Raising Flagg.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for brief drug content. Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes. At Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741; and Laemmle One Colorado in Pasadena.

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‘Itty Bitty’ is a bit unsure of itself

Extremism gets a fatal case of the angry cutes in director Jamie Babbit’s “Itty Bitty Titty Committee,” a lame romp about the swoony rush of a young lesbian student’s consciousness-raising that has the dramatic piquancy of a feel-good Disney Channel movie. Mopey, recently dumped Anna (Melonie Diaz) answers phones at a plastic surgery clinic but is shown the error of her patriarchy-enabling ways by flirtatious activist Sadie (Nicole Vicius), who runs with an underground group of feminists that targets society’s men-in-charge symbols: vandalizing stores only with slim female mannequins, installing an Angela Davis figure in a park dominated by a male statue, and cracking wise about what the Washington Monument resembles. But in the cartoonish screenplay by Tina Mabry and Abigail Shafran, political awakening is a matter of saying, shouting or graffiti-scrawling the right thing, while the movie’s emotional concerns are reserved for dippy romantic entanglements, none of which resonates as character-building devices.

Meanwhile, Babbit’s grip on the material is as rhythmless as a mosh-pit scrum; she can’t decide if the film is a feminist-movement comedy (in which case it’s unfunny and obvious) or a radicalized storybook romance (in which case it’s shallow and obvious). In the end, there’s more dramatic urgency in the slamtastic girl punk soundtrack, which features bands such as Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy.

-- R.A.

“Itty Bitty Titty Committee.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. (323) 848-3500.