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Capsule reviews by Andy Klein (AK), Paul Birchall (PB), Tim Cogshell (TC), Annlee Ellingson (AE), James Greenberg (JG), Len Klady (LK), Wade Major (WM), Luke Y. Thompson (LYT), and others as noted.

The Aristocrats. Comedians Penn Jillette (producer) and Paul Provenza (producer/director) taped more than 100 of their colleagues, some telling their individual versions of a classic dirty joke called “The Aristocrats,” other discussing it, remembering where they first heard it, talking about what's wrong with it and how to make it better, dismissing it as lousy, not getting it, even not knowing quite what to say. Others just go off on tangents too funny to have been cut, even though they're only indirectly relevant. Outside of the setup and the punchline, the joke is basically an invitation to improvise the foulest, most disgustingly extreme riffs involving sex, scatology, and anything else with the power to shock. Provenza has edited the film to touch on a whole variety of serious (in the good way) issues about humor and jokes and taboos and bad taste and being a comedian, without ever getting serious (in the bad way). If you're not inherently uncomfortable with this stuff – and maybe even if you are but can somehow go with the flow – the movie is painfully, soda-out-your-nose, hyperventilatingly hysterical. (AK)

Asylum. In 1959, the wife (Natasha Richardson) of an up-and-coming psychiatrist (Hugh Bonneville) gets involved in a passionate, indiscreet affair with a patient (Marton Csokas), who's been incarcerated in the asylum for having murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy – all of it transpiring under the watchful, possibly manipulative, eye of another shrink (Ian McKellen). The latest from British director David Mackenzie is much like his previous Young Adam – with the point of view shifted from the male to the female. The new film has a lusher, more romantic style than Young Adam, with sweeping camera movement and a beautiful, ominous score by Mark Mancina, but, even more than in its predecessor, the characters range from the unlikeable to the psychologically opaque. In particular, McKellen is never less than riveting, but here one has to wonder whether he and Mackenzie ever worked out just what his character is all about. (AK)

Bad News Bears. Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) directed this remake of the 1976 little league comedy that spawned two sequels and a short-lived television series. While the tale of a boozy, foul-mouthed coach and his band of misfits has been updated, the basic story and characters remain intact from Bill Lancaster's original script. It's difficult to imagine a more perfect match in the casting of Billy Bob Thornton in the role created by Walter Matthau – both masters of imbuing curmudgeons with humor, compassion, and an embraceable facility for the profane. Yet, the crispness of the earlier film has evolved into a slacker comedy in which the life lessons are all too obvious and banal. Thanks to sluggish direction, Thornton's laconic manner, and a lack of surprises, it rarely gets to first base on other than a forced walk. (LK)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. See Latest Reviews.

Batman Begins. After years walking the earth and learning to combat evil, rich kid Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) returns to Gotham and forges the identity of Batman, with more than a little help from faithful family retainer Alfred (Michael Caine) and scientist Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). He goes to war on a local crime boss (Tom Wilkinson) and a corrupt psychiatrist (Cillian Murphy) but soon finds himself up against a more daunting foe. Christopher Nolan (Memento) revives the moribund Batman franchise with the best studio film so far this year and candidate for The Best Comic Book Movie Adaptation Ever, simply by approaching this 66-year-old icon with respect. Gone are any vestiges of campiness or surreal production design or strangely unpatched plot holes. He puts Batman in a relatively real world and makes us understand why he strikes fear in the hearts of the bad guys. The result is darker, more disturbing, and far more character-oriented than its predecessors without forgoing the requisite action sequences. In a rare reversal, Liam Neeson gets to be scary, while Gary Oldman is completely restrained. Despite a nearly total absence of sex, “bad” language, and blood, this has strong scenes that my not necessarily suit the kiddies. (AK)

The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Thomas (Romain Duris) is a young Parisian real-estate entrepreneur whose methods include gangsterish strong-arm tactics. His mother, now dead, was a successful classical pianist; after running into her former manager, he becomes obsessed with trying to revive his childhood talent to the level of a concert career. While he takes lessons from a young Asian woman (Linh-Dan Pham), who speaks almost no French, his divided attentions piss off his partners (Jonathan Zaccai and Gilles Cohen); and he is further distracted by the exploits of his irresponsible father (Niels Arestrup). At first, the idea of remaking James Toback's directorial debut, 1978's Fingers, seems an odd one, particularly since the original ranged from not very good to downright irritating. But Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips) has, through a few plot changes and even more differences in tone and performance, surprisingly made a silk purse out of Toback's sow's ear. Duris, best known here for the comedy L'Auberge Espagnole, does terrific work. (AK)

Broken Flowers. A well-to-do but directionless middle-aged man (Bill Murray) receives an anonymous note from one of his many ex-girlfriends, letting him know he has a 19-year-old son. His intense next-door neighbor (Jeffrey Wright) insists that he go visit the four exes (Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton) from the appropriate time period. Director Jim Jarmusch is less concerned with resolving the “mystery” story than with the ways in which the process changes the initially reluctant hero. In a sense, the trip wakes him from the dead; but it's not clear whether he's better off for it. Murray does almost the entire film deadpan. His character's lifetime of being a commitmentphobe has left him unmoored. His quest, rather than correcting that, only makes him painfully more aware of it. Murray has the only really big part, and he plays it as though it was written for him … which it was. The other, much smaller performances are all good, but it's Wright who nearly steals the show. Jarmusch wisely realizes that a central character that dead or deadpan – take your choice – needs to be counterbalanced by someone with incandescent energy. (AK)

The Brothers Grimm. See Latest Reviews.

The Cave. See Also Opening This Week.

Chaos. Chaos (Kevin Gage) is the name of a big, bald redneck resembling wrestler Bill Goldberg who, along with his twisted family, likes to abduct, rape, murder, and call people “fag.” By the time Chaos has sliced off one of the female leads' nipples, chewed on it, then shoved it in her mouth and made her vomit, shortly before stabbing her repeatedly and having sex with her corpse, most of the audience will likely have walked out – and there's still a good hour to go. A '70s-style exploitation movie along the lines of I Spit on Your Grave, it's repugnant mainly because writer-director David DeFalco earnestly seems to believe he's made more than mere exploitation – in fact, it's a realistic warning to young girls, and will encourage them to be more responsible! Yeah, whatever. Though shocking, the cumulative acts of horror are curiously not desensitizing in the least; the final shot has quite an impact. (LYT)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A mysterious, reclusive candy manufacturer (Johnny Depp) opens up his magical factory for one day to five apparently random children and their accompanying guardians. Strangeness ensues. Tim Burton's new version of Roald Dahl's children's book, which was previously filmed in 1971 as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, is mostly an excuse for the protean Depp to create yet another of his rogues' gallery of unique eccentrics. The Wonka that Burton and Depp have come up with is far less benevolent and … well, downright creepier … than anything in the original – a pervertedly pre-sexual hybrid of Michael Jackson and Carol Channing. People who are deeply attached to the book or the earlier movie may bristle at Depp's reimagining of a character that Gene Wilder had made his own; in particular, the addition of a psychological backstory for Wonka is likely to grate. It's funny enough that, when Burton tries to squeeze serious feelings from it at the end, he's just barely successful. Still, Burton has both a stronger visual imagination than previous director Mel Stuart and the technology and money to bring it to the screen. Danny Elfman's score is likewise a huge improvement on the music from the original. (AK)

Cinderella Man. Director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who collaborated on A Beautiful Mind (2001), reteam for the glossy, mostly accurate story of boxer Jim Braddock, who, in the depths of the Depression, made an extraordinary comeback to beat heavyweight champ Max Baer (Craig Bierko). In almost every way, this is a by-the-book, retro Hollywood production – basically Seabiscuit without the feedbag and the withers. The first third is slack, but after that the excellently shot fight sequences keep the story alive. While history suggests that Braddock was precisely the devoted family man and generally nice lug that Crowe portrays here, Howard has tried to beef up the drama by turning the appealing Baer into a moustache-twirling villain. Crowe and Renée Zellweger (as Mrs. Braddock) do solid work, but the supporting players steal the show: not just the intense Bierko, but also Paul Giamatti and the always first-rate Bruce McGill, whose characters display more nuances than the leads. Other than the initial sluggishness, this should prove wholly satisfying to people looking for a shallow crowd-pleaser. On the other hand, two hours and 25 minutes is awfully protracted for that sort of thing, suggesting that its makers may erroneously think they've delivered something deeper. (AK)

Crash. In no way connected to the J.G. Ballard novel filmed several years ago by David Cronenberg, writer-director Paul Haggis's Crash has more than its fair share of psychological collisions. More of a kindred spirit to Robert Altman's Short Cuts, it offers an emotionally charged view of Los Angeles from a dozen vantage points that range from the D.A. to an Iranian store owner. What connects the half dozen or so plot threads are crime, frustration, and attitudes toward race. It's a heady, sometimes tragic, often magical variation of La Ronde with a stellar cast that includes Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton, and rapper Ludacris in top form. Haggis creates a serious, thought-provoking entertainment of singular ambition: It rattles one's sense of social order. (LK)

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Rob Schneider reprises his role as an unattractive fishtank-cleaner, who nonetheless gets repeatedly coerced into “man-whoring” by his pimp friend T.J. (Eddie Griffin, also rarely in truly funny movies but hilarious here). Here he's plunked down in Amsterdam, where he has to clear T.J. of allegations of murder. As gigolo to the most cartoonishly deformed women on the planet – including one with a penis for a nose – he discovers the stunning revelation that what women really want is a man who genuinely listens. This loose premise is used as a framework for all kinds of disgusting and glorious jokes about “prosti-dudes,” gay panic, Asians with small penises, Canadian tourists' penchant for public urination, politically correct racism, and even the U.S. invasion of Iraq! Norm Macdonald shows up as a crusty Scottish hooker who deserves a movie of his own. My credibility is probably going to take a major hit on this one, but: damn, it's funny! (LYT)

The Devil's Rejects. Less a sequel to House of 1,000 Corpses than a retooling of the basic concept from horror homage to retro-revenge flick, Rob Zombie's latest finally delivers on all the hype that was mostly undeserved the first time out. Ignoring the grand finale of Corpses, this '70s-style B-movie begins with a big shootout at the residence of the murderous Firefly clan. Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Otis (Bill Moseley) go on the run and hook up with Baby's heretofore unacknowledged father (Sid Haig), a redneck clown who runs a local horror museum. Meanwhile, the cop on their trail (William Forsythe) becomes more and more driven and less scrupulous. It's possible there's an Abu Ghraib metaphor in there somewhere, as we see the alleged hero stoop to the very methods his hated quarry employ. The movie is unapologetically brutal, with a dream cast of character actors past and present, including Ginger Lynn, Danny Trejo, Ken Foree, Michael Berryman, Mary Woronov, and Steve Railsback. This is what hardcore genre fans have been waiting for. (LYT)

The Dukes of Hazzard. So bad that it verges on incarnate evil, this adaptation of the popular 1979-1985 television series has achieved the near-impossible task of making the original show look Shakespearean by comparison. Superficially, the plot is like any given episode: Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds) and his lawman lackey (M.C. Gainey) have something nefarious up their sleeves, and only the Duke cousins (Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville) – along with their hillbilly hottie cousin (Jessica Simpson) and crusty uncle (Willie Nelson) – stand in the way. The series – created by Kentuckian Gy Waldron in his low-budget Smokey and the Bandit precursor Moonrunners (1975) – could be juvenile and silly, but its affection for the spunk and spirit of the rural south was never in question. The movie, by contrast, sneers at its subject with a city slicker's condescension. Neither screenwriter John O'Brien (Starsky & Hutch) nor director Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers, Club Dread) know the show very well, nor do they seem to care, inexplicably transforming the lovable Duke boys into a pair of unbearably loudmouthed, licentious louts. (WM)

El Crimen Perfecto. See Film feature.

Fantastic Four. During a space mission, five people are exposed to unusual radiation that gives each of them superhuman powers: One (Julian MacMahon) becomes metallic supervillain Dr. Doom, while the others (Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis) become known as … the Fantastic Four! Not in a league with any of the recent Spider-Man or X-Men adaptations, this latest exploitation of the Marvel Comics library is the plain-wrap version of the original material. Director Tim Story (Taxi, Barbershop) manages to give it no character whatever, with the casting making things worse. Alba is easy on the eyes, but she's a little bit young to be “director of genetic research” or however she's introduced here. Rumor has it that Gruffudd and MacMahon have done good work elsewhere, but you'd never know it from this. And Evans is so obnoxious that you start rooting for the bad guy. Only Chiklis leaves an impression: While acting from inside a huge, feature-obscuring suit, he manages to make the Thing the most emotionally involving character strictly with his voice and eyes. (AK)

The 40-Year-Old Virgin. When a bunch of guys working at an electronics store (Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Romany Malco) discover that a geeky, socially awkward coworker (Steve Carell, who cowrote with director Judd Apatow) has never quite gotten around to … you know … doing it, they become determined to remedy this anomaly, even though they aren't the world's greatest role models. Into the mix stumbles a single mom (Catherine Keener), who is clearly Andy's soulmate. Carell did terrific work on The Daily Show and was howlingly funny as the lovably imbecilic weatherman in last year's Anchorman, but who would have thought he could hold the center of a film as a leading man? Still, despite several memorable set pieces – most notably one involving the removal of what appears to be Carell's genuine, Robin Williams-level body hair – the movie doesn't reach the level of hilarity of Anchorman. It's never less than amusing, but it's never much more, either. (AK)

Four Brothers. After a Detroit social worker (Fionnula Flanagan) is slain in an apparent convenience-store robbery, the four foster brothers she raised as her own (Mark Wahlberg, Andre Benjamin, Tyrese Gibson, Garrett Hedlund) gather to track down the killers, only to discover a far more tangled web of danger, deceit, and corruption than they ever imagined. While probably director John Singleton's best film since his lauded debut, Boyz N the Hood, it's still an uneven effort, veering toward the obvious one moment, only to right itself with an unexpectedly brilliant twist the next. Had this been released circa 1974, in the wake of such hard-edged and popular policiers as The French Connection, Bullitt, and Serpico, it would have seemed barely serviceable genre fare, a notch or two below Shaft and Across 110th Street. But with competition from grittier television offerings and the growing reluctance on the part of studios to exceed PG-13 levels of violence and profanity, anything even remotely adult – however flawed – is more than welcome. (WM)

The Great Raid. It's 1945, and the United States is making its big push against the retreating Japanese. One key objective, more for moral reasons than strategic ones, is to rescue 500 American POWs being held in a remote camp in the Philippines – the lone survivors of the more than 70,000 who surrendered at Bataan in 1942, following MacArthur's departure and famed pledge to return. The resulting raid is generally considered one of the great rescues of all time, a masterpiece of planning and execution. If only the same could be said for this unfortunate, lackluster picture. Made two years ago by John Dahl (The Last Seduction), this is a lugubrious, stillborn effort that doesn't even get around to anything resembling a raid until 90 minutes in. Prior to that, it's all hokey, melodramatic war-movie clichés, with Benjamin Bratt and James Franco as the brave young soldiers leading the raid, Joseph Fiennes as the ailing senior officer in the camp, and Connie Nielsen as the brave nurse-cum-secret-agent that Fiennes can only love from afar. The film plays more like a television movie of the week – precisely what it should have been all along. (WM)

Grizzly Man. Another of Werner Herzog's real-life characters with obsessions at least as crazy as they are magnificent, Timothy Treadwell achieved considerable fame as the man who made friends with the grizzlies. For a decade and a half, he had spent summers in the Alaskan wilderness, hanging with his ursine homeys and, not insignificantly, filming his own exploits. Until, that is, September 2003, when an unfamiliar bear showed up at Treadwell's camp and sated his hunger on the flesh of Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. Herzog's film is part interpretive biography, part meditation on humanity's relationship with animals and nature. Treadwell's copious filming of himself may have been arrogant and self-promoting, but it gives Herzog a library of material to excerpt for his own purposes. To Herzog, Treadwell, whether his motivations are benevolent or self-serving, indulged in the most dangerous sort of sentimentality, inappropriately projecting a framework of human feelings onto the animals. There are points where Herzog seems to be sympathetic to his subject, but in the end it's hard not to regard Treadwell as either a sad man who created a dangerously unreal view of life to bolster an otherwise fragile ego or a nutcase whose personal charisma misled a young woman to her death. (AK)

Gus Van Sant's Last Days. A fucked-up, spaced-out musician/junkie (Michael Pitt) wanders around his big old house and the surrounding woods, muttering to himself, building a campfire, putting on a slip, muttering to himself, and then – not a moment too soon (in fact, many moments too late) – killing himself or ODing or doing something that thankfully puts an end to the incessant muttering. Director Gus Van Sant is sometimes brilliant (Drugstore Cowboy, Mala Noche), sometimes awful (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), sometimes blandly proficient (Good Will Hunting); his latest uses more or less the same technique as his previous, Columbine-themed Elephant. That is, he follows characters around in long, uninterrupted takes, with impressionistic sound, positioning the audience as an eavesdropping ghost. In Elephant, this method was grimly effective, putting us right in the students' world as it was being shattered. But in Last Days, there are fewer characters and fewer events; besides, terminal junkies – even if based on figures as culturally significant as (in this case) Kurt Cobain – are perhaps the last people you'd ever want to spend 90 minutes eavesdropping on. They are dull dull dull, and unfortunately, as a result, so is the film. (AK)

Happy Endings. A young woman (Lisa Kudrow) is being blackmailed by a cocky filmmaker (Jesse Bradford) who claims to have information on the child she abandoned years ago, while her stepbrother (Steve Coogan), with whom she once had sex, becomes convinced that his boyfriend's sperm has been stolen to create a baby. As enjoyable as Don Roos's newest film is, it contains two tired structural devices: a plot in which different groups of people have their lives all connect at various intervals while following their own individual arcs; and the “shock” intro, in which something really dramatic and sudden happens, setting up the body of the movie as a flashback. Kudrow seems born to deliver Roos's dialogue – she's seldom been better than in this and The Opposite of Sex. Coogan is less campy than usual, but still appealing. They help to elevate Happy Endings above the usual quirky multi-character indie indulgence – but just barely. (LYT)

Herbie: Fully Loaded. After a 25-year hiatus, the magical VW returns to the big screen. Ooooh. Pinch me. Lindsay Lohan, Justin Long, Breckin Meyer, Matt Dillon, and Michael Keaton star; Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) directed. (AK)

Howl's Moving Castle. Hayao Miyazaki's latest anime, loosely adapted from a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, takes place in a mountain town where steam power is still widespread and sorcerers are employed by the government to create flying war machines and the like. A young woman (voiced in the English dub by Emily Mortimer) is cursed by a witch (Lauren Bacall) and flees to the countryside, ultimately finding sanctuary in the titular building, a Jules Verne-like contraption that walks on bird legs. Here, she becomes the housekeeper of the irresponsible wizard Howl (Christian Bale, doing his throaty Batman growl). Miyazaki's usual obsessions with transformation, spirit animals, flying, and gooey amorphous creatures are all in play, but there's very little plot momentum. At times, it feels like all the interesting stuff is happening far away from our main characters, who dawdle en route to the inevitable Beauty and the Beast climax. Yes, there are moments of great beauty here, but, boy, the story could have used some editing. (LYT)

Hustle & Flow. In contemporary Memphis, a pimp (Terence Howard) strives to make a hip-hop record, in order to break the cycle of drugs, prostitution, and violence that has informed his adult life. There's a lot of hustle in Hustle & Flow, and it mostly works to the advantage of this urban empowerment saga. Firsttime writer-director Craig Brewer has combined grit and funk with sentimentality to great effect. And, while the segue that reveals the pimp to have the soul of an artist is a bit of a stretch, an exceptionally good cast goes a long way to smooth over the narrative bumpiness. Brewer and his actors have the street cred to work a warhorse formula and infuse it with novel twists that provide an unexpected and welcome vitality. (LK)

The Island. Two photogenic naifs (Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson) living in a sterile, contained facility discover that, no, the world hasn't been wiped out by a plague, but that rather that everything they know is a lie. They are really clones, grown to generate spare parts for rich people on the outside; they escape and try to blow the lid off this evil enterprise run by a ruthless doctor (Sean Bean), who sends a mercenary (Djimon Hounsou) to track them down. Director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) drags out the first half, tying us to McGregor's POV, even though we already know the stuff that he is slowly figuring out. Once Bay cuts to the chase, however, it's nonstop action – sometimes exciting and occasionally clever – but, like most Bay run/drive/explode sequences, mechanical and less involving than it ought to be. Not only are there the usual number of implausibilities, but there are also scientific stretches that should please religious-right fans. Who needs science, anyway? (AK)

Junebug. Chicago newlyweds Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) and George (Alessandro Nivola) are headed to North Carolina, where she hopes to sign a backwoods painter for her art gallery. Since George grew up not far away, it's also a chance for his wife to meet her new in-laws for the first time. They would be Mom (Celia Weston), Dad (the always wonderful Scott Wilson), their embittered younger son Johnny (Ben McKenzie), and his pregnant wife Ashley (Amy Adams). Phil Morrison's feature is low-key to the point of drowsiness. Madeleine's discovery of the family's quirks and tics is supposed to pass for drama, but the characterizations are too superficial to offer any real insight. Davidtz and Nivola, one of the most watchable young actors working today, make a sexy couple, but we never even learn what he does for a living, let alone why they're together. Without more depth, Morrison's portrait of rural life comes off as unintentionally condescending. (JG)

Mad Hot Ballroom. First implemented a decade ago in two schools, the American Ballroom Theater's Dancing Classrooms now provide 10 weeks of intense, mandatory instruction in ballroom dancing to 7,000 fifth-graders in 68 schools throughout New York City's five boroughs. At the end of the program, each school can choose whether to compete in what's called the Rainbow Team Matches. Structuring their narrative around three teams, director Marilyn Agrelo and writer Amy Sewell capture the innocence and humor of these little ladies and gentlemen – as they merengue, rumba, tango, foxtrot, and swing their way to the finals at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center. On the cusp of adulthood and thrust into the arms of the opposite sex, these kids learn, not just how to move, but how to interact. Although it could stand to lose 20 minutes or so, Mad Hot Ballroom, like the upcoming Rock School, proves that when given a chance – and, let's face it, when pushed – even average kids are capable of sublime artistry and grace. (AE)

Madagascar. Four coddled animals (voiced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith, and David Schwimmer) from the Central Park Zoo have to adjust to life in the wild when they find themselves washed ashore on the titular African island. The script of this latest computer-animated feature from DreamWorks is full of great gags, but, even more than the previous Shark Tale, a huge percentage involve references directed toward adults. There is a fair amount of broad physical humor that shows the influence of Warner Brothers cartoons, which may provide yocks for the rug rats. A basic script problem weakens the story: At the start, Rock's zebra appears to be the protagonist, but somewhere halfway through Stiller's lion takes center stage. It's slightly unsettling and hampers audience identification. Stiller does a good job, but his voice is nondescript next to the other immediately recognizable leads. Tom McGrath (who codirected with Eric Darnell) is terrific as a militaristic penguin, but the really great performance here is from Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G), whose manic, idiotic lemur king babbles nonstop, like Robin Williams as Aladdin's genie, kicking the energy up to another level. (AK)

March of the Penguins. Luc Jacquet's extraordinary documentary about the Emperor penguin – the only land animal that resides year-round in the Antarctic – follows the species' arduous annual mating ritual. There's an innate power in capturing the circle of life in the harshest environment on earth. The narration read by Morgan Freeman is at turns fascinating, intrusive, and overly explanatory. Still, together with Microcosmos and Winged Migration, this clearly puts the French in the forefront of ethnographic filmmaking – not simply for their zeal, but for their consummate artistry. (LK)

Matando Cabos. See Latest Reviews.

Me and You and Everyone We Know. For her debut feature, performance artist Miranda July pulls off a minor miracle – a truly original film about quirky people in a quirky world. July plays a waifish artist and sometimes cab driver for the elderly, who is smitten with Richard (John Hawkes), a distracted department-store shoe salesman. As these reluctant lovers circle each other, July spins an enchanting web of secondary characters and subplots in which life seems to make sense even in its randomness. Even some elements that might sound tawdry become sweet in July's hands. Where movies too often tell us everything, Me and You and Everyone We Know leaves room for mystery. More than anything, it's a tone poem about chance encounters, the unexpected power of love, and the unlimited possibilities for the child in all of us. (JG)

The Memory of a Killer. See Film feature.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith. After six years of marriage, the Smiths (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) each discover that the other is a well-paid master assassin, working for a shadowy rival organization. Each is ordered to kill the other, and no trust remains between them. This leads to a lot of coy, cat-and-mouse banter, which is where the film begins to heat up. It gets hotter when they're on the run together, both being pursued by, well, everyone else in the movie. Director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) keeps things constantly moving, blowing stuff up real good and judiciously using John Woo-ish shots now and again. I.e., it's all a lot of fun. And, no matter what claims Pitt and Jolie have been making about their lack of an offscreen relationship, they certainly display terrific onscreen chemistry. Still, it's hard not to be bothered by the movie's utter lack of concern for preserving even the minimal level of plausibility and plot logic usually found in such films. The final scene is cute, but couldn't it have been set up to make even a tiny bit of sense? (AK)

Murderball. Quadriplegic rugby – or “murderball,” as it used to be known – is as violent and macho as any extreme sport you might catch on an obscure cable channel. Young men who have been maimed by accident or the misfortunes of birth are equipped with gladiator-like wheelchairs they ram into each other while attempting to put a ball in the opposing goal. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's documentary finds the drama of the game and the inner life of its players. Following them over the course of two years – from the 2002 World Championship in Sweden to the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece – we get a full dose of their life and large-sized personalities. But what gives the film its surprising depth are the tender moments. Murderball is ultimately as full-bodied as any heroic sports story, but what makes it special is the humanity and spirit of these remarkable athletes. (JG)

Must Love Dogs. A neurotic preschool teacher (Diane Lane) juggles two guys – an “incorrigible” divorcé (Dermot Mulroney), who happens to be the father of one of her unbearably precocious students, and a nutcase boat-builder (John Cusack). The best thing about Gary David Goldberg's film is that the protagonists, played by two actors most of us would either like to be or do, are very clearly not perfect. You think Cusack's irresistible? What if he had no means of income and spent all his free time watching Dr. Zhivago and building outmoded wooden boats that he won't sell to just anyone? Still a catch, you think? What if Lane had the most irritating family in the world? This is still a studio romantic comedy, and some things are predictable. But others are not – the “quest for a condom” sequence is unexpected and amusing, and Christopher Plummer, playing Lane's randy Irish dad, deserves a movie all to himself. (LYT)

My Date with Drew. When scuffling young Hollywood wannabe Brian Herzlinger wins $1,100 on a game-show pilot, he decides to use it for a dual purpose: to somehow get a date with Drew Barrymore, on whom he has been nursing a crush since childhood; and, together with friends Jon Gunn and Brett Winn, to make a film – this one – documenting his efforts and, hopefully, his eventual rendezvous with his heartthrob. For the first third, the film drags. It tries to coast on Herzlinger's charm, but the guy comes across as just another deluded hustler, if not an actual stalker. Still, as he approaches his goal, his vulnerabilities begin to creep through, and it's hard not to be sympathetic. In the last third, surprising developments speed up the pace, and we are fully won over. (AK)

9 Songs. The ever-unpredictable Michael Winterbottom delivers another of his convention-defying cinematic experiments in this simple but very explicit study of a short, torrid love affair between a young Englishman (Kieran O'Brien) and a free-spirited American girl (Margo Stilley). There's little discernible structure to the picture apart from that suggested by its title – nine live concert performances (by acts as diverse as Salif Keita, Primal Scream, and Michael Nyman) separating nine episodes in the sexual evolution of a relationship. Shot mostly on digital video with only a miniscule crew, this mostly improvised film breaches the taboo against depicting real sex in (relatively) mainstream movies. It clearly isn't for everyone: It's languorously paced even for its scant 69 minutes and, despite its content, generally comes across less as erotic than as clinical. Winterbottom isn't interested in titillating or, for that matter, entertaining: He's playing scientist in the purest sense of the word, seeking to better understand reality through controlled but open-ended experimentation. (WM)

Pretty Persuasion. A fresh-faced Beverly Hills nymphet (Evan Rachel Wood), aspiring to television fame, enlists her adoring but none-too-bright best pals (Elizabeth Harnois, Randa Azzouni) to frame their nebbishy, lecherous English teacher (Ron Livingston) for sexual molestation. The subsequent trial catapults her to the stardom she dreams of, even as it ruins the lives of virtually everyone around her. Director Marcos Siega's grimly sardonic teen comedy is the spiteful flip side to Clueless. While the plotting is clever and fairly tight, the satire of American culture is too shrill and cartoonish to sustain believability. Wood's character is simply too diabolical to engender rooting interest – and, midway through, the actress herself seems to realize it, with her performance gradually switching over to an interpretation that's more than three-fifths camp. The film ultimately leaves a sour taste, not because it's dark, but because it's so skewed it seems dismissibly lame. (PB)

Red Eye. On a flight home after her grandmother's funeral, a workaholic hotel manager (Rachel McAdams) is informed by the nice young psychopath (Cillian Murphy) sitting next to her that her beloved dad (Brian Cox) will be murdered unless she makes a simple phone call, using her position to order a change in the room assignments for the new Director of Homeland Security … thus enabling an assassination. If you stop to think about it, the set-up is kind of silly, but, luckily, director Wes Craven keeps things brisk enough that you rarely do stop to think about it. (Lop off the opening and closing credits, and the movie runs about 75 minutes – a good thing.) McAdams, like the rest of the cast, is perfectly adequate; only Murphy gets to have more fun; he may be slightly less creepy here than he was in Batman Begins, but he has eyes that are paradoxically both burning angry and cold dead. (AK)

Saint Ralph. When his gravely ill mother lapses into a coma from which “only a miracle” will wake her, a 14-year-old Canadian Catholic kid (Adam Butcher) resolves to achieve the most unlikely of miracles – winning the 1954 Boston Marathon. Written and directed by former Detroit Marathon winner Michael McGowan, this heartfelt attempt at a kind of Canadian Billy Elliot is a mostly hit-and-miss affair, too obvious to ever really strum the heartstrings, but speckled with too many memorable scenes to completely dismiss. Butcher is engaging, though not terribly endearing, while Campbell Scott and Gordon Pinsent, representing the “good priest/bad priest” axis, are absolutely superb. Jennifer Tilly's minor turn as a nurse is another plus. On the whole, not a great film, but well-geared to sate your “feel good” yearnings. (WM)

Secuestro Express. A well-to-do young couple (Mía Maestro, Jean Paul Leroux), out for a night on the town in Caracas, are randomly kidnapped by a trio of thugs, looking to collect a ransom from the woman's father (Rubén Blades). While money is their prime object, they also revel in humiliating and threatening the pair, the resulting stress showing that she's a mensch and he's a selfish jerk. This debut feature from Venezuelan writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz may well serve as a productive portfolio film, showing that he can handle any style from a glossy perfume commercial to rough handheld chases to weird Lynchean tableaux. Whether it was wise to jam all these things into one film is a different question. An even more important set of questions is: Why did he bother to make it? Why would anyone want to see it? The film may have pretensions to social relevance – there's lots of talk about the justifiable resentments of the impoverished kidnappers toward the blithely apathetic Martin – and it may style itself as fearless realism, but it's basically 90 minutes of sadism directed toward the audience. There is nothing new to be learned here, nothing we haven't been put through numerous times before, and no pleasure to be had. That's entertainment! (AK)

The Skeleton Key. Old Dark House thriller with Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, and John Hurt. Iain Softley directed. (AK)

Sky High. The title refers to a high school atop a high-flying anti-gravity platform, where teenagers with super powers are trained in their use. Will Stronghold (Lords of Dogtown's Michael Angarano) – son of superheroes the Commander (Kurt Russell) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston), who now live in the suburbs and conceal their secret identities by wearing glasses – at first appears to have no powers, but he soon develops super-strength, becoming the school hero, at which point, the usual teen-movie standbys kick in: Will he ditch his real friends for the in-crowd? Will he make it with the super-hottie (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) or realize that his longtime platonic best friend (Danielle Panabaker) is actually pretty damn hot in her own right? For a superhero movie, the budget is not huge, and some of the CG is cheesy, but the campy tone, which recalls Craig Mazin's The Specials and the Adam West Batman, doesn't require state of the art. What the movie lacks in visual style it makes up for with smart humor – from the likes of Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, and Bruce Campbell as the teachers, and from some of the ridiculously specific powers the kids have, like the ability to shapeshift … but only into a gerbil with purple-streaked hair. (LYT)

Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith. Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) turns to the Dark Side, has a big fight with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), and transforms into Darth Vader. Senator Amidala (Natalie Portman), his secret wife, gives birth to twins and names them Luke and Leia. Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) becomes the evil emperor. Everything falls in place at the end to set the scene for the so-called Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (or simply Star Wars, as it was in 1977). Writer-director George Lucas closes the book (allegedly) on the dominant cultural touchstone of the final two decades of the last millennium. Revenge of the Sith is substantially better than Lucas's last two efforts, but is that really saying much? Like them, Sith looks great. Unlike them, it has swift pacing and very little meandering. Like them, it has some awful performances and embarrassing dialogue. Unlike them, it finally gets where it's going … but stumbles at that crucial moment, falling down in the one area that it can't afford to – making us feel something at the moment Anakin goes to the Dark Side. Fans may take to Revenge of the Sith because they can connect to it (and to the rest of the saga) in a way some of us (myself included) can't. Others will scratch their heads and wonder how Lucas strayed so far from what made the original trilogy work. (AK)

Stealth. Boy, that Jessica Biel sure is hot. And, boy, those videogames sure are fun. So, if you like Jessica Biel and videogames, go see Stealth, in which Jessica flies around in a computer-generated stealth fighter alongside two other dudes (Josh Lucas and Jamie Foxx) and an autopilot named EDI, who talks and sounds suspiciously like HAL 9000 from 2001. So when it gets struck by lightning while in flight – the first of many, many scientific and narrative implausibilities – no one but the characters in the film is surprised that the machine goes rogue and decides to attack Russia. Take this stuff seriously, and you'll suffer. But think of it as an Xbox game that would be way too hard for you to play and defeat in 121 minutes, and you'll be fine. If you sit through the end credits, you'll get to see the set-up for a potential sequel. (LYT)

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Desperate to find a kidney for his sister, a deaf young factory worker (Shin Ha-kyun) in South Korea gets ripped off by a black-market organ ring and thus turns to kidnapping the four-year-old daughter of an industrialist (Song Kang-ho), in order to afford a legitimate organ. Nothing goes right, and all the wrong people die, setting off an unstoppable chain of vengeance. Sporting one of the greatest titles ever, this 2002 film from Park Chan-wook is similar to his recently released Oldboy in its subject matter but far plainer in its execution. Once again, Park moves the narrative with “cosmic irony,” manipulating events to make sure that no good can befall his doomed characters. In Oldboy, the implausibilities were even greater, but they felt appropriate, given that film's proudly artificial, feverish style. Here, everything is presented more realistically, and it makes the contrivances more irritating. The onscreen violence may be no more extreme, but it feels more gratuitous and sadistic in this context. (AK)

Tony Takitani. See Latest Reviews.

2046. The latest from Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong's leading art-house director, is a semi-sequel to In the Mood for Love (2000). Tony Leung Chiu Wai reprises his role as Chow Mo Wan, a heartbroken writer now transformed into a cynical rake. The title refers to the setting of Chow's dystopian novel, which we see bits and snatches of, but most of the action takes place in Hong Kong in the mid-1960s. 2046 is also the hotel room across the hall from Chow, inhabited by a succession of his female friends (Carina Lau Ka Ling, Ziyi Zhang, Faye Wong). As is so often the case in Wong's work, describing the plot is futile. Chow parties, has affairs, writes, and remembers. Most particularly, the latter – which is why the order of the narrative is not, on a single viewing, entirely clear. The film shifts without warning from being in the present to recalling the past to fantasizing the future. 2046 creates the sort of dreamy, drifting, reflective mood that Wong is a master at. He deliberately unmoors the movie from expectations of plot structure, but gets away with it because of the luscious visual textures he creates, with the help of longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle and editor/production designer William Chang Suk-Ping. (AK)

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Valiant. During World War II, when the Royal Homing Pigeon Service – doing its part for the war effort – loses an elite team to a gauntlet of Nazi falcons, it has no choice but to take on some less-than-desirable recruits, including an eager but undersized young bird named Valiant (Ewan McGregor). It doesn't take a brain surgeon to fill in the rest of the story: It's the familiar narrative paradigm of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer but with homing pigeons. The implementation here, by British animation house Vanguard and Shrek producer John Williams, isn't up to the level of Pixar's A Bug's Life or DreamWorks's Antz, which followed the same pattern, but it's good enough to keep both children and adults enjoyably engaged for its brisk hour-and-a-quarter running time. With cream-of-the-crop British vocal talent (John Cleese, Ricky Gervais, Tim Curry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Laurie, John Hurt, Rik Mayall, and Olivia Williams), it does a better-than-average job of compensating for the predictable and insubstantial nature of the story. (WM)

War of the Worlds. A divorced, irresponsible working-class dad (Tom Cruise) tries to protect his two kids (Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin), after aliens put a long-planned invasion into action, destroying everything in their path and scooping up humans in order to feast on their blood. Steven Spielberg's new version of H.G. Wells's novel – the great-granddaddy of all paranoid alien-invasion stories – is structured as one long nightmare. In terms of making most of the film utterly terrifying, Spielberg has succeeded totally. But there are problems in the overall pacing and structure. The terror doesn't really build; the scariest stuff is in the first half, where it reaches such a high pitch that even the director of Jaws can't really crank it any higher. Cruise can be a very good actor, but this is far from his best work, which may well be the script's fault: In general, the character definition here is shallow, stereotypical, and not very interesting. Still: scary and suspenseful as hell. (AK)

Wedding Crashers. Two lawyers (Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn) love to sneak into strangers' weddings, for entertainment, great food, and (most of all) hustling women into bed. But their buoyantly exploitive partnership is endangered when one breaks a cardinal rule: At an upper-crust ceremony, he genuinely falls for the already-spoken-for daughter (Rachel McAdams) of an oh-so-WASPy cabinet member (Christopher Walken). He pursues her, while his buddy tries to fend off the amorous advances of her younger sister (Isla Fisher) and her younger brother (Keir O'Donnell). David Dobkin (Shanghai Knights) directed this old-fashioned buddy comedy, which owes a lot to Some Like It Hot: The heroes are sexist scoundrels, and the whole film revolves around the process of them seeing the error of their ways. There are some terrifically funny scenes, but nearly everything is predictable, and, at two hours, it slightly overstays its welcome. Wilson is his usual charming self, but it's Vaughn (in the equivalent of the Jack Lemmon role) who gets to steal the show. (AK)

The World. Beijing's bizarre World Park – an Epcot-like theme park that consists of some 106 scale representations of the world's great cities and landmarks – is the setting for this elegant elegy to the hopes and struggles of China's rural twentysomethings. Using the park as a metaphor for the crossroads at which the “old” and “new” China find themselves, acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke (Unknown Pleasures, Platform) weaves a thoughtful tapestry of interlocking stories, all centering on young adults who have fled their provincial homes in search of a better life in Beijing. Jia's style is clearly not for everyone; the long, leisurely takes and a distant, almost passive, involvement in the lives of the characters suggest the influence of Taiwanese masters like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang. But Jia's concerns are uniquely his own, and the application of that style here produces a singular work of such profound resonance, it cannot help but be regarded as among the year's best. (WM)