NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM (PG) It's a toss up who's the real star here — Ben Stiller or the special effects — in a comedy-adventure about a hapless security guard who discovers all the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History are coming to life. Also stars Owen Wilson, Ricky Gervais, Dick Van Dyke and Carla Gugino. (Not Reviewed)
NOTES ON A SCANDAL (R) A fierce performance by Cate Blanchette and an even more remarkable one by Judi Dench are the main reasons to see Notes on a Scandal, a solid little thriller that has something bad to say about nearly all of its characters. Blanchette stars as Sheba Hart, a greenhorn teacher who gets taken under the wing of veteran instructor Barbara Covett (Dench), an oddball spinster whose affection for the younger woman goes from creepy to deadly. Blanchett's character is no angel either, and her steamy affair with one of her 15-year-old students only complicates the film's nasty turn of events and snowballing head games. In the end, the film doesn't really amount to much more than a retooled and interestingly textured variation on your basic Fatal Attraction cat-and-mouse, but some of the twists and turns are surprisingly effective, and Dench and Blanchette are a pairing made in cat-and-mouse heaven. Also stars Bill Nighy. 3.5 stars
THE PAINTED VEIL (PG-13) A classy picture postcard with a good performance or two tucked inside, The Painted Veil's credits are impeccable, from its well-respected source (Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel of the same name) to its well-respected stars, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. Watts is in particularly fine form as pretty but shallow Kitty, a spoiled Londoner forced by her cuckolded husband (Norton) to accompany him on a virtual suicide mission to a cholera-ridden village in China. The Painted Veil doesn't seem all that comfortable sustaining the slow-burning intensity of the couple's strained relationship, and so it deflects our attention with detours to a world-weary neighbor (Toby Jones) and with various representatives of the budding, anti-imperialist nationalism sweeping China in the 1920s. And then there are those adorable but tragically doomed nuns at the local orphanage where Kitty volunteers. The movie's arc is fairly predictable, with most of the characters working through their pain, getting in touch with their humanity, finding redemption and, finally, reaching an understanding that approaches, as Lou Reed once had it, some kinda love. Also stars Liev Shrieber, Diana Rigg and Anthony Wong. 2.5 stars
PAN'S LABYRINTH (NR) Besides functioning as a brutally incisive account of life during wartime, Pan's Labyrinth is something of a fairy tale, a classic fable shaken and stirred with a modern twist (including a wicked, obsessive-compulsive stepfather, a trio of tasks to be completed before the moon is full and a bionic-insect fairy for a guide). The movie is also an elegant coming-of-age tale, taking place during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, and filtering that conflict through the imagination of a 10-year-old girl who absorbs the messy suffering into a richly ordered fantasy world of her own device. Taking us down the rabbit hole and straight through the looking glass, Pan's Labyrinth layers its real-world wartime drama with glimpses of a parallel universe where anything is possible, where pagan myth and Jungian symbols collide and magical realism mixes freely with grotesque imagery straight out of Goya. The film is a fairy tale in the best and darkest sense (a baby-killing, eyeless monster dining by an enormous pile of tiny shoes is just one of its terrible pleasures), so be aware that this is most decidedly not, repeat not, an entertainment for children. Stars Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Ivana Baquero, Ariadne Gil and Alex Angulo. 4.5 stars
PERFUME (R) Faithfully adapting Patrick Suskind's cult novel, director Tom Twyker offers up the life and times of Jean Baptiste Grenouille, a strangely repellent 18th-century Frenchman with a preternaturally developed sense of smell, but who gives off absolutely no odor himself (almost as if he doesn't quite exist in the same physical dimension as the rest of us). Perfume vividly brings to life the ineffable otherness of this man who fell to earth, with Twyker (working territory infinitely more refined than the rat-a-tat razzle-dazzle of Run Lola Run) retaining the agreeably overripe essence of Suskind's novel while expanding its moral scope. Grenouille is transformed here into a sympathetic monster in the classic mold of the one created by Dr. Frankenstein, where monstrousness is essentially innocence gone tragically wrong. At once noble, blasphemous, pathetic and stark raving bonkers, Grenouille ultimately morphs into a Nietzschean Jack the Ripper, but even when Perfume eventually threatens to turn into this week's serial killer thriller, the movie remains utterly unique — a heartbreaking love song to beauty, sung by a beast of a man who, lacking a soul of his own, attempts to feed upon the soul of the world. Stars Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Dustin Hoffman and John Hurt. 4 stars
