HOT FUZZ (R) An even more seamless genre-bender than the director's previous Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright's thoroughly entertaining Hot Fuzz mashes up comedy, action, buddy movies and the odd Agatha Christie whodunit, while gleefully taking the piss out of everything it touches. The movie's smart enough to show some respect too, and its bottom line simultaneously spoofs and cherishes big, splashy action movies in much the same way that Shaun stroked and skewered horror. Wright's co-scripter Simon Pegg stars as Nicolas Angel, a London supercop who makes his less dedicated colleagues look so bad that he finds himself "promoted" to a beat in a picturesque, backwater burg (at which point the movie's perfectly chosen soundtrack becomes dominated by The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society). The big joke here is that the sleepy village turns out to be anything but, and Angel winds up matching wits with a hooded reaper who's slicing and dicing the locals (and making it all look like a series of extremely unconvincing accidents). Hot Fuzz is some very funny stuff, with comedy that does droll as well as slapstick, and a well-stocked bank of almost too-clever pop culture references. It all tends to go on a bit too long for its own good (there are at least two climaxes too many here), but even the excesses are worth a look. By the end, Hot Fuzz is all glorious anarchy, as it should be. Also stars Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Billie Whitelaw and Edward Woodward. 4 stars
THE LAST MIMZY (PG) The story here is actually pretty simple, but it's communicated in such a tedious, convoluted manner that it's hard to get a handle on what's happening until the movie's nearly over and even harder to care. Adorable little Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) and big brother Noah (Chris O'Neill) discover a box filled with mysterious "toys" that seem to be giving them special powers — although, as it turns out, the children's powers are just one more red herring in a movie filled with them. Very little of what occurs here seems specifically connected to anything else, entire areas of the plot are introduced and then haphazardly discarded, and even the main idea driving the story — some gobbledygook about the toys being beamed here by a future civilization in need of saving — is only explained in what amounts to a perfunctory postscript. Pitched in some bizarre netherworld between kid-friendly fare and adult drama, the movie gussies itself up with what is essentially very slight material with baroque visual effects and contrived narrative flourishes that are probably supposed to pass as sophisticated but that only add to the general air of incoherence. Also stars Timothy Hutton, Joely Richardson, Rainn Wilson, and Michael Clarke Duncan. 2 stars
PERFECT STRANGER (R) Despite the perfectly generic title and perfectly bankable A-List stars (Halle Berry flirting with Bruce Willis!), Perfect Stranger turns out to be far from perfect and not at all strange. James Foley, who has directed some pretty good films in his time, cooks up a slick but basically pointless thriller that never quite kicks into gear. The movie is pretty much all foreplay, promising puzzles within puzzles without ever really providing one worth pondering. Berry stars as Rowena Price, a foxy newspaper reporter who goes undercover at a top advertising agency run by a philandering executive (Willis) who may have murdered Berry's friend. The stars are fun to watch — Willis plays a slightly more ominous version of his standard scalawag, and Berry's cartoon crusader may be her best since Catwoman (take that with as many kernels of popcorn as you wish) — but the script is lazy to a fault, with cheesy flashbacks surfacing every so often in lieu of actual character development. Also stars Giovanni Ribisi, Gary Dourdan and Patti D'Arbanville. 2 stars
