SCARY MOVIE 4 (PG-13) Another round of random spoofing, David Zucker style, of the latest batch of horror flicks — Saw, The Grudge, The Village, and so on — with much hilarity involving bodily functions and obligatory doses of T & A no doubt abounding. Stars Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Criag Bierko, Carmen Electra and Andre Benjamin. (Not Reviewed)
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (R) A sensation at Sundance and at the Toronto Film Festival, Thank You For Smoking doesn't quite live up to the buzz but it's good, nasty fun nonetheless. Aaron Eckhart (The Company of Men) has his moment in the sun as the perfectly named Nick Naylor, a sliver-tongued shill for the tobacco industry who never met a piece of spin he didn't like. Morallly flexible to the max, Nick has made his deal with the devil, but he's also smart and curiously likeable — as is the movie — and both of them eventually have us eating out of their hands. First-time writer-director Jason Reitman (son of perennial Hollywood fixture Ivan) positions Nick at the center of a deliciously non-PC satire of modern-day life and a culture grounded in the notion that everything is for sale. The film fans out in too many directions as it unfolds, and by the end there are at least two or three irons too many in the fire — a kidnapping scheme, a scheming potential love interest (Katie Holmes) and Nick's impressionable son (Cameron Bright) all vie for screen time — but, Thank You For Smoking still gets its job done in style. So far, this is the funniest and smartest American comedy of the year. Also stars Robert Duvall, Adam Brody, Maria Bello and David Koechner. 4 stars
X-MEN: THE LAST STAND (PG-13) There's lots to gawk at in this supposedly final installment of the X-Men franchise, including super-powered mutants who can fly, walk through walls, create massive walls of fire and ice, conjure storms, read minds, transform into metal, duplicate themselves and, in one spectacular sequence, redirect the path of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Last Stand would almost certainly have benefited from a narrowed focus on just a handful of characters, but the script and performances are a half-notch above what we expect in our comic-book extravaganzas, making this a solid if somewhat workmanlike conclusion to the X trilogy. The story this time out revolves around a newly discovered "cure" that turns mutants into ordinary humans — a discovery that forces the international mutant community to make some hard choices about who they are and who they want to be. This gives the movie plenty of room for not-so-thinly disguised messages about accepting one's self and others, but the whole mutant "cure" thingie is really just a Maguffin, a holy grail to be drooled over and chased after, not unlike the one currently on display in The Da Vinci Code. Fortunately, The Last Stand does a considerably better job with this material, and by the time the film moves in for the kill with its final assault of battles, disasters, illusions and revelations, we're exhausted and overwhelmed in that blissful way that only the best popcorn movies can supply. Stars Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Kelsey Grammar.3.5 stars
