NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (PG) Maybe the best movie ever about all-American high school geeks, and certainly one of the funniest, Napoleon Dynamite is about a slack-jawed loser with a tight red perm and almost no concept of how to live in the world. Mouth permanently agape, and eyes simultaneously squinty and glazed, Napoleon is barely a millimeter away from being a zombie — but then again, so are most everybody else in the movie. The film takes place in a bland little town in Idaho where time passes slowly, as do the thoughts and words of the inhabitants, and the movie depicts it all with sly humor and affection. Most of the conventions of the high school comedy are here — the school prom, the class election — but the film transcends cliche with a lethal combo of slapstick, absurdity and dry, deadpan Jarmusch-ian wit. The young, mostly nonprofessional cast was largely drawn from 24-year-old director Jared Hess' pals at Brigham Young University, but don't hold that against them. Among its many other virtues, Napoleon Dynamite offers proof positive that Mormons really do have a sense of humor. Stars Jon Heder, Sandy Martin, Tina Majorino and Aaron Ruell. Opens July 16 at local theaters.
THE NOTEBOOK (PG-13) Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (the head mean girl from Mean Girls) star as star-crossed lovers in this slow-moving, sticky-sweet, cliche-ridden romance. The tale is told in flashback, with a nicely evoked setting of coastal North Carolina in the 1940s being one of the film's few saving graces. The source here is yet another assembly line product generated by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember), so you pretty much know what you're getting into even before the opening credits roll. Also stars James Garner, Gena Rowlands, James Marsden and Sam Shepard. 1/2
SLEEPOVER (PG) Having survived the Spy Kids trilogy, Alexa Vega faces a real adventure: high school. At a junior high graduation slumber party she and her uncool friends compete with the popular (i.e., mean) girls in a scavenger hunt. This sweet 'tween fantasy will give false hope to real 14-year-olds but may empower a few to transcend their niche in the established social order.
—Steve Warren
SPIDER-MAN 2 (PG-13) Spider-Man 2 concentrates and amplifies the strengths of the first film, skillfully interweaving human-size dramatic elements with enormous and enormously visceral action set pieces. Much time is spent reintroducing the film's characters and rehashing their relationships, but this turns out to be essential in getting us to care about what happens to those characters once the sparks eventually begin to fly. And what sparks they are! Where the first movie's nemesis, Green Goblin, was somewhat (unintentionally) silly, the sequel's mechanical-armed transgressor, Doctor Octopus, is a monumental and menacing foe — and, as we all know, movies like these live or die by their villains. Sam Rami stages Doc Ock's every scene brilliantly, harking back to the director's pre-blockbuster days as a class horror act with pulp fare like Darkman and the Evil Dead movies. It's all part of a web of solid gold, providing substance and flavor to what is essentially a kick-ass action movie. Stars Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco and Alfred Molina.
THE STEPFORD WIVES (PG-13) Although not quite the catastrophe indicated by all that awful advance buzz, Frank Oz's take on robot housewives in suburban hell is still a bit of a mess. Oz's remake eschews any traces of horror or suspense for the broadest sort of camp, bringing the already obvious satirical undertones of the original film to the surface and running with them like an energetic but none-too-bright puppy with a pair of your favorite underpants in its mouth. The pro-feminist/anti-conformist agenda is played as farce for most of the film's running time, with telegraphed plot points and a cavalier approach to pacing making it seem as if the film assumes that everyone is already in on the joke, so what does it matter. There are also narrative and tonal inconsistencies galore, culminating in a bizarre shift to the deadly serious occurring about an hour in, rendering the movie completely schizophrenic and dead in the water. Some of the comedy bits are appealing enough, however, in a lazy, glossy and thoroughly disposable sort of way. Stars Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken, Jon Lovitz and Bette Midler.