OPENING THIS WEEK
APPALOOSA (R) Ed Harris's performance as Jackson Pollock was probably the best thing about his directorial debut, Pollock (2000), and it's largely the performances that linger in his second feature, a solidly constructed traditional western that he and Robert Knott adapted from a Robert Parker novella. Harris and Viggo Mortensen star as hired guns, Jeremy Irons is the ruthless rancher they're tangling with, and Renee Zellweger is a mannerist standout as the promiscuous and unpredictable widow who wins Harris's heart. This isn't a visionary western like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), but in its own quiet way it delivers the goods. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
BLINDNESS (R) I have to admire a mainstream movie that's so overwhelmingly bleak, but that's the only real distinction of this dystopian sci-fi drama by Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener). An epidemic of blindness paralyzes the world, and in one city armed guards herd the victims into a deserted mental hospital to fend for themselves. Conditions inside quickly devolve into Lord of the Flies-style savagery, as a compassionate doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), who's concealing the fact that she can still see, clash with a self-appointed dictator (Gael Garcia Bernal). Adapted from a novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, this ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists. With Alice Braga and Danny Glover. —J.R. Jones
FLASH OF GENIUS (PG-13) Greg Kinnear stars in this crowd-pleaser about Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and waged a decades-long legal battle against the auto industry for stealing his invention. In the course of the movie, Kearns manages to lose his family, his friends and apparently his sanity before he puts his life back together and launches one last legal assault on the corporate Goliaths. The cast is excellent — especially Kinnear, who's perfected his wounded everyman persona — and Marc Abraham's direction is elegant and understated. But their work is seriously undermined by the skeletal script, which barely develops the characters and unintentionally raises more questions about Kearns's quixotic battle than it answers. With Lauren Graham, Dermot Mulroney and Alan Alda. —Reece Pendleton
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE (R) The Devil Wears Prada for lads. After causing a ruckus at a British awards show, a muckraking journalist (Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead) lands a job at a Vanity Fair-style glossy and moves to Manhattan, where he offends everyone in sight and fights the urge to sell out. Of course, in a movie that's dripping with glamour and jammed with beautiful stars (Kirsten Dunst, Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson, Danny Huston, Megan Fox), "selling out" has to be defined down to whether a puff piece is obsequious or snotty. Pegg has some good obnoxious moments, but he's only a few movies away from becoming Dudley Moore. Robert Weide, a veteran of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, directed. —J.R. Jones
NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST (PG-13) Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl and they make great music together. It's a familiar formula, but as the title characters, Michael Cera (Juno) and Kat Dennings give it such a fresh spin you'd think they invented love at first sight. Nick, a New Jersey senior who pines for his shallow ex-girlfriend (Alexis Dziena), is playing bass for a gay rock band when he meets Norah, a rich but soulful Manhattanite who's wowed by his CD mixes. Recognizing each other as kindred spirits, they decide to track down the elusive underground band they both love. Director Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Varga) and cinematographer Tom Richmond transform nocturnal New York into a soft-focus wonderland for their sweet but screwball courtship. —Andrea Gronvall
RELIGULOUS (R) >In his first film as writer-star, comedian Bill Maher surveys the malign influence of organized religion, arguing that faith is a neurological disease that must be cured before it destroys the planet. This has its funny moments, but unlike Maher's excellent HBO show, Real Time, it aims for laughs more than insights — and aims low. Maher interviews a few heavy hitters (Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project; Reverend George Coyne, director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory), yet he mostly bypasses serious religious thinkers in favor of fundamentalist goofballs he can ridicule with ease. And he and director Larry Charles (Borat) play dirty, using on-screen captions to mock the interviewees and creating phony reaction shots by editing in footage of them taken out of context. The end result is a small movie about the biggest questions of all: why we're here and how this all came to be. —J.R. Jones
RECENT RELEASES
BABYLON A.D. (PG-13) The new film from director Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine, Gothika) is a sci-fi-ish thriller with Vin Diesel guarding a woman hosting a virus that could destroy the world. There's also a cult lurking on the sidelines seeking to create some sort of a genetically altered Messiah. Also stars Meanie Thierry, Michelle Yeoh, Lambert Wilson and Charlotte Rampling. (Not Reviewed)
BANGKOK DANGEROUS (R) Nicolas Cage stars as a well-paid assassin who travels to Thailand to kill four people in this loose remake by the Pang brothers of their 1999 film. While Cage is appropriately laconic and surly as a loner whose only ties are to the people who hire him, his performance is unusually flaccid. The story includes several overused plot devices, including the clichéd final job with a big payoff that will allow Cage's character to retire permanently, but when he allows a Thai gofer into his locked-down world and decides to train him, things go predictably awry. While the film includes several exciting, creatively shot action scenes, the drama is otherwise so shopworn that the violent climax is a relief. With Shahkrit Yamnarm and Pamward Hemmanee. —Joshua Katzman
BURN AFTER READING (R) A pair of dim-witted gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt) blackmail a disgruntled CIA analyst (John Malkovich) in this comedy from the Coen brothers. In contrast to their bleak Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading offers a hilarious parody of spy thrillers, replete with sinister music and shadowy figures following the protagonists. The Coens' fondness for anticlimaxes diminishes the film's potential punch, but the hilarious performances alone would make it worth seeing, including Michael Clayton co-stars George Clooney and Tilda Swinton. —Curt Holman 3.5 stars
CHOKE (R) Character actor Clark Gregg adapted, directed and played a supporting role in this ineffectual version of the novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. Sam Rockwell plays a "historical interpreter" at an 18th-century village who struggles with sex addiction, tries to care for his demented mother (a charismatic Anjelica Huston) and chokes on food at restaurants so he can scam his rescuers. Choke retains Palahniuk's snide, aggressive voice and engineers some memorably dark gags, but the different plot threads never add up to much. 2 stars —Curt Holman
EAGLE EYE (PG-13) Working in the finest tradition of brain-dead blockbusters, director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia) and executive producer Steven Spielberg take a script riddled with absurdities and throw millions and millions of dollars at it. Two Chicagoans who don't know each other (Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) are coerced into carrying out a terrorism plot by a mysterious and omnipotent organization that communicates with them by cellphones, manipulates their movements with split-second timing and controls almost every electrical device in their path, from security cameras to traffic lights to the scrolling LED screen in a travel office window. Caruso and Spielberg probably thought they were reviving the paranoid style of '70s political thrillers, but their story is so implausible it barely provokes a tremor. With Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Chiklis, Rosario Dawson, and Anthony Mackie. —J.R. Jones
ELEGY (R) In Isabel Coixet's Elegy, Ben Kingsley plays David Kepesh, an intellectual and avid womanizer whose age has crept up on him, leaving him staring out the window of his handsomely decorated Manhattan apartment and pondering how it's still possible he's "engaged in the carnal aspects of the human comedy." If this sounds like Philip Roth territory, it should — Elegy is an adaptation of yet another Roth novel about the complex dovetailing of mind and body (among other things), and Kingsley's Kepesh is a quintessential Roth hero, a tortured soul of enormous intellectual and sensual appetites, equally at home quoting Tolstoy and Bette Davis. A renowned literary critic and popular college professor, Kepesh is also fond of seducing female students 30 years his junior, but when he becomes involved with a beautiful grad student named Consuela (Penelope Cruz), Kingsley's fiercely independent character becomes obsessed, consumed by jealousy and riddled with paralyzing doubts that ultimately tear the relationship asunder. Kingsley is very good here (a welcome return to subtlety after the broad strokes of The Wackness), and Cruz is even better, but the film simply seems too enamored of melancholy for melancholy's sake to really be effective, and it never quite manages to convincingly detail the process by which basic physical desire transforms into something known, for better or worse, as love. Also stars Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Dennis Hopper. 2.5 stars —Lance Goldenberg
FLY ME TO THE MOON (G) Three talking houseflies hitch a ride on Apollo 11 in this first feature-length animation specifically designed for 3D. Getting to the good news first, the 3D effects are plentiful, cleverly imagined and often stunningly realistic, but technique will only get you so far. The animation itself is rather bland (beginning with the terminally cute and utterly forgettable insect heroes), and the story doesn't amount to much either. Outside of a few minutes devoted to the actual lunar landing, and a couple of minor acts of heroism on the flies' part, nothing much really happens here, and the trio of stowaway insects don't really do anything other than hang out in the rocket observing the astronauts from the sidelines, like, well, flies on the wall. The movie's 1969 setting prompts a smattering of classic rock on the soundtrack to keep grown-up viewers awake, but almost everything else about this trip to the moon, outside of that remarkable use of 3D, is strictly dullsville. Features the voices of Christopher Lloyd, Adrienne Barbeau, Ed Begley Jr., Tim Curry, Kelly Ripa, Nicollette Sheridan, Trevor Gagnon, David Gore and Philip Bolden. 2 stars
HAMLET 2 (R) Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) is the cartoonish hero of Hamlet 2, a failed actor whose resume consists of appearances in ads for herpes creams and juicers. Marschz has been reduced to teaching high school drama and directing student productions of plays based on Hollywood movies, Despite his artistic airs and ambitions, he has very little talent and even less taste — he genuinely loves that cookie-cutter crap that Hamlet 2 can't stop ragging on, movies like Mr. Holland's Opus and Patch Adams — and he's too clueless to even realize what a mess his life is. When word comes that the drama department is being shut down as part of the ongoing de-funding and de-valuing of the arts (a high school drama teacher being almost as expendable as a film critic at an alternative weekly paper). In desperation, Dana decides to produce an original play so spectacular he's sure it'll reverse his flagging fortunes — an all-singing, all-dancing sequel to Hamlet. Everything here is played for laughs, and no subject is too touchy to become a joke: the absurd "life lessons" doled out by Hollywood movies; the casual cruelty of high school kids and Coogan's pathetic character flaws and ultimate realization that his life is a "parody of a tragedy" — much like his play., a mind-bogglingly awful production that consumes most of the movie's last act with a barrage of Shakespearean characters dueling with light sabers, pondering group sex with Hillary Clinton and crooning a tender ballad like "Raped in the Face" and the pelvis-thrusting "Rock Me Sexy Jesus." Also stars Catherine Keener, David Arquette, Marshall Bell, Melonie Diaz, Joseph Julian Soria, Elisabeth Shue and Amy Poehler 3.5 stars —Lance Goldenberg
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (PG-13) State-of-the-art special effects will almost certainly be the real stars of this big-screen version of Jules Verne tale of a scientist discovering marvels, terrors and a fabulous lost city deep within the bowels of the earth. The movie will play at select theaters in a 3-D version, which is probably the ideal way to see this. Stars Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and Anita Briem. (Not Reviewed)
LAKEVIEW TERRACE (R) Lake View Terrace, you may recall, is the Los Angeles suburb where in 1991 four LAPD officers beat Rodney King for more than a minute while a bystander caught the incident on video. In this incendiary social thriller by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men), it's also the home of a black cop (Samuel L. Jackson) who takes it upon himself to get rid of the interracial couple who've moved in next door (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington). By scrambling the typical power relationship between black and white, LaBute focuses our attention on power itself, and by plunging into the still-taboo subject of black bigotry, he gets closer to the truth of bigotry in all its forms than does the pious white atonement of most racial dramas. This is being marketed as a slam-bang entertainment, but it's also one of the toughest and most relevant movies of the year. —J.R. Jones
THE LUCKY ONES (R) Three soldiers returning home from Iraq (Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams, Michael Peña) are thrown together for a cross-country road trip after an electrical blackout grounds every flight out of JFK, and as they drive from New York to Saint Louis to Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, each feels increasingly alienated from what was once home. Past movies about Iraq veterans have been box-office poison (Stop-Loss, Home of the Brave), but by structuring this as a comic road movie, writer-director Neil Burger (The Illusionist) manages to examine the emotional isolation of returning vets without sinking into a bog of despair. Typical of the movie's waggish sense of humor is the scene in which an explosive argument drives the characters out of their minivan onto the side of the highway; when they finally resolve their differences, they realize they've locked themselves out. —J.R. Jones
MAMMA MIA! (PG-13) Based on the Broadway musical so beloved by aging boomers and their familiars, Mamma Mia! relies on the hits of '70s uber-group Abba to tell the story of a young bride-to-be (Amanda Seyfried) trying to discover which of her mother's three ex-lovers is her real father. Meryl Streep is a hoot as the bride's bohemian mother (a self-described ex-slut), again demonstrating her remarkable versatility by singing, dancing, doing light comedy and occasionally emoting, all with considerable panache — but the rest of the movie is a mixed bag, at best. Mamma Mia! doesn't pretend to be anything other than fluff, but even on those terms it's sometimes tough to take, with performances that practically shriek with campy desperation (prime offenders being Christine Baranski and Julie Walters as Streep's gal pals), and singing that ranges from the passable (Colin Firth's thin and reedy balladeering) to the flat-out embarrassing (Pierce Brosnan's rendition of "S.O.S." is sheer torture). It all takes place on an impossibly picturesque Greek island, so there's plenty of gorgeous scenery to gawk at, but the colorful locale is a lazy substitute for the original stage show's inventive stylization, and the naturalistic setting ultimately just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, the Abba music is just as ridiculously catchy as you want it to be (who can resist "Dancing Queen?"), even as rendered by often inept pipes, and the film manages to espouse both hippie free-love and the sort of classic romanticism that requires one of the male leads to get down on one knee and propose to someone by movie's end. And let's not forget the Greek Chorus (composed of actual Greeks) who burst out cackling when someone complains of a "cruel act of fate." Also stars Stellan Skarsgard, Nancy Baldwin, Rachel McDowall and Enzo Squillino Jr. 2.5 stars —Lance Goldenberg
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA (R) With this adaptation of James McBride's novel, Spike Lee aims for an African-American Saving Private Ryan that will recognize the bravery and sacrifice of the segregated soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division, who helped liberate Italy in World War II. Malcolm X (1992) proved that Lee could rise to the challenge of a sweeping historical epic, but this 160-minute drama is overblown and unconvincing, the director's bright, poppy style clashing with the grim subject matter. Lee is typically heavy-handed in detailing the racist treatment of black soldiers, both at home and in the European theater, but at least in these scenes he's fully engaged; the long stretch set in a Tuscan village behind enemy lines, where the four heroes (Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller) wind up after being separated from their unit, plays like second-hand Rossellini. —J.R. Jones
MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL (R) Dane Cook stars as a major-league asshole who specializes in mending other people's relationships: Jilted boyfriends hire him to date their exes and repel the women back into their former lovers' arms. His lucrative business is threatened, however, when he meets his roommate's brassy, self-centered ex (Kate Hudson), whose immunity to Cook's antics proves irresistible to him. Cook does some surprisingly good work, bringing a darker and more malevolent undercurrent to his character than the script might have suggested. There's something genuinely transgressive beneath the movie's rom-com surface, though director Howard Deutch keeps retreating to the safety of frat-boy humor. —Reece Pendleton
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE (PG-13) To anyone who's claimed they could watch Diane Lane in anything, Nights in Rodanthe should be the ultimate test. We're sure the actress will be stunning as always, but with Richard Gere playing her love interest, who knows how much scenery will be chewed in her presence. (Not Reviewed)
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (R) Strange bedfellows of the year: David Gordon Green, one of the most uniquely understated voices of independent cinema (George Washington, All the Real Girls) teams up here with Judd Apatow, a producer whose hit comedies rely on vomit and feces in much the same way that Jerry Bruckheimer depends upon explosions. The result — a comedy/action flick about a couple of potheads on the run from killers — is a weirdly competent move to the mainstream, with the indie auteur casting aside artistic pretensions and embracing a blandly self-effacing style that Andy Warhol might have blessed. The rigorously no-frills approach puts the movie's nuts and bolts front and center, from James Franco's fabulous turn as Seth Rogen's mush-brained pal (hands-down best comic performance by an overly serious method-actor since Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), to the gleefully crude humor, mostly revolving around typical Apatow fixations like errant bodily fluids and faces shoved into boxes of cat turds. The movie's basic premise is that everything is funnier when high, and Pineapple Express essentially filters the conventions of buddy movies and action flicks through a stoner sensibility, so even when we get a slow-mo shoot-out à la Bruckheimer, it's with one of the characters screaming, "Prepare to suck the cock of karma!" The story arc of Pineapple Express isn't ultimately all that different from the movies it's supposedly spoofing — Rogen and Franco eventually realize they're "not very functional when we're high" and then hit bottom before emerging victorious — but the unflagging energy of the movie's one-damn-thing-after-another scenario is pure Apatow, screwball comedy for a toilet-humor era. Also stars Danny McBride, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez, Kevin Corrigan, Nora Dunn and Ed Begley Jr. 3 stars —Lance Goldenberg
RIGHTEOUS KILL (R) Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, working together for the first time since Heat (1995), are veteran New York City cops trying to track down a vigilante serial killer. Watching these old pros play longtime buddies is a pleasure, especially since they're together in most scenes. But this thriller by Jon Avnet (88 Minutes) is mostly by the numbers, and its surprise ending, though effective, feels somewhat forced. Avnet explores some dark corollaries between police work and sadomasochism, but they're eventually shunted aside by the plot machinations. With Carla Gugino, Curtis Jackson, Brian Denehy, John Leguizamo, and Donnie Wahlberg. —Joshua Katzman
STAR WARS: CLONE WARS (PG-13) Adapted from the Cartoon Network series and buffed up for the big screen with 3-D CGI, this Star Wars animation takes place in between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, with Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker trying to forestall an intergalactic incident by rescuing the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt. The trapezoid of scrolling type that used to open the movies has been replaced by voice-over, which probably says something about the deterioration of children's reading skills, and Hayden Christensen, who played Skywalker in the two earlier movies, has been replaced by ones and zeros, which is a big improvement. Without the grandiose narrative structure of the six live-action releases, this feels even more pointless, a mechanical attempt to milk the kids for every last dime. Dave Filoni directed. 1 star —J.R. Jones
TRAITOR (PG-13) Despite all the international-thriller trappings — there seems to be a captioned establishing shot every 10 minutes — this feature more closely resembles such stool-pigeon dramas as White Heat, Donnie Brasco and The Departed. The central character, played with winning gravity by Don Cheadle, is an American-born Muslim whose loyalties bounce like a pinball between U.S. law enforcement and the jihadist cell he's infiltrated. Based on a story by Steve Martin of all people, the script seldom rises above formula (Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough are especially ill-served as a pair of starchy FBI agents), but its respectful treatment of Islam is both unusual and welcome. With Jeff Daniels and Said Taghmaoui, excellent as Cheadle's jihadist pal. Jeffrey Nachmanoff directed. —J.R. Jones
TROPIC THUNDER (R) Ben Stiller writes, directs and stars in this uneven but often hilarious comedy about a group of pampered Hollywood actors who come under real-life fire in the jungle while making "the war movie to end all war movies." Robert Downey Jr. nearly steals the show while channeling Russell Crowe as a method actor with a major identity crisis (he's convinced he's African-American for most of the film); Jack Black is reliably Jack Black-ish as a drug-addled twit known for his Meet the Krumps-styled fart comedies, and Stiller plays a fading action star whose attempt at a career revival had him playing a mentally challenged boy who talks to horses ("never go full retard," is Downey's advice). The funniest bits occur during the opening sequences, but there's good stuff throughout as the movie hones the cartoonish excess of Zoolander through spot-on satires of Hollywood's machinery, from its moguls and superstars to its assorted satellite players. Tropic Thunder's plentiful cameos are also extremely entertaining (Steve Coogan, Bill Heder and Danny McBride are all a hoot, but best of all is Tom Cruise in a bald cap and fake chest hair). And don't miss the pre-show fake trailers, the best of their kind since Grindhouse. Also stars Matthew McConaughey, Brandon T. Jackson, Jay Baruchel and Brandon Soo Hoo. 3.5 stars —Lance Goldenberg
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA (PG-13) Scarlett Johansson plays a young dabbler in the arts, whose most notable achievement so far has been directing a short film about, as she puts it, "why love is so hard to define." Johansson's slightly pompous statement is the perfect set-up for a joke, and the punch line comes when someone dryly responds, "That's a big subject to cover in 12 minutes." Woody Allen's sly joke is that his movie addresses that same impossibly immense and elusive topic — and, in its modest way, actually manages to pull it off. The deceptively simple story here concerns Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and her friend Cristina (Johansson), two young Americans whose notions of love and romance go through curious changes while spending the summer in Barcelona. Vicky is the levelheaded one in this pair, happily monogamous with her dull, businessman fiancé, while Cristina's craving for adventure and "counter-intuitive love" draws her to a passionate and unstable Spanish painter named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). The characters all wind up coupling in various combinations, and not the ones you'd necessarily expect, and when Juan Antonio's brilliant, volatile, sexy and totally unhinged ex-wife (Penelope Cruz) shows up, the dynamics change in even more unpredictable ways. Allen avoids playing any of this as melodrama, and although Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn't really a comedy, there's a lighter, tongue-in-cheek tone here that puts all the bed-hopping and hand-wringing in perspective, and that's certainly a refreshing change of pace from the director's recent forays in quasi-thriller territory (Match Point and Cassandra's Dream). Also stars Patricia Clarkson and Chris Messina. 3.5 stars —Lance Goldenberg
THE WOMEN (PG-13) (PG-13) Meg Ryan plays a wife and mother whose privileged life crumbles when she discovers her husband is having an affair with a perfume counter clerk (Eva Mendes). "Murphy Brown" creator Diane English mishandles this remake of the classic 1939 screwball comedy with an all-female cast. Annette Bening stands out as a caustic magazine editor who struggles with professional compromises, but otherwise The Women offers conventional you-can-have-it-all uplift while sending mixed messages about label-obsessed materialism. Also stars Eva Mendes and Debra Messing. 2 stars —Curt Holman
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2008.