Continuing

by only deeper (and that’s the only time that word will be applied to this movie). Plus, The Chamber ) has even come close. For one thing, but they’re adrift, should be, best known for his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross -- partly because GGR is superior screen Mamet, Paul Giamatti, how the Glengarry have fallen. Director James Foley is, never jelling into any kind of ensemble. The double-triple-quadruple-cross plot recalls the hole Mamet dug himself with The Heist, not Doug Jung’s fifth-generation House of Games retread, it helps not to let the actors turn in some of the lazier performances of their careers; nothing wrong with Edward Burns (at least as an actor, partly because nothing he’s done since ( Fear, Oh, Andy Garcia or Dustin Hoffman, which is so Mamet-licious it’s a wonder the assembled con men don’t start talking about "the thing." For another, it helps to start with Mamet, didn’t they use the same framing device for Deliver Us From Eva ? -- Sam Adams (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview and Rachel Weisz

"I think Eskimos are smug." This observation, by anger management patient John Turturro, is easily the loopiest in all of Peter Segal’s ridiculous and redundant buddy flick. For the most part, the movie trudges along, pitting anger management "guru" Jack Nicholson against his newest court-ordered patient, Adam Sandler. (The judge who so orders is the late Lynne Thigpen, who, as ever, weathers all insanity with integrity.) Arrested for ostensibly untoward behavior on an airplane ("This is a very difficult time for the country," notes the security guard), Sandler must endure in-home counseling from the wholly obnoxious Nicholson, who not only has him interacting with classmates Turturro and Luis Guzmán, but also arranges his meetings with trannie prostitute Woody Harrelson (self-named "Galaxia") and pretty barfly Heather Graham. Ostensibly, this leads to Sandler’s repairing his relationship with the absolutely perfect Marisa Tomei. But really, it’s all about the boys. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Talented young footballer Jess (Parminder Nagra) loves David Beckham. But her parents, first generation immigrants to the London suburbs, want her to focus on a proper marriage to a nice Indian boy, much like her sister (Archie Panjabi). Gurinder Chadha’s charming, energetic movie charts Jess’ efforts to hide the fact that she’s signed on with a girls’ auxiliary team, befriended teammate Keira Knightley (a Mia Hamm fan), and developed a crush on their sensitive Irish coach (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Unlike most teen romances, this film takes the girls’ perspectives and complicated feelings seriously, detailing their daily negotiations of culture differences (race, nation, gender, class, and generation). And while it includes some standard contrivances, it uses them to reveal the ways that assumptions shape experiences, particularly, girls’ experiences. Various conflicts come to a head in a colorful finale that crosscuts between a final football match and a traditional Indian wedding. Cultures continue to clash, but in ways that are increasingly responsive to one another. --C.F. (Bala;Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Justin Lin’s film isn’t as edgy as its MTV-funded ad campaign suggests. But it’s smart and engaging, and it knows what it is -- a teen movie with teeth. It tracks the increasingly messy efforts of Asian American honor students in Orange County (Parry Shen, Karin Anna Cheung, Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Jason J. Tobin, John Cho) to buck the tedious system that insists they be "model minorities." They can do that, no problem (selling cheat sheets to less adept students), but they’re looking for higher stakes. Once they move on to drug dealing and gangsta-affected thieving and violence, they’re in too deep (which, thankfully doesn’t mean that the moral deus ex machina kicks in). The images are fresh, the insights into intra-community class and gender dynamics are sound, and the plot structured around an academic decathlon -- definitely not the usual high school film. Perhaps most interestingly, not a parent appears in the film, though they’re surely "felt," on frame edges and rooms down the hall. The kids are on their own, but they’re also shaped by expectations, even when they do their best to resist. --Cindy Fuchs (Bridge)

Michael Moore has deliberately taken on a subject -- the American propensity for violence -- that can’t be explained, just to see how close to the impossible he can get. Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore pushes past that answer, pointing fingers at retailers who offer cut-rate ammunition, at racial and economic disparities, and at a media that makes it seem like we’re more violent than we actually are..--S.A. (Roxy)

Lonely, depressed tax lawyer Steve Martin meets witty, well-read "lawyer girl" in a chat room. How surprised he is when she arrives on his doorstep: Boisterous ex-con (and executive producer) Queen Latifah wants him to help her clear her record of the felony burglary for which she was framed. And how unsurprised you are that she teaches this uptight white man to shake his booty, open up to his two kids, lust after his ex (Jean Smart) and even outsmart Latifah’s thuggish ex (Steve Harris). The broad comedy derives from standard class and race frictions, helped along by Martin’s neighbor, Betty White (fearful of "Negroes") and his no. 1 client, Joan Plowright (fond of plantation songs that remind her of childhood servants). Latifah is delightful, and as the man who wisely falls in love with her on first meeting, Eugene Levy brings a welcome dryness to the otherwise predictably soppy proceedings.--C.F. (UA Riverview)

Perhaps best known for directing Mariah Carey’s "Honey" video, Paul Hunter here tries to pull together a clutter of clichés into yet another movie-based-on-a-comic-book. Assigned to protect a Sacred Scroll from nefarious Nazis, a noble No-Name Monk (the great Chow Yun-Fat) is reduced to mentoring smart-ass pickpocket Kar (a.k.a. Stiffler, a.k.a. Seann William Scott) and Russian mafia princess Jade (James King). Their interactions include clever choreography (by Wong Wai Leung) and exceedingly well-worn paths to enlightenment (with, it must be said, a fun getting-to-know-you scene involving cocoa puffs). For the most part, the film combines elements from Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Karate Kid, even a moment or two from Subway’s underground battling, featuring a chiseled torso of a thing (Patrick Hagarty), all without much innovation. To an extent, the film parodies its own corniness (Kar has learned his initial skills from kung fu movies, Monk dispenses wisdom in riddles), but the jokes ("Good luck with that enlightenment stuff," ta-tas Kar when he thinks, wrongly, of course, his learning is done) aren’t smart enough to make up for the reckless race and culture stereotypes. --C.F.(AMC Orleans; UA Riverview)

Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, Chicago splits off Kander and Ebb’s cracking songs from the rest of the story, setting them in a fantasy nightclub space that is interwoven with the real-life setting. Following in Stanley Donen’s footsteps, Rob Marshall is a choreographer turned director, and the movie’s dance sequences fall together like little bits of magic, though the faux-retro salaciousness sometimes comes off more Broadway crass than le jazz hot (and Catherine Zeta-Jones is too hippy for her high-cut costumes). Zellweger, though, proves to be an honest-to-goodness triple threat; while hardly a belter, she finds her way into Roxie’s go-getter bite, and she’s as light on her feet as any good comic actress. Who knew, what’s more, that Richard Gere had been hiding a mean lyric tenor all these years? Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it’s the best traditional movie musical in many a moon. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16)

Given that Neil Jordan's remake of Bob le Flambeur is obsessed with the relationship between copies and originals, it's almost fitting that festivalgoers who turned up to see it on Sunday were rewarded with a screening of the other festival entry with (nearly) the same name. Chances are, though, ticket holders to the sold-out screening didn't feel that way, so the fest has added additional screenings -- appropriately enough, a pair of 'em. An uncanny companion to The Truth About Charlie, The Good Thief works many of the same back alleys: movie directors in principal roles (Emir Kusturica and twin directors Michael and Mark Polish), African music and French rap to convey polyglot fusion, a palette saturated with neon blues. But Jordan adds layer upon layer, referencing both his stars' real-life personae (Nick Nolte plays a recovering junkie, with mug shots that look not unlike the actor's well-publicized own) and a cultural lineage traced from the U.S. to France and back again. (In conversation, Nolte's Bob mocks the music of Johnny Hallyday, best know as the "French Elvis.") Ultimately, The Good Thief twists itself in too many circles -- The Limey pulled off what The Good Thief tries, but Jordan isn't a stylist of Soderbergh's caliber (though he is canny enough to nick a heist method from Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven remake). Still, there's something worth savoring about The Good Thief, an aftertaste more satisfying than the meal itself. --S.A. (Ritz Five)

Camp Green Lake isn’t a camp so much as a juvenile detention center in the middle of B.F., Texas, and there’s no longer anything green or lakey about it. Why are the "campers" -- with Goonies-ish names like Armpit, Zero and X-ray -- each required to dig a new hole in the middle of the desert every day? To tell too much would spoil the fun, which comes by the shovelful, but here’s a teaser: What do peaches and onions have to do with a kissing bandit, a family curse and Latvia? You’ll just have to figure it out along with Stanley "Caveman" Yelnats IV (Shia LeBeouf), who’s sent to Green Lake for stealing shoes, and who has to deal with being the new kid while staying a step ahead of stern warden Sigourney Weaver and "counselors" Jon Voight and Tim Blake Nelson (channeling Roscoe P. Coltrane and Deputy Cletus with giddy abandon). Based on the Newberry-winning book by Louis Sachar (who adapted it for screen), Holes is the rare adolescent movie that doesn’t pander. It delves into the fantastical without shying away from real-world issues like peer acceptance, homelessness and intolerance, but it never stops being engaging popcorn entertainment for all ages. Who woulda thunk? A teenage buddy comedy that actually engrosses. --R.G. (Bridge; Narberth; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

It’s raining. Hard. When roads become impassable, 10 strangers gather at an ooky motel in the middle of nowhere, whereupon they’re hideously murdered one by one: one has a baseball bat stuffed down his throat; another is sliced up with a knife; and all that can be found of another is her head thunking around inside a dryer. Pressed into service to track the killer in James Mangold’s psycho-thriller is honorable limo driver/former cop John Cusack and less-nice current cop Ray Liotta. It’s almost worth the price of admission just to see these two together, along with some fine attitude thrown by Amanda Peet (as the good-hearted hooker). The other eight victims-to-be (including Jake Busey, Clea DuVall, John C. McGinley, and Rebecca De Mornay) are less carefully drawn, and a parallel plot -- in which a death row inmate (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and his shrink (Alfred Molina) try for a last minute reprieve -- doesn’t fit in a way that makes you know it will fit, eventually and crucially (and not so cleverly as it might have). By the last half-hour, the plot has run itself into a corner, but until then, the tension and performances are tight. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham;

Rory Culkin holds his own among the wall-to-wall Douglases in this On Golden Pond-ish group hug of a movie. Lawyer dad Michael and wholly uninteresting mom Bernadette Peters are going through a little bumpy period (thanks in part to his one minute of lust with Sarita Choudhury, down at the soup kitchen where they work -- she’s also the dark-skinned person with whom anyone in the film has more than a moment of conversation); brother Cameron Douglas is selling weed and flunking out at Hunter; and grandparents Kirk and Diana Douglas are offering semi-wise advice while no one’s listening. It helps that Culkin has one or two decent lines ("What’s wrong with a nose ring?" asks Cameron D; "It’s in her nose!" comes the distressed 11-year-old’s reasoning), but the movie is poky and annoying, hitting every emotional note too hard. The saving grace (aside from the non-related Culkin) is that, by the end, Kirk kind of sneaks up on you, with a cagey, detailed performance. --C.F. (Roxy)

Performances stand out in Lisa Cholodenko's follow-up to High Art. As a California record producer whose medical resident son (Christian Bale) and his thesis-writing fiancee (Kate Beckinsale) take up temporary residence in her house/studio, Frances McDormand has the earthy naturalism of a woman who's cut her own path in the world. And as the incipient rock star who's cutting an album in her house, Alessandro Nivola is a revelation, incarnating the kind of nascent sex god whose appeal is only increased by his seeming effortlessness. Bale and Beckinsale's squares aren't nearly as compelling; at bottom, you feel like they're just sounding boards for the film's more freewheeling characters. (The squares loosen up, but the free spirits don't get any less free.) Despite its endorsement of the laissez-faire life, Laurel Canyon is as neat as a military bed; it would've been a lot more effective if Cholodenko had left some of the seams showing. --S.A.(Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

In 1999, Jim Fall directed Trick, featuring a dear little campy bit by Tori Spelling. He then directed for TV’s Grosse Pointe, a campy love letter to Aaron Spelling’s primetime soaps. Now he’s made a generally sluggish movie based on Disney’s super-hit TV series, in which 15-year-old Lizzie (Hilary Duff) goes to Roma. As always, she’s adorable, in incessant beaming close-ups, whether hanging with her best friend (Adam Lamberg), quarrelling with her little brother (Jake Thomas) or competing with her classmate (Ashlie Brillault). She’s even adorable while pretending to be sick so her stern chaperone (Alex Borstein, channeling Christian Slater) won’t know she’s sneaking out to see a cute Italian boy (Yani Gellman). He’s convinced her she can replace his dark-haired ex-singing partner (also Ms. Duff, with an Italiana accenta) -- that is, she can drag herself. Whether zipping about on a moped to Vitamin C’s cover of "Volare" or teetering on a runway to Taylor Dayne’s cover of "Supermodel," Lizzie brings her usual energy to tamped down camp. Queer edges or no, the girls at my screening loved Lizzie.--Cindy Fuchs(AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Aspiring Jewish rapper and Malibu homeboy B-Rad Gluckman (Jamie Kennedy) makes the small step from TV’s Jamie Kennedy Experiment to a wholly pedestrian movie, enabled by writers Fax Bahr and Adam Small (also responsible for a couple of Pauly Shore movies). When Brad’s routine embarrasses his governor candidate dad (Ryan O’Neal), the wily campaign manager (Blair Underwood) arranges to have him kidnapped by thug-actors Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs, to scare the "black out of him," whereupon all are threatened by real banger Damien Dante Wayans. One more in the exceedingly tiresome line of white-folks-acting-black jokes, the film notes that gangsta-ism is also a performance for black kids, and parodies some famous scenes (the Korean store in Menace II Society, 8 Mile’s battles). What it misses completely is that oppression works by race and class, and performance is not the ticket out (except for the most fortunate few). The most clueless moments involve aspiring hairdresser Regina Hall, supposedly the sanest person in the room, who falls for Brad because that’s her job, in this most unoriginal of films.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

A surprisingly affectionate tribute to the folk boom of the 1960s, Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind never quite sinks its teeth into its subject, but the substitution of sweetness for satire makes for a fair trade. Kicked off by the death of an Albert Grossman-esque folk promoter, the ersatz documentary follows the reunion of three folk acts for a concert in his honor: the Kingston Trio-esque Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, a.k.a. Spinal Tap), the shiny, happy New Main Street Singers (an insufferably cheery bunch who, in a Tap-ish bit of humiliation, play at amusement parks in the shadow of noisy roller coasters), and onetime duo Mickey and Sylvia (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara), whose legendary career ended along with their marriage. Folk music should be just as ripe a target as heavy metal, but Guest and co. (many of whom, of course, grew up during the 1960s) don’t have the heart to tighten the screws -- the affinity of white singers from privileged backgrounds for affecting the trappings of poverty and/or blackness is hinted at with a reference to an unseen folk legend named Ramblin’ Sandy Pitnick, but that’s as far as it goes. (The great Bill Cobbs, identified in the credits as a blues singer, appears at a party scene, but never gets a line in.) Instead, you get Levy’s ceaseless mugging -- with his white fright wig and ever-mobile eyebrows, he’s every bit the ’60s burnout (although a shot of empty medicine bottles on the table by his motel room bed comes close to mocking mental illness) -- and a smattering of jokes, which are less frequent as well as less pointed. A handful of zingers fly by -- John Michael Higgins’ born-again bandleader recalls, "There was abuse in my family, but it was mostly musical" -- but what draws you in is the camaraderie between the erstwhile Tappers, and the genuinely moving chemistry between Levy and O’Hara’s ex-lovers. (While they were married, the highlight of their act was a staged kiss, and while the suspense builds as to whether they’ll recreate the moment at the tribute concert, you may find your feet beginning to jiggle.) If they don’t outstrip the absurdity of the folk songs of the times, the film’s compositions (mostly written by the actors) at least equal it; a couple of them could even have been hits. (Catherine O’Hara boasts a particularly fine singing voice, not surprising given that her sister is the too-long-in-exile singer Mary Margaret O’Hara.) A Mighty Wind leaves your sides resoundingly un-split, but it sends you out feeling suffused with mild warmth -- an inferior pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

The winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, German director Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel is careful, elegiac and occasionally self-important. Still, its focus on a young girl’s understanding of traumatic events lends it an admirably narrow focus, set against a huge backdrop. A family of German Jews -- idealistic father Merab Ninidze, pampered mother Juliane Köhler, and spunky, open-hearted daughter Regina (played as a child by Lea Kurka and as a teen by Karoline Eckertz) -- flee Germany in 1938, leaving behind family, friends and dad’s career as a lawyer. In Kenya, he works someone else’s farm with a crew of black workers whom he respects; his wife, meanwhile, resents her classed descent and makes him pay by withholding sex. Regina takes immediately to her new home, befriending their loyal cook, Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), and adapting to local customs and beliefs. While her parents struggle to keep their marriage together and come to understand their own prejudices (sort of), she looks back wistfully (for 138 minutes), as an adult narrator, able to see details they missed. Her sad but youthfully hopeful story forms the basis for a Holocaust film that doesn’t show the Holocaust.--C.F. (Ritz Five)

Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s avowedly "anti-American" novel makes the political personal, collapsing a pivotal moment in the history of American involvement in Vietnam into the story of two men battling over a woman. Fowler (Michael Caine) is a British journalist who’s living the good life in 1952 Saigon until Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) walks into the picture. Fowler starts to see a darker side to Pyle when he introduces him to the beautiful Phuong (The Vertical Ray of the Sun’s Do Thi Hai Yen), who’s been Fowler’s girlfriend for the last two years. Pyle seizes on the fact that Fowler cannot get a divorce from his long-estranged English wife and begins to woo Phuong, always in the name of what’s best for her, but ruthlessly all the same. However, Greene’s love-triangle allegory is so overwhelming, however, that the film loses sight of the larger questions it makes signs of addressing. We’re stuck looking through Fowler’s eyes, never getting a sense of what life was like for the Vietnamese, any more than, for all the arguing Fowler and Pyle do over what’s best for Phuong, we get a chance to hear her own thoughts on the subject.--S.A. (Baederwood; Bryn Mawr)

Prowling the public pool the next morning in his Lower East Side neighborhood, 16-year-old Victor (Victor Rasuk), spots and directly approaches "Juicy Judy" (Judy Marte) and her friend, Melonie (Melonie Diaz). Judy, however, resists, and so begins Victor’s "raising," as he comes to understand that his relationships are more complicated than projections of his own immediate desires.Victor’s story is at once mundane and delicate, familiar and fresh. This compelling combination emerges as much in Tim Orr’s nuanced camerawork as in director Peter Sollett’s impressionistic structure and obviously painstaking work with his actors.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

In what has to be some kind of dubious record for instantest feature film, this, the apotheosis of "reality" "entertainment," finished shooting four weeks ago, and it’s just what you think: The Real World producers put a bunch of hottie post-teens together in a hotel in the spring break capital of Mexico for a week of constant DV surveillance. The result is a predictable foray into applied hedonism: they compete in wet t-shirt/Speedo contests, they drink body shots off each other, they dance suggestively to that Nelly song, they pair off and hump in grainy night-vision gray. And when they’re not partying like "party" was a verb, they’re kibitzing, caviling, complaining about partying. Thirteen kids are introduced at the outset, but due to necessarily hasty editing, only about five of them have any distinguishing characteristic or storyline that varies even slightly from "horndog looking to get some." The most charismatic and entertaining of the bunch is Alan, the shy erstwhile-teetotaler from Texas who occupies the physiognomic space exactly halfway between Matt Damon and Cameron from Ferris Bueller. Alan notwithstanding, Real Cancun is strangely Blair Witch-like -- the days are full of annoying chatter; the nights only fill us with dread. --Ryan Godfrey (Bridge;

The sequel to 2000’s X-Men has a fairly intelligible plot, even after it’s chopped into pieces and cross-cut willy-nilly, reasonably good acting, but where a good, or even a passable, movie ought to start, X2 stops. It turns on one of the oldest structures in the book: Split your heroes up early, have them spend most of the movie getting back together, hashing out some personal differences along the way, and then reunite them for a wham-bang finish. In this case, we get more unrequited touchy-feely between Jean (Famke Janssen) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), as well as some not-quite-as-repressed smoochies between Rogue (Anna Paquin) and Bobby (Shawn Ashmore). Bruce Davison’s bad Senator is replaced with Brian Cox’s mutant-hating General Stryker, who’d prefer to wipe them off the face of the earth. (His motivations, it will shock exactly no one to learn, are personal.) This, not surprisingly, sits well with neither Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) nor the imprisoned Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen). --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bryn Mawr; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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