Continuing

FULL FRONTAL

Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal, a hermetic, self-regarding tale of life in the Hollywood food chain, was originally conceived as a “sequel” to sex, lies and videotape, but this time the jerking off takes place behind the camera, not in front of it. At times, the movie seems designed to demonstrate no more than Soderbergh’s definitive membership in the Tinseltown in-crowd (Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, etc.). All in all, they’re perhaps the most fatuous, micron-deep collection of characters since Mike Figgis’ Timecode, which similarly tried to hide its shallowness beneath a cloud of video murk. It’s impossible, of course, for a movie to have no style (even no style is a style), but Full Frontal does its damnedest. --S.A.(Bryn Mawr)

THE GOOD GIRL

Turning 30, Justine (Jennifer Aniston) stands daily at her register at the Retail Rodeo, and her life looks like a prison sentence. Into her black hole of a routine walks Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), glowering and self-consciously poetic. He and Justine are equally needy and inexperienced, in different ways. Much like Chuck & Buck, the previous collaboration between screenwriter Mike White and director Miguel Arteta, the film plumbs the depths of human longing and manipulation, with similar legerdemain. And it resists easy resolution.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritx 16)

K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER

Kathryn Bigelow’s submarine movie is much like other submarine movies: The setting is claustrophobic; the exterior shots are dark and rumbling; the crew includes a charismatic spunky guy (Christian Camargo), a rookie (Peter Sarsgaard) with a girl back home, a loyal “first mate,” a nervous doctor, etc.; there’s a showdown between two strong-willed and dissimilar men, in this case two Soviet captains, Vostrikov (Harrison Ford) and Polenin (Liam Neeson). More unwieldy than Bigelow’s other pictures (Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days), this one suffers from a clichéd script. “Inspired by actual events” (and a 1996 National Geographic documentary on those events), the film is set in 1961, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R were locked in a contest of mutually assured destruction (conveniently explained in the first few minutes by ominous marshal Joss Ackland). During missile tests, the sub’s nuclear reactor develops a leak. Klaus Badelt’s overbearing score kicks in (courtesy of the Kirov Orchestra, apparently in an effort to “Russian-ize” the film), the camera follows many men running around in tight quarters, the captains get it on while the men -- who love affable Polenin and resent severe Vostrikov -- watch and worry. If they can’t cool the core, the sub will explode, take out a nearby U.S. destroyer and (since Ben Affleck isn’t even born yet) initiate all that mutual destruction. Radiation pervades the ship, noble sacrifices are made. --C.F. (UA Riverview)

THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE

Less a documentary than an illustrated autobiography, this moving picture version of Robert Evans’ 1994 memoir was originally conceived as a Vanity Fair DVD giveaway, and it has that magazine’s glossy, celeb-sucking tone (and none of its occasional journalistic edge). Evans didn’t direct -- Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein (On the Ropes) did -- but it’s as self-serving as if Evans had hand-drawn every frame. Luckily, no one knows how to serve himself like Evans, the outsize Hollywood personality who was at Paramount’s helm during its 1970s heyday: Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and both Godfathers came to fruition under his watch. (A true mogul, Evans seems more proud of the first picture’s financial success than the latter’s Oscars.) Evans, whose smoked glasses and laconic drawl were swiped by Dustin Hoffman for his Wag the Dog performance -- a hilarious credits sequence features footage of Hoffman imitating the producer on the set of Marathon Man -- made himself a legend by always acting as if he was one, and Kid reproduces that surface perfectly; it just never gets any further beneath it than Evans chooses to go. --S.A. (Ritz Five)

LITTLE SECRETS

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Young violinist,

You must keep the town’s secrets.

And bore us to tears.

(UA Riverview)

LOVELY & AMAZING

Each unhappy in her own way, actress Elizabeth Marks (Emily Mortimer) and her artistic sister Michelle (Catherine Keener) form the intriguing center of Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing. Like her first film, 1996’s Walking and Talking, this one deftly and indirectly considers the complicated relationships of ordinary -- difficult, sexual, insecure, insightful -- female characters, in this case, the 30-something sisters; their mother, Jane (Brenda Blethyn); and adopted sister Annie (Raven Goodwin). It’s hard for all of them to say what they mean, to feel like themselves, to be girls. Jane announces she is going into the hospital for liposuction, so she can “feel better about herself.” Her daughters, even as they reject Jane’s worry about how she looks, act out similar concerns. Michelle has developed more effective emotional armor than her sister, but continues to argue with her husband (Clark Gregg) about the fact that she’s never had a paying job. Reluctantly, she agrees to take Annie while Jane’s in the hospital; black and just 8 years old, the girl is starting to articulate her own insecurities, stemming in part from her interracial adoption and in part from living with this particular family. Jane’s surgery, meanwhile, results in complications, leading her daughters to re-evaluate their own disappointments. The film’s emotional specificity, its very smallness of scope, is enormously rewarding. Shot on digital video by Harlan Bosmajian, it achieves a refreshing intimacy, never pushing too hard, never revealing too much. Even as the girls have their own problems, they provide acutely familiar reflections.--C.F. (Ritz Five)

MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Martin's so crazy,

You better see his movie

Or he might hit you.

(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

MASTER OF DISGUISE

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Oh, Dana Carvey,

You were a funny George Bush!

Now you're a turtle.

MOSTLY MARTHA

Martha (Martina Gedeck) lives a precise life. The much-acclaimed chef at a fine Hamburg restaurant, she makes perfect food, maintains a strict routine, and sees a shrink because her boss (Sibylle Canonica) thinks she’s neurotic. (True, she hides in the freezer at work for “time out,” but she is admirably efficient, proud of her control of all “logistics.”) All this changes when her niece Lina (Maxime Foerste) comes to live with her. Suddenly, Martha’s routine is undone: she’s sleeping on the couch (giving Lina her room), cooking an 8-year-old who refuses to eat, and repeatedly late getting her to school. Almost worse: there’s a new chef hired to helped out in her kitchen, an Italian (Sergio Castellitto) who plays “Volare” and dances while working. While the rest of the plot is wholly unsurprising, Gedeck’s convincingly taut performance (food is full of “issues” for her, not just a means to externalize her inner glow and nourish others) and director Sandra Nettelbeck’s preference for crisp, careful compositions help the film avoid both the mushiness of a “food” movie like Chocolat and the sensual-saturation of a Babette’s Feast. --Cindy Fuchs (Bala; Baederwood; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING

Toula (Nia Vardalos) is Greek, 30 and unmarried. It’s the last part that is killing her hyper-Hellenic family, who thinks she should quit dabbling at college courses (“She’s got enough education for a woman” says her father) and just settle down and start a family. So when Toula falls in love with Ian, the man of her dreams (Sex in the City’s John Corbett), everything’s just wonderful -- except he isn’t Greek. What follows is essentially Meet the Greek Parents: The large, gregarious family is suspicious of Ian the Protestant and -- gasp -- vegetarian, who tries his best but obviously doesn’t fit in, and Toula becomes increasingly embarrassed by her ethnicity’s eccentricities. Will the couple gain the family’s approval and end up having the wedding? If so, will it be big, fat and Greek? Well, I don’t want to give anything away. Second City alum Vardalos wrote the screenplay, based on her semi-autobiographical one-woman show, so her knowing, frazzled performance and many of the details of her character’s over-attentive family life ring true. Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan shine as Nia’s restaurant-owning parents; Dad Gus’s fixation on Windex as a panacea is particularly amusing. If director Joel Zwick’s staging is a smidge too hammy and sitcommy to work completely, keep in mind that this 25-year TV vet learned ethnic comedy working with the likes of Chachi, Balki and Mork.--R.G. UA 69th St. UA Grant; Ritz Five;

Ritz 16)

MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS

Written and directed by Yvan Attal, My Wife Is An Actress stars Attal as Yvan, a sports journalist whose wife, Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is, you guessed it, an actress, and whose celebrity is a constant thorn in her husband’s side. Attal never cuts down to the bone, but he doesn’t pretend to. When, for example, Charlotte’s uncomfortable getting naked for a love scene, her British director has the whole crew strip off, but while the crew’s bodies are filmed in unflattering truth, Attal catches his wife from behind, her hip perfectly cocked, curves glowing, a movie dream even before the cameras start rolling. The film celebrates cinema even as it acknowledges the wounds it causes.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

POSSESSION

Based on A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel, Neil LaBute’s new film interlaces two romances, one more interesting than the other. A pair of literary scholars (Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Brit again) tracks the secret relationship of a pair of Victorian poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle, both playing 19th-century again). The trick is that the relationships run perversely parallel. The 19th century writers (both already attached, he to a chilly wife and she to a passionate artist girlfriend) resist their attraction until they can stand it no longer; as they conduct their research -- some library work, but mostly lovely journeys to rendezvous points they discover in love letters -- the scholars (she’s involved with a snotty fellow scholar, he’s devoted to being a misogynist bachelor) do the same. While the plot surely concerns desire and fervor, the tone remains detached; LaBute calls it “emotional archeology.” Being a LaBute film, its not-so-very subtext is less love than power. And here, the gender roles seem all too fated: men believe they wield it, and are mystified to learn that women do. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

ROAD TO PERDITION

Maguire (Jude Law), a freelance photographer, specializes in images of corpses, and, rather ingeniously, secures his employment by murdering his own subjects. His latest assignment is Irish mob hit man Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), anti-heroic protagonist of Sam Mendes’ latest dysfunctional family saga, Road to Perdition. Sullivan initially appears possessed of a pleasantly upper-middle-class existence, ensconced with his quietly supportive wife, Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and two young sons. Sullivan is introduced from the perspective of Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin); sent to fetch dad for dinner, he pauses in the hallway outside his parents’ bedroom, watching his father carefully remove his jacket and gun. The shot through the narrow doorway, inspired by the film’s source, Max Allan Collins’ 1998 graphic novel, exposes Michael’s complex mix of fear and love for his father. Though Michael knows enough not to ask about his father’s occupation-- namely, killing people for Chicago boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) -- he’s also curious enough to check it out for himself. The trauma begins one stormy night, when he stows away in the back of the car and inadvertently sees his dad shoot several men with his Tommy gun. Though Sullivan assures his employers that Michael “understands” and business can continue as usual, it’s immediately clear that whatever familial equilibrium they all pretend to share is destroyed. Sullivan and Michael go on the run, and the film’s father-son romance begins in earnest. They embark on a six-week series of Midwestern bank robberies, conveyed in a montage that looks like a graphic novel in motion. The film’s manifest reverence for its source, its artful darkness and precise composition are stunning, and almost make up for the tired plot (Eastwood and Costner’s A Perfect World comes to mind), in which a boy sees his father (figure) redeemed by good intentions, if not acts.--C.F. (Narberth; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

“My job sucks,” says Matthew Perry at the beginning of Reginald Hudlin’s peculiar romantic comedy. He plays Joe the process server, sent to serve Elizabeth Hurley divorce papers, thus ending her status as “trophy wife” to insufferable Texas millionaire Bruce Campbell. As Perry tells it, his life sucked at the time he was making the film, bouncing between the Friends set, rehab and movie locations in New York and on Ross Perot’s ranch in Dallas. (Since the film was shot when the industry was panicked about an actors’ strike, he had to show up, period.) Perry describes Joe as “dark,” but mostly, he looks anxious. Then again, this film might make anyone nervous: Joe has to fall for egocentric Hurley, avoid Campbell’s snakeskin-boot-wearing thug (Terry Crews, whose mere appearance makes an elevator-full of white people scatter), beat out rival server Vincent Pastore and outsmart his own boss (Cedric the Entertainer, who spends most of the film alone in an office, literally phoning in his performance). Perry also has to be smacked down by a pair of gangsters, ride an airport baggage belt, outrun a monster truck, and out-Tom Green Tom Green when he sticks his arm inside a temporarily impotent bull. Nasty. Jazz bassist Marcus Miller composed the score, which, aside from the requisite guitar plunking theme to indicate so-called serious moments, is sharper than anything in the film. --Cindy Fuchs (UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

SIGNS

Signs doesn’t look much like an alien invasion movie. Rather than presenting climactic battles or fearsome big-eyed creatures, it focuses instead on establishing moods. These include familiar responses within the genre (wonder, dread, anticipation -- experienced by ex-priest Mel Gibson, his two kids and brother Joaquin Phoenix), but they are also remarkable in that, at least initially, they are predicated on not knowing and not seeing exactly what’s going on. Indeed, for about 90 minutes, M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie resists showing much of anything, relying instead on not-so-informative TV news reports and reaction shots to convey the scary business. Sadly, the movie eventually abandons its delicate ambiguity, its attention to such everyday things, to deliver a resolution which can only look contrived and reductive. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Main St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview; Ritz 16)

SIMONE

Or, My Computer Program Is an Actress. The most infuriating media satire since Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing -- whose distributor at least had the good graces to cancel its release after screening it for press -- Andrew Niccol’s flaccid, toothless tale lays bare what was already evident in Gattaca (which he also wrote and directed) and The Truman Show (which he just wrote): Niccol’s grasp of the complexity of modern media is dwarfed by the average PlayStation-literate eight-year-old. Presumably inspired by the digital performance-tweaking George Lucas used for The Phantom Menace -- using different parts of an actor’s face from different takes, and so on -- Simone stars a lost-looking Al Pacino as a studio-sponsored art-film auteur (as if such creatures existed) whose latest pic is in danger of being shelved after his temperamental lead actress (Winona Ryder) walks off the set and threatens to sue if they use any of her footage. Enter Elias Koteas as an eyepatched inventor who drops off a computer program capable of creating a virtual actor -- or, how catchy, “vactor” -- before conveniently dropping dead. Pacino hesitates, but eventually grasps the potential to be the world’s ultimate control freak, replacing human vicissitude with computerized certainties. That the resulting films look like snatches of beer-commercial Fellini doesn’t stop them from being hugely successful, or creating a media frenzy surrounding the identity of their “reclusive” starlet. Like Hartley, Niccol frames his story as a fable, mainly so he doesn’t have to do his research, but his generalities are preposterously off-target, his contemptuous misreading of pop culture so overwhelming, that the result is about as meaningless as it’s possible for a movie to be. Niccol’s lame attempts to ape Sullivan’s Travels only add insult to idiocy. --S.A.(Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

SPIKE AND MIKE’S FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION

The latest installment in this brushed-up version of S&M’s traditionally gross-out showcase includes some humdingers. Aussie Adam Elliot’s Brother is a bittersweet but bawdy childhood reminiscence, Jonathan Hodgson’s The Man With the Beautiful Eyes a haunting, scratchy adaptation of a Bukowski poem, Pixar’s For the Birds (seen before screenings of Toy Story II) a whimsical take on bird-eat-bird politics. There are some stinkers, too, like Cameron McNall’s dull The Last Drawing of Canaletto -- a test study of moving light that goes nowhere, but not fast -- and Jonah Hall’s Metropopular, in which cities, animated and personified, compete for the country’s affection. (And, dude, New Haven makes the cut but we don’t? See me after class.) But it’s all worth it for Don Hertzfeldt’s manic Rejected, which ostensibly begins as a collection of rejected TV idents and quickly spirals into hilarious, rapid-fire madness. Hertzfeldt, known for his shaky-pencil animation and dark humor, makes a quantum leap from such shorts as Billy’s Balloon and Lily and Jim, shifting gears with abandon and deepening the grossout into the genuinely disturbing. --S.A. (Roxy)

SPY KIDS 2: THE ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS

(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

STUART LITTLE 2

It’s good to know that even mice can fall for the wrong chick. But if Stuart Little knew anything about Melanie Griffith, the voice of his pseudo-love interest -- a bird named Margalo -- he would have driven away, very fast, instead of taking her home to the swank little Victorian the Little family calls home, across the street from Central Park. It’s hard not to like this follow-up to the original Stuart Little movie, about a family that adopts a talking mouse. Michael J. Fox, the voice of said rodent, is an animator’s dream, bringing life and emotion to the title role. The always-kooky, always-sexy Griffith also gives great voice and Nathan Lane as the woeful, puffy old queen of a cat is a scream. Geena Davis is always nice to look at even if her mother-smothering character rightfully makes one squirm. With just enough action to keep things moving and enough simulated mayhem to get a PG rating, SL2 entertains children and adults alike without wallowing in schmaltz. Well, not too much schmaltz. Well, not so much schmaltz that it still isn’t a pleasure to watch a screen mouse not named Mickey. --H.A. (UA Riverview)

UNDISPUTED

The central action in Walter Hill’s Undisputed film’s central action focuses on a much drawn-out battle between two mighty boxers, played by two charismatic and extremely hard-bodied performers. The trappings -- the hackneyed plot, the stock characters, the references that might have been topical when the movie was shot and then shelved a couple of years ago -- are as inconsequential as Master P’s four-second-long appearance. Inspired in part by the Mike Tyson saga --when he was convicted for the rape of Desiree Washington -- the film begins when heavyweight champion James “Iceman” Chambers (Ving Rhames) comes to Sweetwater Prison, choppered in rather than taking the usual long hot bus ride. Of course, many of the other inmates, such as Lifer Monroe Hutchen (Wesley Snipes) who’s been winning Sweetwater bouts for 10 years -- and the white warden (Denis Arndt) and white head guard (Michael Rooker) -- resent his black celebrity and are wholly unimpressed by his protestations of innocence. This story is intriguing -- the complex cultural background and fallout of a major athlete’s rape conviction, and how marginalized, hard-time men make order and icons out of the leftover lot they’re dealt. But that doesn’t mean the guys in Undisputed don’t fall in lockstep with mainstream values, revering the strongest and the fastest and so on. The result is a routinely schematic opposition: self-described gladiator Iceman versus super-sober Monroe. In fact, it hardly matters once the two meet in the cage at film’s end, in a fight arranged by feisty Mafioso and boxing student/historian Mendy Ripstein (Peter Falk). The fight images are stunning: none of that slow motion brutal ballet stuff, just hard-charging, train-rush wallops and collisions. Boxing is an ugly “sport,” mainly in its financing. But these guys are beautiful.--C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St,.UA Riverview)

XXX

XXX reeks of a kind of desperate hipness, the overwhelming sense that the movie’s 35-year-old star (Vin Diesel) and 53-year-old director (Rob Cohen, of The Fast and the Furious) would like nothing more than to win the hearts and minds of 15-year-old boys everywhere. That, of course, is the action game, but it’s rarely been played as cravenly as it is here. XXX feels like it was written by a marketing survey; the plot contrives to have Diesel snowboard, motorbike, drive a couple of sports cars real fast (one off a bridge) and even pseudo-skateboard (with a serving tray). Xander Cage, Diesel’s alter ego, has a crochety boss (Samuel L. Jackson), a bumbling gadget supplier (Joe Bucaro III), a sultry, accented co-spy who rebuffs his advances (Asia Argento). And, of course, he’s got a nebulous foe with a ridiculous name hell-bent on world destruction for no particular reason, in this case, a group of ex-Russian soldiers calling themselves Anarchy 99, which in real life is probably the Hotmail address of an 11-year-old in Topeka. If it weren’t so pathetic, it might be kind of amusing. The script shoehorns in numerous references to PlayStation and “first-person shooter” games and displays the same infantile, almost pre-sexual misogyny that kept James Bond in pussy galore. And there’s the rub: For all Diesel’s desperate positioning, XXX is no more than Bond with a pierced septum.--S.A.(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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