continuing

AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER

Catapulted this time to 1975, Austin (Mike Myers) hooks up with the golden-’froed Foxy Cleopatra (Beyoncé Knowles) to fight Dr. Evil along with new nemesis Goldmember, a lisping Dutchman with eczema and a 24-carat dingly-dangly. In particular, the movie founders on Knowles’ vacant performance. --S.A. (UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

BLOOD WORK

As Terry McCaleb in Blood Work, Aging Clint Eastwood plays an FBI profiler who, within five minutes, has a heart attack while chasing a particularly ornery serial killer. “Two years later,” he has a new heart and a new case, courtesy of Wanda De Jesus, whose murdered sister provided him with that heart. Though the plot is too neat and predictable, the look is shadowy-lush, the editing efficient and the Eastwood character at once grand and vulnerable. --Cindy Fuchs (Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

BLUE CRUSH

It’s hard to remember if surfing is the most visually beautiful of all sports, or if, after watching Blue Crush, it just feels like it. On one level, John Stockwell’s girls-on-boards yarn is standard-issue sports movie stuff, with its damaged central character building towards a chance at redemption which just happens to coincide with a major competition. But it reminds you what’s so potent about sports movies; they dramatize, perhaps better than any other genre, the idea that life comes down to moments, moments in which you either take your shot or wish you had. In the surfing scenes, David Hennings’ camera seems to be everywhere -- on the board, in the water, swooshing past the characters, diving beneath and rising up to meet them. (The feats were executed without a single blue screen or tank shot, and the sheer rush of adrenaline makes you believe it.) The film’s trio of surfer girls -- Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake -- are sure-footed on their boards, and the offhand camaraderie among them feels as lived-in as their threadbare surroundings. Stockwell knows how to take the edge off his mandated plot points by throwing away on-the-nose lines (though the ending still crosses one too many Ts), and how to mix in non-professional actors (as he did in crazy/beautiful) without shattering the mood. Climaxing with a lengthy competition sequence which plunges you into the roaring waves again and again, Blue Crush sucks you in, and you emerge gasping for breath, but eager to head back out. --S.A. (AMC Orleans)

FEARDOTCOM

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

A killer website

uses Flash animation

to bore you to death.

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

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)

I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART

All photographer Sam Jones wanted to do was film Wilco making their next album. Of course, that album became Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and its completion was followed by a spate of record-label and inter-band controversy that has long since passed into rock-geek lore. When Reprise Records rejected the album, obviously Jones had to adjust the focus of his film as a result. And while he does manage to illustrate modern-day industry shenanigans, he’s also forced to quickly summarize what by all accounts was a lengthy and arduous gestation period, making sure to get across Yankee’s unconventional sound as well as the growing rift between frontman Jeff Tweedy and guitarist Jay Bennett (leading up to the latter’s ouster near the end of the film). As enjoyable as the many in-concert segments are, a few should have been excised for more in-studio footage. Plus, a band as seemingly freewheeling as Wilco would have benefited from a more cinéma vérité approach à la Let It Be, rather than what becomes an increasing procession of talking heads. --Michael Pelusi (Ritz at the Bourse)

THE LAST KISS

“Everybody I know is in a crisis!” exclaims a character in Gabriele Muccino’s The Last Kiss (L’Ultimo Bacio), and based on what we see of his friends and family, the statement seems to be a pretty safe bet. Carlo (Stefano Accorsi) is freaking out because he’s soon to turn 30, and his girlfriend is pregnant; Adriano (Giorgio Pasotti) has a toddler of his own, and is chafing at the yoke of responsibility; even Carlo’s mother (Stefania Sandrelli) is at the end of her rope, stuck in a marriage whose inattentiveness is tantamount to cruelty. The subject, of course, is hardly new to the screen, but then, it’s hardly new to life, either. Writer-director Gabriele Muccino interweaves their stories and more with high velocity, often using camera motion to connect the scenes, as if the camera were perpetually swooping around Rome, stopping in just long enough to observe each new development. He also lets his characters make all kinds of mistakes, most notably when Carlo runs out and cheats on his wife with 17-year-old Francesca (Martina Stella). Adriano, meanwhile, is stricken with wanderlust, and considers joining his friends on a trip to Africa -- or, really, anywhere. The Last Kiss empathizes with that desire to break free, even as it recognizes the many unwise ways in which it manifests itself.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

MASTER OF DISGUISE

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Oh, Dana Carvey,

You were a funny George Bush!

Now you're a turtle.

(UA 69th St.)

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. All this changes when her niece Lina (Maxime Foerste) comes to live with her. Suddenly, Martha’s routine is undone. 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. --C.F.(Bala; Baederwood; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING

Toula (Nia Vardalos) falls in love with Ian (John Corbett) and everything’s just wonderful with her Greek family -- 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.--Ryan Godfrey (UA 69th St. UA Grant; UA Main St.; Ritz Five;

Ritz 16)

one hour photo

“These snapshots are their little stands against the flow of time.” For 20 years, Sy (Robin Williams) has been the “photo guy,” working the Phototek counter down at the SavMart, meticulously calibrating the processor so all the colors on all customers’ pictures turn out just right. Day after day, hour after hour, he turns bits of film into memories, to be gazed on, framed, kept. Sy himself lives a life devoid of hues: Timid and lonely, he obsesses over the photos he develops for one perfect-seeming family, the Yorkins (read “your kin”): Nina (Connie Nielsen) and Will (Michael Vartan), and their son Jake (Dylan Smith). Making extra prints of all their pictures, Sy covers his TV room wall with them -- and he imagines himself inside the scenes, posing all-smiles with Jake, mom, and dad. From the start, of Mark Romaneck’s One Hour Photo, you know he’s headed to a bad end, as he appears in a police interrogation room, questioned by the sober Detective Van Der Zee (Eriq La Salle, whose character is named for the Harlem Renaissance photographer). The film, however, complicates its mundane stalker plot by its own attention to composition, which mirrors but also refracts Sy’s. In its attention to both the artifice and meaning of images, One Hour Photo is deftly creepy. It takes you inside Sy’s desperation, modeled on photos and happy family images that photo counters use to promote their services, images that ask, “Don’t you want these memories to be yours?” And worse, “If they’re not yours, what’s wrong with you?” Neatly, ominously, the film composes a bleak vision of Sy’s consumption of and by his culture.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

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

Though Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) knows enough not to ask about his father’s (Tom Hanks) occupation-- namely, killing people for Chicago boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) -- he’s also curious enough to check it out for himself. The trauma in Sam Mendes’ latest dysfunctional family saga, Road to Perdition 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 (Hanks) 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, so Sullivan and Michael go on the run. The film’s manifest reverence for its source, Max Allan Collins’ 1998 graphic novel, its artful darkness and precise composition are stunning, and almost make up for the tired plot. --C.F. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

SERVING SARA

“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. 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), beat out rival server Vincent Pastore and outsmart his own boss (Cedric the Entertainer). Perry also has to be smacked down by a pair of gangsters, ride an airport baggage belt and out-Tom Green Tom Green when he sticks his arm inside a temporarily impotent bull. Nasty. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; UA Riverview)

SIGNS

Signs doesn’t look much like an alien invasion movie. Indeed, for about 90 minutes, rather than presenting climactic battles or fearsome big-eyed creatures, M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie resists showing much of anything except mood-establishing reactions (wonder, dread, anticipation -- experienced by ex-priest Mel Gibson, his two kids and brother Joaquin Phoenix). Sadly, the movie eventually abandons delicate ambiguity 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

Presumably inspired by the digital performance-tweaking George Lucas used for The Phantom Menace, 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. Enter Elias Koteas as an eyepatched inventor who drops off a computer program capable of creating a virtual actor before conveniently dropping dead. Pacino hesitates, but chooses computerized certainties over human vicissitude. That the resulting films look like snatches of beer-commercial Fellini doesn’t stop them from being hugely successful. 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.--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 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. 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. --S.A. (Roxy)

SPY KIDS 2: THE ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS

Juni (Daryl Sabara) and Carmen Cortez’s (Alexa Vega) adventures form the center of Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams. Their perspective, part convincingly ingenuous and part movie-kid wise, organizes the film’s general view of things: Adults tend to err and children tend to save the world. More cute diversion than thrillsville outing, Spy Kids 2 shows Juni having more trouble dealing with Carmen’s crush on a rival than with any of the island’s ostensible “dangers.”--C.F.

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

UNDISPUTED

Inspired in part by the Mike Tyson saga --when he was convicted for the rape of Desiree Washington -- Walter Hill’s Undisputed begins when heavyweight boxing champion James “Iceman” Chambers (Ving Rhames) comes to Sweetwater Prison, choppered in rather than taking the usual long hot bus ride. Many of the other inmates, such as Lifer Monroe Hutchen (Wesley Snipes) who’s been winning Sweetwater bouts for 10 years resent his black celebrity and are 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 hold mainstream values, revering the strongest and the fastest and so on. The result is a routinely schematic opposition, with stunning imagery. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St,.UA Riverview)

XXX

Reeking of desperate hipness, the plot contrives to have Vin Diesel snowboard, motorbike, drive a couple of sports cars real fast and even pseudo-skateboard (with a serving tray). Diesel also has a crochety boss (Samuel L. Jackson), a bumbling gadget supplier, a sultry co-spy who rebuffs his advances and a nebulous foe. If it weren’t so pathetic, it might be kind of amusing. --S.A.(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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