New Movie Shorts

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Movie beasts can't find
Ripley, Jesse the Body.
They'll eat us instead.

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

INTIMATE STRANGERS
The soap opera visible in the opening moments of Patrice Leconte's silly psychodrama is no doubt the director's way of winking at the movie's preposterous premise, but a soap opera with lather this mild would be off the air in a week. On her way to her first therapist's appointment, neglected housewife Sandrine Bonnaire stumbles into tax attorney Fabrice Luchini's office. She thinks she's in the right place, he knows she isn't, but he allows her to unburden herself all the same, quickly developing an infatuation with his unnamed patient. Irony of ironies, he turns out to have bigger problems than she does: Still living and working in the apartment where he was born, sitting at his father's desk with a toy collection in full view for good measure, he's (can you guess?) a bit underdeveloped, while she's predictably unhappy for not much of a reason. Mixing eavesdropping with garden-variety melodrama, Leconte's Ordinary Peepholes feels like a French copy of an American copy of a French art film, with an offensively insincere happy ending tacked on for good measure. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five)

THE PRINCESS DIARIES 2: ROYAL ENGAGEMENT
(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Gee, we really hope
things work out for our fave
underdog rich girl.

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

YU-GI-OH!
Alone in his room, Yugi Moto (voiced by Dan Green) summons the spirits of ancient Egyptian gods, who spin him into an alter ego, the Pharaoh. In Hatsuki Tsuji's movie — based on the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, entailing comic books, TV series, video and card games — the newly schiz-y boy becomes a world-famous card player (the King of Games), inspiring the jealousy of rival CEO Seto Kaiba (Eric Stuart) and the interest of newly reawakened evil god Anabis, who wants to destroy the world. Thus, the showdown, a literal game of Duel Monsters! in the KaibaCorp gaming dome, where the adversaries throw down cards and shake up the universe, with players' point tallies recorded in the screen's corners. As the game has elaborate and seemingly changeable rules, the film's appeal seems limited to those legions of aficionados (reportedly, slightly older than the Pokémon crowd) who get it. For the rest of us, the game is endless and the melodrama excessive. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

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