Breakfast On Pluto
See Sam Adams' review and interview with writer-director Neil Jordan.
(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Bloodrayne
A haiku:

Babes fight in latex
written by that Go Fish chick
Keep it in your pants.

Potheads and frat boys
Wonder if they've snuck into
40 Year Old Virgin 2.

Hostel
Eli Roth loves to make an audience squirm. That isn't idle speculation; the director was in attendance at Hostel's Philly screening and watched gleefully from the wings during the climactic moments. Here Roth ditches the '70s camp-and-slash homage of Cabin Fever for the nihilist slapstick of Takashi Miike, who makes an enigmatic cameo. But Roth's twists take much gentler curves than Miike's 90-degree lurches, driven purely by the desire to get to the next gruesome set piece rather than any concern for subtext. The slow-build first half seems to be an indictment of ugly Americans and exploitation tourism, as a trio of dopey backpackers smoke and fuck their way through Amsterdam and Eastern Europe, only to fall victim to an enterprise selling torture and murder to wealthy businessmen. Roth plays cunningly with audience identification, shifting focus midway and forcing the viewer to sympathize with a largely unlikable character. But he ultimately cops out, opting to turn him into a hero for a vengeful finale that negates any of the earlier criticism, instead indulging in the same misogyny and homophobia as his characters. Hostel delivers on the shocks, but despite all the blood, fails to get under the skin. --Shaun Brady (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

The Matador
Lifting liberally from (and watering down) the superior Grosse Pointe Blank and The Tailor of Panama, this lukewarm satire throws Pierce Brosnan's washed-up hit man and Greg Kinnear's down-on-his-luck businessman into each others' orbits, with male bonding and meditation on middle-aged failure to follow. Although he trampled his Bond rep with more gusto in Tailor, Brosnan wears his hangdog frown like a fitted suit, but Kinnear can't overcome the patronizing underwriting of his struggling salaryman. Writer-director Richard Shepard, a one-time wunderkind (The Linguini Incident) who's been toiling in the salt mines for the better part of a decade, lacks the requisite flair for genre subversion, substituting men's-group melodrama and half-hearted set pieces for any real dissection of masculine archetypes. Matador is most pleasantly surprising when Shepard veers toward the conventions of an earlier era and away from the glib cynicism of most self-conscious genre retreads, but he doesn't have the vision to make the movie's halves work together. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Match Point
See Cindy Fuchs' review.
(Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)