BREAKFAST ON PLUTO
Neil Jordan's polymorphous picaresque retells the most turbulent period in recent Irish history through the eyes of a border-town transvestite. Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy) may seem like an unreliable narrator at first but his singular perspective allows Jordan to revisit the Troubles without succumbing to maudlin self-seriousness. Breakfast isn't the first time Jordan has mixed transvestism and the Troubles, but there's no Crying Game "surprise" here. The son of a village priest (Liam Neeson) and his vanished housekeeper (Eva Birthistle), Kitten is "misconceived" astride the gender line, effectively spurning the notion that boundaries are impervious and incontrovertible. Although Breakfast on Pluto is hardly apolitical, its cockeyed approach to Ireland's long-running tragedy is bound to strike some as flippant. Ever-changing yet always true, Kitten is the standard-bearer of an age to come, a blithe spirit too fluid to be chained by doctrine. --S.A. (Roxy)

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Ang Lee's burnished, melancholy adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's laconic tale of weather-worn sheep-tenders in the Wyoming countryside is more of a post-Western than a genuine oater, an elegy for cowboys who've run out of trail. It's John Wayne at the end of Stagecoach with no sunset to ride off into, no way to free himself from "the blessings of civilization." It's hardly the first movie to hint at what trail hands get up to on those long, cold nights, but it's the first time we've seen one cowboy flip the other over and spit into his palm. Unspoken heartbreak is Lee's stock in trade, and Brokeback milks the sentiment for all it's worth, although its placid pacing more often takes you to the verge of tears than past it. Ultimately, Brokeback Mountain isn't a Western. It's a weepie. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz East; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

CAPOTE
It's a role so juicy any actor could drown in it: Truman Capote, the defiantly swishy, endlessly quotable author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, who in his day was the most famous writer in America. But Capote comes not to praise its subject, nor to bury him—rather, to dig him up just long enough to drag his name through the mud. Sketched in Stygian hues without wit or insight, it's a portrait of a man so hollow you can barely stand to look at him. As played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote is a smug, tone-deaf exploiter who sees the horrific murder of a Kansas family at the heart of In Cold Blood as the ideal opportunity for career advancement. If it weren't filmed in a style that might be called Mid-Autumn Oscar Grab, its criticisms might bear some weight. But its every point is so crushingly obvious that the movie's self-importance begins to seem more offensive than any sin Capote might have committed. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

CASANOVA
Despite the trailers playing up Casanova as a blissed-out romance á la Chocolat, Heath Ledger is reduced to playing the pretty face at the center of an old-fashioned farce. Romance is present, of course, in the form of Sienna Miller's proto-feminist, whose very disgust at Casanova's libertine methods makes her the only woman who can inspire him to settle down, but Lasse Hallstrom is content to play lip service to his title character's exploits. The sexless affair is continually upstaged by the colorful supporting cast: Oliver Platt in false teeth and fat suit, Jeremy Irons hamming it up as the foppish Grand Inquisitor, and especially Omid Djalili as Ledger's unflappable valet. The actors may speak in Olde Europe accents, but Shakespeare's audiences could have anticipated every twist in this parade of mistaken identities, cross-dressing women and buffoonish villains. --Shaun Brady (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16)

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN 2
The season's second extended-family comedy deals with the problem of writing for 20 kids by largely ignoring them, concentrating instead on the slapstick-inducing rivalry between heads-of-household Steve Martin and Eugene Levy. Director Adam Shankman proved his ability to bring out the incompetence of talented comedians in Bringing Down the House. Now, his lack of effort seems to have infected his collaborators, from images that defy an audience to keep their eyes from wandering to indifferent performances by the unwieldy ensemble. Martin has been rehashing this character since 1989's Parenthood, and one wishes that his pet projects better justified these cynical paycheck gigs. --S.B. (AMC Orleans; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
Veiled Christian allegory and not-so-veiled franchise-spinner, Andrew Adamson's big-budget C.S. Lewis adaptation starts off insufferable, then graduates to merely sufferable. Beginning inside a German bomber, Lion is at first all jagged editing and mugging cut-ins, the kind of "children's entertainment" predicated on the notion that kids have mush for brains. This version of Lion lays the New Testament symbolism on no thicker than the book, thus setting up a new generation for eventual feelings of betrayal when they realize they were tricked into reading the Bible. Who could have guessed that a story about a war between fundamentalist factions could seem so irrelevant?--S.A. (Bridge; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

THE DYING GAUL
Drawing its title from a piece of Roman statuary and its epigraph from Melville ("Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall"), Craig Lucas' brittle three-hander reaches for the ice pick precision of Fassbinder but is ultimately torn apart by its own cross-purposes. Peter Sarsgaard plays a gay screenwriter in 1995 Hollywood who has channeled his grief over his lover's recent death into the titular screenplay-within-a-screenplay. A charismatic exec (Campbell Scott) takes Sarsgaard under his wing—loves the script, just loves it, only couldn't the HIV-positive lover be, well, a woman? Similarities to Lucas' AIDS fable Prelude to a Kiss will not pass unnoticed, and Lucas hardly goes easy on his grieving proxy, who takes the bait and swaps the genders faster than you can say "heteronormative." The movie's final plunge into tragedy seems not just willful but malicious, as if Lucas were convinced he needed to hurt his audience to make them feel his pain. Surprisingly, given the script's patchwork quality, the three central performances are uniformly fine, with Sarsgaard's gasping emotional breakdown rivaling anything he's done on screen. --S.A. (Roxy)

THE FAMILY STONE
Yes, it's that Christmas movie again: Throw a bunch of diametrically opposed types together in a room and wait for the holiday's warming glow to force the various polar opposites together. Dermot Mulroney, everyone's favorite bland runner-up pretty-boy—Michael Showalter might have winged his target had he cast Mulroney as The Baxter—brings his uptight new girlfriend home to meet the family: Berkeley stoner Luke Wilson, angry young sis (complete with NPR tote) Rachel McAdams, pregnant-again older sister Savannah Stehlin, and we-ran-out-of-sibs-before-we-ran-out-of-types kid brother Tyrone Giordano, who is deaf, gay and in an interracial relationship. Sarah Jessica Parker's over-enunciated line readings always sound like she's teaching diction to second-graders, and the image isn't helped by her taut schoolmarm look. Writer/director Thomas Bezucha at least knows what he has with Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson as the parents, and allows for a few quiet moments amidst the orchestrated chaos, when glances and gestures suffice to conjure a genuine family dynamic. --S.B. (Ritz 16)

FUN WITH DICK AND JANE
Set "a long, long time ago" in the year 2000, Dean Parisot's update of the 1977 farce (scripted by Judd Apatow and Nicholas Stoller) begins with perfect couple Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni riding high on Clinton-era prosperity, with candidate Bush promising more of the same. But before you can say "oversight," Carrey's corporation disappears in a vortex of Enronian manipulation (masterminded by CEO Alec Baldwin), and the perfect couple's perks evaporate almost overnight. The movie is too often glossy and loud when it ought to be sharp and quick—the kind of thing Jonathan Demme would have knocked out of the park 20 years ago. The movie ends with a sarcastic thank-you to the CEOs of Enron, WorldCom et al., but it's release-valve humor, the kind even a corrupt executive might chuckle at. --S.A. (UA Grant; UA Riverview)

GLORY ROAD
You know the drill. Enthusiastic, hard-driving coach arrives at a backwater school and inspires his underdog team to victory, while loyal coach's wife holds baby in kitchen and provides heartfelt reaction shots from stands. Once again based on a true story, James Gartner's version focuses on Coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) and his successful campaign not only to bring Texas Western University's 1965-66 NCAA basketball team to the national finals, but also to teach the rest of the nation something about race. He's aided by brilliant players recruited from other schools or factory jobs, as apparently he knows of every underappreciated black player anywhere, and molds a team of five black starters—a first for the NCAA. The kids endure racist abuse as they tour the South, and the opposing team at the finals is the University of Kentucky, starring Pat Riley and coached by Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), whose exasperated reaction shots tend to feature Confederate flags in the background.Rousing, manipulative and predictable, the movie knows its business. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
As played by David Strathairn in Good Night, And Good Luck. , Edward R. Murrow isn't so much galvanizing as iron-clad. Most of Good Night focuses on Murrow's 1954 dogfight with red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the responsibility of journalism—or, more pointedly, journalists—to make their voices heard in a climate of fear. Murrow's See It Now turned the tables on McCarthy by presenting the senator "in his own words," a strategy Good Night echoes. In retrospect, the most important confrontation in Good Night is not the Murrow-McCarthy showdown, but the face-off between Murrow and CBS head William S. Paley (Frank Langella). Although Paley respects Murrow's work, the broadcasts sell poorly and alienate advertisers. When an uncompromising Murrow tells Paley that the news is supposed to lose money, Paley responds, "People want to enjoy themselves. They don't want a civics lesson." The trouble with Good Night, And Good Luck. is its assumption that the two are incompatible. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

HOODWINKED
The primary gimmick of Kanbar Animation's initial effort—a Rashomon-ish police investigation of a break-in at Grandma's house, involving the theft of her secret recipes—allows each of the principals to tell a story. As Red (Anne Hathaway), Wolf (Patrick Warburton), Granny (Glenn Close) and Woodsman (Jim Belushi) all bring different pieces to the puzzle, intuitive detecting by the frog Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers) leads to a denouement full of extreme sports tricks, thugs on snowboards and oddly flat-seeming animation, all more frantic than amusing. Most of the verbal gags aim at adults, the Looney Tunes-derived slapsticky violence might please kids, but these tracks remain divergent. Plus, with all its energy directed toward the hyper-actionation, the movie loses what makes the fairy tale so creepy and compelling to begin with—the cute little girl's engagement with the fuzzy beast pretending to be her grandma. Here, Red's martial arts skills undermine the threat, and place big bad Wolf at an obvious disadvantage. Increasingly bland rather than lively, the film peters out. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Narberth; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

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. --S.B. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

KING KONG
At the start of Peter Jackson's King Kong, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is surviving the Depression in New York City by juggling and cartwheeling on a vaudeville stage. She meets film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) as she is trying to steal an apple. Denham is a schemer and opportunist, recently threatened with shutdown by his wary producers and in search of a new leading lady for his current project. His excursion is grandly delusional, as he tricks playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) into coming along to finish a script (and fall in love with Ann) and finagles stern Captain Englehorn (Thomas Kretschmann) into persisting until they literally crash into Skull Island. What sets the new movie apart from its predecessor is its characterization of Ann, and her relationship to Kong. At once sensational and heartrending, it's a romance that can't possibly be. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

LAST HOLIDAY
Following a clunk on the head at work, Georgia Byrd (Queen Latifah) is informed that she's got only weeks to live. After a little fretting, she quits her job and cleans out her savings for a trip to the resort village Karlovy Vary, where she stays at the Hotel Pupp. Wayne Wang's remake of the 1950 Alec Guinness film gives in to the romantic comedic conventions the director indulged in Maid in Manhattan. The fact that Holiday is less tedious than its J.Lo-helmed predecessor is a credit to Latifah, whose luminous energy makes the flat-footed plot proceedings almost bearable. Almost. The cliches are dull by any standard, as Georgia is surrounded at the hotel by unhappy rich people and their servants, called on to instruct them in what's really important. While the assembly of actors is appealing (Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu) this comfort-food film can't get out from under its burden of formula. As she gains increased clout (a star on Hollywood Boulevard might count for something), perhaps Queen Latifah can angle for work that's actually challenging. --C.F. (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. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

MATCH POINT
"What I am is sexy." When Nola (Scarlett Johansson) makes this observation over drinks with Irish tennis pro Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), he's briefly taken aback. "You are aware of your effect on men," he says, leaning back. She is, of course, because she's a woman in a Woody Allen movie. This one is set in London rather than New York, and its murder plot unfolds more slowly than his comedies, but its thematic focus is unmistakable. The emblematic male, Chris, is bewildered by women, particularly the vivacious and at least initially radiant Nola. This even as he's engaged to be married to Chloe Hewett (Emily Mortimer), a bossy if occasionally sweet heiress, and Nola is dating Chloe's brother Tom (Matthew Goode). They bond over their similarly unhappy childhoods and imagine money will make their lives better. This desire for a shift in class puts a damper on their own relationship, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and Chris devises ways to have his cake and eat it too. Because he's the indecisive, unhappy, inarticulate protagonist in a Woody Allen movie, you can pretty much guess what happens next. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA
Transplanting the gloss of Chicago to between-the-wars Japan, Rob Marshall's Orientalist trifle is a sketchbook masquerading as a moving picture. Marshall's shellacked super-production fetishizes every detail of period dress and custom, but larger nuances loom, like the fact that Ziyi Zhang, like her co-stars Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh, is not, in fact, Japanese, or that all the actors are forced to speak Robin Swicord's stilted English. Memoirs' tale of intrigue in the omiya is too stern-faced to read as camp, although Gong turns in a performance of towering, chops-licking nastiness that only throws the movie's tepid tastefulness into sharp relief; there hasn't been a better "I will destroy you" since Barton Fink. Aimed squarely at the crochet-swaddled hearts of graying Academy voters, Marshall's overstuffed spectacle misfires on every level there is, especially in misusing some of the world's greatest actors. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

THE MEMORY OF A KILLER
In the early stages of Alzheimer's, professional killer Angelo Ledda (Jan Decleir) refuses to complete his latest contract, on a 12-year-old girl, angering his wealthy, well-connected client. When he learns she's been killed anyway, Angelo makes it his personal mission to set things right—in the manner he knows best. Running along another track and headed for collision, Antwerp chief inspector Vincke (Koen De Bouw) closes in on the killer, following his own connection with the dead girl. Ledda is plagued by increasingly hectic neon green, jagged memories of previous murders. Vincke confronts any number of bureaucratic obstacles. Based on Jef Geeraerts' novel and directed by Erik Van Looy, the film is less ambiguous than it looks: Ledda's subjective confusions appear on cue, and his relationship with Vincke is patterned after any number of cop-and-crook pairings, underlining their similar compromises, cynicisms and frustrations. No one can win in this formula. --C.F. (Bryn Mawr)

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
Don't let the change in ownership cloud the issue: Weinstein Company or no, Stephen Frears' nudie comedy is classic Miramax piffle. Doubtless hoping to recapture Oscar gold, Judi Dench reprises her Shakespeare in Love performance as the titular widow, a wealthy ex-colonial who returns to England bereft of ritual propriety. Engaging Bob Hoskins' music-hall impresario to revive a shuttered theater, she finds the between-the-wars crowds difficult to impress, but Mrs. H. knows how to woo the locals: boobies, and lots of them. A little seductive bullying of Christopher Guest's jelly-spined minister, and they've got a license to stage tableaux vivants rife with unclad country girls. Frears, whose career meanderings seem less diverse than perverse, is working the opposite side of Dirty Pretty Things' street, building up Britain's myths rather than taking them down; remove a few stray pubes and Mrs. Henderson Presents could pass as a '30s quota quickie. Frears takes no joy in the theatrical artifice of the movie's musical numbers (scored with vintage songs which grow burdensome with subtext as WWII approaches); the filmmaking is dully classical, as if Frears were aiming for TV (or, perhaps more relevantly, the DVD players of Academy members) all along. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

MUNICH
Munich is all about "Munich." Not the place, or the event associated with the place—the taking and killing of Israeli hostages at the 1972 Olympic Games by a pro-Palestinian group—but about the profound and shifting meaning the city's name took on afterward. Spielberg's film tracks (and fictionalizes) the assassinations that follow the murders, carried out by an Israeli counterterrorist team led by Avner (Eric Bana), a Mossad agent and bodyguard to the Israeli Prime Minister. His primary Israeli contact is Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), who is dedicated to revenge as a declaration of selfhood. Avner comes to question this imperative as his icy resolve gives way to guilt and angst. Home, tribe and family—these are the values by which Avner measures his duty and yet, Munich contends, the efforts to define home by endless cycles of aggression can never succeed. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

NINE LIVES
"Hey, we all make our beds, huh?" A motel worker's offhanded comment strikes Sissy Spacek as profound: you can tell because the piano stops plinking as she makes a call to her daughter (Amanda Seyfried). Mom's brief conversation ends her near-adulterous evening (with very pleasant Aidan Quinn), and sends her home to grumpy wheelchaired husband Ian McShane. Like the other eight women's stories in Rodrigo García's film, this section takes the form of one long, handheld take, linking disparate moments and, on occasion, crossing characters from one section to another. The performances are sharp, but the plots tend toward the Lifetimey. While the structure seems innovative (especially the challenging, thematically meaningful single takes) the film is weighed down by conventional aches and limits. --C.F. (Bryn Mawr)

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Maybe we need another Pride and Prejudice like Jane Austen needs the royalty checks, but Joe Wright's fluid, graceful adaptation at least avoids drowning in its own redundancy. Matthew MacFayden makes a somewhat dull Darcy, and as the sharp-tongued, headstrong Elizabeth Bennet, the shallowness of Keira Knightley's gifts has never been more apparent. But their callowness somehow works in the movie's favor—rather than an anachronistic you-go girl, Elizabeth comes off as a petulant, strong-willed not-quite-woman whose independence is more a matter of instinct than principle, while Darcy's irritable mystery reads as twentysomething self-seriousness. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr)

THE PRODUCERS
Broad and blustery, the film version of Mel Brooks' musical is too long and too strained to be much fun. The story involves Broadway producer/old-lady-Lothario Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) and accountant/aspiring producer Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick), who conjure a surefire plan for profits: They will produce the worst show ever, collect lots of financing and close it opening night. The film's grandeur seems left over from the stage; director/choreographer Susan Stroman leaves the gigantic gestures and boomy orchestration in place. The best thing to be said for the whole shebang is that it might put some brakes on the rage to bring stage musicals to film, particularly with movie actors who are neither singers nor dancers. --C.F. (Ritz 16)

RUMOR HAS IT
By the very act of invoking The Graduate, Rob Reiner's latest makes a tacit admission: Mainstream American film has gotten old and boring. Where the 1967 film somehow managed to grab hold of a popular audience with a witty and sexy (if now very dated) dive into the psyche of a young man terrified of maturity, Rumor states plainly that passion is a sign of stunted adolescence which must be squelched in favor of a life of complacent comfort. This account of the "real life" characters behind Henry's story goes so far as to rewrite the ending so that Costner's proto-Hoffman in fact lost the girl and became an aging Lothario. Reiner's final cozy acceptance of Aniston's shallow Pasadena family seems to accept that every young idealist Meathead wises up into a bald suburban Republican. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. --S.B. (Ritz 16)

SYRIANA
When it comes to guns, oil and drugs—the means by which money moves in the world — you only maintain relationships as long as they're useful. Working through multiple and complex storylines, Syriana argues that such transience is never as manageable as power brokers imagine. Stephen Gaghan's film offers up a tangle of plotlines, all having to do with personal betrayal and political intrigues, but the film's central metaphor is familial, specifically father-son. Inspired by See No Evil, a 2002 memoir by former CIA operative Robert Baer, Syriana recalls 1970s political thrillers where the good man must beat his evil government employers at their own game, but Bob Barnes' (George Clooney) moral dilemma is not so easily sorted. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE
Pity poor Tristan (James Franco). Every good turn he endeavors to make turns tragic. Following a hand-to-hand battle with a bald Irish brute, the young British hero to be is thought dead by his fellows, sent off on a burning bier, only to be rescued by the beautiful Irish princess Isolde (Sophia Myles). Once he's healed and they've fallen in love, he's hunted by her glowering father (David O'Hara), so he slogs his way back to England, where he's promptly set up to win the princess (who has not, by the way, told him her identity) for his own one-handed tribal leader, Lord Marke (Rufus Sewell, who needs to play a different part). The thinking is that the international marriage will ensure peace between the warring nations, which of course it does not, owing to multiple betrayals along the way. Not as antic or silly as his Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Reynolds' return to the realm of noble knights, passionate damsels and grizzly scoundrels is melodramatic and anachronistic. The soapy structure only makes the medieval setting gloomier. --C.F. (UA Riverview)

WALK THE LINE
John R. Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) was a hard-drinking, drug-abusing, soul-searching, black-wearing, June-Carter-loving man. Yet, he was persistently vulnerable and eager to impress. James Mangold's much-anticipated biopic predictably showcases high and low points, and draws direct lines between tragedies and emotional fallouts. The problem is that biopics need beginnings and endings, and this one wrestles the man's contradictions and passions into typical shape. The film focuses on the volatile relationship between Cash and the generous, God-fearing, self-judging June and paints a good-woman-behind-a-great-man portrait, such that June (played by Reese Witherspoon) appears only as he knows her, without a life of her own. It's a familiar story, and it makes you think that the true innovation might lie in her. --C.F. (UA Riverview)