The Wicker Man

A thoroughly lost Nicolas Cage plays a California highway cop drawn by a mysterious letter (written on parchment and sealed with wax, no less) to the remote Summersisle, a Pacific Northwest enclave noted for its organic honey. Lured by his ex-wife (the appropriately beestung Kate Beahan), Cage stumbles into a hivelike matriarchy ruled by queen bee Ellen Burstyn, who mumbles her way through dozens of Lee's repurposed lines. Cage, naturally, gets fightin' mad, but despite a well-placed kick to sultry barmaid Leelee Sobieski's sternum, he's outmatched in a society where the only men are mute drones.

LaBute's unvarnished gynophobia is delivered with astonishing ineptitude; the movie's intended scares are more likely to produce guffaws. Awakening from a dream in which the body of his dead daughter is in his arms, Cage screams "God damn it!" as if he'd just spilled coffee on his nice pants. Cage's bullheaded turn may be the worst of his many bad performances, but to be fair, almost none of the performers seems to know what to do with LaBute's script (which means that obviously neither did LaBute). The sole spot of calm is Six Feet Under's Francis Conroy, who invests her brief scenes with a calm, eerie conviction. (Her fellow HBO veteran Molly Parker would have got a nod, except she keeps blowing her lines. Mocking Cage as an out-of-his depth Quixote, she quips, "So, sir knight — still tilting windmills?") Had it the courage of its repugnant convictions, The Wicker Man might at least have been a landmark of woman-hating camp. As it is, it's not even a good date movie.

—Sam Adams

Of the scant 30 or so attendees who sit down to watch Crank, the chattiest pair sit right behind us, but even they're silenced a few minutes in; Crank comes at you too relentlessly to leave space for heckling. First-time feature directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor chuck in every gimmick they ever learned in the commercial game and sure, it's overkill, but that's kinda the point. The premise is the Maserati of high-concept, sleekly designed and precision-tooled: Speed meets D.O.A. , with the rococo cartoon breathlessness of Run Lola Run. The premise is milked dry with sadistic glee, nary an inanimate object entering the frame without some painful use being found for it. The filmmakers have obviously studied up on their Grand Theft Auto, from the equal opportunity offensiveness to the '80s-and-beyond soundtrack. It's really a burlesque of an action film, and our small crowd laughs and applauds enthusiastically — almost as often as they groan and wince in sympathetic pain.

—Shaun Brady