Toula (Nia Vardalos) is Greek, 30 and unmarried. It’s the last part that is killing her hyper-Hellenic family, who thinks she should quit dabbling at college courses (“She’s got enough education for a woman” says her father) and just settle down and start a family. So when Toula falls in love with Ian, the man of her dreams (Sex in the City’s John Corbett), everything’s just wonderful -- 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, who tries his best but obviously doesn’t fit in, and Toula becomes increasingly embarrassed by her ethnicity’s eccentricities. Will the couple gain the family’s approval and end up having the wedding? If so, will it be big, fat and Greek? Well, I don’t want to give anything away. Second City alum Vardalos wrote the screenplay, based on her semi-autobiographical one-woman show, so her knowing, frazzled performance and many of the details of her character’s over-attentive family life ring true. Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan shine as Nia’s restaurant-owning parents; Dad Gus’s fixation on Windex as a panacea is particularly amusing. If director Joel Zwick’s staging is a smidge too hammy and sitcommy to work completely, keep in mind that this 25-year TV vet learned ethnic comedy working with the likes of Chachi, Balki and Mork.--Ryan Godfrey (UA Grant; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Part of growing is admitting your age. So if Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love strains less overtly for “mature” themes than his overreaching Magnolia, it’s because Anderson is beginning to stop pretending to be his 60-year-old idols. That interest is repaid in a performance of surprising depth from Adam Sandler, who plays Barry, a variation on his own honed-to-bluntness comic persona -- with the catch that the world around him is anything but comic. Sandler is as much of a manchild here as in any one of his tiresome movies, but his boyish façade is frequently shattered by explosive fits of rage. When, at a family gathering, Barry is pressed by his many sisters (including the wonderfully sluggish Mary Lynn Rajskub) about his awkward meeting with the shy Lena (Emily Watson), he frets and writhes, and just when everything seems to have calmed down, puts his foot through the sliding glass door. The fifth or sixth time Anderson tries the same trick, its not quite so startling. At times, Anderson seems merely to be testing his audience’s capacity for annoyance. The challenge for Sandler and Watson, then, is to meet cute amid the din, which they do with ample charm. Anderson still loves his damaged dreamers, and still thrives on outré plot twists: in this case, Barry calls a sex chat line one lonely night, and ends up targeted for theft and beatings by the service’s sleazy owner (Anderson vet Philip Seymour Hoffman). But Punch-Drunk Love has the focus that’s been missing from Anderson’s films, along with a manic energy all its own.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Ana (excellent America Ferrera) is graduating from Beverly Hills High School. But unlike her privileged classmates, she can’t count on going to college. Though she applies to Columbia, with the help of her teacher (George Lopez), Ana must go to work: her mother Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros) and sister (Ingrid Oliu) need her to work at the sister’s sweatshop. Equally stubborn and impassioned, Carmen and Ana argue vigorously -- about Ana’s curvy body, Carmen’s unlikely pregnancy, Ana’s white boyfriend, and “real women’s” expectations and desires. Written by George LaVoo and Josefina López (based on her play), and winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Dramatic Audience Award winner, Patricia Cardoso’s first feature is alternately soapy and rousing, predictable and resourceful. Everyone in Ana’s family code-switches, speaks English and Spanish, performs one way for the white folks and another with one another, and while they all want something “more,” they’re also caught up in getting through each day. Carmen can’t imagine alternatives, and so she worries that Ana will move on and that she won’t (as both possibilities reflect on her). Ana, for her part, wants both to show up her mother and support her family; she’s equally afraid of failing and leaving what she knows, especially her beloved grandfather (Soledad St. Hilaire). A refreshing alternative to most high school movie girls, Ana has a sense of who she is and where she comes from. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

The director of Mouse Hunt and The Mexican doesn’t seem like the greatest choice to remake a cultishly popular Japanese horror movie, but The Ring is easily the most terrifying movie to come out of Hollywood in years. (That is not, by the way, a cue to gird yourself for the fright of a life, then come out and brag that “it wasn’t that scary.” Too many people ruined The Blair Witch Project for themselves that way.) Despite a foolish opening nod to Scream (which probably played a lot better in Japanese), The Ring is blissfully free of the deadend self-consciousness that has rendered American horror movies almost unwatchable. The premise is simple, creepy, and inescapable: a videotape which kills everyone who watches it after exactly seven days. Skeptical reporter Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) watches the tape after her niece dies mysterious, and then the clock starts ticking. Though Watts’ investigation takes her all over gloomy Seattle (and even off the coast), you hardly ever see more than two or three people in the frame -- the film thrives on isolation, the product of a society centered around the TV. (At one point, Watts stands on her apartment balcony and gazes at the building across, each apartment with its television facing outward, communicating more than the back of the person watching it.) Though The Ring abuses the loud-noise scare, it successfully rachets up the tension and never goes slack, meaning you keep having to find new edges on your seat.--S.A. (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Roger Dodger opens with a bravura sequence, the kind that either elevates or sinks an entire film. Drunk less on alcohol than on his own glibness, Roger (Campbell Scott), a mid-level ad exec who’s enjoying a boozy lunch with several colleagues, launches into a spellbinding explanation of how men are about to become “extinct.” They’ve had their traditional roles usurped, lost their primacy in the workplace and the home -- all that’s left is for women to figure out how to reproduce without sperm and men will be nothing more than a source of cheap labor. It’s hogwash, the worst kind of antifeminist drivel, but Scott puts it across with conviction. That’s pretty much what Dylan Kidd’s debut feature is about. There’s no particular insight into relations between the sexes; Kidd doesn’t have the heart for real provocation. And the plot’s just enough to serve: Roger is abruptly saddled with his teenage nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who’s decided it’s time for Uncle Roger to teach him the finer points of wooing the fairer sex. Roger jumps at the chance, boasting that he scores “every night,” and sneaks Nick into a swanky bar, where they do their best to pick up Elizabeth Berkeley and Jennifer Beals. But as is usually the case in a movie set in the span of a day, Roger is near his breaking point. Like a lot of mid-scale indies, Roger Dodger is essentially a one-character movie, but there are worse actors to focus your attention on than Campbell Scott. His ’40s matinee idol looks are amply employed here to suggest a person who’s focused all his attention on his outward appearance (the bait, if you will) without much confronting who he is.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

If the most original idea in the 1994 The Santa Clause was killing Santa, in Michael Lembeck’s 8-years-in-the-making sequel, it’s dressing up his till-now contented replacement, Tim Allen, as Plastic Fascist Santa, complete with military uniform, epaulets, an army of 8-foot wooden soldiers, and an fierce determination to give all kids coal for Xmas. The motivation is dual: Allen must tend to his son (Eric Lloyd), who’s been tagging school walls with pro-Christmas graffiti; and he must fulfill the Second Clause, which is to marry by Christmas Eve or the “de-santafication process” will rob all children of the holiday forever. His subsequent romancing of the son’s principal (Elizabeth Mitchell) is by the numbers, but the duplicate Santa he leaves at the plant, to look after the multi-culti elves’ last-minute toy production, is increasingly loony-tunes, occasionally even funny. The action split, however, means that the regular Santa story is more markedly tedious by comparison. The liveliest players get the briefest screen time. Santa’s fellow Legendary Figures include Aisha Tyler as Mother Nature (who oversees the wedding “by the power vested in me, by me”), Peter Boyle as Father Time, Art LaFleur as the Tooth Fairy (who so desperately wants a new name), Kevin Pollak as Cupid, and Michael Dorn (last seen as Worf, Star Trek’s Last Angry Black Man) as The Sandman.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Baederwood; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Somewhere between the phantasmagorical revolving station of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame and the cramped quarters of a Volkswagen bug (and a major improvement over Mir -- the decrepit Soviet space home that deserved a tabloid headline of “Oy, Vey Is Mir”) the International Space Station is lofty testament to the wonders of worldwide cooperation in the name of science. It also makes for some amazing cinematography. Space Station, the latest IMAX film, gives viewers the typical IMAXian bird’s-eye view of things -- in this case, life aboard a space station -- with a twist. The film, a co-production of IMAX and Lockheed Martin, was shot by astronauts, who not only master the elements of space travel, but do a very fine job taking pictures as well. As astronaut Brian Duffy explained at a press conference, he and his fellow space travelers spent nearly three years not just training for their mission, but they learned the intricacies of filmmaking as well. All in all, Space Station is one small step for man, one giant leap for audiences.--Howard Altman (Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute)

Clearly cast in the mold of Buena Vista Social Club, Paul Justman’s documentary struggles with structure to the point where it’s still introducing characters a half-hour before the end, but the story it’s got to tell is so strong that the minor flubs don’t matter. The Funk Brothers were the unofficial conglomeration of musicians who backed virtually every hit from Motown’s Detroit era, and as an opening title claims, played on more No. 1 hits than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Elvis combined. Based on Allan Slutsky’s biography of legendary bassist James Jamerson, Shadows mixes interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers with new performance footage, where Chaka Khan, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Joan Osborne and others step in for Motown’s greatest vocalists. Based on an orchestral style that kept individual musicians from standing out and a factory mentality that discouraged the lifting of the curtain, these musicians have languished in obscurity despite being part of some of pop music’s best-known songs. (It didn’t help that most of Motown’s albums were released without credits, or that Motown discouraged them from sharing the spotlight.) It seems inconceivable now that you’ve never wondered who played the guitar riff on “My Girl” or the drums on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” but you don’t feel educated so much as elated -- by the music, and the sense of a lingering wrong finally redressed. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)