About Schmidt isn't just the best performance Jack Nicholson has given in nearly two decades; it's practically the only one that matters. Nicholson doesn't so much discard his star image as aid director Alexander Payne in destroying it. It's easy for stars to play 'brave¨ by dipping their manicured toes into the misery of 'ordinary people,¨ but it's far more honest to play outwardly unexceptional people as we all see ourselves: as the star of our very own show. From the outside, Nicholson's insurance salesman Warren Schmidt may seem like an average schmo, but seen through his eyes, he's King Lear. When we first meet him, he's sitting at his desk waiting for the wall clock to tick off the last seconds of his career. The best Schmidt's friends -- who, incidentally, we never see again -- can say of him is that he was an exceptionally enthusiastic drone. With the days at home with his wife (June Squibb) dragging on endlessly, Schmidt one night calls a number off the television to sponsor a young Tanzanian boy; before long he's sending letters off to the other side of the world on a regular basis, pouring out his heart in a way you sense he never has. When even his meager domestic security is stripped away from him, Schmidt hits the road in a 35-foot Winnebago: Crossing the Midwest, he discovers his childhood home has been replaced by a tire store, while his only daughter (Hope Davis) desperately tries to prevent him showing up even a few days before her impending marriage to a water-bed salesman (a rat-tailed Dermot Mulroney). The Midwest serves Payne as a satirist because it's so easy to play off coastal assumptions of heartland virtue: Schmidt has lost any reason to put on a good face, and any conviction that it would help.--Sam Adams (Baederwood; Bryn Mawr; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

'Do I have an original thought in my head?¨ The question plagues poor Charlie Kaufman. Flush with the success of Being John Malkovich, Charlie is hired to write a screenplay based on New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Wrestling a series of related concepts -- adapting someone else's book, making that adaptation original, making that adaptation comprehensible not to mention vaguely marketable -- he frets, a lot. He frets himself right into the movie you're watching. The screenplay for Adaptation is credited to Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother, Donald Kaufman, a fictional sibling as self-confident as Charlie is insecure. The movie includes L.A. scenes in which Charlie and Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage) argue and Charlie works on his screenplay, as well as scenes where Orlean (Meryl Streep) meets with her book's subject, John Laroche (Chris Cooper). Charlie's version of Susan's story is about her rejection of a former life, her growing appreciation of her strange subject. (This version is, of course, related to Charlie's own desire to be appreciated.) She withdraws from her literary friends and husband back in Manhattan, reconsiders her own priorities, imagines herself reflected in Laroche. In him, she sees (or more precisely, Charlie sees her seeing) the passion she believes she lacks. Meanwhile, everywhere he turns, Charlie feels pressure to perform and produce, to make art. To adapt. This last takes a surprising turn, as Charlie begins to admire Donald, to absorb his lesson-by-example. Resplendently self-referential, Adaptation careens between fiction and confession, repetition and revelation. The second collaboration for Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the film zips and zaps between scenes and realities. At first, Charlie insists that scripts should reflect 'life,¨ where people fail, where nothing happens. But Charlie, and his script, change. And Adaptation becomes -- ostensibly -- less heady, more thrilling, with a climax Donald might write, complete with car chase and sentimental self-disclosure. It's easy to read this turn as a descent, an abandonment of the film's initially giddy warps and spins. Or you might see it as an arrogant dismissal of the sort of formula that Charlie's been deriding all along. Still, the relentlessly self-critical Adaptation isn't about to reward sentimentality. It seeks originality. It seeks not to suck, but more than that, it seeks to survive sucking. Adaptation, the film proposes, is not about change as much as it's about survival. --C.F. (Bala; Bridge; Ritz 16)

Back for a second session, Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal return as a troubled mobster and his equally neurotic therapist, in a rote sequel that's sporadically funny but woefully disorganized and often plain tedious. The two are thrown together after De Niro feigns psychosis to get out of prison and is released into Crystal's custody, thus connecting them at the hip for the rest of the movie. There are moments of inspiration -- De Niro and Crystal warbling selections from West Side Story -- but the whole mess seems shockingly underdeveloped.--S.A. (AMC Andorra; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

After he responds to a white Navy shipmate's taunting with a violent outburst, Antwone Fisher (Derek Luke) must endure three sessions with the base shrink, Dr. Jerome Davenport (Denzel Washington). Antwone's indignant, but the good doctor is patient. Eventually, he knows, Antwone will talk. He has to. He's got a story that will touch everyone. This story is, as such stories tend to be, both terrible and inspirational. (The movie is based on Fisher's autobiographical script.) Born in the Ohio State Correctional Facility to a drug-addicted mother, his father murdered months before he's born, Antwone is given over to the state, then raised by a foster mother, Mrs. Tate (Novella Nelson), as dreadful a matriarch as has ever appeared on screen. By the time he's a teenager, Twone is living on the street; following yet another trauma, he joins the Navy. Here he repeatedly takes out his righteous rage against the men on his ship. Each fight lands him back in the doctor's vicinity and steers him to another disclosure, some dark secret -- cruelty, abandonment, violence -- from long ago. The film's single-mindedness reduces the story's obvious complexity. It surely does touch everyone, but Antwone Fisher doesn't always show how. --C.F. (UA Riverview)

Michael Moore specializes in political theater, but his record on follow-up isn't great, to say nothing of his willingness to trim the truth to fit an easy argument. That's what makes Bowling for Columbine such a surprise: it's not afraid to ask questions it doesn't know the answers to. Calling it disorganized or inconclusive misses the point; Moore has deliberately taken on a subject -- the American propensity for violence -- that can't be explained, just to see how close to the impossible he can get. Ranging all over the place, both physically and thematically, Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore, an NRA member and former child marksman, pushes past that answer, pointing fingers at retailers who offer cut-rate ammunition, at racial and economic disparities, and at a media that makes it seem like we're more violent than we actually are..--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

There's something slightly irksome about the way Chicago is put together, if only because it seems to be the movie musical that caters to people who don't like movie musicals. Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, the movie splits off Kander and Ebb's cracking songs from the rest of the story, setting them in a fantasy nightclub space that is interwoven with the real-life setting. Following in Stanley Donen's footsteps, Rob Marshall is a choreographer turned director, and the movie's dance sequences fall together like little bits of magic, though the faux-retro salaciousness sometimes comes off more Broadway crass than le jazz hot (and Catherine Zeta-Jones is too hippy for her high-cut costumes). Zellweger, though, proves to be an honest-to-goodness triple threat; while hardly a belter, she finds her way into Roxie's go-getter bite, and she's as light on her feet as any good comic actress. Who knew, what's more, that Richard Gere had been hiding a mean lyric tenor all these years? Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it's the best traditional movie musical in many a moon. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) spends 14 months in torture, being half-drowned, stung by scorpions, electrocuted and kicked. When M (Judi Dench) sees him back at HQ, she tells him she thinks he divulged info while drugged and that he's 'no longer useful.¨ Well, that's enough for Bond: Within seconds, he's escaped, trying to find out who betrayed him in North Korea and redeem himself. Brosnan carries all this well, but here enters Halle Berry, as Jinx, who brings into Bond's white-guy heroic world a black woman who can not only keep up and save him, but also whoop him.--C.F. (Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

Devon (Nick Cannon), high-school band drummer, expects a good reaction when he gets to Atlanta A&T, the university that recruited him for his skills. The stakes are high: In this world, the football game provides a useful context for halftime, when the show really starts. Initially thrilled to be where he always dreamed of being, Devon soon learns that, once again, he's slightly out of place -- a raw if brilliant talent whose resistance to rules makes his hardworking teammates anxious. His mother is supportive, but his father, a onetime drummer now working for NYC transit, has been absent. And so he clashes immediately with would-be father figures, including senior/drumline leader Sean (Leonard Roberts) and the band director, Dr. Lee (Orlando Jones). While Devon's gift has allowed him to get over for most of his life, at A&T he has to submit to the 'tree-shaking¨ that ranks musicians and determines who is on the line for any given weekend. Scripted by Shawn Schepps and Tina Gordon Chism, Drumline follows a basic boy-learns-life-lessons plot, complete with familiar secondary characters: the wise and supportive dancer-girlfriend, Laila (Zoë Saldana); Jayson (GQ), the Caucasian bass player who learns to 'appreciate¨ his instrument after rhythmic instruction from Devon; and the tough girl, Diedre (Candace Carey), who puts the boys to shame with her one-armed push-ups. These foils serve their purpose; they makeDevon look relatively complicated. Most importantly, he is the focus of the film's fierce, fun energy and -- no small thing -- first-rate drumming. Its enthusiasm is hard to resist.--C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Pierce Brosnan has a license to swill as Desmond Doyle, an alcoholic, unemployed Dublin housepainter whose three kids are made wards of the state after his wife abandons the family. The oldest child, Evelyn, is sent to live with mean old nuns, and even after Doyle gets work and gives up the drink (you know he's sober when he starts shaving), a technicality of Irish law requiring the approval of both parents for release keeps Evelyn at the convent. Urged on by wholesome bartender Julianna Margulies and wholesome lawyers Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn and Alan Bates, Doyle takes his case to the media and to the Supreme Court. All but the most lachrymose should skip Evelyn; do yourself a favor and cry another day. --Ryan Godfrey (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Todd Haynes' magnificently obsessed version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama introduces Cathy (a blond, peppy Julianne Moore), the perfect suburban wife and hostess, with two children, a black maid (Viola Davis) and a hard-working husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid) who slips out of work one night, to a dimly lit underground bar. Frank's plight is portrayed as it would have been at the time, but we're understanding, not clucking our tongues. The resurgence of the passion Frank thought he'd quelled is hardest on Cathy, who turns to her black gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) for help. Far from Heaven is a stylistic marvel: though it's still a little more impressive than impassioned, the sophistication with which Haynes has intermingled the modern and postmodern is awe-inspiring.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

The innovative melding of art and biography grants Taymor's film -- written by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, and based on a biography by Hayden Herrera -- an uncanny and welcome grace. It's well known that Frida (played by Salma Hayek) suffered mightily and throughout her life, emotionally, spiritually and physically: a 1925 trolley wreck breaks her back and leaves her in a body cast for years. This pain became the primary source of her art (her many self-portraits are her most famous legacy) as well as a dreadful, inevitable focus. Throughout Frida's recovery, her photographer father (Roger Rees) dotes on her, while her mother (Patricia Reyes Spándola) frets that her chance for proper marriage is over. This standard parental divide more or less sets up Frida's lifelong investment in genderfuck: She rejects expectations that girls should stay home and cook, throwing herself into her painting and politics (she and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) were dedicated Communists) with bracing enthusiasm. --C.F. (Cinemagic; Ritz at the Bourse)

Just in time for 'Christmas in the hood¨ (and the 'ho, ho, ho¨ joke is too obvious and unfunny), first-time director Marcus Raboy has Craig and Day-Day (IceCube and Mike Epps) start new jobs as rent-a-cops down at the mall. And on this Friday, they do what they always do: complain about their money situation, run from thugs, smoke weed and tangle with church ladies. In other words, nothing's changed, except maybe that you've seen this before, twice, and Chris Tucker has moved on to more lucrative jokes.--C.F. (Cinemagic)

Martin Scorsese's tale of New York City in the mid-1800s begins in the Five Points, what today is part of Manhattan, but here is frontier country ruled by murderous, warring factions whose brutality is equalled only by their vocabulary. A snowy opening confrontation sets the anti-immigrant Natives, led by the mustachioed, cleaver-wielding Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), against the Irish Dead Rabbits, lead by by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), who's fond of dispatching his prey with a weighty iron crucifix. As Vallon lies bleeding to death in the snow, Bill proclaims him a worthy opponent. Big softie that he is, Bill spares Vallon's son, who grows up to be a goateed Leonardo DiCaprio, bent on revenging his dead father. Navigating the Five Points isn't easy, though; where there aren't gangs, corrupt cops (like the be-brogued John C. Reilly) rule the roost, themselves little more than uniformed street gangs. Trouble is, such a world requires characters of similar size, and rather than cast two titans, Scorsese uses a ham and a mouse, apparently hoping they'll balance each other out. Day-Lewis' Bill adopts a nasal bark of comical intensity, while, chin fuzz notwithstanding, DiCaprio is nowhere near convincing as a street tough with murder on his mind. Scorsese tries to soup up the action, stooping to techniques that hacks invented trying to imitate him (the use of AVID-spawned digital undercranking is particularly disheartening), but Gangs is all hue and no cry.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Chris Columbus' literal-minded faithfulness to the Harry Potter books may produce insufferably lengthy films (the new one clocks in at 2 hours, 41 minutes), but they also allow you to pass leisurely through J.K. Rowling's magnificent plots. This time around, Kenneth Branagh joins the cast as the pompous, vain Gilderoy Lockhart and The Patriot's Jason Isaacs steps in as Lucius Malfoy, father of the bratty Draco. What Chamber makes you impatient for is the day when Y Tu Mamé También's Alfonso Cuarõn takes the helm with movie no. 3. Now that should be something to see. --S.A. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Middle parts of trilogies don't have the best of reputations, composed as they are mainly of connective tissue between the introduction and the conclusion. It's no surprise that the characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers spend an awful lot of time walking. Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) spend at least an hour of screen-time being carried through the forest by an ambulatory tree, while more intrepid Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) make it to the gates of the dread forest Mordor before backing off and trying an alternate route. Even if you're not familiar with the scope of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, this can't come as much of a surprise. Having decided in The Fellowship of the Ring that all their hopes rest on the success of Frodo's quest to drop the ring of power into the molten heart of Mount Doom, destroying it and the dark lord Sauron with it, this is the characters' only objective. However, the reduced burden of plot actually allows The Two Towers to be a better realized and more satisfying experience than its predecessor. For all the sorcery and swordplay, the film really offers us is a chance to inhabit Tolkien's world, which this time we get to do without worrying about how we got there or where we're going next. It begins with a great bang, a dream flashback to Gandalf's demise, and ends with one, too: the battle to protect the human stronghold of Helms Deep, which in the book occupies only a few dozen pages, but is here expanded to occupy most of the movie's last hour, in one of the most elaborate and complex battle sequences ever committed to film. Gollum, the shrivelled creature who once held the ring, and has been reduced to a reptilian hulk by its loss, was created entirely digital (though based on the movements of actor Andy Serkis), and seems nearly as real as the furry-footed hobbits he shares scenes with. And in essence, that's the secret to Jackson's approach, emphasizing the physical combat and military maneuvering without losing the historical and ecological underpinnings of Tolkien's tale.--S.A. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

Written by Kevin Wade (Working Girl, Meet Joe Black) and directed by Wayne Wang, this 'ethnic¨ revision of Pretty Woman uses the 'iconic¨ Jennifer Lopez strategically. She plays Marisa Ventura, dedicated single momto Ty (Tyler Garcia Posey), proud Bronx native and maid at the upscale Beresford Hotel. This sets up the film's basic Cultural Insight: rich, 'upstairs¨ people are vain and selfish, and 'downstairs¨ people -- including Marisa's maid-buddy Stephanie (Marissa Matrone) and butler/father-figure Lionel (Bob Hoskins) -- are earthy and compassionate. Boosted by them, Marisa looks fabulous: diligent, reliable, smart and energetic. Whatever Marisa's ambitions, this distinction between classes remains in place until she meets the man of her dreams, a classically beautiful scion of a wealthy political family and U.S. Senate candidate-to-be, Chris Marshall (Ralph Fiennes). The crossing-over is helped by the fact that he walks in on Marisa while she's trying on a Dolce & Gabbana white wool suit, and mistakes her for someone 'like him.¨ --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St; UA Riverview; Ritz 16)

Based on a true story, Rabbit-Proof Fence is set in Western Australia in 1931, when mixed-race aboriginal children were regularly stripped from their families by their government 'protector,¨ Neville (Kenneth Branagh), and sent to government schools, supposedly so the 'half-castes¨ might be more readily bred into white society, thus preventing the creation of 'an unwanted third race.¨ (The practice, incidentally, continued until 1970.) The titular fence, called the largest in the world, ran the length of the Australian continent, and it was that fence that the story's three girls used to find their way 1,200 miles home. This brief tale, more effectively than the ponderous American, exposes the 20th-century fallout of manifest destiny's last gasp -- governments that sought to conquer through management and intrigue rather than all-out occupation. Rabbit-Proof Fence is a simple story, told mainly with non-actors, but if Phillip Noyce's technique kills the feel of neo-realism, it lends lyricism and poignancy. If not on the level of Walkabout or The Last Wave (both of which, like Rabbit-Proof Fence, feature actor David Gulpilil, who offers a perfect, near-wordless performance as the native tracker sent to find the girls), it's a solid, heartfelt work worth seeing before it quickly vanishes. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Ana (excellent America Ferrera) is graduating from Beverly Hills High School. But unlike her privileged classmates, 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 Lõpez, Patricia Cardoso's first feature is alternately soapy and rousing, predictable and resourceful.--C.F. (Bryn Mawr)

The Ring's 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, 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. Though The Ring abuses the loud-noise scare, it rachets up the tension and never goes slack, meaning you keep having to find new edges on your seat.--S.A. (AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham)

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, was shot by astronauts, who not only master the elements of space travel, but do a very fine job taking pictures as well.--Howard Altman (Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute)

It's notable that Michael Cunningham's The Hours shows up on a bedside table in Pedro Almodõvar's newest movie, because in a way, it more fully seizes the notion of improbable emotional connections than the novel's upcoming movie adaptation. The plot takes so many turns, it's unfair to reveal too much, but its basis is the relationship that develops between two men -- Benigno (Javier Cémara) and Marco (Daráo Grandinetti) -- who are both attached to comatose women, the former professionally, the latter romantically. In fact, they first connect while watching a dance performance, when Benigno notices Marco tearing up, and it's a key clue to Almodõvar's real subject: the way fictions, either those created for us or the ones we create ourselves, fill the gaps between people, for good or for ill. Repeatedly making nods to other types of art -- including a mesmerizing silent-film interlude, filmed by the director, which is transportingly beautiful but hides a sinister meaning -- Talk to Her perhaps spreads itself too thin, but it's a movie about passions, so if they overrun, it's almost appropriate.--S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

This space-age adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island makes Long John Silver a robot with an electric eye patch (que?) and has the young Jim scrape space barnacles off the ship's hull. To pull younger viewers in takes real imagination, which in this version has unfortunately been forced to walk the space plank. --S.A.(UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Any copy editor will tell you that there should be an apostrophe in the title of this Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock romcom, and anyone who sees the film will tell you that there should be some justification for this snoozer's existence included with the price of admission. While I was sleeping, Bullock's schlumpy, idealistic community lawyer Lucy Kelson accepted a job with Grant's callow, womanizing multimillionaire developer George Wade. Over a few montage-y months, George W. grows utterly dependent on Lucy, so when she decides to leave Wade Corp. for something more liberal, fake movie love has just two weeks to work its impractical magic.--R.G. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

If you don't know the Nickelodeon TV series, the film fills in details: Following a fluky run-in with a shaman, 12-year-old Eliza (voiced by Lacey Chabert) can talk to animals, and uses her gift to save creatures she meets while traveling across Africa with her parents (Tim Curry and Jodi Carlisle)and family. When poachers (Rupert Everett and Marisa Tomei) kidnap a cheetah cub, Eliza promises the mother (Alfre Woodard) that she'll get him back. --C.F. (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)