See Sam Adams' review and interview with Fernando Meirelles on p. 25. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

If the chunky block of opening narration needed to explain its light-fearing bogeywoman isn't enough to warn you that Darkness Falls is a grade-A stinker, here's another hint: Darkness Falls isn't just the name of the movie; it's the name of the town where it's set. Presumably the filmmakers used up all their imagination devising a fresh motivation for their vengeance-prone demon, the ghost of a woman with a disease making her sensitive to light who was unfairly burned at the stake by the town's residents. (There's something about children losing their last baby tooth as well, but we don't have all day.) A movie whose villain is repelled by light would seem to be a goldmine for any noir-loving auteur, but instead Chaney Kley and Emma Caulfield (Buffy's Anya) spend most of the movie diving for flashlights. With just enough budget to prevent it from being really inventive, Darkness Falls plays like bad TV, except you can't make toast while you're watching.--Sam Adams (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Charming if occasionally exasperating, The Way Home tells the story of a South Korean grandmother trying to make peace with her city-raised grandson. Deposited at his grandmother's bare-bones shack, Sang-woo (Seung-Ho Yu) is heartbreakingly ungrateful, throwing a tantrum when his video game runs out of batteries, hectoring his crippled and penniless grandmother to trudge the miles to town to procure replacements. When, after stomping his feet and demanding "Kentucky chicken," she procures a meal of real chicken for him, he overturns the plate and sulks; he'd rather have the Colonel's pre-packaged fare than the best his grandmother can offer. (Among other things, the episode makes you wonder what "Kentucky" means to a child in South Korea.) Of course, this sharper-than-a-serpent's-tooth stuff become almost unbearable after a time; even if you don't expect Sang-woo to undergo a sudden conversion, you can't help wanting to reach through the screen and give him a smack. It's all by way of earning a happy, or at least bittersweet, ending, but the way there can be a little rough going. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse)

Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) is going to prison, "to hell for seven years." That Spike Lee's 25th Hour sets Monty's individual story against the almost unfathomable backdrop of Ground Zero is only one of its audacious ambitions. Gorgeously shot on digital video by Rodrigo Prieto, with a screenplay adapted by David Benioff from his novel (published in 2000), the film cuts between Monty's last day and the incremental events that brought Monty to his unbearable present. While his dad, James (Brian Cox) guiltily believes his past alcoholism and debts pushed his son into dealing, Monty harbors his own rage and self-hate, which he turns on his girlfriend, Naturelle Rivera (Rosario Dawson), suspecting she turned him in to the feds. But it's the next morning -- the 25th hour -- when Lee's movie delivers its most potent insights into what all this frenzy aspires to: hope, safety, self-possession. Stunningly, the movie doesn't resolve its own ending, doesn't let on what choice Monty will make. 25th Hour is an uncommonly urgent and resonant film.--Cindy Fuchs (Bala; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

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 can say of him is that he was an exceptionally enthusiastic drone. One night, he 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. 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.--S.A. (Baederwood; Bryn Mawr; Ritz East; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

"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 movie includes L.A. scenes in which Charlie and twin 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). Meanwhile, everywhere he turns, Charlie feels pressure to perform and produce, to make art.--C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16; 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. His story is, as such stories tend to be, both terrible and inspirational. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Michael Moore specializes in political theater, but his record on follow-up isn't great. 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. Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore 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. (Cinemagic)

Teenage con artist Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) helps the government and corporations catch the kind of crook he used to be. For each new guise, Frank studies cheap novels and TV shows to learn the jargon. Unfortunately, Catch Me gets tripped up by the need to psychologize, to pin everything down to Frank's pain over his parents' divorce. As Hanratty, the FBI agent who spent years tracking him down, Tom Hanks becomes a surrogate father, which might be a nice grace note if the movie didn't have to hammer on it like a chimp on a toy piano. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bala; Bridge; Narberth; Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, Chicago 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. 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), Renée Zellweger 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. Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it's the best traditional movie musical in many a moon. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Pierce Brosnan carries this installment 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)

For Devon (Nick Cannon), high-school band drummer, arriving at Atlanta A&T, the stakes are high: 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: These foils serve their purpose; they makeDevon look relatively complicated. Most importantly, he is the focus of the film's fierce, fun energy and first-rate drumming. Its enthusiasm is hard to resist.--C.F. (Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

Todd Haynes' magnificently obsessed version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama introduces Cathy (a blond, peppy Julianne Moore), the perfect suburban wife, and her 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)

It's well known that Frida (played by Salma Hayek) suffered mightily and throughout her life, emotionally, spiritually and physically: this film focuses on blurring that experience with her art. Throughout Frida's recovery, her photographer father (Roger Rees) dotes on her, while her mother (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) 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. --C.F. (Bryn Mawr; Cinemagic)

In mid-1880s New York City, the anti-immigrant Natives, led by Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), wage war against the Irish Dead Rabbits, lead by by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson). 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.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

Jason Lee is engaged to Selma Blair. But when he takes Tiki dancer Julia Stiles home after his bachelor party, it appears that the impending wedding is probably a bad idea. Toilet- and sex-related hijinks follow. Written by Greg Glienna, the film borrows heavily from his own Meet the Parents, from the in-law-to-be jokes (her rich parents: James Brolin and Diana Scarwid; his tacky ones: Julie Hagerty and David Koechner), to the pet trouble (here, a scary dog belonging to Stiles' psycho ex, Lochlyn Munro), to the stressful efforts to hide mistakes from the relentlessly clueless Blair. (To be fair, she's charming as the girl who will lose the guy.) As the romantic lead struggling to rise above tedious plot and diarrhea humor, Lee is best when he reminds you of Banky (his character in Chasing Amy), puzzling over his sexual desires (he's strangely enamored of the male dance instructor).--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Directed by Stephen Daldry and scripted by David Hare, The Hours translates the complex organization of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel -- three women in different times and places, each struggling with depression and desire -- as a kind of puzzle, each piece interlocking. Essentially three separate films, The Hours deploys clever matching shots to shift between them. The movie opens on the suicide of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), in the London suburb of Richmond, 1941. She writes a note to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), then walks down to the river, where she puts stones in her pockets and wades in. From here the film cuts back in time, to 1923, as Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway, visiting with her sister, Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson), and her children and confronting her own evolving madness. The second story takes place in 1951 Los Angeles, where housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and in the process, facing doubts concerning her marriage to gentle Dan (John C. Reilly), for whom she and her young son (Jack Rovello) endeavor to make a birthday cake. Dan sees her melancholy, but has no concept of how to help, or even talk with her. For her part, Laura is seriously considering Mrs. Dalloway's example, planning not only her husband's party, but also her suicide. The third piece, set in 2001 Manhattan, follows Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) as she puts together a party for ex-lover Richard (Ed Harris), a novelist now dying of AIDS-related illness. Much of The Hours is about grief, focused through the prism of women oppressed by culturally ordained and personally absorbed obligations. Its female subjects are, on one hand, unfathomable prisms of passion, rendered in brilliant performances. But they're also functions of a coherent narrative. As sensitive as Leonard, Richard or even Dan might strive to be, he just can't get it: Women's stuff remains mysterious. This seems somehow reductive, political oppression creating an insular emotional world where culpability and generosity may never be known.--C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16)

Sarah (Brittany Murphy) and Tom (Ashton Kutcher) are the cute Ugly Americans whose unsinkable romance founders when they honeymoon in Europe. The usual tensions are in play: Sarah's a pampered 90210er, Tom's from the other side of the tracks, and Sarah's dad thinks Tom's not good enough for his princess. Of course, both Tom and Sarah are harboring decidedly inconsequential secrets from the other. And Europe does what it always does to Americans in comedic films and very special sitcom episodes, which is to say, it turns them into spastic buffoons.--R.G. (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

(AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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, offering us is a chance to inhabit Tolkien's world without worrying about how we got there or where we're going next.--S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Jennifer Lopez plays Marisa Ventura, dedicated maid at the upscale Beresford Hotel. 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 in class 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. (UA Riverview)

Everything in Joe Carnahan's Narc happens with a crash or a bang, or some sound-engineering combination of the two. Jason Patric plays a discharged undercover cop who's been given a shot at reinstatement if he can help solve the murder of another cop, the catch being that he needs the help of burly loose cannon Oak (Ray Liotta) to do it. Both Liotta and Patric's performances have been drawing some raves, but while they're both pleasant to watch, Carnahan's idea of "drama" is pedestrian. Narc feels like a rogue TV show that's strayed into the movie theater, putting on its best face but still hopelessly outclassed.--S.A. (Bridge; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Night watchmen/ wannabe cops Martin Lawrence (Earl) and Steve Zahn (Hank), who have been impelled by the buddy-movie gods to team up in spite of their mutual enmity to bust a ring of dirty cops while trying to clear their own good names. Zahn's at his best when he gets to play the unhinged dumb guy, but Lawrence is the big first-weekend draw: ergo, Earl gets to be the not-so-wisecracker and Hank merely the glowering straight-man cracker. There's something comforting about the warm, nostalgic '80s (and yeah, '70s and '90s) quaintness of black-white crimefighting banter and airborne cars lovingly slo-moing through warehouse siding, but Earl's unrepentant, unfunny racism puts the damp in Security's blanket. --Ryan Godfrey (Cinemagic; UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

A Polish Jew hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw, sometimes looked after by friendly non-Jews, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the titular artist, has refused to acknowledge that life has already changed forever, that the Germans had invaded weeks before. Tragically, Szpilman and his family stay in their apartment; they can't quite act. And so they wait, until they too are moved to a barracks, and then taken to a camp. The film mostly takes Szpilman's view, showing the atrocities he sees; Polanksi and cinematographer Pawel Edelman hardly linger on any of these images. Finally forced to evacuate, Szpilman spends the rest of the film keeping out of sight. While the "action," such as it is, now decreases, the film becomes almost unbearably acute, approximating the man's psychic state, his process of internalization.--C.F. (Ritz Five; 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.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. --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.--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.--S.A. (AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham)

Pedro Almodóvar's newest movie takes so many turns, it's unfair to reveal too much, but its basis is the relationship that develops between two men -- Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) -- who are both attached to comatose women, the former professionally, the latter romantically. Almodóvar's real subject is the way fictions, either those created for us or the ones we create ourselves, fill the gaps between people. Making nods to other types of art, 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)

While I was sleeping, Sandra Bullock's idealistic community lawyer Lucy Kelson accepted a job with Hugh Grant's callowmultimillionaire 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. (Bala; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)