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 (Bridge; Ritz 16)

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away from him, Schmidt hits the road in a 35-foot Winnebago: Crossing the Midwest, he discovers his childhood home has been replaced by a tire store, while his only daughter (Hope Davis) desperately tries to prevent him showing up even a few days before her impending marriage to a water-bed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.--S.A. (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)

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.

The undisputed "King of Cali" is Laurence Fishburne's Smoke, president of the Black Knights biker club and speedster nonpareil, who meets with cyclists from all walks of life at night to burn sweet, sweet rubber. When beloved Black Knight Slick Will is killed in a freak racing accident, his young, photogenic son Kid (Antwone Fisher's Derek Luke) decides he doesn't want to wait his turn as a BK acolyte any longer, and forms his own club, Biker Boyz, with the intention of unseating Smoke as the chopper chieftain. Although the Boyz win a few legit races, most of their brand-building stems from less-than-honest misdirection: mostly confusing their opponents with flashy but unnecessary stunts at speed.--R.G.(AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Michael 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. (Roxy)

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. 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.(Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

Fernando Meirelles' epic-scale tale of teenage violence in the Rio de Janeiro slums is plainly aimed at the international market. But no matter how often he stops the action, speeds it up, spins it around or turns it on its head (and that is, make no mistake, pretty often indeed), you never get the feeling he's doing it just for kicks. The kicks happen all on their own. The movie depicts a world rife with gang violence where growing to adulthood is a rarity. We meet Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues as a teenager and up, Luis Otávio as a child) in the middle of all this quite literally; he turns a corner and finds himself confronted on one side with a mob of gun-wielding kids, and on the other with a handful of loaded-for-bear cops. Narrated by Rocket, the movie makes many leaps, filling in background material and fleshing out side characters. There's the young, ruthless gangster king who rises to the top by virtue of sheer cold-bloodedness; his softer-edged buddy, who finally plans his exit from criminal life; and, of course, the artistically inclined young hero who's in this world but not of it, and always looking for a way out. (When we first see Rocket, he's carrying a camera, and it's his skills as a photographer that open his world beyond the favela's boundaries.) City of God walks the thin line between showmanship and show-off, and gets safely to the other side.--S.A. (Ritz Five)

The 1984 "unauthorized autobiography" by Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell), the man who invented The Gong Show, comes to the big screen via an adaptation by Charlie Kaufman and directed by George Clooney. The result is a brilliant mix of television history, artistic license and self-inflation. Filtered through multiple perspectives, Confessions traces Barris' experiences: When ABC rejects his initial pitch for The Dating Game, poor Chuck despairs. Miraculously, just as he's feeling most forlorn, he's tapped by Jim Byrd (George Clooney), shadowy, grim and fedora-ed, like any CIA handler should be. Informed that he "fits the profile" of the international spy, Chuck signs up, anticipating exciting missions, exotic locales and beautiful women. Soon, Chuck evinces a newfound sense of confidence and performance. In order to maintain his "cover," his assignments -- some undertaken with the help of fellow spy, Keeler (brilliant Rutger Hauer) -- coincide with excursions he must chaperone for winners of his now-successful The Dating Game, conveniently set in snowy Helsinki or Berlin. The film elaborates on lifelong desire for approval through his womanizing self-image.--C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; 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 Riverview)

Get past the sophomoric title and you'll find more second-year stuff. LL Cool J (keeping his abs under wraps for once) plays the player hired to take Eva (Gabrielle Union) off the hands of three very harried fellows, each dating one of three sisters and menaced by Eva, the fourth. The premise is pure beer-commercial misogyny -- the guys would all be happy if Eva would stop warping the sisters' priorities, which she only does because she's a frigid bitch -- despite buppie craftsman Gary Hardwick's attempt to take the edge off with a completely extraneous opening number where the cast dances to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "You're All I Need to Get By." (That and a totally extraneous LL voiceover make it pretty clear Deliver Us has been through the reshoot wringer.) LL's supposed to seduce Eva, get her to move away with him, and then dump her (oh, the chuckles), but wouldn't you know it, they end up falling for each other -- which might be a cliché, but the moments when the pair are on screen together are the only moments the movie comes even close to being tolerable. --Sam Adams (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; ; 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)

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

It's a fairly cheap ploy to give your throwaway action comedy such a hot-button name, but don't be fooled, Mr. Ashcroft: National Security is the name on the shoulder patches of 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 (sample dialogue: "You have the right to shut the hell up."), 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. --R.G. (UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; 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, is near starving, his hair hanging in clumps off his skull, his skin pale and gray. Commanded to play something by a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann), he's playing for his life, but it's difficult to know exactly what that life might mean now. Yet Szpilman will survive this encounter. You know this because Roman Polanski's film is based on his memoirs (published in 1946). Opening in September 1939, The Pianist introduces the young artist as he is playing, refusing to acknowledge that life is 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. This attenuation -- Szpilman's diminished view, his simultaneous dread of seeing and need to see -- is The Pianist's most startling effect. Brody's physical and emotional reduction is part of it, but even more extraordinary is the paring away of the film's self-image, its presumed capacity to elucidate and illustrate. The Pianist attends to the senses in ways that grander pictures cannot.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Graham Greene's avowedly "anti-American" novel makes the political personal, collapsing a pivotal moment in the history of American involvement in Vietnam into the story of two men battling over a woman. Fowler (Michael Caine) is a British journalist who's living the good life in 1952 Saigon until Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) walks into the picture. Fowler starts to see a darker side to Pyle when he introduces him to the beautiful Phuong (The Vertical Ray of the Sun's Do Thi Hai Yen), who's been Fowler's girlfriend for the last two years. Pyle seizes on the fact that Fowler cannot get a divorce from his long-estranged English wife and begins to woo Phuong, always in the name of what's best for her, but ruthlessly all the same. However, Greene's love-triangle allegory is so overwhelming, however, that the film loses sight of the larger questions it makes signs of addressing. We're stuck looking through Fowler's eyes, never getting a sense of what life was like for the Vietnamese, any more than, for all the arguing Fowler and Pyle do over what's best for Phuong, we get a chance to hear her own thoughts on the subject.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; 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.

If CIA agents are really as hung up on father issues and rocky romances as they appear in the movies, the so-called free world is in even more trouble than the agency's bungled info-deciphering would indicate. In director Roger Donaldson's version of this recurring "troubled agent" scenario (see also Tony Scott's Spy Game), Colin Farrell is the gifted trainee, Al Pacino his brilliant recruiter/father figure, and Bridget Moynahan his rocky romantic interest. For half the film, they're claustrophobic at a training camp called "the Farm." Here they learn that "everything is a test" and "nothing is what it seems." Apparently, this is news for the newbies, because they repeat both phrases like mantras. They also work with those huge-type movie-computers, emote flagrantly, drive like crazy people and miss obvious cues concerning plot turns, all of which suggests they're not exactly cut out for the spy biz, where acumen and precision are reputedly valued.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant;UA Riverview)

What's most informative about the ongoing cinematic fascination with the Holocaust is the larger point it makes about history: no matter how long you imagine any series of events, you can never exhaust all the angles of approach. Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann's explores what might be considered a historical footnote: the story of European Jews who escaped the Nazis by taking refuge in Shanghai, then a disorganized international city where entry was illegal but passport control was nonexistent. By Holocaust standards, the numbers involved are minimal -- an estimated 20,000 Jews found refuge -- but of course, their stories are no less fascinating for their unusualness. Their impact is blunted, though, by the film's haphazard use of stock footage, and a slow opening which offers a grade-school primer on the rise of the Nazis. (There's nothing wrong with explaining Kristallnacht, but it's a safe bet that most people coming to the film know why Jews were fleeing Germany, and in any case the focus ought to be on the survivor's words and not the narrator's, even if he is Martin Landau.) Shanghai Ghetto's use as a teaching tool is never in doubt, but it could use some dramatic honing. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse)

The best thing that might be said about this sequel to Shanghai Noon is that it gives Jackie Chan a chance to dance, sort of. Translating the famous Gene Kelly number from Singin' in the Rain, he uses a street vendor's stash of umbrellas to outwit and outstep a throng of thugs. They're chasing him for a reason, though it hardly matters. He and partner Owen Wilson are tracking Chan's father's assassin in London, which grants them excuses to visit the wax museum, commit homoerotic slapstick on the hands of Big Ben and pillow-fight with prostitutes (granted, this might have occurred in the wild West too), and for Wilson to make fun of British wussiness, Scotland Yard and the Queen's guards. Chan has a sister this time, too, played by Fann Wong, and her martial arts are faster and more wire-worky than Chan's own (though he also submits to wires and a couple of stunt double moments, too). It all goes to show that the first film's "chemistry" had a lot to do with a semi-clever script, which this one sorely lacks.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Main 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)

It's notable that Michael Cunningham's The Hours shows up on a bedside table in Pedro Almodóvar'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 Cámara) and Marco (Darío 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 Almodóvar'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.

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 in a bid to save the Coney Island community center from the wrecking ball. Over a few montage-y months, George W. grows utterly dependent on Lucy for her legal knowledge, shirt-choosing acumen and bimbo wrangling, so when she decides to leave Wade Corp. for something more liberal, fake movie love has just two weeks to work its impractical magic. Grant and Bullock have about 15 romantic comedies under their collective belt, so their collaboration here is both inevitable and inevitably ordinary. Writer and first-time director Marc Lawrence's script is so square, bland and twist-free, he may well have submitted it on ceramic floor tile. Hugh, Sandy, love ya, but it's time to think about giving your own notice to the genre. Hope you got plenty of severance pay. (In the U.K., I believe they call it redundancy.)--R.G. (Ritz 16)