After Massimo (Andrea Renzi) is mowed down crossing the street, his wife Antonia (Margherita Buy) finds a painting with a romantic inscription on the back in his office, which betrays the shocking knowledge that her husband had been having an affair for seven years. The surprises don't end there -- she tracks down the painting's sender and finds not a bottle-blond tootsie but a trim, attractive young man: Michele (Stefano Accorsi). That His Secret Life develops beyond this hoary, 50s-melodrama premise is both to director/co-writer Ferzan Ozpetek's credit and his detriment, the latter for having started in such over-fished waters.--S.A (Ritz at the Bourse).

Essentially three separate films, The Hoursopens on the suicide of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), in the London suburb of Richmond, 1941. 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 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 facing doubts about her marriage to gentle Dan (John C. Reilly).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.--C.F. (Bala; Bridge; Ritz 16)

Andie (Kate Hudson) decides to write a what-not-to-do article, using her own experience with an actual Guy to be named later and an actual span of 10 Days in which to make said Guy first fall for her and then drop her like a spoonful of black hole. Ben (Matthew McConaughey) bets his boss that he can make a girl fall in love with him in the same 10-day span. What really strains the credulity, though, is that the plot centers on the Knicks being in the NBA Finals; is this a romantic comedy or science fiction? Still, if you don't mind rooting for liars, there is some fun to be had here.--R.G. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Main St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Director Alan Parker's new film argues -- vigorously and sanctimoniously -- against the death penalty. Kevin Spacey plays David Gale, a philosophy professor and anti-death penalty activist currently on death row in Texas for the rape and murder of his colleague, the significantly named Constance (Laura Linney). With four days to live, he invites a famously principled reporter (named Bitsey and wanly played by Kate Winslet) to interview him so that he might tell his side. Her uncovering of the truth is painfully slow, especially since the mystery is wholly unsurprising and dependent on glaring character inconsistencies. Perhaps worse, the film's argument against capital punishment -- it's bad because mistakes can be made -- is needlessly overstated (the activists are set against a smarmy governor ominously named Hardin; Gale's lawyer screwed up repeatedly; pro-death penalty interviewees appear in grainy TV close-ups, etc.). --C.F. (Bala; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St; UA Riverview)

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary witnesses art in the un-making -- the disintegration and eventual collapse of Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, what was to have been his first production from his own script in over a decade. The production begins with a budget so tight nothing can go wrong, and then practically everything does: actors don't show up, locations turn out to be uncomfortably close to NATO bombing ranges and Gilliam's Quixote turns out to be too frail to ride a horse. Fulton and Pepe, former Temple grad students who filmed Gilliam's production of Twelve Monkeys for their documentary The Hamster Factor, have what looks like unrestricted access, eavesdropping on conflicts, tantrums and moments of utter despair, and their detailed approach helps make the case that even an auteur as singular as Gilliam needs a team. --S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

The premise has promise, in an I-love-the-'80s teen movie redux way: The near-campus house of newly single Mitch (Luke Wilson) is rezoned by the butthole dean (Jeremy Piven) for college-related use only after a housewarming party gets too raucous, so married but terminally juvenile best friends Frank (Will Ferrell) and Beanie (Vince Vaughn) convince Mitch to turn the house into a rule-flouting, cross-generational fraternity. What should follow, and what the trailer promises, are beer-soaked, increasingly transgressive shenanigans involving hazing, sex and that old-time rock 'n' roll. What actually follows is anarchic only in the sense that it's badly structured, arbitrary and -- despite Ferrell's ample and omnipresent bare backside -- half-assed. Don't expect Animal House -- it's more like a big fat Greek petting zoo. --R.G. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

A Polish Jew hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw, sometimes looked after by friendly non-Jews, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the titular artist, refuses to acknowledge that life has already changed forever, that the Germans had invaded weeks before. The film mostly takes Szpilman's view, showing the atrocities he sees; cinematographer Pawel Edelman hardly lingers on any of these images. Finally forced to evacuate, Szpilman keeps 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)

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. When British journlist Fowler (Michael Caine) introduces Pyle (Brendan Fraser) to the beautiful Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), his girlfriend of 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, 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 Phuong, we get a chance to hear her own thoughts on the subject.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

In director Roger Donaldson's version of this recurring "troubled agent" scenario, Colin Farrell is the gifted CIA trainee, Al Pacino his brilliant recruiter/father figure, and Bridget Moynahan his rocky romantic interest. Trained at "the Farm," they learn that "everything is a test" and "nothing is what it seems." Apparently, this is news for the newbies, who 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.--C.F. (Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant;UA Riverview)

Jackie Chan 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 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). --C.F. (AMC Orleans; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

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 gaps between people. Making nods to other types of art, Talk to Her perhaps spreads itself too thin, but it's about passions, so if they overrun, it's almost appropriate.--S.A. (Ritz Five)