"I don’t want to go to college and spend four years writing bad girl poetry," says small-town girl Noel (Zooey Deschanel). Replies unlikely Lothario Paul (Paul Schneider): "There’s probably just as much bad poetry in the bathroom at the mill." He has a point: There is bad poetry everywhere, and David Gordon Green (George Washington) is proving to be a master at harvesting it. At least the young, non-professional actors in Geo. W. could put Green’s faux-naif dialogue over with a semblance of conviction; the stuttering and clucking the pros in Real Girls use to make themselves seem not like, you know, actors is purely an embarrassment. At least this is a movie that signals its absurdity early on: The film’s second line is, "I’m just standin’ here [fumbled pause] lookin’ at that bucket [fumbled pause] thinkin’ I like you." Green so begs comparison with Terrence Malick he might as well change his name (he’s even planning an unfilmed Malick script as his next project), so we might as well oblige: Real Girls has none of the moral weight or cleverness, none of the dandelion buoyancy of Days of Heaven, none of the mutilated sorrow of The Thin Red Line. It’s a highly polished turd, so false you imagine the filmmakers must have invented new truths just to betray them. It’s hard to think of a movie that less deserves to have the word "real" in the title.--Sam Adams (See Cindy Fuchs’ interview with director David Gordon Green and actor Paul Schneider.)(Ritz East; Ritz 16)

Based on the kind of absurdly convoluted script some Hollywood moron probably paid a bajillion bucks for, Basic starts with an intriguing premise and a tried-and-true structure: Sgt. Nathan West (Samuel L. Jackson) leads a patrol of seven soldiers into the Panamanian jungle for a training exercise, and one hurricane later, all but two are dead, and the survivors are none-too-eager to talk about what happened. Enter Tom Hardy (a buzz-cut John Travolta), a maverick ex-military narc with some blemishes on his record and some time to kill. Once on the base, he butts heads with straight-arrow lieutenant Connie Nielsen, who’s apparently given a ludicrous attraction to Travolta’s character so audiences won’t think a tough-talking military woman with short hair is, well, you know. It’s no surprise that screenwriter James Vanderbilt (whose other credit is the idiotic Darkness Falls) is a recent USC grad, since Basic is clearly the product of a) watching way too many movies and b) not doing anything else. That Travolta -- who apparently isn’t happy unless he chalks up a string of shitty films so he can make another comeback -- is involved isn’t much of a shock either. But you wish director John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Thomas Crown Affair) would more consistently be paired with good material; the fact that Basic is well-directed ends up working against it, since it just makes its shortcomings more manifest.--S.A. (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

I know I’ve said this about other films, but this time it’s literally true: The Core is deeply ludicrous. First, you’ve got to get your head around the idea that the outer core of the Earth is spinning, and if it happens to stop -- which it totally could -- we’re all in deep doodoo: our planet’s magnetic field will start to disappear, and then it’s nothing but massive lightning storms selectively destroying famous cities and microwave radiation from the sun frying us in our cars and melting iconic bridges. That’s just great. Don’t we have enough to worry about these days? But never fear: If that happens, Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart will lead a team of actor/scientists deep below the surface to recreate all of your favorite scenes from all of your favorite spaceship/submarine/save-the-world movies. They will speak the scientific jargon of our times ("nuke-yu-ler"). They will call magma "lava." They will believe that one is a prime number, and that two isn’t. They will get out and walk around 1000 miles below the surface in magic spacesuits that protect them from being crushed by the weight of the Earth. Jules Verne’s version with the lakes and the dinosaurs is actually more plausible (and infinitely more entertaining), and doesn’t plumb such idiotic depths.--Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

Elia Suleiman’s breathtaking film is a work of apocalyptic vaudeville, a series of blackout sketches depiciting life in occupied Palestine. Angry, funny, poetic and profound, Divine Intervention is, as its subtitle has it, "A chronicle of love and pain," less a bulletin from the front lines than a cri de coeur. The film’s intricate structure, the way the seemingly disparate anecdotes fit together, only really becomes visible on a second viewing, but its pleasures and provocations are immediate. From a Nazarene who compulsively destroys the repairs Israeli road crews make to the street outside his house to an Israeli policemen who pulls a Palestinian prisoner from the back of his van to give directions to a wayward tourist, the film is fiercely intelligent and unapologetic. It undercuts its flirtations with dogma with the image of Suleiman himself, who appears as a stone-faced, sad-eyed character whose unvoiced troubles color his cartoonishly violent revenge fantasies. Practically without precedent and currently without equal, Divine Intervention deserves a spot in the history it both reflects and rewrites.--S.A. (See Sam Adams’ interview with writer/director/actor Elia Suleiman.)(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

From its start -- Nate Dogg in front of Mount Rushmore flanked by dancing white girls dressed in skimpy red, white and blue -- Chris Rock’s crossover dream is obvious and derivative. (Lumpy white people fo-shizzling is tired already.) Picked by party regulars to lose a race for president, D.C. alderman Rock shakes things up by running a hip-hop campaign and naming his bail bondsman brother (Bernie Mac) as his running mate. He encourages poor folks to get mad ("That ain’t right" becomes his slogan, set off against his opponent’s "God bless America, and no place else!"), flirts with adorable Tamala Jones and impresses his ostensible handlers (Dylan Baker and Lynn Whitfield) and snooty white folks with slang and song (Nelly, Jay-Z, DMX). Written by Rock and longtime collaborator Ali LeRoi, the movie is bogged down by predictable, easy jokes, so that the political points (racism is everywhere, CEOs get away with murders, kids need to get "knocked out!") look weaker than they are.--Cindy Fuchs. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

The winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, German director Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel is careful, elegiac and occasionally self-important. Still, its focus on a young girl’s understanding of traumatic events lends it an admirably narrow focus, set against a huge backdrop. A family of German Jews -- idealistic father Merab Ninidze, pampered mother Juliane Köhler, and spunky, open-hearted daughter Regina (played as a child by Lea Kurka and as a teen by Karoline Eckertz) -- flee Germany in 1938, leaving behind family, friends and dad’s career as a lawyer. In Kenya, he works someone else’s farm with a crew of black workers whom he respects; his wife, meanwhile, resents her classed descent and makes him pay by withholding sex. Regina takes immediately to her new home, befriending their loyal cook, Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), and adapting to local customs and beliefs. While her parents struggle to keep their marriage together and come to understand their own prejudices (sort of), she looks back wistfully (for 138 minutes), as an adult narrator, able to see details they missed. Her sad but youthfully hopeful story forms the basis for a Holocaust film that doesn’t show the Holocaust.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

The first feature from music video director Jonas Åkerlund (Madonna’s "Music," Metallica’s "Turn the Page") all but begs you to hate it, opening with a frenetic scene of meth addicts in action, every movement splintered into its component parts and reassembled in the most eye-grabbing fashion. (Literally: The film actually devises an effect for the sound of eyes swiveling rapidly in their sockets.) But despite a few genuinely nasty moments -- speed freak Ross (Jason Schwartzman) cuffing his stripper girlfriend to the bed, then duct taping her eyes and mouth while he runs errands shoots to the top of that list -- Spun is stupidly likeable, as must any movie be that features John Leguizamo jumping around the house in nothing but a sock. Don’t get me wrong: Brittany Murphy should still be taken out back and shot, and they can throw Eric Roberts (whose lisping caricature of a gay drug lord is too clumsy to be offensive) on the pile for good measure. But at heart, Spun can’t be as nasty as it wants to be -- it’s certainly not as loathsome as The Acid House -- and its failure turns out to be a good thing.--S.A. (Ritz East; Ritz 16)