"I think Eskimos are smug." This observation, by anger management patient John Turturro, is easily the loopiest in all of Peter Segal’s ridiculous and redundant buddy flick. For the most part, the movie trudges along, pitting anger management "guru" Jack Nicholson against his newest court-ordered patient, Adam Sandler. (The judge who so orders is the late Lynne Thigpen, who, as ever, weathers all insanity with integrity.) Arrested for ostensibly untoward behavior on an airplane ("This is a very difficult time for the country," notes the security guard), Sandler must endure in-home counseling from the wholly obnoxious Nicholson, who not only has him interacting with classmates Turturro and Luis Guzmán, but also arranges his meetings with trannie prostitute Woody Harrelson (self-named "Galaxia") and pretty barfly Heather Graham. Ostensibly, this leads to Sandler’s repairing his relationship with the absolutely perfect Marisa Tomei. But really, it’s all about the boys. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

The elements in Robert Duvall’s latest directorial effort, following six years after The Apostle, don’t fit together any better than the title suggests. Duvall plays a New York-based hitman who’s finally starting to settle down late in life when he’s sent to Argentina on a job. There, he becomes enraptured by the tango and falls in love with a beautiful dance instructor (Duvall’s 30-year-old squeeze, Luciana Pedraza) while awaiting a shot at his target. An actor whose best performances always have something of the unfinished about them, Duvall shows a similarly spontaneous side as a director, but Tango lacks what an acting teacher would call a spine. At times, Duvall’s mumbling performance verges on Tourettic, and the groups of no-doubt fascinating people he’s gathered together on screen have so little to do that the movie feels like a collection of asides. (Ironically, it takes a stronger directorial hand to create the feeling of spontaneity.) Tango isn’t nearly as embarassing as it could be, given that the plot is nakedly structured around Duvall’s own obsessions and the female lead went to his girlfriend, who’d neither acted nor danced the tango before. But it’s not steps that make a dance; it’s motion, and Assassination Tango goes too many ways at once. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse; 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. (Ritz 16)

Talented young footballer Jess (Parminder Nagra) loves David Beckham. But her parents, first generation immigrants to the London suburbs, want her to focus on a proper marriage to a nice Indian boy, much like her sister (Archie Panjabi). Gurinder Chadha’s charming, energetic movie charts Jess’ efforts to hide the fact that she’s signed on with a girls’ auxiliary team, befriended teammate Keira Knightley (a Mia Hamm fan), and developed a crush on their sensitive Irish coach (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Unlike most teen romances, this film takes the girls’ perspectives and complicated feelings seriously, detailing their daily negotiations of culture differences (race, nation, gender, class, and generation). And while it includes some standard contrivances, it uses them to reveal the ways that assumptions shape experiences, particularly, girls’ experiences. Various conflicts come to a head in a colorful finale that crosscuts between a final football match and a traditional Indian wedding. Cultures continue to clash, but in ways that are increasingly responsive to one another. --C.F. (Bala;Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

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)

Lonely, depressed tax lawyer Steve Martin meets witty, well-read "lawyer girl" in a chat room. How surprised he is when she arrives on his doorstep: Boisterous ex-con (and executive producer) Queen Latifah wants him to help her clear her record of the felony burglary for which she was framed. And how unsurprised you are that she teaches this uptight white man to shake his booty, open up to his two kids, lust after his ex (Jean Smart) and even outsmart Latifah’s thuggish ex (Steve Harris). The broad comedy derives from standard class and race frictions, helped along by Martin’s neighbor, Betty White (fearful of "Negroes") and his no. 1 client, Joan Plowright (fond of plantation songs that remind her of childhood servants). Latifah is delightful, and as the man who wisely falls in love with her on first meeting, Eugene Levy brings a welcome dryness to the otherwise predictably soppy proceedings.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; 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. 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 69th St.; UA Grant)

Eddie Griffin might be one of our greatest standup comedians. Or, he might be one of our worst. You won't find out watching Dysfunktional Family, which has the distinction of being the most incompetently directed performance film I've ever seen. Griffin's family and his threadbare upbringing are at the center of Griffin's act, so the decision to mix in documentary footage of Griffin going home for a family reunion isn't totally off-the-wall, but director George Gallo's decision to intercut the real-life characters with Griffin doing his act, often in mid-sentence, totally robs us of any chance to watch Griffin strut his stuff. --S.A.(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

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 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 (she and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) were dedicated Communists) with bracing enthusiasm.--C.F. (Bryn Mawr)

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.)

Following his debut with Friday, F. Gary Gray has made a nice little career out of turning ridiculously conventional shoot-’em-ups into much better movies than they deserve to be (see also: The Negotiator and Set It Off). His trick is no big secret; he merely elicits strong acting out of his stars -- in this case Vin Diesel and Larenz Tate. Diesel is an undercover narcotics cop in Los Angeles who arrests a Mexican kingpin and ends up with a dead wife when the new cartel takes over. He and partner Tate go after the nascent honcho, who calls himself Diablo (aren’t druglords always called Diablo?), until Diesel steps over the line and has to turn in his badge. The end. Nah, just kidding. He actually takes the law into his own hands! Like I said, so conventional it should be wearing a nametag and eating lunch at the Reading Terminal Market. But it all somehow works, because Gray gets a career-best performance from a damaged, haunted Diesel, and whattaya know, we consequently care for the character. One movie will not make me a Vin Diesel fan, but count me in on the F. Gary Gray bandwagon. Now someone get him a script apart. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

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 premise of Phone Booth couldn't be simpler: A guy named Stu (Colin Farrell) answers a phone on the corner of 53rd and Eighth in New York City. As it turns out, the caller has his eye on Stu, literally, watching him through a high-powered rifle scope. To underline his threat, the sniper takes out a loud-mouthed pimp, at which point the cops and the press amass, assuming Stu is the shooter. For the rest of the movie, Stu -- accused by the killer-caller of being too selfish and cynical, too modern mannish -- is caught in that phone booth.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; 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, 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)

WHAT A GIRL WANTS

Warner Bros. is hoping that what a girl in the 7-14 demographic wants is an exact tonal replica of The Princess Diaries, only with Amanda Bynes. She's a headstrong but button-cute working-class American teen who decides to spend the summer with her blue-blood English father (Colin Firth), who has yet to find out he's been a dad for 17 years. To complicate matters, daddy is running for Parliament, and he's also about to get married to an evil stepmother, who comes complete with an equally evil daughter.--R.G.