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Justin Lin’s film isn’t as edgy as its MTV-funded ad campaign suggests. But it’s smart and engaging, and it knows what it is -- a teen movie with teeth. It tracks the increasingly messy efforts of Asian American honor students in Orange County (Parry Shen, Karin Anna Cheung, Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Jason J. Tobin, John Cho) to buck the tedious system that insists they be "model minorities." They can do that, no problem (selling cheat sheets to less adept students), but they’re looking for higher stakes. Once they move on to drug dealing and gangsta-affected thieving and violence, they’re in too deep (which, thankfully doesn’t mean that the moral deus ex machina kicks in). The images are fresh, the insights into intra-community class and gender dynamics are sound, and the plot structured around an academic decathlon -- definitely not the usual high school film. Perhaps most interestingly, not a parent appears in the film, though they’re surely "felt," on frame edges and rooms down the hall. The kids are on their own, but they’re also shaped by expectations, even when they do their best to resist. --Cindy Fuchs (UA Riverview)

Oh, how the Glengarry have fallen. Director James Foley is, and should be, best known for his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross — partly because GGR is superior screen Mamet, and partly because nothing he’s done since (Fear, The Chamber) has even come close. For one thing, it helps to start with Mamet, and not Doug Jung’s fifth-generation House of Games retread, which is so Mamet-licious it’s a wonder the assembled con men don’t start talking about “the thing.” For another, it helps not to let the actors turn in some of the lazier performances of their careers; nothing wrong with Edward Burns (at least as an actor), Paul Giamatti, Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia or Dustin Hoffman, but they’re adrift, never jelling into any kind of ensemble. The double-triple-quadruple-cross plot recalls the hole Mamet dug himself with The Heist, only deeper (and that’s the only time that word will be applied to this movie). Plus, didn’t they use the same framing device for Deliver Us From Eva? —Sam Adams (Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

It’s raining. Hard. When roads become impassable, 10 strangers gather at an ooky motel in the middle of nowhere, whereupon they’re hideously murdered one by one: one has a baseball bat stuffed down his throat; another is sliced up with a knife; and all that can be found of another is her head thunking around inside a dryer. Pressed into service to track the killer in James Mangold’s psycho-thriller is honorable limo driver/former cop John Cusack and less-nice current cop Ray Liotta. It’s almost worth the price of admission just to see these two together, along with some fine attitude thrown by Amanda Peet (as the good-hearted hooker). The other eight victims-to-be (including Jake Busey, Clea DuVall, John C. McGinley, and Rebecca De Mornay) are less carefully drawn, and a parallel plot -- in which a death row inmate (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and his shrink (Alfred Molina) try for a last minute reprieve -- doesn’t fit in a way that makes you know it will fit, eventually and crucially (and not so cleverly as it might have). By the last half-hour, the plot has run itself into a corner, but until then, the tension and performances are tight. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Rory Culkin holds his own among the wall-to-wall Douglases in this On Golden Pond-ish group hug of a movie. Lawyer dad Michael and wholly uninteresting mom Bernadette Peters are going through a little bumpy period (thanks in part to his one minute of lust with Sarita Choudhury, down at the soup kitchen where they work -- she’s also the dark-skinned person with whom anyone in the film has more than a moment of conversation); brother Cameron Douglas is selling weed and flunking out at Hunter; and grandparents Kirk and Diana Douglas are offering semi-wise advice while no one’s listening. It helps that Culkin has one or two decent lines ("What’s wrong with a nose ring?" asks Cameron D; "It’s in her nose!" comes the distressed 11-year-old’s reasoning), but the movie is poky and annoying, hitting every emotional note too hard. The saving grace (aside from the non-related Culkin) is that, by the end, Kirk kind of sneaks up on you, with a cagey, detailed performance. --C.F. (Roxy; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

In what has to be some kind of dubious record for instantest feature film, this, the apotheosis of "reality" "entertainment," finished shooting four weeks ago, and it’s just what you think: The Real World producers put a bunch of hottie post-teens together in a hotel in the spring break capital of Mexico for a week of constant DV surveillance. The result is a predictable foray into applied hedonism: they compete in wet t-shirt/Speedo contests, they drink body shots off each other, they dance suggestively to that Nelly song, they pair off and hump in grainy night-vision gray. And when they’re not partying like "party" was a verb, they’re kibitzing, caviling, complaining about partying. Thirteen kids are introduced at the outset, but due to necessarily hasty editing, only about five of them have any distinguishing characteristic or storyline that varies even slightly from "horndog looking to get some." The most charismatic and entertaining of the bunch is Alan, the shy erstwhile-teetotaler from Texas who occupies the physiognomic space exactly halfway between Matt Damon and Cameron from Ferris Bueller. Alan notwithstanding, Real Cancun is strangely Blair Witch-like -- the days are full of annoying chatter; the nights only fill us with dread. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Steve James, a co-director of Hoop Dreams, began to film in 1995, ten years after moving to Chicago and leaving behind Stevie Fielding, a troubled child to whom he’d served as a Big Brother during college. James promised to stay in touch, but didn’t, and returns to find Fielding’s life as bad as he could have imagined -- still living with his grandmother as he nears 30, James has been in and out of jail, never holding a steady job, and still has a vicious relationship with the mother who abandoned him in spirit if not in the flesh. James is so shaken by his first encounter with Fielding, he doesn’t return for two years, and by the time he comes back, Fielding is in trouble again, this time seriously, accused of sexually molesting his 8-year-old niece. Fielding’s life has been so unforgiving that even the victim’s mother begins to show him sympathy, but Stevie confronts the fact that sympathy may not be enough to save him; as Fielding’s relationship with his mother is rekindled, he only gets worse, reopening wounds that had been scarred over. James watches, sometimes impotently, sometimes trying to help, always torn between his relationship with Fielding and his need to live his own life; James invites Fielding and his fiancée to his house in Chicago, but won’t allow his kids to interact. (His wife, who counsels sex abusers for a living, does her best to help, but never harbors any doubts that Fielding is guilty.) Insight comes from surprising sources, as in a wrenching scene where a palsied classmate of Fielding’s fiancée recalls her own experience with sexual abuse, and James does anything but make himself the hero of the piece; at times, Stevie verges on a feature-length confession of powerlessness, both James’ and the documentary form’s itself. After all, though James was Fielding’s Big Brother before he was a filmmaker, the process of ingratiation and abandonment is perfectly analogous to documentary filmmaking, with rare exceptions. The film’s conclusion offers no easy answers, in some ways no answers at all, but the questions it’s asked are so profound that easy solutions would only trivialize them.--S.A. (Ritz Five)

Though Mark Moskowitz sets out looking for Dow Mossman, who wrote what Moskowitz calls "one great novel" and then vanished off the map, his literary detective story evolves into a love letter to the act of reading. So it's not surprising that Stone Reader's structure is more literary than filmic. Moskowitz's discursive style, encompassing footage of the filmmaker raking leaves or taking his son to the fair, might strike some viewers as needlessly self-indulgent, but they'd be half-wrong – self-indulgent, yes, but no more so than a chronicle of a hopeless quest should be. Moskowitz, whose background is in political commercials, plays needlessly fast and loose with the rules of documentary filmmaking–he "mails" a copy of the book to a friend, then happens to be standing by when he unwraps the package – but the journey wins out in the end. –S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

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