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; Bridge; 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 Riverview)

Performances stand out in Lisa Cholodenko's follow-up to High Art. As a California record producer whose medical resident son (Christian Bale) and his thesis-writing fiancee (Kate Beckinsale) take up temporary residence in her house/studio, Frances McDormand has the earthy naturalism of a woman who's cut her own path in the world. And as the incipient rock star who's cutting an album in her house, Alessandro Nivola is a revelation, incarnating the kind of nascent sex god whose appeal is only increased by his seeming effortlessness. Bale and Beckinsale's squares aren't nearly as compelling; at bottom, you feel like they're just sounding boards for the film's more freewheeling characters. (The squares loosen up, but the free spirits don't get any less free.) Despite its endorsement of the laissez-faire life, Laurel Canyon is as neat as a military bed; it would've been a lot more effective if Cholodenko had left some of the seams showing. --S.A.(Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Aspiring Jewish rapper and Malibu homeboy B-Rad Gluckman (Jamie Kennedy) makes the small step from TV’s Jamie Kennedy Experiment to a wholly pedestrian movie, enabled by writers Fax Bahr and Adam Small (also responsible for a couple of Pauly Shore movies). When Brad’s routine embarrasses his governor candidate dad (Ryan O’Neal), the wily campaign manager (Blair Underwood) arranges to have him kidnapped by thug-actors Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs, to scare the "black out of him," whereupon all are threatened by real banger Damien Dante Wayans. One more in the exceedingly tiresome line of white-folks-acting-black jokes, the film notes that gangsta-ism is also a performance for black kids, and parodies some famous scenes (the Korean store in Menace II Society, 8 Mile’s battles). What it misses completely is that oppression works by race and class, and performance is not the ticket out (except for the most fortunate few). The most clueless moments involve aspiring hairdresser Regina Hall, supposedly the sanest person in the room, who falls for Brad because that’s her job, in this most unoriginal of films.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Vin 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 Larenz Tate go after the nascent honcho, 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! So conventional -- but it all somehow works, because of a career-best performance from a damaged, haunted Diesel, and whattaya know, we consequently care for the character.--R.G. (UA Riverview)

A surprisingly affectionate tribute to the folk boom of the 1960s, Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind never quite sinks its teeth into its subject, but the substitution of sweetness for satire makes for a fair trade. Kicked off by the death of an Albert Grossman-esque folk promoter, the ersatz documentary follows the reunion of three folk acts for a concert in his honor: the Kingston Trio-esque Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, a.k.a. Spinal Tap), the shiny, happy New Main Street Singers (an insufferably cheery bunch who, in a Tap-ish bit of humiliation, play at amusement parks in the shadow of noisy roller coasters), and onetime duo Mickey and Sylvia (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara), whose legendary career ended along with their marriage. Folk music should be just as ripe a target as heavy metal, but Guest and co. (many of whom, of course, grew up during the 1960s) don’t have the heart to tighten the screws -- the affinity of white singers from privileged backgrounds for affecting the trappings of poverty and/or blackness is hinted at with a reference to an unseen folk legend named Ramblin’ Sandy Pitnick, but that’s as far as it goes. (The great Bill Cobbs, identified in the credits as a blues singer, appears at a party scene, but never gets a line in.) Instead, you get Levy’s ceaseless mugging -- with his white fright wig and ever-mobile eyebrows, he’s every bit the ’60s burnout (although a shot of empty medicine bottles on the table by his motel room bed comes close to mocking mental illness) -- and a smattering of jokes, which are less frequent as well as less pointed. A handful of zingers fly by -- John Michael Higgins’ born-again bandleader recalls, "There was abuse in my family, but it was mostly musical" -- but what draws you in is the camaraderie between the erstwhile Tappers, and the genuinely moving chemistry between Levy and O’Hara’s ex-lovers. (While they were married, the highlight of their act was a staged kiss, and while the suspense builds as to whether they’ll recreate the moment at the tribute concert, you may find your feet beginning to jiggle.) If they don’t outstrip the absurdity of the folk songs of the times, the film’s compositions (mostly written by the actors) at least equal it; a couple of them could even have been hits. (Catherine O’Hara boasts a particularly fine singing voice, not surprising given that her sister is the too-long-in-exile singer Mary Margaret O’Hara.) A Mighty Wind leaves your sides resoundingly un-split, but it sends you out feeling suffused with mild warmth -- an inferior pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. --S.A. (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

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. (UA 69th 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, 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. Finally forced to evacuate, Szpilman keeps out of sight. While the "action" now decreases, the film becomes almost unbearably acute, approximating the man’s process of internalization.--C.F.(Bridge)

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. (Baederwood; Bryn Mawr)

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; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

Aleksandr Sokurov’s latest movie is genuine cinematic singularity -- an entire movie filmed in a single 90-plus-minute shot. Sokurov stages his time-traveling film inside The Hermitage, the camera gliding past the arrayed throngs of Russia’s imperial past, Tilman Büttner’s camera floating like a specter through halls, while a disembodied voiceover takes note of what it/we/the camera see. Wafting through the entry on the wake of incoming ballgoers, the camera-ghost soon encounters a tall, slim figure clad in a high-collared black coat. Played by Sergei Dreiden, the character is identified in the credits as "the Marquis." Together, mostly, the pair moves from room to room, encountering figures from Russian history (most of whose identities aren’t clear until the closing credits), discoursing on art, history and the Russian character. If this sounds like being stuck in the corner at a particularly boring cocktail party, well, you’re not far off the mark. A far cry from the purposeful time-shifting of Béla Tarr or Hou Hsiao-Hsien (to name just two masters of the extended take), Russian Ark often seems to be an impressive achievement, but it’s more of an object than a movie.--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. Moskowitz’s discursive style, encompassing footage of the filmmaker, is self-indulgent, yes, but no more so than a chronicle of a hopeless quest should be. Moskowitz 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)

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. Nominally based on the arch 1958 Sandra Dee/Rex Harrison fish-out-of-water comedy The Reluctant Debutante, What a Girl Wants is instead as bland a corporate calculation as a corporation can calculate. Characters are motivated into action -- say, causing a hubbub at the uptight formal ball, or flying tearfully back to America without saying goodbye -- not by anything happening on screen, but because that’s what such characters are supposed to do at that particular timestamp. Firth, clear-eyed and debonair, is terrific as usual, but he’s overpowered by the banality of the modern fairy-tale formula. This will probably end up being your niece’s favorite movie, until what a girl wants is this same film with, oh, let’s pick Mandy Moore. --R.G.(Baederwood)