Continuing Shorts

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

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)

BLUE CAR

Karen Moncrieff’s writing-directing debut uses familiarity as a lure, baiting the audience with what seems to be a simple, even trite story about a young girl (Agnes Bruckner) discovering her gift for poetry before sliding into a more complicated, and more difficult to execute, tale. Though Blue Car is hardly a thriller, Moncrieff develops her story gradually enough that giving too much away feels like a spoiler, but suffice it to say that the film turns traditional cinematic teacher-student relations upside-down, and its lessons are hard-earned and not those you expect. David Strathairn, elevated beyond his usual second-banana status, creates a man whose absent conscience renders him dangerous without being precisely evil. Moncrieff’s too-pat ending almost undoes what’s come before, but the complexity of Strathairn’s peformance keeps tidiness at bay.--Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

BRUCE ALMIGHTY

Jim Carrey needs a vacation from himself. In this latest movie with director Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar), he’s Bruce, a self-centered Buffalo TV reporter with a perfect girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston), a knack for "human interest" stories and a slumping career. Ignoring the girl, he blames his professional misery on God’s oversight, feeling particularly tired of having to be the funny guy on the broadcast. The last time Carrey grappled with this problem, he made the treacly The Majestic. This time, he combines rubberman antics, schmaltzy revelations, and lots of self-love in a plot that’s one idea stretched past breaking: God (Morgan Freeman) grants Bruce godly powers, leading to a pile-on of cute tunes ("The Power," "If I Ruled the World," "God Gave Me Everything"), bad behavior and a silly moral lesson in the end. Steve Carell makes the most of his indignities as Bruce’s rival at work, but as his boss, Philip Baker Hall just looks adrift. Aniston looks like she’s in another movie entirely, which may be a cagey survival strategy. It’s hard to tell.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview.)

CHICAGO

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.(Ritz 16)

DADDY DAY CARE

Steve Zahn is fearless. No matter the role, he comes with fierce, seemingly earnest, mostly hilarious determination. In Steve Carr’s second Eddie Murphy movie (his first being 2001’s Dr. Dolittle 2), Zahn is a lonely Trekkie who agrees to help unemployed dads Murphy and Jeff Garlin run a daycare center. The comedy is premised on Murphy reacting to kids doing the darndest things (a joke that gets dismal quickly), while he finds his way toward excellent childcare. His enterprise is goaded by competition with the only other option in town, run by odiously named evil-school-marm Miss Harridan (Angelica Huston). All the kids are adorable beyond words, which makes them the film’s saving grace but also its fallback -- nothing much else gets attention (like, say, script, characterization, continuity). Murphy’s own 4-year-old, played by Khamani Griffin, has a bit of a trajectory (he learns to make friends while daddy massages his own ego), but as the working mom/wife, Regina King struggles mightily against a simply terrible role. Thank goodness Zahn is there to save the day, in particular when he speaks Klingon with one seemingly incomprehensible child. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

THE DANCER UPSTAIRS

Set in "Latin America, the recent past," where a military regime lurks behind the cloak of democracy, stability starts to erode rapidly during a series of mysterious incidents that both troubles and arouses the nation’s people. Dead dogs with dynamite stuffed in their mouths, are found hanging from lampposts, some with messages attached. At the same time, public leaders are being assassinated with increasing, unpredictable frequency -- in one case, by a smiling child who yells out, "Viva el Presidente Ezequiel!" before blowing himself up. Meanwhile, we meet Rejas (Javier Bardem), a successful metropolitan police detective, who accepts the corruption endemic to the government, but tries to keep his hands clean. But Dancer’s abstracted terrain removes the story from the landscape of history. It becomes instead a story about the disturbing power, even appeal, of symbolic murder. Though Ezequiel proclaims himself the "fourth flame of Communism, after Marx, Lenin and Mao," there seems to be no fixed ideology behind his revolution, other than the unmaking of the present situation. It’s anarchy in its purest, most volatile form. Directed by John Malkovich with the icy control familiar from his performances, the movie’s style is composed, implacable (the cinematography is by José Luis Alcaine), and its flirtation with the shape of the political thriller only increases the extent to which Rejas seems like a man alone. Dancer is never fully at home with the mechanics of the political thriller; indeed, it doesn’t even seem that interested in them. Mood and philosophy are more the point, the sense of a country dissolving, or perhaps reconstituting itself, in secret.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

DOWN WITH LOVE

Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) has an enviable reputation as a "ladies’ man, man’s man, man about town," that is, a man who can please everyone. The epitome of swinging bachelorhood circa 1962, Catcher has a different girl for every meal of the day and a lesson to learn by the end of Peyton Reed’s adoring, if overeager, homage to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day-Tony Randall romantic comedies in which elegance and in-jokiness were of a piece. Down With Love is less delicate. Proto-feminist author Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger) arrives in NYC determined to make her new women-should-abandon-love-and-have-sex-like-men manifesto, Down With Love, a bestseller. When Barbara calls out Catcher as the worst sort of man (torpedoeing his dating career), he decides to get even. Much like Hudson in Pillow Talk, he plays a hick, here astronaut Zip Martin, in order to make her fall in love with him and disprove her premise. The film lurches from set piece to set piece, in part because Zellweger is not a subtle and self-effacing team player like Day, and in part because the innuendo is all on the surface. It’s as if writers Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, as well as director Reed were afraid viewers wouldn’t get it. The film’s most nearly saving grace, aside from McGregor’s sweet dance steps, comes from David Hyde Pierce, playing Catcher’s editor, Peter McMannus. The scenes shared by Peter and Catcher achieve a precision and buoyancy that the rest of Down With Love doesn’t quite match.--C.F.(Bala;Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

IDENTITY

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. (Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)

THE IN-LAWS

Neurotic podiatrist Jerry Peyser (Albert Brooks) is hosting an elaborate wedding for his daughter, and the family has yet to meet the groom’s always-traveling father, Steve Tobias (Michael Douglas). When he finally shows up for a get-to-know-you dinner, it’s clear that Tobias is a little too colorful to really be the international copier salesman he claims to be. In fact, he’s a CIA agent, working under deep cover to sell a contraband submarine to a French arms dealer. For no particularly good reason other than the timeless laws of odd-couple adventure comedies, Tobias involves his soon-to-be in-law, Dr. Peyser, in the international smuggling proceedings, racing the clock to get back in time for the nuptials. There’s no getting around the fact that Michael Douglas is way too old to be a James Bond type. That he has to stand comparison to Arthur Hiller’s 1979 original Peter Falk as a wacky agent makes his job that much more thankless. Albert Brooks, like Alan Arkin, has made a fine career of playing the lovable kvetch; he’s at his flabbergasted best when the world around him is mysteriously off-kilter, when the clockwork of his universe is unexplainably skipping beats. But in The In-Laws, his character is so fussy and annoying that for the first time we’re inclined to root against him. The dream of a truly great podiatric action hero is no closer to fruition, I’m afraid.--Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview; Roxy)

LAUREL CANYON

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.(Ritz at the Bourse)

THE LIZZIE MCGUIRE MOVIE

In 1999, Jim Fall directed Trick, featuring a dear little campy bit by Tori Spelling. He then directed for TV’s Grosse Pointe, a campy love letter to Aaron Spelling’s primetime soaps. Now he’s made a generally sluggish movie based on Disney’s super-hit TV series, in which 15-year-old Lizzie (Hilary Duff) goes to Roma. As always, she’s adorable, in incessant beaming close-ups, whether hanging with her best friend (Adam Lamberg), quarrelling with her little brother (Jake Thomas) or competing with her classmate (Ashlie Brillault). She’s even adorable while pretending to be sick so her stern chaperone (Alex Borstein, channeling Christian Slater) won’t know she’s sneaking out to see a cute Italian boy (Yani Gellman). He’s convinced her she can replace his dark-haired ex-singing partner (also Ms. Duff, with an Italiana accenta) -- that is, she can drag herself. Whether zipping about on a moped to Vitamin C’s cover of "Volare" or teetering on a runway to Taylor Dayne’s cover of "Supermodel," Lizzie brings her usual energy to tamped down camp. Queer edges or no, the girls at my screening loved Lizzie.--C.F. (Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

THE MAN ON THE TRAIN

The Man on the Train opens, sensibly enough, with a man on a train: spike-haired, leather-jacketed Milan (Johnny Hallyday), trundling around this provincial village and looking absurdly out of place, the iconic image of him striding alongside the railroad tracks already replaced with the image of him stumping peevishly down a cobblestoned hill, a thin, frail old man following in his wake: Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), who offers him a room for the night, as the only hotel in town is closed. Even so early in the film, the stage is set for a fairly odious, touchy-feely affair, full of sharing, and learning, and men with gruff exteriors who melt into teary little puddles. Patrice Leconte knows that an audience can see the outlines of such a story looming, and The Man on the Train works overtime to convince us that it has nothing so reductive in mind. By the time the movie finally gets around to giving us what it’s all but promised it wouldn’t, we’re almost relieved. While Leconte has nothing so self-conscious in mind as a buddy movie that comments on buddy movies, the casting of lead actors as iconic as Hallyday and Rochefort is surely no accident. Leconte knows that part of the joy of The Man on the Train is watching these old hands square off against each other, and what’s more, he knows we know it, but rather than turn his two personalities into caricatures of themselves, Leconte lets us see beyond their façades. Even though Milan turns out to have come to town for criminal purposes, he’s not the outlaw he appears; the photograph drawn from his jacket pocket, which looks to have been taken in the American West, turns out to be from a fun fair where he worked as a stunt man. And for all his defeated self-loathing, the self-proclaimed "silent onlooker" Manesquier has enviable qualities of his own, though having Milan grab him by the lapels and shout, "Don’t you see how extraordinary you are?" may not be the best way to reveal them.--S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

THE MATRIX RELOADED

Watching The Matrix was like being injected with pure adrenaline, but the experience also served as its own vaccine -- you could only do it once. If you had seen it, and saw it again, Andrew and Larry Wachowski’s cringeworthy dialogue, their adolescent grasp of both philosophy and sexuality, came rather abruptly to the fore. There’s no chance that The Matrix Reloaded could instill the same awe as the original, but it’s not just sequel-itis that keeps Reloaded from connecting. The script acknowledges the imperative to top the original early on; as Neo (Keanu Reeves) faces off against a handful of Matrix-defending Agents led by Agent Smith (the fabulous Hugo Weaving), he remarks, "Hmmm. Upgrades." Reloaded introduces the human stronghold Zion, located near the Earth’s core. When the human forces organize for defense against the machines who are burrowing through the Earth’s crust to destroy them, the parliamentary disputes take on an unfortunate Star Wars cast, but the subterranean caverns also provide an opportunity for Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to doff his shirt and beat the war drums Spartacus-style. The bind in which Reloaded finds itself is due in no small part to the standards set by the first film. It’s no longer enough to have characters perform stunts that defy not only human physiology but the laws of physics -- it has to look real. We know that Weaving’s being doubled either digitally or by stuntmen -- not to mention all the times that the patented "bullet-time" camera moves reduce Reeves to a phony-looking digital stand-in. The Matrix’s whole mythology is caught up with the difference between reality and (computer-generated) fantasy, so when the line is blurred in places where it’s not supposed to be, the whole movie gets knocked off course.--S.A.(AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; Narberth; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

A MIGHTY WIND

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. (Bala; Ritz East; Ritz 16)

NOWHERE IN AFRICA

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)

The sequel to 2000’s X-Men has a fairly intelligible plot, even after it’s chopped into pieces and cross-cut willy-nilly, reasonably good acting, but where a good, or even a passable, movie ought to start, X2 stops. It turns on one of the oldest structures in the book: Split your heroes up early, have them spend most of the movie getting back together, hashing out some personal differences along the way, and then reunite them for a wham-bang finish. In this case, we get more unrequited touchy-feely between Jean (Famke Janssen) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), as well as some not-quite-as-repressed smoochies between Rogue (Anna Paquin) and Bobby (Shawn Ashmore). Bruce Davison’s bad Senator is replaced with Brian Cox’s mutant-hating General Stryker, who’d prefer to wipe them off the face of the earth. (His motivations, it will shock exactly no one to learn, are personal.) This, not surprisingly, sits well with neither Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) nor the imprisoned Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen). --S.A.(AMC Orleans; Bryn Mawr; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)