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)

Stella (Charlize Theron, earnest as ever) is the only girl in The Italian Job. Being as it’s a remake of a 1969 Michael Caine heist picture, you’d think that her input would be minimal. But Stella brings surprising edge to her by-the-numbers part (originally male), not to mention crucial elements to the plot -- namely, safecracking skills, a thirst for vengeance and a Mini Cooper. Still, she’s up against it in this too-many-guys-vying-for-supporting-pizzazz picture. Her veteran safecracker father, John (Donald Sutherland), calls her on his cell from Venice. It turns out that dad’s skipped parole and is about to embark on one last job, after which he promises to go straight. John’s crew -- all predictable types -- includes his son-like favorite student, master planner Charlie (Mark Wahlberg); driver/womanizer Handsome Rob (Jason Statham); computer nerd Lyle (Seth Green); explosives expert Left Ear (Mos Def); and inside man Steve (Ed Norton). Though they get away with the gold, one of their number -- Steve, whose grumpiness is evident from frame one -- double-crosses the bunch, steals the gold and shoots John dead in the process. The others are, of course, soon fixated on vengeance. Steve’s snarky meanness comes to a strangely distant climax when the film eventually comes to its end -- a car "chase" in L.A. featuring a trio of tricked-out Mini Coopers careening along sidewalks and up and down subway stairs. (In the 1969 version, the Mini Coopers, then equally cute and stylish, raced through the streets of Torino.) Steve, meanwhile, watches from an appropriately menacing black helicopter, such that Norton’s performance is rendered in the most tedious sort of reaction shots: "Hmmm, what are you up to, Charlie?"--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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.(Bryn Mawr; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

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; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; 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.(Baederwood; Roxy)

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)

(AMC Orleans; UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; UA grant; UA Riverview)

SPELLBOUND

In Toronto last fall, you could actually hear the rarely experienced phenomenon of "buzz" at work; everywhere you went, people seemed to be talking about Spellbound, to which their audience would inevitably reply, "Spelling bees?" Maybe spelling champions were the kids even the nerds made fun of, but Jeff Blitz’s piercing, engaging documentary finds that the American dream is alive and well, at least as far as the National Spelling Bee is concerned. Following eight children on their way to nationals, Blitz finds a true microcosm of American society, from the well-heeled New Haven family whose daughter all but expects to win to the recent immigrants from India who’ve tutored first one child and then the other in French and Spanish (in addition to Latin at school, of course), all in the hopes of mastering the art of spelling words no one’s ever heard of. ("Cephalalgia" comes up in the first round.) There’s enough drama on these kids’ faces to make for an epic miniseries, but Blitz ably boils it down in 95 minutes, elegantly interweaving stories once the big contest begins. Even at the end, Spellbound doesn’t falter; Blitz’s climax takes the emphasis off victory, pointing the way toward the post-orthographical future. --S.A.(Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

TOGETHER

Dismiss Chen Kaige’s story of a young violin prodigy struggling with the responsibilities of his talent as a Hollywoodized sugar pill at your peril; Together eventually boasts more toughness than any number of grit-scoured H-wood dramas. Following the boy and his success-hungry father from the provinces to Beijing, Together spans the extremes of Chinese culture (recalling Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju), but the tension between traditionalism and progress doesn’t play out along predictable lines. Together’s ultimate rejection of material success doesn’t come across as piety but as a hard-won insight, no doubt born of its maker’s own bouts with success. --Sam Adams (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

WINGED MIGRATION

Moments in Jacques Perrin’s documentary, which follows migrating birds in flight around the globe, almost defy belief: The camera seems to soar among them like, well, a bird, dipping and diving, so close you swear you could reach out and grab a feather. Waddling geese are transformed into sleek creatures of the sky, while birds that already seemed graceful become almost supernatural. A few moments break the spell, though; twice, when the camera is about to capture the food chain in all its merciless, fascinating splendor, Perrin cuts away, which seems more dishonest than tasteful -- edit that stuff out for the Discovery Channel, but leave it in for the theater. And though you’d think a film about birds couldn’t possibly have any political content, what else to make of a sequence where Perrin cuts from American hunters downing birds in flight to a flock flying past the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty? No Frog-basher I, but something smells fishy, and it ain’t just that seagull. --S.A.(Bala; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

WRONG TURN

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Answers the question:

What if the Blair Witch had been

a bunch of rednecks?

(AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)

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; UA Riverview)