Larger, louder, faster. Miami detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) are back bigtime, pissing off the white establishment and working their mojo. They shoot up Klan members, crash cars and track ferocious ecstasy dealers, Russian Peter Storemare and Cuban Jordi Mollà, invidiously aligned to move money and drugs inside eviscerated corpses, a gimmick allowing for spectacular gross-outs. Again directed by Michael Bay and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the movie doesn’t know when to quit, piling on macho stunts (the Humvee booming down a hill full of homes is pretty stunning), Mike’s love-god routine and a wholly delirious Lawrence (as when Marcus ingests some X and starts feeling his own nipples). And then, once the boys have finished what for others would be a whole movie, they start again, getting high-tech help from the CIA when they have to recover Marcus’ kidnapped sister/Mike’s new squeeze (Gabrielle Union) in Cuba. This is the film’s most outrageous fantasy, that the agency has its act together. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

What’s not to love about Mandy Moore? The charming pop star is not only dating Andy Roddick, but also working on a decent movie career, playing a high-school diva in The Princess Diaries and a lovely doomed-by-illness girl in A Walk to Remember. In Clare Kilner’s film, as Halley, she’s also lovely, but with edge and enough odd supporting characters to make this conventional coming-of-age story fresh. Though Neena Beber’s script relies on by-the-book crises (death, pregnancy, car accident), "surefire" gags (grandma Nina Foch smokes pot and cracks wise, though it is wonderful to see her on screen doing anything) and musical courtship montages, the film’s rhythms are delicate. Allison Janney is subtle as Halley’s newly divorced mom, and as the boyfriend, Trent Ford is alternately prickly and dreamboaty, a suitable teenromance object of affection. Best is Moore, who is mature and delightfully young at the same time. --C.F. (UA Grant; UA Main St; UA Riverview)

Adapted from a novel by Dodie Smith (best known for 101 Dalmatians), Tim Fywell’s minor yarn treads familiar young-adult territory, with fairly predictable results. The Mortmains are a British family set up in an old, crumbling castle, headed by Bill Nighy’s brokenhearted novelist, unable to write even before the death of his wife left him an ineffectual drunk. Our eyes, though, are trained on Cassandra (Romola Garai), the younger of two daughters, forever overshadowed by her flame-haired elder sister, Rose (Rose Byrne). Forever scribbling in her notebooks (Do I see an authorial alter ego?), Cassandra is initially bedeviled by the arrival of two wealthy Americans (a goateed Henry Thomas and Marc Blucas, monumentally dull as always), but when Rose commences a flirtation with both, Cassandra’s feelings begin to take hops in directions her isolated childhood has left her ill-equipped to understand. Garai’s capturing of those inchoate emotions is Castle’s most memorable feature, but it’s not enough to enliven a formulaic exercise. --Sam Adams (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

Everyone knows about James Bond’s MI6, the UK’s international secret intelligence organization. Nobody knows about MI7, which seems to be better at that whole secret thing -- a minor miracle, given the Clouseau-level incompetence of its top agent, Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson). English -- who’s only High Spy because his negligence got all the other agents killed -- has all the criminal-thwarting skills of a moderately talented gibbon and all the raw, magnetic savoir-faire of, well, Mr. Bean. In spite of these considerable drawbacks, he’s got a better-than-outside chance at foiling outrageously accented John Malkovich’s Gallic plot to usurp the Queen’s throne, getting nearly all the way to first wicket with Interpol agent Natalie Imbruglia (!), and most impressively, pantsing the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although there are a few gutbusters along the way, Atkinson’s toady mugging and flailing shtick is largely a Bean retread, and the creaky world-domination plot manages the trick of being simultaneously pedestrian and ridiculous. It’s a shame that there isn’t much more to this than ejector-seat gags and poop jokes; the potential is there, and we’re ready to laugh, Rowan, but most of this material isn’t licensed to kill. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Bala; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

This collection of short films nominated for this past Academy Awards is thankfully more imaginative than its title. (Come on, people: it’s not like puns on "shorts" are hard to come up with.) Including all but one of the 10 nominated short subjects (minus the 38-minute "Johnny Flynton"), the collection reveals Oscar’s short subjects to be of about the same quality as its features, well-crafted, mildly provocative, but none truly outstanding. The main attractions for most will be Pixar’s "Mike’s New Car," a brief sketch involving the main characters from Monsters, Inc. , and "The ChubbChubbs!", a Sony Pictures Imageworks production that screened in theaters before Men in Black II. (Both were omitted from the preview tape, natch.) Of the three other animated nominees, the warped "Mt. Head," a kind of Japanese Bill Plympton fantasia, stands out the most, but its hysterics grow tiresome even over a handful of minutes. Live-action-wise, the Belgian "Fait d’Hiver" and the French "I’ll Wait for the Next One," tell sharp stories with swift punch lines, though neither amounts to more than an urban legend, while the Australian "Inja" tells a parable of race relations that ends with an emphatic question mark. That leaves the charming, if deliberately silly, "This Charming Man," from Denmark, in which a Dane masquerades as a Pakistani to win the heart of a former schoolmate who’s teaching foreign-language classes. A romantic comedy enlaced with blunt references to Danish racism, the film (which has nothing whatsoever to do with The Smiths) is hardly essential viewing, but its good-naturedness is enough to make you want to see director Martin Strange-Hansen work at greater length. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

"Everyone has a private life, a public life and a secret life," Dan Mahowny (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tells his shrink. "Trouble is, my secret life is a bit less secret than anyone else’s." Indeed. During the 1980s, the real Mahowny, a timorous Toronto banker, stole $10.2 million to maintain his gambling habit. In director Richard Kwietniowski’s script, from Gary Ross’ book, Stung, Mahowny is a difficult character to like, snuffly and reclusive, and particularly selfish when interacting with his strangely generous girlfriend (Minnie Driver). In other words, he’s a character Hoffman might play easily, but the film isn’t about that so much as it is about his lack of affect, the problems in reading surfaces that reveal precious little -- the eerie non-ending night of the casino, the thrill of winning huge amounts of money, the awe bestowed on anyone who does it, the business of gaming and the business of cop crackdowns. As the curt and frankly mystified Atlantic City casino manager who deals most often with Mahowny, John Hurt (who starred in Kwietniowski’s Love and Death on Long Island) is exquisite. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)