THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
Nobody believes poor wooden climatologist Dennis Quaid when he announces that global warming is gonna incite a big, crazy ice age. To make matters worse, his guesstimate (100 to 1,000 years) is a bit off: the Very Perfect Storm is only, oh, let's say 48 hours away. But you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. When super cool-looking tidal waves, rain, tornadoes, hail, blizzards and their pals make a really rad unified assault on the Northern Hemisphere, you find your poncho and run. South. Grand computer-generated sequences and satellite photos and dozens of eager anchormen tell the story long before worthless professor Quaid can: Europe, Canada and the top of the U.S., plus all their crumbly landmarks, are utterly screwed. Having said almost nothing useful to advise the president, Quaid grabs a backpack and some disposable friends and heads north to rescue his dumb-ass son Jake Gyllenhaal. (Poor doof is holed up in the New York Public Library with a chick he digs.) All signs point to that being a stupid, stupid plan, but we're not about to start heeding omens now, are we? That said, when an NYC zookeeper takes a brief respite from the apocalypse to observe that his CGI wolves have escaped, you might make a mental note. --Patrick Rapa (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

LOVE ME IF YOU DARE
Yann Samuel's odious post-Amélie romance is more motion than emotion. The camera keeps zipping around, perhaps to find an angle from which its on-again, off-again lovers don't look like one-upping sadists. Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard (Thibault Verhaeghe and Josephine Lébas-Joly as kids) play childhood sweethearts whose dare/double-dare games continue into adulthood, growing ever more complicated and camouflaging a sometimes-repressed passion that's far uglier than the movie cares to admit. What can you expect from a film whose idea of everlasting romance is permanent paralysis? --Sam Adams (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

SOUL PLANE
A longtime anomaly for maintaining his long-term relationship, Snoop Dogg's marriage is ending now, as his movie career is, um, taking off. Perhaps he was distracted during filming. In music-video director Jessy Terrero's feature-film debut, Snoop shows no sign of the comedic rhythms he's demonstrated in every other film or video he's ever been in. Rather, and like everyone else in sight, he's caught in a non-role as running gag -- in his case, laidback player-pilot Capt. Mack. Also stifled in this "ghetto fab" version of Airplane! are Kevin Hart as owner of the airline (NWA), Method Man as his cousin, K.D. Aubert as his ex (there's a gesture toward "plot" in their efforts to reunite), Tom Arnold as father to 18-year-old girly Arielle Kebbel and Punk'd field agent Ryan Pinkston (pity these children), and D.L. Hughley as the bathroom attendant. (Mo'Nique, no surprise, is decidedly unstifled, jumping all over every man who comes her way, including John Witherspoon as a lecherous, lip-smacking blind man, a walking punch line that's exhausted long before he steps on screen.) "Uneven" doesn't begin to describe this raucous, $16 million string of alternating fart and sex jokes. Still, the pace flags early, and the repetition turns numbing. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE
In Toni Kalem's adaptation of Anne Tyler's novel, the romance is predictably eccentric. In small-town North Carolina, lonely Evie (Lili Taylor) wears a rabbit costume down at Kiddie Acres and lives at home with her widower dad (Tom Bower). Smitten by the self-centered late-night radio natterings of would-be rock star Drum Casey (Guy Pearce), she attends some shows and then, in a fit of worship, carves his name into her forehead -- backward, because she's looking in a bathroom mirror at the time. Her devotion attracts local press and Casey's attention; they bond a little, fall in love sort of. When Drum proposes, relatively clear-headed Evie asks why. "Because you make me feel like myself." It's hard not to notice that he sees himself in her, on her face as well as in her eyes. She's all about him; he's not into her. While Taylor can make most anything look interesting, this film (awaiting distribution since 1999) devolves into careening episodes. (You might wonder at a couple of points if whole scenes have been cut.) When Drum finally has all he needs, they've got a happy ending, with Evie still his loyal reflection. And that certainly seems backward. --C.F. (Ritz Five)

THE THIRD MAN
For all the impression he makes during his five minutes on screen, The Third Man is not Orson Welles' movie. Joseph Cotten played opposite Welles in Citizen Kane as well, but here he's the star, and the film moves to his laconic rhythm. Written by Graham Greene, The Third Man is the story of an ugly American named Holly Martins (Cotten), a pulp novel writer who arrives in a divided Vienna to find that a job opportunity has become a murder mystery -- within minutes of arriving, Martins finds not only that the friend (Welles) who called him to Vienna has been murdered, but that he was a notorious racketeer. The mystery writer drawn into a real-life mystery is a convention as old as the hills, but Greene and director play out the concept with a blend of wryness and moral depth. While a baffled Martins is asked by a book club audience for his opinion of James Joyce, he also is brought face to face with the grotesque results of his friend's black-market dealings. Reed's tilted-camera style has always struck me as unnecessarily ornate -- trying to impress Orson, perhaps? -- and the camera keeps cutting, Fritz Lang-like, to the bug-eyed faces of passersby in a half-successful attempt to create an atmosphere of paranoia. But Cotten's charm -- not unlike Jimmy Stewart's, when you think about it -- and his mixture of uprightness and confusion ultimately carry the day. By the way, this is not a "special edition," not a "director's cut," and has no "restored footage"; it's just the damn movie, shown in a lovely restored print. -- S.A. (Ritz East)