Continuing Movie Shorts

BREAKIN' ALL THE RULES
Dumped by his model girlfriend (Bianca Lawson), Jamie Foxx quits his job at Spoils publishing, stops shaving, writes the best-selling Breakup Handbook, then falls for his cousin's girl (Gabrielle Union). He doesn't quite feel guilty, because his self-absorbed cousin (Morris Chestnut, who already starred in this movie, when it was called Two Can Play That Game) asks him to help him break up with Union. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES
Coffee and Cigarettes is a return for Jim Jarmusch. It takes him back to the black-and-white vignettes of Stranger Than Paradise and the variations-on-a-theme riffing of Night on Earth. Low budget and low-speed, in the sense that conversations over the titular substances don't move especially quickly, the film is really a set of 10 film-ettes, shot over a decade. The collection is held together by thematic focus (the coffee and cigarettes) and the weird ways in which most of the actors are playing "themselves." Iggy Pop meets up in a diner with Tom Waits, their conversation circling celebrity as a kind of cover for identity. Alfred Molina has charted his family tree only to find that Steve Coogan is a distant relative. Cinqué and Joie Lee (Spike's siblings, who've both worked with Jarmusch) endure the attention of their waiter (Steve Buscemi), who says they remind him of "Heckyl and Jeckyl, you know, those cackling magpies," even as the twins roll their eyes in disbelief at his blundering offensiveness. All these and other connections, oblique and unavoidable, outline the provocative method to Jarmusch's seeming disorder. The film is all about finding the sameness in difference. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

CONNIE AND CARLA
After they witness a murder in Chicago, Liza-and-Barbra-loving airport bar singers Connie (Vardalos) and Carla (Toni Collette) escape to the West Coast, where they don big wigs in order to hide out as drag queens. This leads to Connie's near-romance with Jeff (David Duchovny), homophobic brother of one of their new friends (Stephen Spinella). The film allows some questions concerning traditional gender, but its celebration of "being yourself" is a little strange, given the girls' incessant lying to their generous and trusting hosts. --C.F. ( Ritz 16)

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND
Eternal Sunshine is a love story, but a love story in reverse. Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Joel (Jim Carrey) fall for each other in the first 10 minutes, and then, all of a sudden, Joel is mourning her loss: One second she's fetching her toothbrush, the next he's sobbing uncontrollably behind the wheel of his car. Instead of not returning Joel's phone calls, Clementine has hired a company to wipe all memory of him from her mind. No muss, no fuss. After some soul-searching, he decides to erase Clementine as well. In fact, we start to realize, he's already made the decision: We've been watching his memories, which are being erased before our eyes. Director Michel Gondry gives Charlie Kaufman's conceits weight and form, tethering them to earth. Such convolutions require absolute simplicity from the actors, who also include Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

GLOOMY SUNDAY
Adapted and directed by Rolf Schübel, Gloomy Sunday grafts a tired period melodrama onto the legend of the titular song, made infamous in late '30s Europe when media reports hyped it as the soundtrack to a rash of suicides. The Jewish owner of a chic Budapest eatery (Joachim Krõl) hires a new pianist (Stefano Dionisi), with whom he must then share the affections of the restaurant's beautiful manager (Erika Marozsán). The central threesome is played out with an unconvincing lack of complication, and the Holocaust is depicted as little more than an inconvenient intrusion into this blissful ménage. -- Shaun Brady (Bala)

GODZILLA
It's in the nature of movie monsters to return from the grave, so it's fitting that the original Godzilla is back in theaters 50 years after its initial release. But be warned: The radioactive, fire-breathing creature from beneath the sea hasn't brought Raymond Burr along this time. In fact, this uncut, undubbed version is practically a U.S. premiere. Godzilla's rampage through Tokyo, with its eerie resonance to the Allied firebombing, was carefully left by Honda until an hour into the movie; in the American version, it's the first thing you see. An explicit (if not coherent) anti-nuke allegory, the Japanese version ends with the solemn Dr. Yamane (Kurosawa veteran Takashi Shimura) musing that if mankind continues testing nuclear weapons, another Godzilla will surely be awakened from its watery sleep. Though in later movies, Godzilla acquired a new personality to suit each variation on the story, here it's a force of nature, unleashed by human foolishness. There's no malice in its movements, even as it's melting electrical towers and cramming train cars into its mouth. Like the H-bomb, a repeated point of comparison, Godzilla destroys because it has no other purpose. -- S.A. (Ritz Five)

I'M NOT SCARED
Adapted by Niccol Ammaniti from his novel, Gabriele Salvatores' film paints a simultaneously grim and romantic portrait of a child's disillusionment. One hot summer's day in southern Italy, 9-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Christiano) is playing with his friends, their bare legs dark against the sunburnt fields. After he proves himself the bravest of the group (walking along an old building's exposed ceiling beam by narrating himself as the "Lizard Man," his own invention), he goes back to their play area to retrieve his younger sister's glasses. At this point, his life changes forever, when he discovers a boy in a hole. His leg chained, his body bruised and bloodied, Filippo (Mattia di Pierro) is also nearly blinded by the weeks he's been living in darkness. Michele overcomes his fear to feed and befriend this poor child, also 9. Even as Michele spends his evenings with his gentle mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijõn) and stern father (Dino Abbrescia), he comes to understand Filippo's fear, to empathize with his trauma. At the same time, he learns terrible truths about his parents, loyalty and desperation. Though the plot occasionally lurches into melodrama, Italo Petriccione's stunning cinematography and Massimo Fiocchi's delicate editing make Michele's journeys -- emotional and physical -- feel nuanced. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse)

KILL BILL, VOL. 2
In its first segment, Quentin Tarantino reminds you what a thrilling filmmaker he can be. The Bride (Uma Thurman) and Bill (David Carradine) square off in their first onscreen meeting, captured in widescreen black-and-white against a dusty Texas plain, the language of the Western rewritten to accommodate a dispute between ex-lovers. Unfortunately, QT quickly reminds you what a tiresome dilettante he can be as well, paying "tribute" to dozens of styles without making any of them wholly his own. What animates the best genre films is conviction, but Kill Bill is like a DVD changer on shuffle, its stylistic shifts conveying nothing except the breadth of Tarantino's video collection. (An affectionately silly Shaw Bros. parody goes on punishingly long, practically demanding that audiences toke up in the bathroom first.) Any 20 minutes of Kill Bill might have developed into a great movie, but the only thing Tarantino was developing was film. --S.A. (UA Riverview)

LAWS OF ATTRACTION
Radiant as ever, Julianne Moore here reveals game comic timing, in particular with Frances Fisher, who plays her mother. Unfortunately, she spends more time on screen with romantic object and rival divorce attorney Pierce Brosnan. Ostensibly smitten on their first antagonistic meeting, he pursues her by showing her up, repeatedly. The film takes what seems a very long time to get the couple hooked up, split, reunited, then split and reunited again, by way of a nasty divorce case that takes them both to Ireland (Brosnan's favorite location of late), where they endure It Happened One Night-ish road-tripping. --C.F.(Ritz 16

LIFE OF BRIAN
Though it most obviously stabs at Christianity with the story of Brian (Graham Chapman), a Jerusalem nobody whose life uncannily parallels that of a certain J.C., Monty Python's freeform biblical satire's target is not any one religion, but religions in general, even secular ones. Whether it's Brian's unwanted disciples arguing over whether to follow the shoe or the gourd he's left behind as he runs away, or the anti-Roman factions who do more damage to each other than the empire, Brian stabs at the heart of comedy's favorite target, conformity. If the jokes don't double you over with the same force the 400th time through, Life of Brian's spirit comes through with ever-greater force. Apart from a few dead spots, this is Python's most sustained peak. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

MAN ON FIRE
Denzel Washington plays God's Warrior (Creasy to the ungodly), a Bible-reading former covert ops agent and current alcoholic whose vengeance is unleashed when the cuddly kid he's bodyguarding (Dakota Fanning) is kidnapped and killed by a group of Mexican thugs. With scars on his hands and wounds (from the kidnapping) that won't stop bleeding, he's Dirty Harry with stigmata. --S.A.(AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

MEAN GIRLS
When Cady (Lindsay Lohan) attends her first day of high school, she's startled to see just how strictly the other kids adhere to their habits. This leads to one of Mean Girls' repeated metaphors: As she's spent her childhood being homeschooled by her anthropologist parents in Africa, Cady envisions her new classmates as inhabitants of a "wild" habitat. Luckily, she's soon adopted by fellow mavericks, lesbian goth Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and flamingly gay Damian (Daniel Franzese). Most aggressive among the packs is the Plastics, comprised of Queen Bee Regina (Rachel McAdams) and her wannabe minions Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and Karen (Amanda Seyfried). When Regina takes a liking to "new meat" Cady, Janis and Damien send her forth on a mission to infiltrate the enemy pod and return with information. Little does Cady know that Janis has a personal history with Regina, or that she will develop her own personal investment, in the form of a crush on Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), Regina's ex, whom this uber-mean-girl immediately repossesses once she perceives Cady's interest. Directed by Mark Waters (Lohan's Freaky Friday), Tina Fey's script reveals the multiple ways that kids mimic "grownup" behaviors, even as they resist them. --C.F. (UA 69th St.; UA Riverview)

MONSIEUR IBRAHIM
Gazing out his window in mid-'60s Paris, young Moses (Pierre Boulanger) is distracted by the hookers who work la rue Bleue. While Timmy Thomas' "Why Can't We Live Together" fills the soundtrack, the boy imagines escape from his depressive father's dark, airless apartment. Moses finds some respite in the corner store, owned by a Sufi "from the Golden Crescent," Ibrahim (Omar Sharif), who teaches him generosity, joy and trust. Following some misadventures with a local girl and other crises, Moses accompanies Ibrahim on a drive to Turkey, where the mentor imparts more life lessons, including an appreciation of the sensual logic of dancing (demonstrated by a set of whirling dervishes). By the end, the film is written into a corner, resorting to the tritest of resolutions. Given its dependence on stereotypes and cliches -- the golden-hearted hookers, the flinty Jewish father -- the finale is not surprising, but it is disappointing. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz at the Bourse)

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD
Guy Maddin's silly-serious story involves Canadian beer magnate Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini in a curly blond wig), who sets out to make the Great Depression even greater by staging a worldwide contest to find the nation with the world's most tearful tunes. (The idea is taken from a screenplay by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, though Maddin and co-screenwriter George Toles would seem to have used little more than his premise.) With Prohibition coming, the Canadian (despite the accent) Port-Huntly fears a drop in sales, one she hopes to offset by beaming melancholy melodies across the border, leaving the Yanks with sorrow too deep to be quenched by anything but bootleg Port-Huntly brew. Every character in The Saddest Music is hiding a past that would make a statue weep. For starters, there's Lady P-H herself, who's lost both legs to an accidental amputation. Then there's old Fyodor (David Fox), the good Lady's onetime lover and the wielder of the saw. As far as tearfulness goes, though, neither has anything on Fyodor's son Roderick (Maddin stalwart Ross McMillan), driven into solitary exile by the death of his son. Lady Port-Huntly's contest brings him home, but in disguise: as "Gavrillo the Great," a solo cellist of reputed Serbian heritage. If the black hole of sadness has a Big Bang, it's Fyodor's other son, the brash, opportunistic Chester (Mark McKinney), who returns to frosty Winnipeg calling himself an American theatrical producer. It stands to reason that in a Canadian movie, there's nothing worse than pretending to be American, and indeed, Chester sows destruction in his path while whistling a cheery ditty. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

SHREK 2
Amid DreamWorks' self-congratulatory, Disney-baiting, beautifully animated reunion of Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy (as Shrek, Fiona and Donkey), a new cat all but steals the show. Flustered that his daughter has married an ogre (much less is an ogre), Fiona's father (John Cleese) wants her to reconsider -- to the point of hooking up with Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), an arrangement favored by PC's mom Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders). To that end, dad hires an assassin, namely the legendary Puss-in-Boots. Voiced by Antonio Banderas, Puss not only offers a nifty parody of Zorro, but also puts on a big-sad-eyed kitty face when overtly aggressive strategies fail. Cute, confident and utterly stylish in his feathered swordsman's hat, Puss at first threatens Donkey (who claims the "position of annoying talking animal" for himself), then grows on him, as he does on everyone else (perhaps especially when he coughs up a hairball: yucky!). Much like the first film, the sequel works at skewering traditional fairy tales and conventional children's fare (i.e., Eisner and them), as if this is a new idea. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; Narberth; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER AND SPRING
The second "spring" in the title of Kim Ki-Duk's elegant fable also serves as the heading for its first chapter, an appropriate beginning for a story that ends where it began. Tipping his hat to Ozu (just in time for the centenary), Kim sets his tale of spiritual struggle on a floating monastery, where an old monk raises his young disciple only to watch him betray his teachings, secure in the knowledge that his behavior is part of the lesson. Kim, whose usual fare (like the fishhook-swallowing The Isle) is distinctly higher-wattage, doesn't always trust his story; invasive music swamps more than one lesson. But the early shots are perfectly composed as a Zen painting, and Kim constantly finds surprises in a zone often clouded with fuzzy mysticism. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

SUPER SIZE ME
If you view documentaries as means to an end, you have to give it up for Morgan Spurlock's grease-raking doc, which depicts the gruesome consequences of Spurlock's monthlong all-McDonald's diet: Shortly after its Sundance premiere, the company announced it was striking the Supersize option from its menu. But Spurlock's egocentric premise is more echo chamber than exposé. The doctors he engages to check his progress (and safeguard his health) uniformly express astonishment that anyone could do such damage to their body so rapidly with a high-fat diet, a good indication of just how contrived Spurlock's Big Mac binge really is. (I imagine if you ate nothing but broccoli for a month, your body wouldn't like it too much either.) Ignoring matters of race, social class and gender with astonishing blitheness, Spurlock paints the U.S. as a nation of people who eat crap by choice, as if Whole Foods and KFC were fighting for the same demographic. With its zippy graphics and easy-to-swallow factoids, Super Size Me is the Happy Meal of investigative documentaries, its bite-size satisfaction followed by a sour aftertaste. --S.A. (Ritz East; Ritz 16)

TROY
Cocky warrior Achilles (Brad Pitt) annoys ambitious King Agamemnon (Brian Cox) precisely because he's more concerned with his own name than the king's. The battlefield that takes up most of the film is, of course, Troy, where the stunning Greek queen Helen (Diane Kruger) has arrived with her lover, Trojan prince Paris (Orlando Bloom). The problem is that she's left behind her churlish husband, Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). While he wants to get her back so he can kill her himself, his brother Agamemnon wants to settle a beef with Troy's King Priam (Peter O'Toole). And so the brothers sail forth with their 1,000 ships, each sustained by his own obviously fictional rationale for war. The showdown between Achilles and Hector is the film's liveliest; While this scene recalls the visual thrills of Gladiator, the movie that might be blamed for the spate of mytho-historical "epics," it also reveals what's troubling about current efforts to update the genre. The shock-and-awe spectacle becomes its own end. -- C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

VALENTÍN
Rarely has the phrase "child's-eye view" been more literally embodied than in Alejando Agresti's tart comedy. Posed at adult-waist height, the camera looks up at the unhappy adults around Rodrigo Noya's bug-eyed would-be matchmaker, a strategy that suggests both powerlessness and an ability to see what adults literally overlook. This is, to be sure, well-worn stuff, despite the occasional intrusion of late-'70s Argentinean political unrest (so limited it's more distracting than enriching). But the movie's as firm as it is fuzzy, particularly when Valentín confronts his father (played by Agresti). A stooped Carmen Maura plays Valentín's long-suffering grandmother, almost unrecognizable without her Almodovárian flair. Along with Un Oso Rojo, a strong example of new Argentinean cinema. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

VAN HELSING
Under the auspices of The Order (a mysterious cabal associated with the Vatican and supported by a basement full of monks committed to research and gadget-making), Dr. Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) hunts monsters. Introduced as he takes down an oversized-and-CGIed Mr. Hyde, he reveals his discomfort with his gift for violence and his ongoing mission. Vanquishing evil usually leads to the discovery of a vulnerable human just beneath the surface. Not so with his new target, Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), who's just plain bad. In Transylvania, he hooks up with Anna (Kate Beckinsale), trying to save her brother (Will Kemp) from eternal wolfmanhood, even while battling the Count's trio of bloodlusty wives; they swoop down on Anna's village like Oz's Wicked Witch demanding "Surrender Dorothy." (In fact, the batty little "progeny" produced by his Dracula's mating look a lot like the Flying Monkeys.) Van Helsing has a sidekick (David Wenham), a dark past he can't remember (rather like Wolverine) and a new friend in Frankenstein's not-so-evil Monster (Shuler Hensley). Anna has a very tight bodice. And the film can't get out of its own way: it's too long, the effects are shaky and the bad fathers-irrelevant mothers legacy needs updating. -- C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St., UA Cheltenham, UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview

YOUNG ADAM
Finding a body afloat in dark water, coal-barge worker Joe (Ewan McGregor) pulls it out, with the help of his employer Les (Peter Mullan). What follows is a complexly structured, provocative mediation on amorality, centered on Joe's rather self-conscious self-centeredness. A self-described writer, his descriptive talents and sexual voraciousness impress Les' wife (the ever extraordinary Tilda Swinton), at least to the point that they embark on an affair that she will use to provoke her husband's departure. David Mackenzie's film, based on Alexander Trocchi's novel, cuts back and forth in time, revealing Joe's slow movement toward his current state, which his ex (Emily Mortimer) describes as "in bed with the illustrious working classes." The film's explicit and unromantic view of his activities (and McGregor's willingness to show his penis on screen) earned it an NC-17, though the images are compellingly thematic, concerning his dispassion and carelessness. Joe's trajectory through postwar Glasgow and Edinburgh takes on a dread inevitability; he has a history with the corpse that reconfirms and expands your sense of his many lacks. --C.F. (Ritz Five)