New Movie Shorts

ANCHORMAN
With his furry moustache and neatly pressed polyester suits, news anchor Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) couldn't be enjoying the 1970s more. As he shouts to his trio of news-team sidekicks (Paul Rudd, Steve Carrell and David Koechner), "We've been coming to the same party for 12 years, and in no way is that depressing!" But change comes even to San Diego; station director Fred Willard bows to network pressure and hires the station's first female reporter (perfectly coiffed Christina Applegate) and not even a hefty dose of musk-scented cologne can make things the way they were. Directed by Saturday Night Live vet Adam McKay and co-written by McKay and Ferrell, Anchorman is an unabashed vehicle for Ferrell's oversize talents, but it's assembled with just the right degree of sketch-comedy looseness: McKay doesn't mind stopping the scene for an off-topic joke, as long as it's funny enough, but he's ruthless with the overall story, such as it is. As in Elf, Ferrell plays a character who doesn't know he's human: When he falls in love with Applegate, Ferrell's amazed to discover he has feelings, previously revealed only to his yipping little dog. For all its grab-ass jokes, Anchorman is a deeply feminist movie. Ferrell and his pals end up looking the ultimate in foolishness, while Applegate stands her ground and lets them trip themselves up. Oddly enough, that doesn't give her very much to do; it's one thing to carve out a woman's place in the newsroom, another to write her the funniest lines. --Sam Adams (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

SLEEPOVER
Grown up out of the Spy Kids franchise, awkwardly charming Alexa Vega has run smack into tweens heck. Less-obviously self-absorbed than her slight elders Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff, she's good on her skateboard and just graduated from junior high. Challenged to a scavenger hunt by popular girl Sara Paxton, Vega and her sleepover friends (Mika Boorem, Scout Taylor-Compton and Kallie Flynn Childress) bet the chance to sit at the good lunch table in high school. The night is reduced to a series of episodes, including a date (set up online) with a teacher (Timothy Dowling), and near run-ins with a relentless neighborhood security officer (Steven Carell) and mom (Jane Lynch), who happens to be at the same dance club the girls sneak into. On the boys' front, Vega falls for a cute high school jock (Sean Faris) while her brother (Sam Huntington) keeps clueless dad (Jeff Garlin) at bay back home. Mostly slow-moving, predictable (the dad-at-work-in-the-kitchen scenes are just painful), and unclever (Vega's crew dances to "Wannabe," which is, like, so over), Joe Nussbaum's movie grants Vega and Boorem a couple of decent moments. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

TWIST
More Larry Clark than Charles Dickens, this adaptation relocates Oliver Twist from 19th-century London to modern-day Toronto and transforms its child pickpockets into teenage street hustlers. Writer-director Jacob Tierney shifts the focus from Oliver (Joshua Close, bearing a striking resemblance to the original Cruikshank illustrations) to "Dodge" (Nick Stahl), gone from Artful to strung-out in high heroin-chic style. As Dodge's story bears no resemblance to the novel's, parallels to the source hover on the fringes, merely adding a touch of novelty to an otherwise generic indie-film wallow in misery. The gimmicks eventually get in the way; the too-clever references distract from the otherwise somber tone, and the strategy of keeping master-criminal Bill Sikes off-screen starts to seem less menacing than silly. Told in an unrelenting series of static wide shots, Twist jettisons the novel's humor, and with it any sense of hope. Perhaps presuming to work in the Dickensian spirit of social criticism, Tierney seems to believe that happy endings ring false these days, but Twist, for all of its gritty "realism," comes off phonier than Dickens' Victorian contrivances. --Shaun Brady (Ritz at the Bourse)