Rick McKay's excitable documentary is as breathless as its title, which technically goes on to include the phrase "by the legends who were there." A labor of love decades in the making, McKay's ramble down memory lane stops at all the right doorsteps: a cast of thousands it isn't, but it's off by less than a factor of 10. So, points for persistence, but few for daring: Faced with some of the stage's brightest stars, McKay can't wring out more than the same anecdotes they've told a hundred talk-show hosts and ladies' leagues. Not surprising, as on the occasions we overhear McKay's voice, he's typically asking something piercing like, "So, was it really a golden age?" (Gee, I dunno. I kinda liked Starlight Express.) Even the film's few revealing sections, like a paean to forgotten actress Laurette Taylor, are marred by redundancy; it's not necessary to overlap a dozen people saying Taylor's name to make the point that she was esteemed. (And when McKay uses the same technique to prove that everyone hung out at Walgreen's — oy.) Worst, McKay's supposed valentine to the theater leaves the impression that Broadway today is a barren wasteland, and it utterly neglects productions that fall too far south of Times Square. What a night in the theater. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Rhys Ifans revisits his lovable Notting Hill slob as the title character, an Aussie construction worker anticipating a long-planned camping trip. When his upwardly mobile girlfriend (Justine Clarke) nixes the vacation to schmooze with a local newscaster, Danny does the logical thing: He ties helium balloons to a lawn chair and floats away. Shot down by fireworks over the small town of Clarence, he lands in the back yard of lonely meter maid Miranda Otto and at the center of a would-be exercise in Capra-corn. But director Jeff Balsmeyer ignores the corruption and hardship that gave heft to Capra's populism and limits his politics to a speech extolling the virtues of "little people" that would make even Gary Cooper sound insincere. The leads are nicely restrained, and Clarke remarkably uncovers a layered, empathetic character within the scheming shrew handed her by the script, but otherwise Clarence seems to be where wacky sitcom neighbors go to die. Though surprisingly riddled with plot holes for a film that shouldn't be complicated enough to require them (Danny becomes a media phenom after his stunt, but apparently no one thinks to air a photo), Danny Deckchair is inoffensive fluff for those content with predictable, undemanding romantic comedy. — Shaun Brady (Ritz 16)

If Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's reverent revert bio sheds no new light on its estimable subject, at least this profile of the author of A People's History of the United States serves as a welcome refresher course. The book Matt Damon told Robin Williams would "knock you on your ass" has sold more than a million copies — not bad for a work of explicitly revisionist history that rounds up what Zinn calls "the past's fugitive moments of compassion." As an activist as well as an academic, Zinn has been on the right side of history more than a few times: protesting against segregation and for students' rights as a professor at all-black Spelman College in the 1960s; brokering a deal with Ho Chi Minh to release American prisoners during the Vietnam war, and more recently protesting the war in Iraq. Neutral goes light on the rhetoric and heavy on Zinn's biography, which is enough to make any presidential candidate hang his head in shame. Born into poverty, Zinn enlisted voluntarily and flew bombing missions during World War II, which entailed dropping napalm on a small village full of German soldiers who, he says, "were just waiting for the war to end." No armchair academic, then: It was his firsthand experience of war that led him to a firm belief in peace. Neutral isn't a substitute for reading Zinn's works, or indeed much of a supplement to them, but it's a great place for neophytes to climb on board. As Zinn warns, "If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday." --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

Appropriately enough, there's repetition built right into the plot of this tedious serial-killer yarn: Aaron Eckhart is the detective chasing down Ben Kinglsey's killer, who is himself a former detective whose victims are killers themselves. E. Elias Merhige (Shadow of the Vampire) builds a nifty house of mirrors, but it quickly becomes clear he's directing your attention away from and never toward; the Seven-ish visuals are intriguing until you realize what a rancid cake they're icing. If only someone had sent Kingsley after the folks who write this stuff over and over again: That's a downsizing I could have got behind. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; UA Riverview)

Given the absolute dreckiness of Bob Clark's Baby Geniuses, you might wonder why a sequel has been made, five years later. You'll still wonder when you're done watching the second movie, which brings back triplets Gerry, Leo, and Myles Fitzgerald to play the superheroic central figure, now 7 years old and named Kahuna. He fights evil alongside new babies and new adults, and brings a back story to explain how he has stayed short and 7 since "East Berlin, 1962." Kahuna's nemesis is a Nazi (Jon Voight) who, after his plan to "capture" German orphans is foiled in a flashback, arrives in present-day L.A. to wreak more havoc on the world's children via kids'-show mind control. Here Kahuna has a superhero's lair, under the Hollywood sign, where he, four babies and their babysitter (Voight's goddaughter Skyler Shaye) plan their counterassault. The parents of one baby (Scott Baio and Vanessa Angel) run a daycare center and offer some assistance, though for the most part, the film displays adults' incompetence and irresponsibility. The digital baby lips are improved, but otherwise, the film is as unclever and unimaginative as its precursor. --C.F. (UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

Mira Nair's Thackeray adaptation is a better comedy of manners than cautionary tale, which is to say it goes better before it morphs from Jane Austen into The House of Mirth. Mildly dodgy accent aside, Reese Witherspoon's Becky Sharp earns her surname; rising from impoverished governess to down-market society wife, she flashes her pearly whites like a shark moving in for the kill. There isn't an American actor who can touch Witherspoon's comic timing, and among the Brits, only Eileen Atkins (as sardonic spinster Matilda) truly matches her wit. (Pity Romola Garai and Rhys Ifans — Amelia and Dobbin, if you're keeping track — who have to play it straight.) The British rule in India is already part of the story, but Nair, coming off Monsoon Wedding, plays up the Bollywood/Hollywood angle; when the climactic dance number arrives, you realize the underused Cinemascope frame has been calling out for it all along. The movie, and Witherspoon, don't quite manage the turn into melodrama, overseen by Gabriel Byrne's overripe Steyne, but Vanity Fair's linkage of aspiration and oppression can be dazzling. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)