ANATOMY OF HELL
For all its provocations, there's nothing in Catherine Breillat's new film as jarring as the opening disclaimer: "A film is an illusion, not reality fiction or a happening." Considering that Breillat's oeuvre is littered with graphic sex, genital close-ups and brutal outbreaks of violence, the statement seems disingenuous, if not absurd. The extent to which illusion neutralizes Breillat's literalist take on sexual relations becomes clear when, as warned, the camera cuts away from actress Amira Casar to a body double for "the most intimate scenes": If that's not Casar's hoo-hah housing that rounded stone invader, then why bother showing it at all? Based on Breillat's novel Pornocratie, Anatomy reportedly began life as a Marguerite Duras adaptation, which explains the flat pretensions masquerading as profundities: When a man asks her why she's slitting her wrists in a nightclub bathroom, Casar answers, "Because I'm a woman." Soon, she's paying the fellow, a gay hustler played by porn star Rocco Siffredi (Breillat's ironically titled Romance) to "watch me where I'm unwatchable," though it's more a matter of listening when she's unlistenable. It's a shame that such tedious provocations win U.S. distribution, while Breillat's far more interesting Sex Is Comedy, a playfully self-referential account of the making of Fat Girl, vanished without a trace. —Sam Adams (Prince)

THE FIRST DAUGHTER
Katie Holmes could not be more adorable as the title character in Forest Whitaker's by-the-book romance. Whether dressed in gown and tiara or slacks and pert jacket, she's plainly framed to recall Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday, even as she's stuck with a script that replays Chasing Liberty. At long last on her own (with a battery of Secret Service agents) at a California college, the first daughter cuts loose, much to the horror of her father (Michael Keaton) and mother (Margaret Colin — whom Holmes resembles almost uncannily in some shots), in the midst of running for a second term. Aided by her new best friend and roommate (pop/soul crooner Amerie), Holmes seeks out adventure and boys. Complications arise when she falls for Marc Blucas, typecast here as the second coming of Riley Finn, the earnest soldier boy he played on Buffy. While most of the film is clunkily predictable, some scenes are so laughably cliched (cameras circling the kiss, the couple's afternoon escape in a canoe, he with fishing pole and she with pink parasol) that you might think the director was handed a set of conventions and overkilled them deliberately. --Cindy Fuchs (Cinemagic; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

THE FORGOTTEN
As Telly (Julianne Moore) is grieving over the loss of her 9-year-old son in a plane crash, her husband (Anthony Edwards) and doctor (Gary Sinise) up and tell her that the child never existed. Unwilling to "forget" (a suggestion made to her more than once), Telly hooks up with the significantly named Ash (Dominic West), her Brooklyn neighbor and self-medicating father of another victim on the same flight. Their quest for the "truth" leads to support by a skeptical NY detective (Alfre Woodard), repeated run-ins with National Security agents, and chases on foot or by car, in which our heroes undeniable always elude their supposedly highly trained pursuers. Frequently silly and stunningly reductive, the film ends with a swift descent into utter ridiculousness. Most intriguingly, though, director Joseph Ruben (whose brilliant 1987 film, The Stepfather hints at similar themes) has conjured a consideration of memory as a willful act. In the midst of post-9/11 calls to remember and get even, as well as a presidential campaign focused on faulty memories, historical revisions and outright lies, the movie posits a moral high ground for fervent remembering and makes those who forget (or engineer forgetting) into abject evildoers. The "sides" gimmick makes no sense, but the stakes seem strangely relevant. --C.F.(AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

THE HILLSIDE STRANGLER
The cinematic equivalent of serial killer trading cards, Hillside Strangler is the latest in a line of direct-to-video biopics wallowing in the true-crime mud. Director Chuck Parello and co-writer Stephen Johnston, collaborators on 2000's Ed Gein and separately responsible for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2 and Ted Bundy, further indulge their fetish with this profile of killin' cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. The first act is played as a smirky 1970s Natural Born Killers, milking the oh-so-original comic potential of wide lapels and man-perms, but once the murders start, so do the slasher movie cliches, with a parade of nubile young blondes doing stupid things, taking off their clothes, and getting killed. It is nearly impossible to discern a dividing line between the killers' misogyny and the filmmakers'; once the actresses lose their tops, the camera inevitably loses interest in their faces. C. Thomas Howell gamely overplays Bianchi as a clueless mama's boy overwhelmed by the readily available sex and drugs in L.A., but Nicholas Turturro merely yells his way through a one-note role as his psychopathic cousin. Grudging attempts at psychological insight are made with Bianchi's desire to become a policeman, but these are never contextualized amidst all the grisly rubbernecking. --Shaun Brady (Prince)

THE LAST SHOT
The concept for Jeff Nathanson's directorial debut is clever and perhaps even timely: an FBI agent, Joe (Alec Baldwin), connives to bust a gangster (Tony Shalhoub) by soliciting his investment in a New Jersey film production. Reasoning that anyone can be (or pose as) a "movie producer," Joe buys the rights to a script by Steven Schats (Matthew Broderick), which is, incidentally, about his sister's death in the Grand Canyon. Joe hires a famous actress (Toni Collette) and slowly falls for Steven, a generous, gentle, fretful, winning and wholly enthusiastic artist of mediocre talent. Resourceful and shrewd, both Baldwin and Broderick help to fill in screenplay gaps, as their characters develop an unlikely mutual appreciation. Still, the jokes tend to fall flat. With a premise at once "insider" and "universal," cynical and hopeful, the movie never quite makes its point. Because everyone — from the feds to the movie people to the gangsters — is deceptive and self-interested, no one is quite responsible for the ensuing ruckus, heartaches, or embarrassments, and the lessons learned are ho-hum. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

SHAUN OF THE DEAD
Two-thirds of the team behind the slacker Britcom Spaced (well worth bending the law to watch), Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright exhume the zombie genre and feed it a few pints of bitter, putting a satirical, laddish spin on the dead men walking. The best joke is how long Shaun (Pegg), whose 30s are approaching with all deliberate speed, takes to notice that the people around him are turning into shambling, undead husks. To him, that's how they looked beforehand, checking their watches at the bus stop and hurrying home for dinner, though his own life is hardly more exciting — a dead-end job managing kids he could have fathered, a long-term girlfriend who's about to dump him (and soon does), and a pot-dealing roommate (the sublimely inert Nick Frost) who's more consumed by PlayStation than the game of life. More than fond homage or a piss-take, Shaun actually gets George Romero better than the Dawn of the Dead remake, not least because it's funny. At least, until it isn't. Evidently determined to "outgrow" their TV origins, Pegg and Wright (who co-wrote and directed) saddle Shaun with an unwieldy and interminable sequence which features far too much crying and growing (they should have hired Larry David as their script doctor). Thankfully, a throwaway ending dispenses with the lessons learned. You can't kill what isn't breathing. --S. A. (Bridge; UA Riverview)

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
I'd always assumed that Frank Darabont's 1994 guys-in-prison yarn acquired the bulk of its inflated reputation on video because, in essence, Shawshank was good TV: solid story, decent performances, characterizations that don't develop so much as expand, and high-toned but essentially dull imagery. A short theatrical run to promote the upcoming DVD does nothing to dissuade that impression, though the black-on-black tones of Roger Deakins' cinematography are worth a look. There's a lived-in authenticity to Morgan Freeman's performance as the prison's resident fixer, but it's overwhelmed by Tim Robbins' blank-faced innocuousness and the grating pseudo-Runyon dialogue taken straight from Stephen King's novella. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

WHEN WILL I BE LOVED
I don't know James Toback, when will you? Maybe when you stop making movies about slick-ass hustlers who are obviously just a front for your own too-hipness, or when you stop casting your famous friends to prove that you have them? (You know Mike Tyson. We get it. Two movies is too many.) I realize that in getting Neve Campbell to strip off you've earned the thanks of many a hairy-palmed Scream fan, but I'm just not buying her as the suave, sexually adventurous seductress who twists her would-be mogul boyfriend (the convincingly callow Fred Weller) and an Italian media mogul (Dominic Chianese) around her fingers. I know you think you like strong women, but the end of the movie suggests there's only one way you like them, and it isn't in control. Clearly dropping references to Roc-A-Fella and Glenn Gould makes you feel like the coolest dude around, but boy, is your shit tired. I suppose the title's lack of a question mark means you don't expect an answer. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)