MALEVOLENCE
"Kurt?" "Courtney?" "Kurt!" "Courtney!" No, it's not a night at the Cobain household, c. 1993, but something even more ghastly: Stevan Mena's warmed-over slashorium, a rancid rehash of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween and a thousand lesser imitations whose influence is hidden as well as its leading lady's Australian accent. The movie twists itself into knots delaying the inevitable: a bank robbery goes awry, one of the robbers kidnaps a mother and her young daughter, and only then do the robbers reunite at a house that happens to be a serial killer's stomping grounds. (Talk about bad days.) Though Mena's direction isn't without skill, it is without inspiration, imagination, intelligence or even a remote sense of how to grab the audience's attention without assaulting them with cheesy synthesizer chords. --Sam Adams (Roxy)

MASCULINE-FEMININE
There are times in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 movie when the noise of the street overwhelms the sound of characters talking; not surprising since Godard was more interested in the street. Filmed during a period of political and personal turmoil — American involvement in Vietnam was escalating; Godard's relationship with Anna Karina was falling apart — Masculine-Feminine is one of Godard's most disjunctive narratives with a depressive undercurrent that tugs at its episodes of larkish mayhem. As Paul, just out of the army and eager to meet girls and protest the war in Vietnam, Jean-Pierre Léaud is his awkward, ingratiating self, though real-life yé-yé star Chantal Goya strains even to play a thinly veiled version of herself: jet-black bob notwithstanding, she's no Anna Karina. No matter, since their rather ugly flirtation, which takes the movie through 15 segments called "precise facts," is mainly an excuse for Godard to indict the vacuousness of youth culture, as when he cuts from a beauty queen's admission that she has no idea where in the world wars are being fought to the caption "1965" (as in, "Do you know what time it is?"). The remaining in-jokes, like the episode where Paul leaves a movie to complain to the projectionist about the aspect ratio, seem like vestiges of happier days, while the gunshots that arbitrarily punctuate the soundtrack are harbingers of the political urgency that would soon prompt Godard to abandon storytelling altogether. Shown in a restored 35mm print with new subtitles. --S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse)

MELINDA AND MELINDA
Woody Allen's twice-told tale is half a good idea. As laid out in a pedantic prologue, the idea is to retell the same woman's story from tragic and comic points of view, as conceived by tragedian Larry Pine and comedian Wallace Shawn over dinner in a swank Manhattan eatery that seems to lend the entire movie its brown-and-gold lighting scheme. The trouble isn't just that the tragedy isn't so tragic, nor the comedy so comic (nor that such ideas are better left to Alain Resnais or Hong Sang-soo), but that the movie's interwoven segments are virtually indistinguishable though they share only a single cast member: Radha Mitchell's frazzled Melinda. Despite that comedy and tragedy are as much, if not more, a matter of tone than circumstances, visual style and timing go practically unaltered one scene to the next, negating any hint of formalist frisson and reducing the movie as a whole to a serio-comic pudding. As usual, Allen has rounded up a passel of talented actors, who must have cut their going rates in the ill-informed belief that Allen still provides a showcase for their talents: Will Ferrell, Chloé Sevigny, Chewitel Ejiofor, Jonny Lee Miller and Brooke Smith are among the wasted. --S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

MISS CONGENIALITY 2: ARMED AND FABULOUS
This latest venture in ebony-and-ivory features girls — of both genders. Three weeks after the beauty contest business, Gracie (Sandra Bullock) can no longer function as an anonymous field agent, and so agrees to be the "face of the FBI," smiling on Regis and signing her new beauty advice book, attended by queer-eye stylist (Diedrich Bader) and ferocious bodyguard Sam (Regina King, fearless as ever). All this because she's been dumped by Ben Bratt (unseen, i.e., smart enough not to sign up for a second round). Apparently, having learned nothing from her previous "girl power" outing, Gracie heads to Vegas to recover the kidnapped Miss United States (Heather Burns) and Stan (William Shatner, at once pneumatic and feeble). She tackles Dolly Parton, goes undercover as a Jewish lady and a drag queen, and bonds with Sam. Unoriginal and sluggish, the movie argues that girls don't need boys for self-esteem, which should have been the finale of the first film. Now that the "lesson," at least, is about right, can we stop? --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Narberth; Ritz 16; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

UP AND DOWN
Before a single image appears, Up and Down's clash of cultures is summed up as "Hello America" is sung in heavily accented English over a rollicking gypsy beat. Jan Hrebejk's satire depicts a Czech Republic still unable to cope with the changes wrought by the fall of communism, where rampant immigration is met by a stubborn inability to assimilate. The divide manifests on a personal level through the arrival of two sons: one, a black-market baby purchased by a childless couple, the other returning home after a 20-year exile in Australia to reunite with his ailing father. The two stories cross paths, naturally, in a KFC. From the white supremacist exiled from soccer fandom (the closest thing to national unity) because his adopted baby is "a little dark," to the professor endlessly amused by an African student named Lenin, to the abandoned wife and mother whose career as a Russian translator renders her triply unwanted, the characters span the socio-economic spectrum but are united by a confusion over social identity. A pair of climactic soccer matches presents a dim view of the country's prospects while suggesting that a less insular example, say, that of a sun-drenched Brisbane beach, may hold an answer. --Shaun Brady (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)