Everything is illuminated
In Liev Schreiber's adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Elijah Wood plays Foer as a bug-eyed sightseer in an undertaker's suit, a self-proclaimed "collector" who's almost totally absent from the world he means to explore. Schreiber plays up the culture-clash laffs in Foer's "very rigid search" for traces of his Ukrainian grandmother, trading on the disparity between the timid American and his brash, flashy tour guide (Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz, doing things to the English language for which he should either win a medal or be thrown in jail). The clever-cleverness is all a bit much until Foer starts to close in on his goal, and the sincerity the movie has thus far strived to hide can finally show itself. Americans "finding their past" can be easily mocked, but the movie shines light on the notion that even local history can be buried underfoot. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED
Twenty-year-old Francis Ouimet's 1913 U.S. Open win has all the elements of a feel-good Disney film: impoverished caddy living across the street from Boston country club works up to an underdog win over the world-famous British champion he idolizes, fighting the good fight for class, country and apple-pie American values. The true story even provides a wisecracking kid sidekick (though the cross-culture romance is invented for the film and appropriately disappears midway). Damned if he didn't screw the whole thing up by playing golf, of all things. Bill Paxton's direction suffers the same fate as his acting; over-the-top fun in the proper setting (his 2001 religious-psycho thriller Frailty), but blaringly out of tune in more genteel surroundings. Paxton seems to have instructed his FX artists to exhaust every trick in their manuals to spice up the game, overcompensating desperately until the suspense of the competition itself is totally obscured. By the time an animated ladybug crawls over an enormous ball in extreme close-up, the flop sweat is evident not just on the losers in front of the camera. I'll refrain from making any puns about driving where he should have putted or landing in sand traps, but trust me, they're apt. --Shaun Brady (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

INTO THE BLUE
Wars, famine, pestilence, flood... check. Does the book of Revelations say anything about people lining up to watch Paul Walker carry a movie? Presumably, Jessica Alba is the big draw in John Stockwell's unofficial remake of The Deep, but she gets half the screen time and secondary billing to Walker, who's making quite a career playing the same dopey, boring-ass ab delivery system AS ALWAYS. In this case, he's the dopey, boring-ass leader of four Bahamian treasure divers who find the sunken ship that will make them rich... right next to the crashed plane filled with cocaine that is probably going to lead to trouble. Alba, for her part, has nothing to do here but glumly voice hypocritical movie platitudes like "love is more important than money," and swim away from the underwater camera over and over. Stockwell, who also directed Blue Crush, is clearly more comfortable when the action moves under the waves; the ocean scenes in the first two acts are appropriately tense, claustrophobic and even beautiful. It's a shame that the banal land scenes and the incoherent finale are so stultifying; a lesser critic might even use words like "washout," "wreck" or "at sea." --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

THE MEMORY OF A KILLER
In the early stages of Alzheimer's, professional killer Angelo Ledda (Jan Decleir) refuses to complete his latest contract, on a 12-year-old girl, angering his wealthy, well-connected client. When he learns she's been killed anyway, Angelo makes it his personal mission to set things right — in the manner he knows best. Running along another track and headed for collision, Antwerp chief inspector Vincke (Koen De Bouw) closes in on the killer, following his own connection with the dead girl (he saved her from her literal pimp-daddy some months back). Ledda is plagued by increasingly hectic, jagged, neon-green memories of previous murders (described by one client like so: "His mug seems to have lived under a tram for two years"). Vincke confronts any number of bureaucratic obstacles. Based on Jef Geeraerts' novel and directed by Erik Van Looy, the film is less ambiguous than it looks: Ledda's subjective confusions appear on cue, and his relationship with Vincke is patterned after any number of cop-and-crook pairings, underlining their similar compromises, cynicisms and frustrations. No one can win in this formula. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz at the Bourse)

SERENITY
Joss Whedon's big-screen sequel to his middling space-cowboy show Firefly takes half its length to start cooking, but once it does, look out: More than mere genre twiddling, it's a full-blown head spinner with a gut-sock subtext. Toning down the TV series' oater affectations (no horses, fewer dusty outposts), Serenity taps the Western at its source with a story of renegade ex-revolutionaries whose idealism hasn't quite been stamped out. Skippered by Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), who in earlier years would have come to Casablanca for the waters, Serenity's crew is a raggedy bunch, to say nothing of their cargo: a traumatized psychic (Summer Glau) whose brain holds untapped government secrets. The shadowy alliance of worlds, whose badness is asserted rather than explained, bring in Chewitel Ejiofor's ruthless bounty hunter, a chilly fanatic who believes in the promise of "a better world" and doesn't care what he has to do in this one. That's right: It's pragmatic ideologues versus disillusioned democrats, with the free flow of information (assisted by tech geek David Krumholtz) as the Holy Grail. The knowing humor Whedon trademarked on Buffy is here in abundance, but it falls away as the movie moves into its increasingly dark and resonant second half. Serenity's suggestions about government treachery and the "somnambulant public" are as scandalous as anything since Spartan, and if the assertion that information is all it takes to topple tyrannies might seem a tad naîve, you're so shaken it feels like a lifeline. In Whedon's world, the greatest threat to the republic isn't war but apathy, and if it takes a pinch of willful self-delusion to muster the will to fight, so be it. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

THUMBSUCKER
Ugh, ugh and ugh again: Music video ace Mike Mills' feature debut is a smug, soulless allegory about a high school student (Lou Taylor Pucci) who can't stop sucking his thumb — I wonder what that's about. From his New Agey dentist (Keanu Reeves) to his would-be girlfriend (Kelli Garner), everyone talks like a rehab counselor (when was the last time you heard a 17-year-old lecture on the importance of honesty?), and Mills pumps indie rock out of every orifice to wrap the audience in a suffocating cocoon. (Bad as The Polyphonic Spree are in stereo, they're infinitely more insufferable in surround sound.) There are less enjoyable things you can do with your time, but they involve cheese graters and rubbing alcohol. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)