Movie Guide

Sex/Nudity: 12 scenes, including a few with implied sex and innuendo. Violence: 5 mild scenes. Profanity: At least 7 expressions. Drugs: About 22 scenes with alcohol, including drunkenness.

Director: Mark Romanek. With Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen. (98 min.)

Sterritt ** Williams plays a seemingly bland photo-booth clerk who's become dangerously obsessed with a local family whose pictures he's been processing for years. Williams's acting is as chilling as it is restrained, but Romanek's directing damps down the drama's psychological impact, making it look as glossy and two-dimensional as the snapshots that run through the photo man's finely calibrated machines.

Staff ** Overdone, twisted, unnecessarily violent, creepy, and vacuous.

Sex/Nudity: 6 instances, including innuendo, photos of sex, graphic sex scene. Violence: 3 instances, 1 graphic. Profanity: 17 strong expressions. Drugs: 2 scenes with alcohol.

Director: Bruce McCulloch. With Tom Green, Jason Lee, Megan Mullally. (83 min.)

Staff *** John has a great fiancée, a decent job, and has finally saved enough to buy a house and get married. Everything seems perfect – until his niece gets accepted to Harvard and reminds him of a pledge he made years ago to pay her tuition. Running out of time and options, he turns to an ill-fated career in crime, along with his mentally unstable friend. Zany antics ensue. At first glance, this seems to be another cookie-cutter gross-out movie, but it surprises by being low on gross-out and big on heart, not to mention genuinely funny almost from start to finish. By Alex Kaloostian

Staff * Boring, strange, shameful, juvenile.

Sex/Nudity: Several suggestive scenes with innuendo. No nudity. Violence: 40 instances slapstick violence. Profanity: 66 harsh expressions. Drugs: 25 scenes of smoking and drinking.

Director: John Polson. With Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen, Kate Burton, Shiri Appleby. (85 min.)

Sterritt ** "Fatal Attraction" goes to high school, as a pretty psychopath stalks a swimming-team hunk with deadly results. Polson's well-filmed thriller swims down the usual lanes for this sort of story, and everyone looks way too old for senior year; but many of the suspense scenes work fine, and Bradford is terrific as the endangered hero.

Sex/Nudity: 4 instances sex and innuendo. Violence: 10 scenes. Profanity: 16 mostly mild expressions. Drugs: 1 party scene with drinking and smoking.

Director: Benoît Jacquot. With Angela Gheorghiu, Ruggero Raimondi. (119 min.)

Sterritt *** Imaginative adaptation of Giacomo Puccini's great opera. Most of this French production aims at dramatic realism, skillfully etching the love-struck painter Cavaradossi, the wicked police chief Scarpia, and the fatally deceived title character. Jacquot adds modernist touches, though, as when he shows real Roman locations in home-movie-style footage, and cuts between the performers singing in the studio and miming their roles onstage. The result is a fine opera production given cinematic interest by the director's fresh treatment. In Italian with English subtitles.

Director: Mira Nair. With Naseeruddin Shah, Roshan Seth, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty. (111 min.)

Sterritt *** Celebrants gather in New Delhi for the Punjabi wedding of an Indian-American groom and an Indian bride who's not sure she's ready for matrimony. Despite its entertaining trappings, this is a thoughtful story, touching on sensitive issues of sexuality and child abuse. Nair hasn't lost her eye for revealing details of personality, behavior, and environment. In English, Hindi, and Punjabi with subtitles.

Staff ***1/2 Vital, zesty, mix of comedy, drama.

Sex/Nudity: 10 scenes, mostly innuendo and kissing. Violence: A few scenes implied child sex abuse. Profanity: About 12 expressions. Drugs: At least 8 scenes of drinking and smoking.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3