Movie Guide

Director: Costa-Gavras. With Mathieu Kassovitz, Ulrich Tukur, Ulrich Muhe, Michel Duchaussoy. (130 min.)

Sterritt ** See review.

Directors: André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer. With Traudl Junge. (90 min.)

Sterritt **** See review.

Director: Jonathan Liebesman. With Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Lee Cormie.

Staff * The 1850s lynching of an innocent woman has provided Darkness Falls, Maine, with a "tooth fairy" ghost-in-residence who sometimes attacks children the night they lose their last baby tooth. Sometimes she also goes after adults who venture out in the dark. The largely Australian cast sounds American (but not Eastern) and does a good job of not breaking up while uttering inanities in one idiotic situation after another. By M.K. Terrell

Sex/Nudity: None. Violence: 17 scenes, including dead bodies and ghost attacks. Profanity: 4 harsh expressions. Drugs: 1 scene of drinking.

Director: Martina Kudlacek. With Jonas Mekas, Judith Malina, Amos and Marcia Vogel. (103 min.)

Sterritt **** See review.

Director: Spike Lee. With Edward Norton, Rosario Dawson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Cox. (134 min.)

Sterritt **** A young drug dealer tries to come to terms with his past on the day before he leaves for a seven-year prison term. The film is flawed by implausible psychology and moments of weak acting. But it's more than redeemed by Lee's passionate ideas about America, which he sees as plagued by evils of violence and materialism, yet unbounded in its possibilities. He's a unique filmmaker, and this uneven drama is truly one of a kind.

Staff ***1/2 Intelligent, well-acted, humanistic.

Sex/Nudity: 9 scenes with innuendo; 1 scene of couple in bathtub. Violence: 3 scenes, including brutal beatings. Profanity: 169 harsh expressions. Drugs: 18 scenes of drinking, smoking. 1 scene with illegal drugs.

Director: Chris Koch. With Jason Lee, Julia Stiles, Selma Blair, Diana Scarwid. (105 min.)

Sterritt * After his bachelor party, a groom-to-be wakes up in bed with a woman he doesn't know, then finds out she's his fiancée's favorite cousin, and a lot more fun than the fiancée herself. The screenplay has a lot of talk about people being "right for each other," but the characters are so shallow and generic it's hard to care who winds up with whom. This may be a "guy thing," but a "good romantic comedy thing" it's not.

Staff * Predictable, painfully bad, overacted.

Sex/Nudity: 1 implied sex scene. Violence: 9 scenes of fairly gratuitous violence, including a brutal fight.

Director: Alexander Payne. With Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, Kathy Bates. (125 min.)

Sterritt *** After his wife's unexpected death, a retired man rethinks his future and reevaluates his past while traveling across the Midwest to his daughter's wedding. Nicholson's acting is awesome, and Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor haven't lost their ear for the empty aphorisms of middle-class speech.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4