Movie Guide

Sex/Nudity: 2 instances of innuendo. Violence: 8 Profanity: 7 mild expressions. Drugs: 1 scene of drinking, 1 of smoking.

Director: Edgar Wright. With Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield. (99 min.)

Staff *** Late 20something Shaun (Pegg) gets dumped by his girlfriend Liz (Ashfield), who doesn't want to spend the rest of her life at the pub with Shaun and his disgusting best friend Ed (Frost). Hungover the next day, Shaun takes a while to realize that the morning commute is filled with blood-spattered undead in full B-lot swagger. Shaun and Ed lead a zombie-bashing expedition to save Liz and Shaun's mum, and they all end up hiding out - where else? - at the pub. The film offers homage to zombie films with a Pythonesque lilt. Beware the makeup if you're the squeamish type. By J. Johnson

Sex/Nudity: 1 instances of innuendo. Violence: 22 scenes. Profanity: 64 instances. Drugs: 4 scenes of smoking and drinking.

Director: Kerry Conran. With Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie. (107 min.)

Sterritt * A newspaperwoman and a pilot race across continents to find an evil scientist and stop a robot invasion in 1939. A combination of stilted acting and computer-generated effects, this piece of soulless merchandise is no less mechanical than its own automatons.

Staff *** Uneven pace, cold story, stunning effects.

Sex/Nudity: 3 innuendos. Violence: 13 scenes. Profanity: 6 mild expressions. Drugs: None.

Director: Richard Eyre. With Billy Crudup, Clair Danes, Richard Griffiths, Zoe Tapper. (110 min.)

Sterritt *** Crudup shines as the greatest female impersonator in the serious theatrical world of 17th-century London, but hits a crisis when King Charles II issues a decree allowing women's roles to be played by actual women. A clever story, good chemistry between Crudup and Danes, and first-rate acting make this a jolly good show.

Director: Tim Story. With Queen Latifah, Jimmy Fallon, Jennifer Esposito. (79 min.)

Sterritt ** She's a cab driver, he's a cop, and their adversaries are bank robbers who look like supermodels. Frivolous but fun, somewhere between a comic "French Connection" and the craziest Nascar race you never saw.

Staff **1/2 Idiotic plot, laughs aplenty, Latifah shines.

Sex/Nudity: 1 innuendo. Violence: 3 scenes. Profanity: 60 expressions. Drugs: 2 scenes with alcohol.

Director: Mike Leigh. With Imelda Staunton, Peter Wight, Lesley Manville, Jim Broadbent. (125 min.)

Sterritt **** Staunton plays a middle-aged cleaning woman in 1950s London who performs illegal abortions in her spare time, motivated not by money or ideology but by an intuitive conviction that she's providing a desperately needed service for desperately needy women. The acting is brilliant and Leigh's screenplay - developed through his usual process of improvisation and rehearsal - is very long on compassion, very short on preaching and politics.

Director: Roland Emmerich. With Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal. (123 min.)

Sterritt ** Global warming disrupts Earth's heat-circulation patterns, causing a perfect storm that instantly goes global and creates Ice Age conditions. A climatologist (Quaid) makes a dangerous journey to his young-adult son (Gyllenhaal) for no reason except that death-defying treks are mandatory for science-fiction epics like this. The movie presents no scientific arguments - let alone evidence. The decade after next is too soon to see a picture as silly as this.

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