LIMITED RUN

Bad Santa
Thank the Lord someone has finally helped take the piss out of Christmas with a pure, spitefully cynical spirit. And that person, surprisingly, is Billy Bob Thornton. The usually despicable actor is the pants-wetting, booze-swilling Man in Red crowning the sour Christmas tree that is Bad Santa. Allowing me to review this movie was one of the best Christmas gifts I could receive this year; it's the antithesis of a feel-good film—actually, it's a feel-shitty film that, if you love brutal humor, will warm you like spiked eggnog. (JENNIFER MAERZ) Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

The Blue Butterfly
Léa Pool, the director responsible for the bittersweet tomboy drama Emporte-moi and the irredeemably awful Lost and Delirious, gives us a movie about a 10-year-old cancer patient and his dying wish to capture a Blue Morpho butterfly. William Hurt stars as a lepidopterist. Central Cinema, Thurs-Fri 7, 9:15 pm, Sun Dec 25 at 4:30, 7, 9:15 pm.

It's a Wonderful Life
Shortly after It's a Wonderful Life's 1946 release, James Agee, the most astute and eloquent American film critic of all time, noted the film's grueling aspect. "Often," he wrote, "in its pile-driving emotional exuberance, it outrages, insults, or at least accosts without introduction, the cooler and more responsible parts of the mind." These aesthetic cautions are followed, however, by a telling addendum: "It is nevertheless recommended," Agee allowed, "and will be reviewed at length as soon as the paralyzing joys of the season permit." Paralyzing joys are the very heart of George Bailey's dilemma; they are, to borrow words from George's father, "deep in the race." The sacrifices George makes for being "the richest man in town" resonate bitterly even as they lead to the finale's effusive payoff. Those sacrifices are what make It's a Wonderful Life, in all its "Capraesque" glory, endure. (SEAN NELSON) Grand Illusion, Fri 6, 8:30 pm, Sat-Sun 3:30, 6, 8:30 pm, Mon-Wed 6, 8:30 pm, Thurs 7 pm.

NOW PLAYING

Aeon Flux
In a plague-ridden utopia of the future, a female assassin discovers sinister plots, and clones, and stuff. The advance word has been lethal, but those with at least a passing interest in the original dadaist MTV shorts should find much to groove on—especially given the total commitment of Charlize Theron, who mixes slinky and deadpan in equal measures. (Her signature move, wherein she scuttles on all fours across the terrain at warp speed, deserves enshrinement alongside Chow Yun-Fat's classic two-gun salute.) The plot, unfortunately, is less agile, failing to provide even the most tenuous causal link between the various eye-popping setpieces. Still, you'll forget that things don't make a lick of sense when you admire the constant slew of weirdo invention on display. (Ninja women with hands for feet! Dart-firing, ticked-off vegetables! Frances McDormand in a Raggedy Anne wig!) Whatever its considerable narrative flaws, material this downright bugfreak loopy doesn't escape the bland Hollywood machine very often. Tune in, turn on, etc. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Ballets Russes
This excellent documentary may indulge in a bit of nostalgia for the days when the middle class couldn't get enough high culture, but the story it has to tell is fiery and engrossing. It made me desperately want to go to the ballet. Ballets Russes is about two warring 20th-century ballet companies, which, like the best enemies, originally sprang from the same head. In 1929 Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe collapsed and two years later, Colonel Wassily de Basil and René Blum (all the major players have fantastic names) revived the company, making stars of choreographers such as George Balanchine and Léonide Massine, stocking the corps with the children of aristocratic Russian émigrés, and ultimately splitting into two rival camps. Through blurry but evocative archival footage, hysterical newspaper headlines, and aging ballet dancers who clearly relish their new roles as raconteurs, Ballets Russes spins a glamorous, multivalent, and deeply political tale. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Breakfast on Pluto
See review this issue.

Brokeback Mountain
The first half is a gorgeous love story in which words are kept to a minimum and the arid, exhilarating images of high-altitude scenery and exalted flirtation leave you as breathless as the heroes. When the famous pup-tent consummation (faintly damned as "tasteful") finally occurs, their hunger for each other's bodies is fierce and convincing. In the film's devastating second half, the cowboys come down from the mountain, marry women, and inflict the violence of their disinterest on their families. Brokeback Mountain achieves an elegant hybrid between the "masculine" genre of the Western and the "feminine" genre of melodrama. The tragedy is layered: the punishment the cowboys experience at the hands of others, the hatred they unleash upon themselves, and the uncomfortable sex they have with their wives. But the gay sex is totally hot. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Capote
Capote is a restrained film about a man whose life and work were anything but. Despite its limited scope—it addresses only the years that Truman Capote was writing his groundbreaking In Cold Blood, about a Kansas robbery turned quadruple murder—you want to call the film, after the fashion of ambitious biographies, "A Life." Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, and his is an enveloping performance, in which every flighty affectation seems an invention of the man rather than the impersonator. His pursed lips and bons mots and the ravishing twirls of his overcoat become more and more infrequent until all that's left is alcohol and a horrible will to power: He longs for the death of someone he's grown to love, so that his book can have an ending. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Casanova
See review this issue.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2
See review this issue.

Chicken Little
When a piece of the "sky" falls on Chicken Little's head, he rings an emergency bell and causes everyone in the town to go crazy. Nothing ends up happening, and everyone calls Chicken Little names. A year later, a piece of the "sky" falls again! Dude's totally too scared to say anything, though, because he doesn't want everyone thinking he's crazy all over again. But then what happens?! ALIENS INVADE! Everyone freaks about the deadly lasers and killing machines, but no one takes action to save the world. So now Chicken Little has to work out problems with his father and fight off bullies at school and try to get the girl—all while trying to save planet Earth! Phew. But really this movie is about the cutest chicken ever and an effing hilarious goldfish who doesn't even talk but does some of the funniest shit ever. (MEGAN SELING)

The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
If you weren't told as a small child, you probably know by now that the Narnia tales are Christian allegory. When Lucy stumbles into a mothball-filled wardrobe during a game of hide-and-seek, she enters Narnia, a land where it's always winter but never Christmas. Tilda Swinton is fantastic as the evil witch who's put Narnia in a state of deep freeze. William Moseley's Peter is so blandly heroic that it becomes a bit unsettling. The CGI Aslan isn't inspiring either. But Georgie Henley makes an especially engaging Lucy, and her early scenes with the faun Tumnus (James McAvoy) are almost as magical as they were in the book. Skandar Keynes is great as Edmund. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is decent entertainment—epic and scary and icily pretty. If only it were safe enough to send your freethinking children to. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Constant Gardener
Heavily reworked by director Fernando Meirelles, the stripped-down screenplay retains John le Carré's basic thrust: following the disappearance of his activist wife, a middle-rung foreign ambassador goes proactive on a global scale, uncovering all sorts of corporate malfeasance before eventually zeroing in on illegal drug testing in the slums of Kenya. As in the best adaptations, there's a sense that The Constant Gardener is hijacking the source material in order to feed the filmmaker's personal obsessions. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Family Stone
In its attempt to be all things to all viewers, the holiday-themed smorgasbord The Family Stone hits every conceivable chord, no matter how much of a stretch. The premise follows Sarah Jessica Parker's New York tightass as she travels with fiancé Dermot Mulroney to his small-town homestead. Within moments of their arrival, she lands afoul of Mulroney's hypercritical, hippy-dippy mother (Diane Keaton). Bonds are strengthened, lessons are learned, and so on. Erratic as it is, the film has a saving grace in the form of Craig T. Nelson. He makes for a wonderfully idealized father figure—not averse to smoking a doob now and then, but unafraid to lay the hammer down when one of his clan is threatened. As far as cinematic dream dads go, Atticus Finch has some serious competition. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Fun with Dick and Jane
See review this issue.

Good Night, and Good Luck.
Documenting the Red Scare clash between Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and Joseph McCarthy, George Clooney's second trip behind the lens is a largely terrific picture: a scathing social document submerged within a deeply pleasurable entertainment. Movies about people simply doing their jobs can be fascinating in ways that are hard to define, to the point where a guy laying bricks can trump a fleet of star fighters. Through the eyes of Clooney and Strathairn, the newsroom becomes, variously, a shrine, a confessional, a torture chamber, and the best place in the world to hang out. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The fourth Harry Potter: In which Harry takes off his shirt, learns the value of altruism, and discovers that Lord Voldemort has no nose. Mike Newell's take on the J. K. Rowling franchise is less appealing than the last installment, by Alfonso Cuarón, but then again, who ever said puberty was enchanting? Compared to the initial volumes, the fourth novel gets slightly darker, and Newell takes this development literally. From the unsettling dream that kicks off the action to the kids' dawn return to the newly menacing Hogwarts, the camera rarely pokes above a foreboding blue murk. Harry battles dragons, rescues drowning friends, and faces down a waxy, noseless Ralph Fiennes and his troupe of Death Eaters in Klan hoods. It's exciting enough; but lacking both the wonder of the first movies and the poignant subtext Harry's adolescence was supposed to herald, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire isn't much more than a kiddie action movie. (ANNIE WAGNER)

King Kong
Not to go nuts with the hyperbole, but this King Kong should remind burned-out viewers why they started loving movies in the first place. As genuinely touching as the final New York scenes are, the true heart of the film probably lies in the insanely sustained second act, in which Kong, his gal, and her supposed rescuers come into contact with an army of dinosaurs, angry villagers, and seemingly every creepy thing ever to walk the earth. Throughout, director Jackson manages to simultaneously convey the sense of a filmmaker at the absolute top of his technical game, and a kid deliriously hopped up on Pop Rocks, going nuts with his favorite action figures. His dream project, which will probably already have made a gazillion dollars by the time you read this, comes off as one of the purest examples of sheer cinematic love to ever hit the screen. Man, this is what movies do. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Memoirs of a Geisha
The novel Memoirs of a Geisha was a fake translation of a nonexistent autobiography. It's a rags-to-mistress story, in which Chiyo, an orphan girl with unusual gray eyes, becomes Sayuri, the most sought-after geisha in the hanamachi district. When Sayuri is plucked from obscurity, she attracts both men's desire and the vicious jealousy of an older geisha with a penchant for off-hours hanky panky. Their rivalry shamelessly pits virgin against vamp, and its campy excess provides the film's few pleasures ("I... will... DESTROY YOU!" has got to be one of this year's most memorable lines). The rest of the film is a confused mess—part chick flick drowning in silk brocade, part crass appeal to male voyeurism, and all woefully insubstantial. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Munich
See review this issue.

The Passenger
A 1975 collaboration between director Michelangelo Antonioni and star Jack Nicholson about a beyond-burned-out photojournalist languishing in a seedy hotel in the North African desert. After discovering a corpse next door, he promptly switches passports, oversees his own burial, and leaves his old life in the dust. Hooking up with a gorgeous student (Last Tango in Paris's Maria Schneider, smokin'), he begins a shady journey across Europe, with interlopers both old and new in hot pursuit. In other hands, this premise could be a crackerjack thriller, but Antonioni and Nicholson seem more interested in exploring why their central chameleon does what he does—ditching wife, kid, and successful job in the blink of an eye. The results prove hard to explain, or shake. And then there's that simply magnificent ending shot: an unbroken seven-minute gaze through a window that finally locates this determinedly enigmatic film as a profound, mordant comedy. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Polar Express
Here and there, Polar Express hits on an image or mood worthy of the season, particularly during the early scenes of the magical title vehicle, but the thundering need to make a state-of-the-art prefab classic steamrolls over most of the cheer. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Pride & Prejudice
In her early novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen makes it clear that Elizabeth Bennet has little respect for her friend Charlotte's pragmatic view of marriage. And though Elizabeth loves her older sister, Jane, she can't exactly endorse her lovesick moping either. With practicality and sentiment out of the picture, what can possibly make Elizabeth fall for the proud Mr. Darcy? Austen is decorously evasive on this question, and so the filmmakers responsible for this grimy and immensely enjoyable new adaptation have some wiggle room. According to director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy aren't so much in love as they are erotically enthralled. Their famous clash of wits isn't the cause of their affection; it's sublimation at its most sublime. In other words, forget stuffy: This Pride & Prejudice is totally hot. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Rent
Rent: It's winter, half the characters are dying of AIDS, many are black, most of them are artists, all of them except the bad guy are poor, and in the stage version, the East Village was rendered in stripped-down visual shorthand; you needed the lyrics to understand what was happening. In this movie version, everything is painfully over-explained, no one except Rosario Dawson is sexy (a huge problem), no one looks poor or cold, and the scene where Mimi almost dies looks like a commercial for Urban Outfitters. It feels like a movie about American artists dying at the end of the millennium as imagined and shot by the director of Home Alone, which is exactly what it is. Plus, the music sounds awful. I love movie musicals and I used to live for Rent, but if I hadn't been there to review it I would have walked out. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)

The Ringer
A comedy about making a few bucks by rigging the Special Olympics. Wait a minute, there's a cash prize for the Special Olympics?

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
First and foremost Jesus Is Magic is a mind-fuck. The film alternates between the disarmingly pretty Silverman telling jokes in front of an audience and skits that present her in supplementary guises. Silverman's great skill is economy. "I was raped by a doctor," she announces with her patented stoned-imp grin. "Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl." Despite Silverman's wit, Jesus Is Magic is a messy affair. I'm tempted to endorse the obvious formula: standup = good; skits = bad. While the best laughs come from the standup, and a number of the skits are clunky, some of them do work, and even the lamest bits show us another side of Silverman, a surprisingly chameleonic and fearless performer. If she's smart, Silverman will sharpen her celebrated claws on something meatier than the general notion of taboo. For now, she's just fucking with us. But audiences have never been fucked with by anyone like Sarah Silverman before.

The Squid and the Whale
Writer/director Noah Baumbach's semi-autobiographical tale of a disintegrating Park Slope family unit in the '80s is one of those rare films in which everything feels right, from period detail, to sympathetic yet unsentimental characterizations, to the way that family conversations can shift from funny to sad to terrifying. He's fully backed by his cast, including Laura Linney's free-spirited mom, Jesse Eisenberg's endearingly tight-assed poseur of an eldest son, and, especially, Jeff Daniels's defanged literary lion, one of the most complex—and pitiably self-aware—monsters in memory.

Throughout, Baumbach's unfussy, free-floating style echoes the personality-driven films of the '70s, yet with a uniquely personal bite. Although not without moments of wise-ass comedy there's an underlying witty melancholy that suggests a filmmaker fully locked into his groove. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Syriana
Does the Western world's dependence on oil fuel terrorism? Is corruption within the industry a necessary evil if it keeps the world humming? Syriana leans heavily toward the left in such matters, but in the end leaves it to your conscience to provide any real answers. It's to the film's credit that it rarely preaches; it also slaps your hand away when you look for a measure of comfort. Comparisons between Syriana and Traffic are unavoidable. But where Steven Soderbergh's war-on-drugs screed was thoroughly undermined by its own simplicity (drugs be bad), Syriana—written and directed by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, executive-produced by Soderbergh and star George Clooney—is not interested in easy exits. The usual suspects will no doubt squawk about anti-Bush bias and the Blame America First syndrome, but anyone willing to look past the pundit noise will find a beautifully constructed and patient thriller. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Vikings: Journey to New Worlds
This 40-minute documentary about the legendary Norse invaders is big on spurts of dead-end facts (Viking helmets didn't really have horns! Thursday is really Thor's Day!) and endless reenactments featuring husky Scandinavians in furs. The kid-friendly film only skims the surface of the Viking influence on world culture, and the few scenes that justify the large film format are sweeping panoramas of Icelandic geysers and the sea ice off Greenland. But those frigid green vistas are amazing, and if March of the Penguins didn't chill your ardor for polar cinematography, you'll find plenty to satisfy you here. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Walk the Line
Joaquin Phoenix is a damn fine Man in Black, burning with rage from a young age due to an oppressive father who unfairly blamed Johnny for the death of his brother. Walk the Line explores how Cash taught himself to play guitar, working with the famed Sun Records and hanging with Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis (minor characters here who are entertaining even in their supporting roles), through his infamous Folsom Prison performance. But Cash's strongest emotional elements are developed through his courtship of June Carter, played with sharp Southern charm by Reese Witherspoon. Carter moves from being a boyhood idol of Cash's to touring with him, helping him fight a serious drug addiction, and finally becoming his wife. Theirs is a fiery interplay, and watching their tenderness grow through time and tribulation makes for a powerful story, even if its main subject feels larger than any one film could ever encapsulate. (JENNIFER MAERZ)

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
It's almost time for the annual vegetable fair, and the town has been taking great care in growing the very best produce possible. Problem is, a bunch of ravaging rabbits have been eating up as much of the harvest as their bunny faces can fit. This would be a problem, but luckily for everyone, Wallace and Gromit have invented the Bunny Vac 6000, a large vacuum that humanely sucks up the cutest frickin' bunnies in the whole wide world, and safely releases them to another location. Hooray! But you know how bunnies like to, ahem, breed, so of course the rabbit population keeps rising and rising despite Wallace's efforts. The humor is just as funny as the classic Looney Tunes (which were funny!) but even smarter because it's not actually American-made. (MEGAN SELING)

Yours, Mine & Ours
For want of a Trojan, a genre was born: From The Brady Bunch to Just the Ten of Us, excessively multi-child families have long been a mainstream staple. Adapting a 1968 Lucille Ball/Henry Fonda vehicle (which at least had the diverting element of a clench-jawed Lucy being forced to interact with hippies), director Raja Gosnell (Scooby-Doo) and his writers have done little to update the original: Tight-assed military widower (Dennis Quaid) finds wedded bliss with a loosey-goosey artist widow (Rene Russo), forcing their legion of adorable spawn to intermingle. The leads try their best: Quaid retains some of his old roguish charm, and the wondrous Russo continues to defy the myth of middle-age unemployability. Even with their mighty efforts, the surrounding film remains so utterly, triumphantly white-bread that it fades out even before the lights come up. (ANDREW WRIGHT)