LIMITED RUN

9/11 and the American Empire
A filmed lecture by David Ray Griffith, author of The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Keystone Church, Fri Feb 17 at 7 pm.

All That Heaven Allows
This fantastic Douglas Sirk melodrama is infinitely better than the stiff Todd Haynes ripoff, which contains pretty colors but no emotion whatsoever. (ANNIE WAGNER) Central Cinema, Thurs-Fri 7, 9:15 pm. 9:15 pm show 21+.

Amnesty International Film Festival
A series of documentaries about human rights, both here and abroad. All films screen at Northwest Film Forum. Fighting for Life in the Death Belt, Thurs Feb 16 at 7 pm; Out of Status, Thurs at 9 pm; All About Darfur and Nobody Was Crying, Fri Feb 17 at 7 pm; State of Fear and Walking for Peace: Hanford to Bangor Peace Walk 2005, Fri at 9 pm; Targets: Reporters in Iraq and Fear: Rebecca's Story, Sat Feb 18 at 2 pm; Coca: The Dove from Chechnya, Sat at 4 pm; Love, Labor, Loss and In Women's Hands, Sat at 7 pm; God Sleeps in Rwanda, Tahara, and Fields of Mudan, Sat at 9 pm; Switch Off, Sun Feb 19 at 2 pm; Scared Sacred, Sun at 4 pm; Mardi Gras: Made in China, Sun at 7 pm. See www.amnestyusa.org/filmfest for details.

Carving Up the Screen
Robert Horton gives a talk inspired by the Candida Höfer show up now at the Frye. Filmmakers to be discussed include Kubrick, Hitchcock, Polanski, and Kaurismaki. Frye Art Museum, Sun Feb 19 at 2 pm.

Eyes of the Rainbow
Part of a film series on U.S. women and Cuba, The Eyes of the Rainbow is a featurette about Assata Shakur, a Black Panther leader who escaped from prison and found asylum in Cuba. Central Cinema, Wed Feb 22 at 7, 9 pm. 9 pm show 21+.

Far From Heaven
This Todd Haynes product isn't so much about the 1950s as about our idea of the 1950s; its compulsively precise, straightjacketed masochism is the very antithesis of melodrama. Nonetheless, critics drooled all over Haynes's "tribute" to Douglas Sirk in 2002. It also contains some lovely autumn foliage. So if you like your movies as bright and chokingly dry as variegated yarn, don't let me spoil your party. (ANNIE WAGNER) Central Cinema, Sat-Sun 4:30, 7, 9:30 pm. 9:30 pm shows 21+.

The Future of Food
Untangling the complicated issues behind genetic engineering—whether in the fields of biology or intellectual-property law—isn't easy. Twisting those facts into a horror movie about your dinner couldn't have been a simple task either. Filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia has made a flawed film, but it's effective. The Future of Food's bogeyman is Monsanto, the agribusiness giant that manufactures the herbicide Roundup and genetically modified organisms. By the end of the film, merely hearing a roll call of public officials who have been associated with Monsanto (Rumsfeld and Scalia being the most prominent) is enough to give you chills. If you already know you don't like GMOs, your resolve to buy organic or join a co-op will be steeled. If you're curious about the arguments and arsenal of legal tools available to either side of the debate, you'll leave more freaked-out than convinced. (ANNIE WAGNER) Environmental Learning Center at Camp Long, Wed Feb 22 at 7 pm.

Garden State
Zack Braff's debut film, Garden State, which he wrote, directed, and stars in, may very well be an act of egogasm (when you put Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack of your examination of disaffected twentysomethings, you're just asking for it), but it features enough odd grace notes among the rampant navel-gazing to warrant a watch. (ANDREW WRIGHT) Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight.

Infra-Man
All you need to know about this excellently bad Hong Kong sci-fi move (vintage 1975) is that the chief villain is Princess Dragon Mom, and that the Infra-Man's costume is visibly made from tinfoil and red paint. Ten minutes into the film, the atomic scientist charged with saving the world says, "Things have become so bad that they have never been worse." If he is describing the film, he is factually accurate, revealing a painfully anti-poetic soul: This film is wonderful! I honestly challenge any working American director to better it! (JAMIE HOOK) Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm.

A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde
A documentary about the poet and lesbian activist. New Freeway Hall, Thurs Feb 16 at 7:30 pm.

Loose Change II
A film by Dylan Avery: truth, lies, and conspiracy theories regarding 9/11. Capitol Hill Public Library, Sat Feb 18 at 1:30 pm.

Lysistrata
No sex, boys! Movie Legends, Sun Feb 19 at 1 pm.

Mother
One of Mikio Naruse's less impressive efforts, Mother is a genre film about the transcendent love and devotion of a mother: in this case, a street vendor and laundress in post-war Japan. The fade-heavy narrative stutters through the deaths and departures of one central character after another, and though lead actress Kinuyo Tanaka remains sympathetic throughout, the hagiographic tone feels increasingly oppressive. By the time mom declares that she suffers from the train-induced motion sickness endemic to housewives, you may need your own pickled plum to keep down the nausea. (New 35 mm print.) (ANNIE WAGNER) Northwest Film Forum, Fri 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 5, 7, 9 pm.

Music From the Inside Out
This documentary about classical musicians in the Philadelphia Orchestra starts with the slightly perverse question "what is music?", promptly demonstrates that even people whose vocation is music can't articulate a satisfactory answer, and then digresses into the mundane extracurricular activities of the musicians. One plays in a salsa club on Thursdays, another paints thick impasto onto canvases, a third runs marathons. (Yawn.) There is, however, some interesting discussion of the tension between individual expression and the demands of collective performance. You get to witness some impressive talent (especially the German street performer who plays Vivaldi on an accordion). And thankfully, amid the many flailing attempts to describe music's appeal, not one person utters the phrase "dancing about architecture." (ANNIE WAGNER) Varsity, Fri-Mon 12:30, 2:40, 4:50, 7, 9:20 pm, Tues-Thurs 7, 9:20 pm.

Notorious
A 1946 film by Hitchock about spies and kissing and Nazis. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs Feb 23 at 7:30 pm.

Quiet No More
A documentary about human trafficking, introduced by Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. Harvard Exit, Thurs Feb 16 at 6:30 pm.

Regular or Super: Views on Mies Van Der Rohe
An hour-long doc about 20th century architect Mies van der Rohe. Northwest Film Forum, Tues Feb 21 at 8 pm.

Ruggles of Red Gap
See Stranger Suggests, page 23. Grand Illusion, Fri 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Thurs 7, 9 pm.

The Rutles: All You Need is Cash
A Beatles mockumentary about the "pre-Fab Four." Sunset Cinema, Wed Feb 22 at 7 pm.

Shadow of a Doubt
The 1945 Hitchcock film about a murderer who comes to visit a sunny California town. Museum of History and Industry, Thurs Feb 16 at 7:30 pm.

Third Eye Cinema
A quarterly film program dedicated to experimental and personal cinema and curated by Jon Behrens. This edition includes Maya Deren's beguiling experimental short Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished Witches' Cradle (a collaboration with Marcel Duchamp), plus the famous Surrealist short Un Chien Andalou. Northwest Film Forum, Mon Feb 20 at 8 pm.

Up in Smoke
"Dave's not here." Sunset Tavern, Thurs Feb 16 at 7 pm.

NOW PLAYING

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)

Caché
The Austrian director Michael Haneke, best known for the shock-masochism of his 2001 film, The Piano Teacher, now gives audiences the far subtler and more politically engaged Caché (which won him the Best Director prize at Cannes). Unnerving surveillance videotapes keep showing up at the home of a Paris couple and the road leading back to the culprit is cluttered with bloody chicken heads, imperialist xenophobia, and red herrings—if you've heard that the final scene solves the mystery, you've been misinformed. (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. (ANNIE WAGNER)

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)

Curious George
Curious George is a movie for babies. It's not a kid's movie, it's a fuckin' preschoolers' movie. Anyone over the age of six is going to be extremely bored with the film's insufferable innocence. There's not one joke. NOT ONE. David Cross does the voice of the highly annoying and unloved son, and he's not even funny! There's just George, admittedly adorable, and a fucking neurotic freak running around dressed like a banana. I LOVED Curious George as a kid, and I still do. But I hate, hate, HATE this movie. (MEGAN SELING)

Date Movie
A satire of injection-mold romantic comedies, sure to include lots of jokes about... injection.

Final Destination 3
So these kids are supposed to die, right? But they don't because some little girl has a spooky premonition that this rollercoaster she and all her friends are on is totally gonna crash and kill everyone. So she freaks out like a big stupid baby, which causes some of her friends to get off the ride. Then of course the hydraulics quit and bodies fall from the sky like acid rain. BANG, BOOM, SQUISH! Well, now, Death is pissed and decides to come after them... with a vengeance. The first ones to go are these vapid little hos are just trying to keep up on their tan and then... Mwahahaha! Watching them fry to death in their tanning booths is the raddest thing you've ever seen (they show the skin melting!!). One by one, they start getting knocked off in the cruelest (and coolest-looking) of ways. (MEGAN SELING)

Firewall
Harrison Ford's umpteenth entry into the white-collar family-values action film, smushes together two of the traditionally more wit-intensive suspense genres—the heist picture and home invasion thriller—to shockingly little effect. For all the blarney about hacking and up-to-the-minute tech geekery, it's really just the same ol' story about protecting the homestead from rustlers in black hats. So it's a mediocre movie, and one that would be quickly swept into the rental-shelf ether were it not for the fading legacy of its lead, an actor who was once, after all, the coolest man in the world. Sadly, the persnickety crabbiness that made Indy such a formula-goosing blast has long since calcified; here, Ford just seems bored, vaguely pissed at something offscreen (craft services?), and, frankly, too old for this shit. What's the shelf life on stardom, anyway? (ANDREW WRIGHT)

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)

Greece: Secrets of the Past
Ah, Greece! Your quaint peasants doing old folk dances on picturesque cliffs overlooking the ocean! Your attractive volcanologists riding motorcycles along picturesque cliffs overlooking the ocean! Your enviable archaeologists sipping red wine on a whitewashed terrace on a picturesque cliff overlooking… the ocean! If life in Greece is anything like life in Greece, you should quit your job, abandon your kids, and head east. Which is to say, this IMAX film about Greek archaeology and history is intellectually anemic but beautiful to watch—from the azure seas to the volcanic eruptions to the reconstructed painting of an ancient flotilla to the villages perched on those picturesque cliffs. And it does pose one interesting question: If the ancient village on the island of Santorini was destroyed by a sudden volcanic disaster greater than Pompeii, where are all the corpses? (BRENDAN KILEY)

Hoodwinked
The point of this version of Little Red Riding Hood is a police procedural that recites the story of Little Red's fateful encounter with a hairy grandma four times (the press notes want me to say something about Rashomon here, but that's ridiculous). The narrative receives some elaboration between the story according to Red (Anne Hathaway, trying for Daria-lite delivery) and the story according to the wolf (Patrick Warburton), who is a wily investigative reporter working undercover. But the grandmother has nothing to contribute, aside from the fact that she totally digs some extreme sports. And then there's an evil Eurotrash sports team, for which there is neither explanation nor excuse. Kids may have learned from video games how to tolerate multiple simultaneous perspectives but I doubt they've learned to tolerate a boring story told four times over. Besides, the 3-D animation is worthless. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Howl's Moving Castle
When it comes to animation gods, there's Hayao Miyazaki, and then there's everybody else. Although reportedly considering retirement after completing the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, Miyazaki was apparently intrigued enough by the prospect of adapting a novel by children's author Diana Wynne Jones to return to the drawing board. Now that the collaboration has finally made its way to the States, the results show that the material might actually have been too perfect a match for the director's patented sensibilities. For the first time, the Master's wondrous imagination feels slightly... familiar. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Matador
Sporting a gold chain, a sleazy moustache, and an unfortunate haircut, Pierce Brosnan is amusingly weird as professional assassin Julian Noble. But all the eccentricities in the world can't save this preposterous pseudo-comedy. A hit man who's losing his cool, Julian spends his time fraternizing with a variety of international hookers. At a hotel bar in Mexico City, he happens upon Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear), a genuinely kind, dopey businessman. The two strike up one of those unlikely friendships where, according to the wisdom of Hollywood producers, hilarious comic situations should ensue. Alas, Danny is so relentlessly square and average that Kinnear (who possesses the comedic talents of Dick Cheney) seems entirely disoriented. Brosnan, on the other hand, clearly relishes playing the tacky opposite of his urbane James Bond. The movie's only other selling point is a nicely shot bullfighting scene. (ADAM BREGMAN)

Match Point
Woody Allen's Match Point is a light and brutal thriller about the opposing forces of contempt and desire. Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a former tennis pro with scheming Irish eyes and a permanent frown. While coaching at a tony London country club, he meets a rich young man named Tom (Matthew Goode), who bizarrely appears to be coming on to him. The drinks and box seats at the opera are not in fact invitations to bed, but invitations into the family. In no time at all Chris is engaged to Tom's perky and annoying but equally rich sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and another sort of love triangle has developed. Marriages are consummated, vows are broken, women are discovered to be fertile or infertile in inverse proportion to their social class, and the social order is upended. (ANNIE WAGNER)

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)

Mrs. Henderson Presents
Judi Dench is Mrs. Henderson, a cantankerous aristocrat who, after being rudely and abruptly widowed in 1937, can think of no feminine occupation worth her generous allotment of salt. She hires a producer with the spectacular name of Vivian Van Damm (a sturdy Bob Hoskins), buys a theater with the less spectacular name of the Windmill, and launches a nonstop cabaret show called "Revuedeville." (What kind of name is that?) The whisper-thin premise on which this film is based is Mrs. Henderson's alternate business plan—an entrée into the world of striptease. Only there's no strip to the tease. To get around the censor (a jaundiced Christopher Guest), Van Damm has the nubile young ladies pose still as statues, their picturesque props locking them securely into the land of kitsch. There's a reprehensible side plot involving a naked virgin named Maureen and Mrs. Henderson's dead soldier son. It's the very definition of melodrama, and it's awfully dumb. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Munich
Steven Spielberg has discovered a damning parable about America's post-9/11 strategy. He just hasn't turned it into a good movie. In 1972 Israel sent a hit squad after the Palestinians responsible for the fiendish guerrilla attack at the Munich Olympic games—a high-profile attack that, much like 9/11, brought the reality of terrorism and the fiery politics of the Middle East into popular culture. Israel's eye-for-an-eye reaction to Munich marked the beginning of a tragic, spiraling strategy of vengeance. Munich follows lead Israeli assassin Avner Kauffmann (Eric Bana) through the cloak-and-dagger underworld of counterintelligence and the bourgeois neighborhoods of Europe (where most of the ex-pat Palestinian plotters live) as he knocks off targets and becomes increasingly alienated. The film is heavy-handed, tedious, and—I gotta say—shockingly sexist. Women only exist in this movie to provide earthy symbols of home or as sympathetic props meant to increase our revulsion to the violence. (JOSH FEIT)

Nanny McPhee
Emma Thompson is running a vicious gambling ring, and Derek Jacobi, Angela Lansbury, Adam Godley, and Colin Firth owe her more than their combined net worth. How else can we explain their willingness to stoop so low? There is nothing to recommend this Thompson vehicle (she stars and wrote the screenplay) except for the bit when an old biddy gets hit in the face with a chunk of wedding cake. An adaptation of the well-loved Nurse Matilda books, the movie is a predictable riff on the nanny-as-savior theme: There are seven ill-behaved children who chew up their caretakers, a distracted widower/mortician father, a magical nanny who teaches everyone the true meaning of love, filial piety, citizenship, etc. Despite all this (and a dancing donkey!), the movie is uninspiring and dull. (BRENDAN KILEY)

The New World
Q'orianka Kilcher, a 14-year-old beauty who looks far older than—though exactly as naive as—her age would suggest, plays Pocahontas as a child attracted to John Smith (Colin Farrell) through a chaste but insatiable curiosity. Farrell is more opaque. It's hard to tell whether he's transfixed by this persistent girl or merely bewildered. And when he freaks out and leaves Jamestown, your sympathy for Pocahontas feels more like pity for an abandoned child than identification with an adult woman. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Pink Panther
Physical comedy's not exactly my bag, but I'll admit that it's funny when people fall down (the first 17 times). And I chuckled heartily at Clouseau's ridiculous accent. Even the conceit that French people speak to each other in English is theoretically amusing. But for the most part, the "jokes" in The Pink Panther are so lazy, so nothing special, that they barely register. There are a handful of moments—tiny, beautiful moments—when Martin's writing talent peeks through, silly and surreal. Like when Beyoncé Knowles (as pop star Xania) tells Clouseau, "Next week I have to do something vague in New York." See, that's funny. And nobody had to fall down. (LINDY WEST)

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)

The Second Chance
A white mega-church preacher and a black street preacher share a soda, save souls.

Transamerica
Transamerica, the debut film from writer/director Duncan Tucker, features Bree Osbourne, a pre-operative transsexual woman played with abundant humanity by Desperate Housewives's Felicity Huffman. Huffman clearly aced her homework, and her exceptional performance is the reason to see Transamerica. With deft skill, she shows us the stress that results from constantly working to conceal the past. Bree is intensely self-conscious about her behavior, always doubting her ability to mingle unnoticed. Slight movements belie her efforts—she sticks her pinky stiffly in the air while sipping tea and torques her limbs tightly as she sits. Yet often, Huffman lets the stealth mask slip to reveal the delightfully witty nerd that Bree has always been. (KALEY DAVIS)

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)

When a Stranger Calls
I'm sure, for most of us, the title When a Stranger Calls rings some childhood bells. Nubile babysitter alone in secluded house. Stranger calls; is creepy. Police trace calls to upstairs bedroom. Yikes! And... scene. It's one of our most popular and plausible urban legends (pimple filled with spider babies? Come on)—but how could anyone possibly turn these 17 words into a full-length movie? The answer is, no one can. And I will never get that hour and a half back. (LINDY WEST)

Why We Fight
This agitdoc, from The Trials of Henry Kissinger director Eugene Jarecki, tries to tread the thin line between dry but thorough Frontline documentaries and Michael Moore's gotcha journalism. Both styles of filmmaking are persuasive in their own right, but transferring techniques from one to the other makes the argument start to feel patched together and limp. The central contention here is that America is at war because we don't know anything else. There's also another film embedded in Why We Fight, a quieter, better movie about the politics of conviction and deceit. The hero of this story is Wilton Sezker, a retired police officer whose son died on 9/11. The interviews with Sezker retrace his grief, his anger, his patriotic enthusiasm, his request that his son's name be painted on a missile bound for Baghdad, and his stunned discovery that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Sezker is not so much Everyman as President Bush's Everyconstituent. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The World's Fastest Indian
For a film about a speed freak, Indian has a pleasantly loose, rambling quality. Anthony Hopkins plays Burt Munro, a sixtysomething New Zealand coot who overcame both financial and medical difficulties on his quest to break the land-speed record with his prize souped-up 1920 motorcycle (the Indian of the title). As he makes his way toward Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, he comes into contact with a slew of well-meaning oddballs. These interactions occasionally err on the side of cheesy (a long sequence in L.A. where Munro pals around with a transvestite hotel clerk feels downright Gump-ish), but most generate a feeling of goodwill that's tough to resist. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Casanova
Casanova treats 18th-century Venice as a place where spit-takes graced every meal, mandatory pie-fights broke out on the hour, and even the filthiest urchin possessed bullwhip comedic timing. In its sheer desire to entertain, the film takes whimsy to levels normally outlawed by the Geneva Convention. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Cheaper by the Dozen 2
Not funny enough for kids, or anything enough for grown-ups, this movie is forlornly pointless—but fans of Eugene Levy's leg hair won't leave disappointed. (LINDY WEST)

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. (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. (ANNIE WAGNER)

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)