Red Dragon

dir. Brett Ratner

So here it is, the trifecta for Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, and it's sure to make piles of money. But is Red Dragon any good? The answer is kinda and no--kinda, thanks to Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Emily Watson, and Ralph Fiennes; no, thanks to Sir Anthony himself, who seems so utterly bored with the role that you can almost hear him snoozing with his eyes open.

Not that director Brett Ratner, best known for Rush Hour and its sequel, would know what to do with the flick even if Sir Anthony had shown up awake and ready. The prequel to Silence of the Lambs (when Hopkins was still creepy), Red Dragon so wants to be its Oscar-winning predecessor that entire sections seem to be snipped straight from Jonathan Demme's opus. Clunky and breathtakingly unoriginal, Ratner's film is a paint-by-numbers affair.

If Ratner does, indeed, have talent, it lies in being smart enough to surround himself with talented people. Red Dragon is owned by Norton, Hoffman, Watson, and Fiennes (even if Fiennes occasionally borders on ridiculousness), and each of their performances is solid, entertaining, and smart. Just don't expect Hannibal Lecter, or the film itself, to be frightening, because they're not. Need proof? Just listen to how hard composer Danny Elfman is working to coax some sort of jump out of you. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Brown Sugar

dir. Rick Famuyiwa

At the start of Brown Sugar, Sanaa Lathan, who plays a successful rap journalist, explains that she begins all her interviews of superstar rappers with the question, "When did you first fall in love with hiphop?" The question serves as a simple leitmotif for what has to be Hollywood's first hiphop romance. It functions first at the level of the film's love affair, which is between the rap journalist and Taye Diggs (they first met as boy and girl at an extemporaneous 1984 street hiphop jam that featured Slick Rick, Doug E. Fresh, and Dana Dane--whose masterpiece was "Nightmares" and not "Cinderfella Dana Dane," as the film maintains). It functions second at the level of hiphop music itself, and third, at the level of New York City. I have only one point to make about this stupid film: The question the rap journalist should really ask superstar rappers is, "When did you first fuck hiphop?" (if we are to mirror Brown Sugar's value system--love is honest; fucking is shallow), because there was never a time when money and celebrity did not play a central role in the ambitions of most rappers. And this film is fucking filled with rappers, who are bloated and boring. CHARLES MUDEDE

In Praise of Love

dir. Jean-Luc Godard

It's been more than 40 years since Breathless, and Jean-Luc Godard is still arguing with himself about the validity of cinema, which, alas, remains his one and only calling. I've read that this is a film about a filmmaker trying to steel himself to make a film with a reluctant star (also the director's lover, hesitant because she senses that he is ambivalent toward her). But I'll be damned if anything like a plot revealed itself as the movie played. Shot in glorious black and white, Love felt far more like a random series of meditations on the natures of art, emotion, language, Hollywood, and, of course, France. It's appropriate that no story is apparent here, because the film spends so much time pondering the very idea of Story, which, in French, is the same word as history, which offers classic Godardian inversions--double entendres that are also double negations. In a way, the whole movie is such an inversion (after an hour, the b&w switches to gorgeous color DV footage)--a sign that not only is Godard not back, but that he never went away. SEAN NELSON

White Oleander

dir. Peter Kosminsky

If I were a woman, I would be deeply offended by a movie like White Oleander, which posits that female strength is necessarily tied to violence, control freakery, and frigid sexuality, and furthers the insulting notion that being an artist means being an inscrutable, pretentious hypocrite. Since I am not a woman, however, I will say that Oleander is a waste of talent (Michelle Pfeiffer and Renée Zellweger may not be great actresses, but they're better than this movie lets them be) as well as time. When the main character (a teenage girl whose artist mother goes to jail for murdering her boyfriend) is adopted by white-trash Christians, the film comes momentarily alive, but only to stereotypes that can't outstretch the cast's valiant efforts to transcend them. SEAN NELSON

Tuck Everlasting

dir. Jay Russell

Fuck Everlasting is more like it! Disney has gotten its hands on the award-winning young person's book by Natalie Babbitt with gorgeous but creepy results. Set in 1915, the story concerns Winnie, a tightly corseted girl quivering on the cusp of maturity (played by luscious crumpet Alexis Bledel). When her parents threaten to send her to a "School for Young Ladies," she tears off into the forest and right into the arms of Jesse Tuck (Jonathan Jackson), a strapping young lad slurping straight from the Fountain of Youth. In fact, his whole family done drunk from it, more than 80 years before! The Everly Hillbillies (played by Sissy Spacek and William Hurt) gently kidnap Winnie in order to keep her from spilling their secret and also presumably to give her and Jesse plenty of time to frolic through fields of daisies in slow motion. Meanwhile, an oily fellow dressed in yellow (played by Ben Kingsley--having a ball, as usual) lurks in the forest. A wonderful cast, lovely cinematography, and an almost Zenlike pace cannot overcome the fact that this story is about a 104-year-old guy who's doing it with a teenager! He is approximately six times her age! Yuck! TAMARA PARIS