The Bridge of San Luis Rey
dir. Mary McGuckian
Opens Fri June 10.

Woe be to the filmmaker who attempts to hijack a classic and fails. One of the few mandatory high school reads that warrants bookshelf space afterwards, Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey has an undeniably nifty narrative hook: After five apparently unconnected people meet their maker at the hands of the titular Peruvian bridge, a scholarly friar (here, Gabriel Byrne, wearing an overgrown Moe Howard wig) skirts the line of heresy by trying to divine God's master plan. Good, potentially profound stuff in any form, but where Wilder dealt in clever symbolism and quiet metaphor, writer/ director Mary McGuckian plays to the cheap seats, laying on unnecessary sentiment with a novelty-sized trowel. Not since Demi Moore donned the scarlet letter has a film so unwittingly conspired to debase the original work. To damn with faint praise, McGuckian has certainly assembled an impressive cast-including Kathy Bates, that reliable scene-stealer Geraldine Chaplin, and twin directors the Polish Brothers-but left to their own devices, the actors either munch the scenery (with Robert De Niro and F. Murray Abraham being the primary offenders), or try to vanish beneath their powdered wigs (this may well be the most docile Harvey Keitel will ever get without the aid of a Thorazine dart). The final film somehow comes off as both manic and profoundly boring, fatally overblown and wholly incomprehensible. Whatever the intentions of novelist and filmmaker, having the audience root for the bridge probably wasn't one of them. ANDREW WRIGHT

The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D
dir. Robert Rodriguez
Opens Fri June 10.

Any honest film about childhood must be a sad film (like Theo Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist), because childhood, in reality (and not in memory), is an altogether sad experience. What a little person wants is to grow up and claim control of his life, rather than being under the total control of parents and teachers.

Robert Rodriguez's latest kid movie The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D explores the inherent sadness of childhood. It is about a boy (Cayden Boyd) who is not too bright, or cute, or loved in any profound way by his parents (the ineffectual David Arquette and the beautiful Kristin Davis). His parents are heading toward a break, at school he is bullied, and he has a crush on a girl whose father (his teacher) has ordered him to stay away from. The boy, like all children, has zero power, so he turns to his imagination, which, though feeble, is just enough to help him escape this prison of school and homework. One day the superheroes of his imagination cross the line into reality and his life is transformed into an exciting adventure. He goes to a faraway planet and battles evil. He wins and returns to an improved reality: His parents are not going to separate, the bully is defeated, and the teacher/father gives the boy permission to connect with the object of his crush. Though the ending is happy, the substance of the film is sad, which is why it's the best kid's movie Robert Rodriguez has so far made. CHARLES MUDEDE

The Honeymooners
dir. John Schultz
Opens Fri June 10.

This movie is just plain dumb. Starring Cedric the Entertainer, who should now be called Cedric the Bore (or Cedric the Absolute Bore), the black version of The Honeymooners has a plot that's propelled by a conflict between the wives of Ed Norton (Mike Epps) and Ralph Kramden (Cedric)-they dream of owning a home-and a white developer (an anemic Eric Stoltz). The developer wants to buy a duplex from an old lady, knock her building down, and transform the whole block into a massive multiplex. The wives want to buy the old lady's duplex and achieve the American dream of homeownership. In an effort to resolve the situation, the white developer offers the wives new apartments in his future multiplex, but they don't want anything to do with it; they want the whole house to themselves. Because living in a dense housing development is kinder on the environment than living in a large duplex, one has no choice but to side with the developer. In this crummy movie, it's Ed and Ralph and their sexy but brainless wives who are the real enemy of a progressive urbanism. Down with The Honeymooners and all that they represent. CHARLES MUDEDE

High Tension
dir. Alexandre Aja
Opens Fri June 10.

Press screenings are a strangely mixed blessing for film critics-a free, velvet-roped (or more accurately, masking-taped) seat in the press row is surely a perk, but it comes at the expense of sitting in a packed theater full of weird film parasites and-even worse-other critics. So considering that I spent the 20 minutes that preceded High Tension (not to mention a good amount of spillover into the movie itself) under oppressive nerd fire from a group of thirtysomething men in the press row behind me-barking about their trips to Comic-Con International, their affection for Katie Holmes ("I'd date her, if only because she looks like a young Lynda Carter! Snort!"), and the current status of their three-part Masters of the Universe documentary-you may want to consider the brief review that follows a little biased.

Notable more for its nation of origin than anything else, the French slasher High Tension is pretty unremarkable-an awkwardly formulaic update of the slasher genre of the '70s and '80s (complete with cartoonish gore, unnecessarily loud fluorescent lights, creepy dolls, a gratuitous shower scene, and, of course, a dubious plot twist) unsuccessfully aimed at an American horror audience's bloodlust. It's a cheap, dubbed, and largely artless affair-in other words, one that was hardly worth the mental anguish forced upon me by my fellow critics. ZAC PENNINGTON