originally published April 16, 2008

21

(PG-13) Based on the true life-story of card-counting MIT kids who bilked some Las Vegas casinos for millions, 21 is a crowd pleasing slice of instantly forgettable entertainment. 21 isn’t a bad story, but it deals some clichéd cards. A better director and a more challenging script could have turned 21’s true tale into something more significant.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS

(R) See Movie Pick.

88 MINUTES

(R) Al Pacino stars as college professor and forensic expert, Dr. Jack Gramm, who, according to a death threat, has 88 minutes to live and must solve a string of murders linked to a killer he put on death row. This rote-looking thriller looks pretty familiar; maybe that’s why it’s been gathering dust on the shelf for a couple of years. With Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Benjamin McKenzie, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger and Neal McDonough.

ARRANGED

(NR) Two young women, Orthodox Jew Rochel (Zoe Lister Jones) and Muslim Nasira (Francis Benhamou), look to one another to survive their first year teaching at a public school in Brooklyn and to prepare for the arranged marriages both will soon be going through. Arranged won two Chameleons from the Brooklyn Film Festival and Audience Awards from the Washington Jewish Film Festival, the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival and the Berkshire International Film Festival. Part of the ACC Library’s iFilms series.

AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR

(NR) This film examines the use of the death penalty in Texas, focusing on the story of Carlos De Luna, a wrongly exectuted convict. From award-winning directors Steve James (Hoop Dreams) and Peter Gilbert (Vietnam: Long Time Coming).

THE BAND'S VISIT

(PG-13) Tackling one of the world’s most pressing issues - Arab-Israeli relations - The Band’s Visit does not resort to preaching. The Band’s Visit simply shows us at our best, giving to those in need despite prejudices imposed by culture and religion. A film can still say a lot without bludgeoning the audience into agreement. If The Band’s Visit reminds us of anything, it is that the most well-received messages are often those delivered softly, through subtlety and humor.

THE BUCKET LIST

(PG-13) If not for the magnetic allure of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, director Rob Reiner might finally have tumbled to the bottom of moviemaking’s own pit of despair. Hampered by its schmaltzy script, The Bucket List is a road movie for the terminally ill.

THE COUNTERFEITERS

(R) 2007. This Academy Awardwinning German film was written and directed by Stephan Ruzowitzky. It fictionalizes a secret plan by the Nazis during WWII to destabilize the U.K. by flooding its economy with for

DRILLBIT TAYLOR

(PG-13) Go into Drillbit Taylor realizing that it’s Superbad for the preteens whose parents wouldn’t let them see Superbad (and probably won’t let them see this movie due to its kinship with last year’s surprise smash hit), and one shouldn’t be disappointed.

EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED

(PG) This controversial documentary claims that educators and scientists are being persecuted for their belief in "intelligent design." Hosted by Ben Stein.

THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM

(PG-13) A kung fu obsessed teenager (Michael Angarano, Sky High) gets transported to ancient China, where he must help a band of warriors free the imprisoned Monkey King. It feels a little late in the game for a first-time pairing of martial arts legends Jackie Chan and Jet Li, but if I were the producers, I’d be promoting the hell out of it as well. Knowing the flick was directed by the guy behind The Haunted Mansion, gives me a better idea of how little to expect.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL

(R) The Apatow crew is back, and after the somewhat disappointing performances of Walk Hard and Drillbit Taylor, they need to regain their blockbuster momentum. I don’t know that this bawdy comedy, written by “How I Met Your Mother”’s Jason Segel, about a poor schmo (Segel) who goes to Hawaii to get over a bad breakup with his TV star girlfriend (Kristin Bell of “Veronica Mars”) only to end up in the same hotel as her and her new boyfriend. Expect plenty of appearances from the typical gaggle of Apatow familiars.

A FOUR LETTER WORD

(NR) A romantic comedy set in Manhattan that explores gay relationships with campy panache. [Cotter]

HORTON HEARS A WHO!

(G) The 1954 children’s classic about Horton the Elephant (v. Jim Carrey), whose giant ears allow him to communicate with the tiny speck that is the town of Whoville is one of the good doctor’s most beloved tales, right behind Green Eggs and Ham. The laughs in Horton are never cheap or juvenile (a plus for the adult Seuss lovers in the crowd), yet they are perfectly pitched for little ones’ ears.

LEATHERHEADS

(PG-13) George Clooney’s latest film is like an ugly throwback jersey whose days gone by appeal makes one briefly forget how unfashionable it is right now. Director Clooney momentarily creates a zany Capra-Hawks-Sturges atmosphere; he just doesn’t sustain it. Like 2003’s Down with Love (which also starred Zellweger), Leatherheads is more enamored with its conceit than its conceit is enamoring.

MAD MONEY

(PG-13) Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes rob the Federal Reserve. The leads are game, and interweaving a heist movie with themes of female empowerment gone awry, and the corporate downsizing of white upper-middle class America is intriguing. Too bad the direction stinks.

MEET THE BROWNS

(PG-13) These Browns aren’t worth meeting.

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY

(PG-13) London governess Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) takes a job with lively American singer and actress Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). Soon Miss Pettigrew is plunged into the dizzying glamour of high society. Based on a popular novel of the 1930s written by Winifred Watson.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS

(PG) A not-awful throwback to matinee serials a la Indiana Jones, National Treasure was a feature-length commercial for American historical tourism. What National Treasure was not - a lobotomized counterfeiter of thrills - happens to be everything its follow-up, Book of Secrets, is.

NIM'S ISLAND

(PG) Nim’s Island is a serviceable family friendly adventure film. Imaginative Nim (Abigail Breslin) lives on an isolated island in the South Pacific with her dad (Gerard Butler) and concocts adventures mirroring those of her favorite fictional hero, the world’s greatest adventurer Alex Rover.

NUÇI'S SPACE STUDENT FILM NITE

(NR) 2nd annual student movie screening for Depression & Suicide Awareness Week. An evening of short films themed "The Many Faces of Depression."

PENELOPE

(PG) Penelope isn’t as bad as its trailers make it look. Nonetheless, this modern fairy tale suffers from the overconceptualization of all Tim Burton wannabes.

PERSEPOLIS

(PG-13) Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s film recounts recent Iranian history through the limited but expanding scope of a young Iranian girl. How many hundreds of thousands of Iranians also stride confidently through their own insurrectionary Survivor-fueled montage? Persepolis proves there is at least one.

PROM NIGHT

(PG-13) See Flick Skinny. Sharing little more than a title, a setting, and some dead teens with Jamie Lee Curtis’s popular 1980 slasher flick, the new Prom Night is as dreadful as the worst of the four proms I attended. After three years of therapy and pills, Donna (Hairspray’s Brittany Snow) has gotten over the murders of her mom, dad, and brother by a crazed, obsessive teacher, Richard Fenton (Jonathan Schaech), in time for her senior prom. With boyfriend Bobby (Scott Porter, “Friday Night Lights”) draped over her arm like a tuxedo-clad corsage and her boobie friends, Claire (Jessica Stroup, “Reaper”) and Lisa (Gabrielle Union lookalike Dana Davis), Donna enters the hotel looking for a night to remember; she gets a night I wish I could forget. In order to get a box office friendly PG-13, television director Nelson McCormick, editor Jason Ballantine, and cinematographer Checco Varese artlessly chop up all the kills into bloodless bloodlettings. Every time a good, tense scene gets going, bad editing and shot composition release the tension like fake flatulence from a whoopee cushion. Relying on a hacked up piece of script by J.S. Cardone, Prom Night is about as fresh as week-old canapés leftover from the big event.

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

(R) Interactive midnight screening of the 1975 cult classic. Sex, rock and roll, transvestism and murder all come together in this campy romp - the longest running release in film history. [Cotter]

THE RUINS

(R) The Ruins is an exhaustingly tense trek into the Mexican jungle with four typical American college kids - medical student Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), his girlfriend Amy (Jena Malone), Amy’s best friend Stacey (Laura Ramsey), and Stacy’s boyfriend Eric (Shawn Ashmore) - and their new German friend (Joe Anderson) in search of an ancient Mayan ruin where an unexplainable evil patiently waits to devour them. Dotted with lots of little horrors (a broken back, amputation, self-surgery and more), The Ruins adds up to one big, bad horror flick.

SEMI-PRO

(R) Where Blades of Glory was simply an amusing ice skating flick, Semi-Pro steals from the annals of sports films to be the closest we may get to a new Slap Shot.

SHREK

(PG) 2001. The film that started the insanely popular fractured fairy tale franchise is still as fresh a blast of humorous air as it was seven years ago, and that’s a good thing considering how stale the third entry felt. To save his swamp, ogre Shrek and his pal Donkey must rescue Princess Fiona for scheming Lord Farquaad. Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz all shine. Family Night at the (Described) Movies, presented by the Special Needs Library, features a non-intrusive narration track for visually impaired viewers.

SHUTTER

(PG-13) This slice of pitiful PG-13 horror pie tasted just fine to its target audience. The 13 (and unders) in the theater were scared out of their minds by this predictable A-horror remake; however, Shutter caused me to barely shudder.

SMART PEOPLE

(R) Smart People intrigued me with a captivating trailer loaded with sharp dialogue spoken by its stellar cast, but trepidation gnawed at the back of my mind. Those fears were wrought real and large by the self-absorbed ode to quirky self-loathing. Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (a hunched, paunchy Dennis Quaid) hates his colleagues, his students and the world for not realizing how brilliant he thinks he is. His teenage daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page in a solid, post-Oscar nom performance), is a walking robot of Young Republican conformity. His son, James (Ashton Holmes), is angry and fairly purposeless, at least as far the film is concerned. Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker) cannot commit, though she apparently wants to. Every smart person in Smart People is unhappy; that point is reified by the blissful ignorance of Lawrence’s adopted brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church, who is so good at independent comedy that he never need test the mainstream waters). Too few moments of commercial director Noam Murro’s feature debut possess Chuck’s cheerfulness, and not enough laughs can be had at Lawrence’s miserable expense. The clinical depression of these Smart People is communicable.

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES

(PG) The Spiderwick Chronicles is based on a series of bestselling books by Terry DiTerlizzi and Holly Black about the Grace siblings, twins Jared and Simon (Freddie Highmore) and sister Mallory (Sarah Bolger), who discover a fantastical world existing unseen within our own after they move into the creepy old house that belonged to their great granduncle, Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn).

STEP UP 2 THE STREETS

(PG-13) The limber sequel to 2006’s surprise dance smash, Step Up 2 the Streets is a step down in almost every way.

STOP-LOSS

(R) Kimberly Peirce, who hasn’t made a film since her splashy 1999 debut Boys Don’t Cry, has chosen a whopper of a topic for her sophomore effort. 81,000 of the 650,000 soldiers that saw action in Afghanistan and Iraq have been stop-lossed, or forcibly reenlisted. When war hero and native Texan, Staff Sergeant Brandon King (a much more manly, muscular than usual Ryan Phillippe), is stop-lossed, he goes AWOL trying to figure a legal way out of his predicament. Meanwhile, King and his buddies - Steve (Channing Tatum, steeling his military mettle for G.I. Joe) and Tommy (the continually impressive Joseph Gordon-Levitt) - walk the streets of their small Texas town like ticking, post-traumatic stress bombs. The first half of Stop-Loss impresses its anti-war, pro-soldier message quite vividly and would make a great companion piece to Jarhead. But once Brandon goes on the run with his buddy Steve’s fiancé, Michelle (Abbie Cornish, who looks like a baby-faced Charlize Theron), the film loses its way, meandering between hopeless and bleak on the road to its preordained, pragmatic resolution. Nevertheless, the tough, honest, showy Stop-Loss honors the brave men and women broken on the wheel of what many consider a vain, futile war.

STREET KINGS

(R) Street Kings may commit a hundred moving cliché violations, but the overrated Training Day (which, Denzel fan or not, shouldn’t have even been considered for an Academy Award). A picture of detective Tom Ludlow (a weathered, surprisingly believable Keanu Reeves) can be found in the screenwriter’s guide next to the entry for “dirty cop who is relatively cleaner than his dirtiest colleague.” Ludlow sleeps in his clothes, drinks on the job, talks racist trash to suspects (before shooting them), and is an all-around not nice guy. On the streets of writer James Ellroy’s L.A., that sort of behavior makes him a moral beacon shining atop city hall. Ludlow only hurts criminals; the real villains are the ones who harm their own and stand in the way of the peace officers that keep our streets safe. Street Kings isn’t as morally complex as it pretends to be, and it won’t set the box office on fire. Still, the pulpy, hard-boiled crime film is arresting for the two hours before the credits bail you out.

WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS

(PG-13) Welcome home patently offensive, incorrect and insulting visions of the South, particularly Georgia.

WILLOW GARDEN AND OTHER SHORT FILMS

(NR) The Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, a sextet of independent films to be shown at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2007 and 2008, returns with another screening. Jim Haverkamp, who teaches at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, shared a Festival Prize from the Tupelo Film Festival for the murder ballad-based Willow Garden. The Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers is a program of the Southern Arts Federation and is sponsored by the UGA Parents & Families Association.

THE WITNESSES

(NR) Six-time Palme d’Or nominee André Téchiné directed and co-wrote this drama about the AIDS epidemic’s first outbreak in France. In Paris circa 1984, a group of friends - gay, straight, and bisexual - come to terms with the uncertainty generated by this new disease. Nominated for a Golden Berlin Bear and four Césars (including Best Director), The Witnesses won a Best Supporting Actor for Sami Bouajila. With Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Béart, Julie Depardieu, Johan Libéreau, Constance Dollé and Lorenzo Balducci. Special sneak preview on Wednesday, 4/16 for Boybutante Movie Nite benefitting the Boybutante AIDS Foundation.

Drew Wheeler