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AFTER THE SUNSET PP

As a celebration of the incomparable beauty of Salma Hayek, After the Sunset surely ranks as a four-star affair, lovingly photographing this earthbound Aphrodite as she sashays around the film’s tropical setting in any number of bikinis and low-cut gowns. Oglers of Pierce Brosnan should also find this a thumbs-up affair: While the retiring James Bond has apparently made the switch from martinis to milkshakes, he’s still dashing enough to provide the necessary yang to Hayek’s sensual yin. But beyond the eye candy, there’s little else that’s memorable about this disposable tissue of a movie. Brosnan and Hayek play Max and Lola, lusty lovers who decide to retire to the Bahamas after successful careers as jewel thieves. Yet several factors impede their best-laid plan: their pursuit by an FBI agent (Woody Harrelson) who got burned by the couple during their last heist; the sudden arrival of a touring exhibit showcasing the priceless Napoleon diamond; and Max’s own restlessness, which dovetails with his desire for one final challenge. Don Cheadle’s talents are wasted in the underwritten role of a local hoodlum who wants Max to steal the diamond for him, while Harrelson’s overripe performance is the sort that a suddenly irrelevant actor delivers when he thinks he’s gotten a part that will catapult him back to the top. (Memo to Mr. Harrelson: This ain’t the one; better luck next time.)

BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON PP

Bridget Jones is back, wobbly bits and all. Unfortunately, this follow-up to the delightful 2001 comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary is the laziest sort of sequel, lifting episodes wholesale from the first film before spinning off in directions that don’t even begin to make sense. Therefore, even though the movie opens where the original ended, with single Brit Bridget (Renee Zellweger) at last finding true love with dashing lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the four screenwriters (including Helen Fielding, who wrote the Bridget books) hastily create a series of unlikely conflicts between the couple, simply so they can rehash the same scenario where Bridget finds her attention divided between Darcy and bad-boy womanizer Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). Only this time, Bridget’s antics are often annoying, Darcy’s sultry smolder has been reduced to gray ashes, and a venal action on Cleaver’s part renders the character far too despicable for this sort of fluff. Somehow, it all culminates with Bridget landing in a Thai prison, where she leads an impromptu chorus line of local hookers and drug addicts in a sing-along to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” — a ludicrous sequence that suggests there wasn’t enough cogent material to fashion a sequel in the first place. After appearing emaciated in Chicago, Zellweger’s back to a pleasantly plump size, though all that weight-shifting can’t be healthy (it recalls Raging Bull-era De Niro); then again, when a star’s expenditures often include a personal trainer and a dietician, maybe for once staying fit is easier done than said.

ALFIE PPP

Back in the mid-sixties, during a period when movies like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were causing all sorts of headaches for the MPAA's moral watchdogs, one such ruckus-raiser was 1966's Alfie, with Michael Caine in a star-making performance as a callow bachelor whose womanizing ways finally catch up to him. The plotline that had the censors howling involved an illegal abortion sought by one of Alfie's conquests. The new Alfie also includes scenes centering around an abortion, but because the act is now legal, the moment doesn't carry the same charge that its 1966 counterpart did. In fact, there isn't much in this update that resonates beyond the screen - Alfie '66 may still hold import as an artifact of its era, but Alfie '04 likely won't be remembered as anything more than one more unnecessary remake. And yet, as far as these things go, this one's not bad at all. The setting has been curiously switched from London to New York, and Alfie's escapades now seem almost tame in a nation that frequently celebrates its sexual predators in film and on television. Yet the key to this movie's success rests in the central performance by Jude Law - this easily represents his best acting to date, and he's aided by a letter-perfect supporting cast that includes Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei and Nia Long as various sack partners.

RAY PPP

Just how good is Jamie Foxx's performance in Ray? Let's just say that without him, this new biopic about music legend Ray Charles would possess only marginally more value than a film about, say, Tiffany or The Village People. Director Taylor Hackford, who has never met a movie he can't stretch well past two hours, wastes an awful amount of screen time going over variations on the same themes: Throughout the first part of his adult life, Ray (blind since age seven) alternates between taking drugs, cheating on his wife (sympathetically played by Kerry Washington) and -- oh, yeah -- emerging as a musical genius. Despite an occasional sameness to these scenes the film skips along thanks to the inherent drama in many of the presented conflicts. Yet shouldn't a movie named Ray give us a complete portrait of the man? Still, it's easy to overlook the flaws in the storytelling with Foxx commanding our attention in virtually every scene. The actor loses himself so thoroughly in the role that it's impossible to tell where Ray Charles ends and Jamie Foxx begins.

AROUND THE BEND P1/2

Michael Caine, going through the motions, plays an old codger who divides his 20 minutes of screen time between regaling his grandson (Josh Charles) and great-grandson (Jonah Bobo) with homespun homilies and hiding the boners he gets whenever his Danish nurse (Glenne Headly) enters the room. He then drops dead at the local KFC around the time that his long lost son (Christopher Walken), who’s been cooling his heels behind bars. Well-intentioned but not even remotely involving, Around the Bend leaves plenty of time for either dozing or daydreaming.

SAW PP1/2

In this age of cookie cutter thrillers, here’s one that, for better or worse (or a bit of both), stands apart from the pack. Most moviegoers didn’t want to spend even two minutes discussing the imbecilic likes of Taking Lives or Twisted, yet they’ll be endlessly jawboning after seeing this grisly serial killer opus that clearly aspires to be the next Seven. Two men, a doctor (Cary Elwes) and a photographer (Leigh Whannell, who co-wrote the script with director James Wan), wake up to find themselves shackled to the plumbing in an abandoned building’s bathroom. Realizing that they’re the prisoners of a notorious serial killer who’s fond of playing mind games with his victims, they decide to work together in an attempt to outsmart their captor. But their suspicions of each other’s motives — as well as the specific guidelines laid out by their torturer — work against their success, and the involvement of an emotionally scarred detective (Danny Glover) doesn’t seem likely to help them.

I HEART HUCKABEES PPP

David O. Russell’s movie is a noteworthy effort, with enough engaging hi-jinks — not to mention a high-wattage cast — to distract us from the frequent fuzziness of its psychobabble. Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore) handles what is ostensibly the lead role: Albert Markovski, an activist who hires a pair of “existential detectives” (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to help him discover if a series of coincidences is actually an indication of some deeper meaning behind life itself. As the private eyes go about their business, Albert continues to lock horns with Brad Stand (Jude Law), a rising executive with the Huckabees super-store chain and Albert’s nemesis on environmental matters. Brad’s model girlfriend (Naomi Watts) and an emotionally distraught firefighter (Mark Wahlberg) are also drawn into the fray, and matters become even more heated with the arrival of a French anarchist (Isabelle Huppert) whose nihilistic outlook affects Albert. The philosophical musings espoused by Russell’s characters are ultimately about as deep as those found in fast-food fortune cookies, yet the passion with which these folks rail against their unbearable lightness of being is inspiring.

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE PP1/2

The title outfit — super-macho warriors willing to destroy the world in order to stop the terrorist threat (there goes the Eiffel Tower; there go the pyramids) — is a Republican president’s wet dream, as is the notion of depicting liberal Hollywood actors like Tim Robbins and Alec Baldwin as anti-American stooges who suffer gruesome deaths for opposing our valiant heroes (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a puppet Sean Penn ripped apart by a kitty cat posing as a panther). But wait, there’s more! A Broadway show featuring the song “Everybody’s Got AIDS,” terrorists who speak entirely in gibberish (though we can frequently make out “jihad”), an explicit sex scene between anatomically incorrect dolls, and the longest vomiting scene ever recorded. Juvenile? Sure. Funny? Certainly — though not nearly as often as one might reasonably expect. w



THE FINAL CUT PPP

Robin Williams continues his exploration of the dark side of human nature in this sci-fi saga that’s set at a point when microchips installed in individuals serve to record their entire lives. Williams plays Alan Hakman, whose job as a “cutter” requires him to go through the memories of recently deceased people, edit out the sins, and present loving montages that can be screened at funerals. But the stakes are raised when it turns out that his latest job involves a slimeball whose chip is sought by those who will stop at nothing to obtain it. For a movie that often feels like it’s cobbled together from pieces of Minority Report, Blade Runner and other futuristic odysseys, this one’s weirdly engrossing, and so in thrall with its own big ideas that the occasional plotholes can easily be overlooked.

THE FORGOTTEN PP

Slumming Julianne Moore stars as a woman who, after mourning the death of her son for 14 months, is suddenly told that she never had a child and that he only existed within her own delusional mind. What begins as an unsettling psychological thriller eventually morphs into a sci-fi curio that becomes less intriguing as it plays out. Certainly, this was one way to go, but scripter Gerald DiPego never plays fair, changing the rules based squarely on the demands of his storyline. Director Joseph Ruben manages to stage some genuinely creepy moments here and there, but they’re squandered in a movie that ultimately drowns itself in an ocean of inconsistency.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS PP

A true-life yarn that was dubbed by Sports Illustrated as “one of the greatest sports stories of all time” has now been turned into one of the dullest sports films of recent years. Peter Berg has adapted his cousin H.G. Bissinger’s acclaimed novel but in the process stripped it of any complexity, leaving only a generic pigskin tale.