Possession (2002)

Drama Rated PG-13

Watching Possession is a bit like hearing a disinterested high-schooler read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: The words are there, but the passion is missing. Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart both give oddly miscalibrated performances as modern scholars researching an affair between two historical literary figures, but it’s most likely writer-director Neil LaBute who is responsible

Valiant (2005)

Family Rated G

A lame-duck movie about pigeons. The title hero is a pipsqueak of a bird who joins Britain’s Royal Homing Pigeon Service during World War II. He has the voice of Ewan McGregor, and like McGregor’s other animated incarnation in 2005 – Rodney Copperbottom of Robots – he suffers from a case of terminal niceness. I’ve

Crossroads (2002)

Drama Rated PG-13

More giggling goes on here than anyone over the age of 12 – or male – should have to endure. Otherwise, this movie debut of Britney Spears should please her two main audiences: young teen girls and the creepy men who ogle them. As a standard road-trip flick, Crossroads is predictably, harmlessly insipid, but worse

Fun With Dick and Jane (2005)

Comedy Rated PG-13

If Saturday Night Live ever did a theme show, it might look something like this Jim Carrey comedy, which is less a movie than a thinly connected series of sketches all riffing on corporate scandals and the resulting unemployment. There is some clever social satire here, but only in fits and starts, and never toward

I, Robot (2004)

Action/Adventure Rated PG-13

Admitting in its credits that it is simply “suggested by” the science-fiction writing of Isaac Asimov, I, Robot treats whatever ideas that may lie in its source material as little more than excuses to make a Will Smith cop picture with the slight novelty of having robots as perps. Too bad they look less like

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

Drama Rated PG-13

The self-righteous Mona Lisa Smile is set in 1953, and it should have come out in 1954. The movie thinks it’s blazing new trails in the name of feminism, when the path it walks thankfully has long been charred. Julia Roberts plays a free-thinking women’s college instructor bent on teaching her students there’s more to

Real Cancun, The (2003)

Documentary Rated R

Like the MTV reality series it was spun off from, The Real Cancun takes a bunch of self-obsessed young adults, throws them into one house and prods them into behaving as if they were at a junior-high dance. That no one survives with a shred of dignity shouldn’t come as a surprise. These are kids

Sunshine State (2002)

Drama Rated PG-13

Filmmaker John Sayles (Lone Star, Limbo) – who finds movies in towns where the rest of us find a place to fill up on gas – depicts a coastal Florida community weathering a storm of real estate development. The standout of the ensemble cast is Edie Falco of “The Sopranos,” a constant surprise as a

Thumbsucker (2005)

Drama Rated R

Dripping with irony and full of Donnie Darko vibes, Thumbsucker at first seems to be just another Sundance-spawned exercise in suburban teen alienation, but then the movie opens up to consider the adults in its central high-schooler’s life. The title teen (Lou Pucci) suffers from typical adolescent angst, yet Thumbsucker also considers how that angst

Venom (2005)

Horror Rated R

In this infinitely idiotic horror flick, the population of Backwater, La., consists almost entirely of dumb teenagers, making it just the sort of place a demonic maniac would go fishing. And so one does, with all the ruthlessness, cruelty and utter predictability of hundreds of others in countless slasher films before him. The movie piles