This teen flick turns an Outside magazine article about female surfers into something like MTV’s The Real World in Hawaii. False, forced drama – primarily the heroine’s (Kate Bosworth) unlikely jitters about an approaching surfing competition – take precedence over any real sense of this sports subculture. Even the action shots, edited with the rabid

Jennifer Lopez unwisely tries to dominate this otherwise charming remake of a 1996 Japanese film, even though it is supposed to be about a man (Richard Gere) who solves his midlife crisis by secretly taking dancing lessons, not about how sexy his instructor (Lopez) is. As long the movie focuses on Gere’s character – his

Mandy Moore’s teen melodrama features a birth, a death, a funeral and a wedding, yet it handles such swooning material with something that can almost be called tact. Add the star’s willingness to play a teen with a brain and you get enough genuine moments to make the soap-opera tendencies forgivable.

Nothing new for writer-director Terrence Malick (Badlands, The Thin Red Line), whose pet subject – mankind’s despoiling of an Edenic setting – is here transferred to the legend of John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher). The tale may be perfectly suited to Malick’s languorous cinematography and portentous voice-over narration, but by now these