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

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

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

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

Denzel Washington plays a working-class father who takes a hospital hostage to force the heart transplant his son needs but his insurance won’t pay for. As a rousing, self-righteous melodrama, John Q gets your blood pumping, but as a subtle portrayal of what it’s like to be poor and underinsured, the movie is ludicrous.