This earnest but silly saga about a Mormon missionary sent to the remote island kingdom of Tonga in the 1950s consists of a series of crises (a child missing during a hurricane, alcoholism) that the evangelist manages to neatly solve within 10 minutes each. We learn little about either the island culture or the Mormon

The ruthless, aspiring class president Reese Witherspoon played in 1999’s Election could be a descendant of Becky Sharp, the conniving centerpiece of Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 expose of Victorian high society. Which gives Witherspoon another chance to exhibit the mischievous edge that juts out now and then like her javelin of a chin.

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

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

Winner of 2006’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, this thug-rehabilitation movie goes to exaggerated lengths to redeem its criminal antihero. Presley Chweneyagae gives a riveting performance as a thieving teen who steals a woman’s car without realizing her baby is in the back seat. A crisis of conscience ensues, as well as a crash course in

Anyone who’s ever been part of a wedding will enjoy the way director Mira Nair captures the giddy chaos surrounding such an occasion, even if the titular event here takes place in contemporary India. The movie focuses on a four-day celebration of an arranged marriage between a young New Delhi woman and an engineer from

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

An enchanting ending redeems this otherwise familiar story of contemporary society clashing with traditional culture. Whale Rider takes place in a coastal tribal community of New Zealand, where a young girl (Oscar-nominated Keisha Castle-Hughes) challenges the gender biases that have governed her people for generations. Writer-director Niki Caro fares better capturing the cascading green hills