GUIDE TO WHAT'S PLAYING AT LOCAL THEATERS

OUT THIS WEEK:

MILLION DOLLAR BABY ½
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman
Rating: PG-13
Playing at: Paseo Nuevo

WHITE NOISE ½
Starring: Michael Keaton, Deborah Kara Unger, Chandra West, Ian McNeice
Rating: PG-13
Playing at: Fiesta 5, Camino Real

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON

Starring: Sean Penn, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson, Naomi Watts
Rating: PG
Playing at: Plaza de Oro

CURRENT MOVIES PLAYING:

THE AVIATOR out of 4
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: Martin Scorsese's latest extravaganza is visually astounding, constantly dazzling and frequently thrilling. Every detail is perfect, as you'd imagine from a director who's as famous for perfectionism as the subject of the film, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. Strong performances abound, from star Leonardo DiCaprio to Cate Blanchett as Hughes' legendary love Katharine Hepburn to Alan Alda as a scheming senator. But similar to Scorsese's last collaboration with DiCaprio, the 2002 behemoth "Gangs of New York," it's ultimately about the spectacle. The director seems more interested in aesthetics at the expense of substance, and John Logan's script doesn't delve deeply enough into Hughes' psychology.
Playing at: Paseo Nuevo

BAD EDUCATION
Starring: Fele Martinez, Gael Garcia Bernal
Rating: NC-17
Lowdown: Red is the color of passion. It is also the primary color of " Bad Education," Pedro Almodovar's gloriously feverish ode to what drives us to do things great and terrible. The movie represents another leap in maturity from the writer-director of " Talk to Her" and " All About My Mother." In " Bad Education," novice filmmaker Enrique (Fele Martinez) options an autobiographical novel by his boyhood love, Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal), now an actor begging for a role in it. Ignacio, now using a stage name, seems changed, impervious to Enrique's charms. Nevertheless, he gets the part as a transvestite blackmailing a priest who long ago abused him at a boarding school they attended.
Playing at: Plaza de Oro

BEYOND THE SEA
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: Quick show of hands: Who wants to see Kevin Spacey singing and dancing for two hours as Bobby Darin? Come on, people, he looks and sounds just like him! Well, Kevin Spacey wanted to see Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin. That seems to be the entire point of " Beyond the Sea," in which he plays the pop crooner from his rise to music and movie stardom in the '60s, through his turn as a folk singer during the Vietnam War, and up to his death after open-heart surgery in 1973. Spacey says this isn't about satisfying his ego, but functioning as director, co-writer and star, he's created a film that feels unshakably like a vanity project. You have to admire him for his enthusiasm, though, and for sharing the same unflappable sense of determination to get the film made as the character he's playing in the film itself.
Playing at: Riviera

CLOSER ½
Starring: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen
Rating: R
Lowdown: The smoky Damien Rice ballad " The Blower's Daughter" serves as the theme of Mike Nichols' incisive sex drama " Closer." But it's " How Soon Is Now?," the despairing Smiths song pleading on the soundtrack (at a strip club of all places!), that characterizes the mood of this movie and its four achy-breaky souls. To some extent, the movie is about congenital dissatisfaction. In another sense, it's about the disjunction between who people are and why they love. At 73, Nichols is in peak form.
Playing at: Fiesta 5

DARKNESS
Starring: Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, Stephan Enquist
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: " Darkness," which crept into theaters nationwide on Christmas Day, tries to spook holiday revelers with a guessing game about which member of a handsome American family, relocated to Spain, will kill another. But the real mystery is why such a mangled film was not junked altogether.
Playing at: Fairview Twin

FAT ALBERT
Starring: Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt
Rating: PG
Lowdown: This mostly live-action update of Bill Cosby's Saturday morning cartoon series is a hokey, insipid, outdated mess that even the most nostalgic of parents and the most gullible of kids will have trouble embracing. The real-life incarnations of Albert and his pals are grating, with none of the goofy charm of their cartoon forebears. With his lumpy costume as the title character, Kenan Thompson looks less like the portly ghetto kid and more like what he is - a guy in a fat suit. The trivial plot has Albert and company crawling through a TV set into the real world to help a lonely teen (Kyla Pratt). Executive producer and co-writer Cosby and director Joel Zwick deliver little more than a collection of bad comedy sketches.
Playing at: Paseo Nuevo, Fairview Twin

FINDING NEVERLAND ½
Starring: Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell, Dustin Hoffman, Freddie Highmore
Rating: PG
Lowdown: A recent story in New York magazine wondered whether Johnny Depp would survive respectability, but one could think it was more a question of whether his sudden respectability would survive him. The magazine was right to worry, though. Depp's typical careening lilt of rock 'n' roll is gone from " Finding Neverland," a movie in which everything is on its best behavior, including him.
Playing at: Metro 4

FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi, Tyrese Gibson, Miranda Otto
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: This fairly literal remake dumbs down characters and relationships to fit today's superficial standards in adventure films, blunting the tension and nuance of the 1965 original about a group that survives a desert crash and builds a new plane from the wreckage of the old. Dennis Quaid stars in the role originated by James Stewart, as a jaded pilot who thinks the makeshift contraption designed by one of his passengers (Giovanni Ribisi) will never get them off the ground. Director John Moore's remake piles on action-flick bombast, from overblown visual effects to earsplitting music.
Playing at: Cinema Twin

HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS
Starring: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Zhang Ziyi, Song Dandan
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: Zhang Yimou's " House of Flying Daggers" is, hands down, the most visually ravishing movie of the year. It has sequences of balletic martial arts action that can knock you back, open-mouthed, in your comfy multiplex chair. Yet the movie amounts to frustratingly little by the time it's over, and you come out treasuring the pieces while wondering where the movie went. It's a perfect example of how far production design and editing won't take you when the story's not there.
Playing at: Plaza de Oro

THE INCREDIBLES ½
Starring voices of: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson
Rating: PG
Lowdown: That crashing noise you hear emanating from your local multiplex is the sound of Pixar trying something different - and succeeding magnificently. " The Incredibles" is the first of the company's films to come with a PG rating, and it features not bugs, toys, monsters or fish, but superheroes who fight dastardly villains and toss huge chunks of masonry around. There are explosions, there is civic destruction, there are scary bits. But there are also such emotions as despair, confidence, joy, envy and affection. By going out on a limb, Pixar has made an emotionally resonant, inventively hilarious movie that, oddly, may be its most family-friendly yet.
Playing at: Cinema Twin

KINSEY ½
Starring: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney
Rating: R
Lowdown: Knowing is better than not knowing. This is the message at the center of " Kinsey," Bill Condon's provocative, old-fashioned, hugely entertaining biopic of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey. With the fires of controversy over the man's life and work being stoked once more by self-appointed moral guardians, it's a message that bears repeating: Knowing is better than not knowing. The scandal was how much we didn't know about sex before Kinsey came along. The scandal - and no one needs to be told that this matters in the era of the New Prudery - is how much we still don't know.
Playing at: Cinema Twin

LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
Starring: Jim Carrey, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning, Kara and Shelby Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jude Law, Billy Connolly
Rating: PG
Lowdown: Lemony Snicket has sold out - and his movie is better for it. This may not be what fans of " A Series of Unfortunate Events" want to hear, but it's true: The inevitable Hollywood version of author Daniel Handler's poisoned kiddie-book bonbons inevitably lets a little light into the darkest corners of the Baudelaire orphans' lives. There's the occasional sentimental moment, a smile or two, a conventional mystery plot; there's even - gasp - a happy ending. And of course there's Jim Carrey galumphing all over the place, braying his merry idiot laugh.
Playing at: Fiesta 5, Camino Real

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU
Starring: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Anjelica Houston
Rating: R
Lowdown: In " The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," director Wes Anderson teams up with his " Rushmore" star, Bill Murray, for a droll comedy about a conflicted, Jacques Cousteau-like celebrity oceanographer struggling to complete a documentary film. If you love Bill Murray and the distinctively wry style of Anderson's comedy (" The Royal Tenenbaums," " Bottle Rocket"), you're liable to have a good time with it. But unlike the team's previous collaboration, it's paper-thin and instantly forgettable.
Playing at: Metro 4

MEET THE FOCKERS ½
Starring: Ben Stiller, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: This could have been one of those sequels that tries desperately to capitalize on the unexpected success of the original movie - in this case, " Meet the Parents," which was a huge hit in 2000. So it's an unexpected pleasure to report that " Fockers" is an improvement on " Parents" - whose jokes dragged on too long - thanks largely to the presence of Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, who play Ben Stiller's oversexed parents. It's easy to forget that Streisand can be funny; here, she and Hoffman look like they're having such a blast together, it's impossible not to laugh along with them. But " Meet the Fockers" is still laden with the same obligatory toilet humor as its predecessor, as Greg Focker (Stiller) introduces his mother and father to the uptight, WASPy parents (Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner) of his fiancee, Pam (Teri Polo).
Playing at: Fiesta 5, Camino Real

NATIONAL TREASURE ½
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Sean Bean
Rating: PG
Lowdown: " National Treasure" is the sort of family-friendly contraption where smart people do a lot of stupid things in the service of entertainment. The minute Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), the lass from the National Archives, snatches back the Declaration of Independence from Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage), the man who purloined it, the dastardly Ian Howe (Sean Bean) and his crew pull up and seize her and the document. So naturally she winds up swinging off the side of a speeding van. You see, there might be an invisible map on the back of the Declaration that holds the key to lots of ancient booty.
Playing at: Fairview Twin

OCEAN'S TWELVE
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Julia Roberts, Andy Garcia, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Vincent Cassel, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Eddie Jemison, Carl Reiner, Elliott Gould, Shaobo Qin
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: Steven Soderbergh's " Ocean's Twelve" goes above and beyond the call of the ordinary Hollywood movie. It's so well made and undeniably entertaining it should leap from tall buildings and wear a big " S" on its chest. Given the industry insistence on flimsy movies or pandering ones, the skill on display in " Ocean's Twelve" feels like an act of heroism, rescuing us from gooey contraptions like " National Treasure."
Playing at: Fiesta 5, Camino Real

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Starring: Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: You can't exactly go small when you're doing a movie adaptation of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but even walking in with expectations of grandeur cannot prepare you for this bombastic monstrosity. Simultaneously amped-up and rock-and-rolled down, presumably to make it palatable to a wider audience, director Joel Schumacher's film is far more interested in earsplitting crescendos than in subtly touching the heart. It is shot sumptuously, though, and it's packed with rich details. And some of the now-familiar tunes can be lovely - when the music isn't drowning out the vocals, that is. (The luminous Emmy Rossum, who plays Christine, sang with the Metropolitan Opera starting at age 7.) It's just really hard to take this " Phantom" seriously, despite how seriously it takes itself.
Playing at: Metro 4

THE POLAR EXPRESS
Starring: Tom Hanks
Rating: G
Lowdown: Originally published in 1985, Chris Van Allsburg's " The Polar Express" is a hushed, haunted little book - a child's illuminated manuscript set during the dreamy wee hours of Christmas Eve. It's also all of 32 pages long. Director Robert Zemeckis, by contrast, has 96 minutes of screen time to fill, so we now have elves bungee-jumping from purple zeppelins, children teetering across impossibly high suspension bridges, slam-bang action sequences, and a rock-'n'-rolling Santa's helper with the rubbery face and raucous voice of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler. Yes, it's like that. Don't worry, though - the film version of isn't entirely a Hollywood hatchet job like last year's " Dr. Seuss' the Cat in the Hat."
Playing at: Fairview Twin

RAY ½
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell, Sharon Warren, C.J. Sanders
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: Here's how good Jamie Foxx is in " Ray": For the duration of the film's two hours, it never once crosses your mind that you're watching an actor play Ray Charles. He convinces you of Brother Ray's sightlessness, of his weaknesses for women and the needle, and, above all, of the volcanic talent that slammed together different genres of music until something new was forged. It's a good thing Foxx does all this, because the movie doesn't. Directed by Taylor Hackford ("An Officer and a Gentleman," " Proof of Life"), " Ray" isn't hackwork, but it's not too far off, either.
Playing at: Cinema Twin

SIDEWAYS
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh
Rating: R
Lowdown: Based on a novel by Rex Pickett, " Sideways" is a comic symphony of lies, orchestrated by Alexander Payne with the finesse of a vintage Hal Ashby ("The Last Detail"). The movie starts with a minor social fib and ends with a whopper involving intentional vehicular damage, and in between there are white lies, wholesale chicaneries and more, all springing from the doomed attempt to hold onto youth.
Playing at: Paseo Nuevo

SPANGLISH ½
Starring: Adam Sandler, Tea Leoni, Paz Vega
Rating: PG-13
Lowdown: " Spanglish," the new James L. Brooks movie, is centered on a laid-off Los Angeles wife and mother named Deborah Clasky (Tea Leoni), and Flor (Paz Vega), the Mexican single mom she hires to be her housekeeper. Neither woman is perfect, but both strive to be, and the movie thrives on the antagonism among the two of them and Deborah's husband, John (Adam Sandler). Brooks is a poet, a realist, and a wizard when it comes to creating characters who could pass for real people. Here he has reconsidered cultural melodramas such as " Stella Dallas" and " Imitation of Life" in an age of " Wife Swap." What he's come up with is one of the most humane works ever made about the lives of working mothers.
Playing at: Metro 4, Camino Real

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT ½
Starring: Audrey Tautou, Jean-Pierre Becker
Rating: R
Lowdown: It's 1917, during the worst days of World War I, and five French soldiers have been pushed out of a trench into the muddy barbed-wire killing ground known as No Man's Land. Each has maimed himself in the hand in a desperate bid to be sent back home, away from the insanity, and each has been caught, court-martialed, and convicted. Their sentence is, essentially, death by war. This is the central event of " A Very Long Engagement," one that this long, bloody, exhilarating Rubik's Cube of a film keeps returning to over and over again, from different angles and through the recollections of different characters.
Playing at: Plaza de Oro

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