Moreover, I don't think there's any record of an earthquake in 330 or the following years. There was one in 373 B.C., which produced a tsunami that destroyed the Greek city of Helike, near Corinth, and another earthquake must have been responsible for the tsunami that devastated Tryphon of Apamaea's army as it marched along the Syrian coast near the city of Ptolemais in the second century B.C. But not in 330. Meanwhile, in China, the gang of looters is busily plundering a Buddhist cave filled with terra-cotta warriors. Well, the Buddha lived ca. 563-483 B.C., and the emperor Shihuangdi, whose warriors were copied for the film, ruled from 221 to 210 B.C. But the problem--aside from what such statues would be doing in a Buddhist cave in the first place--is that the religion didn't spread to China until the first century A.D. Ooops! Tomb Raider, a big-budget action movie from Paramount. The first five minutes--an Egyptian setting, lots of gun fire, and a homicidal robot--set the tone and pace for the rest of the film. The plot is simple: An alignment of all nine planets plus a solar eclipse takes place in one week. In that time Lara Croft, played by Angelina Jolie, has to find a missing key, racing a secret society known as the Illuminati to gain possession of it. A disk with ancient-looking engravings (an Egyptian protective eye motif is prominent), the key was forged during the last such alignment 5,000 years ago. The amulet gave power over time to the inhabitants of a lost city, a heavily tattooed people to judge by the one who appears on screen.

Abuse of the key led to the destruction of the city, located in Iceland but looking like a Khmer-Mesoamerican hybrid. To prevent its future misuse, the key was broken in half and hidden. The Illuminati are apparently heirs of the original bad guys from 5,000 years ago, and if they get their paws on the key we're all in big trouble. The movie is based on the Lara Croft character from the Tomb Raider video game by Eidos Interactive. Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, hopes the film will capitalize on the video game's popularity--since its 1996 debut, it has sold more than 21 million units, pulling in over $500 million, and has over 1,000 fan sites on the web. The video game has been featured in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Details magazines. Angelina Jolie appears on the Entertainment Weekly cover coinciding with the film's opening. Lara Croft has yet to appear in academic publications such as the American Journal of Archaeology, Antiquity, and Archäologische Anzeiger. On the other hand, the video game is popular among anthropology and archaeology students and Lara Croft is said to be a favorite at Halloween costume parties on campus.What's the literary and cinematic heritage of the Lara Croft character and Tomb Raider approach to archaeology?

I think you can trace it through the Indiana Jones films and Jewel of the Nile, plus a dose of the Clint Eastwood character "Dirty Harry" with his penchant for using large guns to shoot things, to old smash-and-grab archaeology-adventure writing geared toward adolescent boys, like H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. Lara Croft owes a bit to James Bond and to Emma Peel from the old Avengers television series, with maybe a hint of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan for the British nobility touch, the ape-man actually being Lord Greystoke. Supporting Lara Croft in the film are two stock characters, her butler (see Bunter from the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels and Jeeves from P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster stories) and a bumbling computer-geek inventor (see Q from the James Bond movies and Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor). For the film we also have the similarly stock ancient advanced people who fell into evil, bringing down their civilization (see Atlantis). Is there any real archaeology in the film? Most of what's there is backdrop, much of the film being shot at Angkor in Cambodia. (In an AP report, Jolie is quoted as saying, "It's the most amazing place I've ever been to in my life.") The only person identified in the film as an archaeologist, other than Lara Croft, works for an auction house, apparently supplying it with looted artifacts. There is an attempt in the script to give the Lara Croft character some depth, shown in her devotion to her deceased parents, especially her father, but it is swamped by other aspects of the video game's character: "Think James Bond crossed with Indiana Jones...in a Wonderbra" (Entertainment Weekly) and "a high-flying pinup version of Indiana Jones" (JAM! Movies). That's too bad. Not that this is really anything other than an action movie. As you might expect, the film credits are loaded with special effects, visual effects, and stunt people. My favorite on the credit list is Joss Skottowe, Weapons Supervisor. Not somebody you'd find on an archaeological field school. While preparing for her role, Jolie was said to be "on a strict training regimen of gymnastics, bungee jumping, kickboxing, weight training and the use of machine guns," according to an AFP report last September. Should we consider revising the archaeology curriculum on the university level?

THE WORST AND GROSSEST FILMS OF THE YEAR

GIGLI: WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR, PAR EXCELLENCE! Gigli is so carelessly made and performed that it is much like that can of cranberry sauce. Recently, I heard a great story that is probably untrue. Jennifer Lopez was in Vancouver at a yuppie grocer shopping for ingredients to make her man, Ben Affleck, a turkey dinner. Faced with the difficult decision of which kind of cranberry sauce to buy, chunky or smooth, she inquired of the clerk: "Which is sexier?" Though factually suspect (turkey in July?), it's a delicious image: The private Jennifer Lopez has so internalized the public image of sizzlin' hot J.Lo that even cranberry sauce is forced to play a part in the ongoing rock video now substituting for her actual life. Gigli is so carelessly made and performed that it is much like that can of cranberry sauce: just another prop to further J.Lo's plan for world domination. It is perhaps not their fault (though maybe it is) that with the splitting of David and Liza, Ben and Jen are officially the world's favourite doomed couple. But please, all you fans of her perfume and his pointed baby teeth, don't write to remind me that they're human; I don't believe it. I know a few, and humans are not this robotic or waxy, nor do they wear matching cancerous tans as a sign of togetherness. With every Us magazine cover promoting their superstardom, Lopez and Affleck get farther from their status as "actors." Then again, Gigli has nothing to do with acting. The film is simply a scrapbook for Ben and Jen so they can cherish on DVD the early days of their relationship. It is a trivial keepsake with a trivial plot: Affleck plays Gigli ("Rhymes with 'really,' "), a hood so inept that a watchdog gangster is appointed to make sure he doesn't screw up the task of kidnapping Brian (Justin Bartha), a mentally challenged teenaged boy. The watchdog is Lopez, a lesbian who quotes Sun Tzu, thus indicating depth. At this juncture, as at many throughout the day, J.Lo's ass deserves examination. It is the picture's true star. Lopez is so droolingly shot that director Martin Brest (Scent of a Woman) must have needed tiny windshield wipers to clear the spit from his lens. Granted, it is a remarkable ass: It can do yoga, enter and exit rooms and make pizza (probably). But there is something less joyful about the ass this time round; one might even note a touch of melancholy in its sway.

In the beginning, circa Selena, Jennifer Lopez stepped into public life like a serious person, a woman defiant in the face of conventional beauty standards, proud of her Latino heritage and her butt. Now her ass is just another jar of cranberry sauce greasing the wheels of the J.Lo Machine. In other words, does all that ass serve the plot or flesh out Lopez's character? Nu-uh. We learn nothing about this woman called Ricki except that she has terrible diction -- "brew-uhl," instead of "brut-al." Lopez once played a convincing toughie in Out of Sight, where her ass was a magnificent prop because it was withheld; a mere glimpse sent stronger men than George Clooney a-swooning. But Jennifer is not about withholding; recently, these two publicity sluts let millions of people watch them cooking on Dateline NBC. Suddenly one recalls with fondness how Sean Penn used to lash out at photographers to protect his relationship; at least he and Madonna sold the illusion that there was something to protect, not just something to promote. In Gigli, Affleck is his usual lazy self. As a performer, he's coasted on a minute amount of charisma for so long that it's hard to remember what we liked about him in the first place -- oh yeah, he can play a good doofus (Good Will Hunting). Yet engaged in banal banter about the benefits of vaginas and the deficits of penises, even Affleck looks a little too smart for the part. The un-dynamic duo are on screen virtually every second, not so much talking as delivering monologue after monologue, each as dull and inexorably cute ("Gobble, gobble," is her oral sex come-on; again with the turkey obsession?) as, one imagines, their real-life conversations. If they are this devoid of chemistry in private, I give it 11 months. Every once in a while an actor pops by to reveal the two for the amateurs that they are. In a cameo, Christopher Walken actually understands the oddball pitch to which the script aspires.

 Al Pacino, as a preening godfather, is typically over-expressed, but at least he follows the basic principle that a character must be invested with a personality -- even a new voice, and mannerisms! -- distinct from the one the actor uses on Letterman. All of these complaints -- the flat comedy, the mediocre acting by big stars, another incomprehensible gangster plot -- could be levied against any number of movies; it seems unfair to single out Ben and Jen just because they're popular. But, due to two subplots, Gigli is odious even without their presence. First, the lesbian cure. Affleck already converted one luscious Sappho in Chasing Amy, a much livelier look at fence jumping; Gigli is all the more casually offensive in comparison. It is not actually an ontological truth that all lesbians would cease their gay ways if Ben Affleck came knocking. Gigli is mean to his mother (Lainie Kazan), dresses in tracksuits and lives in a home without books. Who wouldn't renounce their sexual orientation for this prize package, especially when the only other lesbian present -- Ricki's ex -- is a raging, suicidal maniac? Second, the Noble Handicapped Savior subplot. The final line of Seabiscuit rang through my head as soon as twitchy young Brian entered stage left: "Some people think we saved him -- but in a way, he saved us." Such is the destiny of Brian and all young actors who suffer the same unidentified illness that befell Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? The kid is ritually humiliated for our amusement -- forced to rap Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back -- and exists solely to make J.Lo and Affleck appear selfless, a Herculean task not so different from the audience's. We are all in service to the celebrities we create. We are all cranberry sauce.

"WEDDING" IS THE GROSSEST OF THEM ALL!

The third American Pie movie delivers what fans expect: Cringe worthy gags.The tone for American Wedding is set in the first 10 minutes when the lead character, Jim Levenstein, is very publicly pantless. Twice. High art it ain't, but if you are a fan of the American Pie movies, this third installment delivers what its audience expects and goes a little further in the gross-out department than either of its predecessors. Hard to imagine, but true. For those who have never seen an American Pie installment, a little history. Originally the story of four high school buddies who make a bet to lose their virginity by prom night, the movies follow the bumbling Jim (Jason Biggs), cerebral Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), loyal Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholson) and thoroughly venal Stifler (Seann William Scott). In the first film, Jim's buddies tell him that sex feels like the inside of an apple pie, hence the title and Jim's penchant for getting caught with his pants down. There's Michelle (Allison Hannigan), the geeky band camp girl with carnal appetites, and Jim's earnest and well meaning dad, played by the wonderful Eugene Levy. Pie II was a summer college story. For the third run around, the boys have now finished college. Jim and Michelle are engaged and the movie follows the weeks leading up to their big day. Jim is hell-bent on giving Michelle the wedding of her dreams, so there are sub-plots about tracking down the dress designer du jour, learning how to dance and making sure the flowers are just so. For some unknown reason the boys have gone from tolerating Stifler's uncouth behavior to despising him, and the lout is not invited to the wedding. That doesn't stop the Stifmeister once he gets a look at Michelle's gorgeous sister Cadence (January Jones), who will be acting as maid of honor. In one of the comedic moments that can make it into a family newspaper, Stifler goes preppy/polite to win over Cadence, while Finch becomes a vulgar boor, also to win Cadence. Then there's the mandatory bachelor party with strippers that goes very, very wrong, and an incident with an electric shaver and Jim's private parts.  The dance-off between Stifler and a large gay man is entertaining, although it does drag on a little too long. Too many of the really funny scenes in American Wedding would be ruined if described, so I'll stop right here. Suffice it to say, if you're a fan, you'll howl and cringe in all the appropriate places. Familiarity with the first two American Pie movies is a must if you want to get all the inside jokes. If none of the above describes you, proceed with caution. You have been warned.

PLATH: Paltrow plays suicidal poet Sylvia Plath: A dreary film bio that offers little insight. No disrespect intended, but you may never be happier to see a writer carted out of her home feet-first than you will with Sylvia. That moment signals the end is mercifully at hand to this dreary film biography that offers little insight into the character of suicidal poet Sylvia Plath. Sylvia, with Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role, presents a woman so unswervingly bound for death by her own hand that her terrible journey ends up feeling monotonous and her actual suicide anti-climatic. When she's not trying to kill herself, Paltrow's Plath talks about doing the deed, recounting past failed attempts at suicide and spouting such cheery lines as, "Dying is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well." No one expects a trip to Disney World in a biopic about Plath. But there has to be more to the woman than the relentless gloom and single-minded devotion to self-annihilation presented by director Christine Jeffs. Only early on, with Plath's whirlwind romance and marriage in 1956 to future British poet laureate Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), does Sylvia rise above a suicide watch. Here, Paltrow and Craig capture moments of passion -- and the few signs of a poet's soul Sylvia possesses -- as they engage in speed recitations with friends or float by boat along a stream, with Plath calling lines of Chaucer in Middle English to cows on the bank. Plath and Hughes' relationship soured amid his philandering, her depression and her jealousy over his early publishing success. But John Brownlow's screenplay leaves viewers to conclude that was all there was to the marriage. Their young daughter and son are barely present, their two years living in Plath's native Massachusetts is depicted in just a few scenes and her time in therapy while in America is ignored. Sylvia mostly settles for giving Paltrow showy moments to rail against Hughes or play the moody emotional martyr in introspective moments. We all know Plath killed herself. Sylvia provides the facts and external circumstances -- death by carbon-monoxide poisoning from her gas oven in February 1963, a month after her book The Bell Jar was published. The movie traces the contributing factors -- a bad marriage, artistic frustration, critical neglect of her work. Yet the root causes remain generally unexplored. The film never leaves any sense of her real inner world and what made her predisposed to suicide. In one scene, Plath's mother (played by Paltrow's real-life mom, Blythe Danner) recounts young Sylvia's early suicide attempt, when she took sleeping pills then hid in a cubbyhole beneath the house, where she was not found until three days later. Again, we're given the effect, not the cause. The filmmakers seem to think Plath is such a poster-poet for depression that it's enough simply to proclaim her as suicidal without exploring why. New Zealand-born director Jeffs struck a delicate chord with her promising debut feature Rain in 2001, a moody, perceptive study of a teenage girl's transition to adulthood amid troubled family times. Sylvia needed more of Rain's gossamer inward gaze and less of the let's-win-Gwyneth-another-Oscar histrionics.  

MEAN GIRLS: Not so good.  biting wit, then runs out of steam. Rating: 2 stars out of five. Mean Girls means to be an updated version of the best teen comedies of the 1980s, like Heathers and Sixteen Candles. While it definitely captures elements of those movies, and features a sparkling performance from rising star Lindsay Lohan, it never quite reaches the same level of instant cult classic. There's the darkly subversive humour and a terrifying trio of queen bees who buzz through the high school halls, like Heathers. There's the acutely observant depictions of various cliques and their labels, particularly in that minefield known as the cafeteria, that made audiences relate so well to Sixteen Candles. But when you look closely, there's another pop culture phenomenon that Mean Girls resembles even more: Saturday Night Live, which makes sense, since it springs from the mind of SNL head writer Tina Fey. The same things that are right and wrong with most of the late-night comedy show's skits are right and wrong with Mean Girls. It comes on strong with sharp, biting wit and great energy, then runs out of steam and doesn't know when to call it quits. (The presence of Tim Meadows, Amy Poehler and Ana Gasteyer also feels familiar in this Lorne Michaels Production, which mercifully lacks the idiotic humor that marked some of his other movies, including A Night at the Roxbury and The Ladies Man.) As directed by Mark Waters (who also directed Lohan in last year's charming remake of Freaky Friday), the movie's structure also feels like a series of sketches. Lohan's character - the new girl in school, Cady, who'd been raised in Africa by her zoologist parents - alternates between the outcasts who initially befriended her and the popular group, which she infiltrates. Each scene offers some great one-liners and a few memorable physical jokes, but there's little narrative momentum to tie the film together and drive it along. This is Fey's first screenplay, though, based on Rosalind Wiseman's best-selling nonfiction book Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence. (It's also Fey's first big film role: The dryly funny Weekend Update anchor plays a dryly funny math teacher and the movie's voice of reason.) And for a while, she has a good thing going. Cady arrives at a suburban Chicago high school (which has to be a nod to those great John Hughes movies like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which also were set there) and becomes friends with punk rock girl Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and chubby Damien (Daniel Franzese), who's "too gay to function."  One day during lunch, she ends up getting trapped in the web of The Plastics, as they're known. Fabulous, blond Regina (Canadian actor Rachel McAdams) is their cruel leader, and her minions are the insecure, sycophantic Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and the airheaded Karen (Amanda Seyfried). When Cady lets it slip that she has a crush on Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), a cute guy in her calculus class who happens to be Regina's ex-boyfriend, Regina befriends her with the intention of destroying her. Janis and Damien have their own plans for destroying the Plastic pack, and figure Cady's access is the best way to achieve them. Cady is caught between both worlds but - because mean girls can be so intimidating and persuasive - she ends up becoming just like them. There are well-intentioned lessons to be learned here and in the book that serves as the movie's inspiration. Fey makes them entirely too facile and literal, banging us over the head a couple of different times with platitudes about the need for girls to be kind to themselves and each other. If she'd only had a lighter touch, the message would have been much more powerful.

GODSEND: A scary thriller but leave before the end. Rating: 2 stars out of five. Godsend is so creepy, so scary, so moody - then collapses in a series of laughable cliches in the final reel. This thriller about a couple (Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) who replace their dead son with a clone keeps the chills coming in a series of spectacular nightmare sequences. Robert De Niro, meanwhile, lingers on the periphery as an avuncular fertility scientist who wants to monitor the success of his experiment. He's a friendly, neighborhood Dr. Frankenstein, pushing the limits of science because he can, heedless of the moral and spiritual consequences. In the middle is Adam (steely-eyed 11-year-old Cameron Bright) who does not know that a previous version of him existed and died in an accident years ago. When he ages past the day when his previous self died, Adam begins to have hallucinations and frightening dreams that baffle his parents. Here's where director Nick Hamm is at his best, constructing vertigo-inducing set pieces in which spooky reflections of Adam scream at him from windows and bizarre children surrounded by flames jump out at him from doorways. It's a combination of gothic visuals and startling sound effects, but it works and keeps the nerves tingling - for a strong ending that never arrives. What has caused Adam's night terrors and bloodthirsty impulses?

Does it have something to do with the soul outliving what God intended for the body? Or did modern medicine leave the soul out entirely when Adam was recreated? The answer put forth - in a desperate attempt at a "twist" shocker - fails to live up to the other possibilities. When a new character is introduced to tie together all the threads, it's as if the entire production flies off track and crashes. Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos are subtle and powerful throughout most of the movie, but seem more puzzled than shocked by the ending their characters find themselves in - as if they suspect they're being Punk'd. Even the normally dependable De Niro falters. At one point, he slides behind the wheel of his car and hammers his fists. "Why, why, why, why, why didn't he listen to me?!" he cries. It's a hairpin turn from a few moments earlier, when his character was menacing - and De Niro's half-hearted delivery evokes laughter from the audience. Bright is the film's only consistent presence, alternating between being the victim of terror and the perpetrator of terror. Godsend, written by Mark Bomback, had the potential to rank alongside The Sixth Sense in terms of authentic spookiness, and would have been a memorable thriller if Bomback, Hamm and the actors had taken a little more care with the third act. There remains a lot to praise about the first two-thirds of the movie, however. See Godsend with some friends - but leave the theatre 80 minutes into the movie and have a good time making up your own endings. You'll enjoy it a lot more. -Anthony Breznicann.

THE PUNISHER" has too much violence without substance. Rating: 1 star out of five. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." The makers of The Punisher, Hollywood's latest comic-book adaptation, need a basic civics lesson. Even matinee-ticket prices for The Punisher conceivably constitute excessive fines, and the sadistic two-hour assault of the movie itself certainly qualifies as cruel and unusual treatment of audiences looking for a good time. Between Walking Tall and The Punisher, Hollywood has delivered a one-two punch of debased vengeance, where heroes are as bloodthirsty as villains and the two differ only infinitesimally in that the filmmakers have stuck a halo on one and horns on the other.

It's like the old editorial cartoon that used the same illustration of an armed thug for a Salvadoran guerrilla (a bad guy in the U.S. government's opinion) and a Nicaraguan freedom fighter (a good guy from a U.S. stance). Same person, same deadly violence, slightly different interpretation of motive. Based on the Marvel Comics character introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man in 1974, The Punisher tries to set up FBI undercover agent Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) as a noble family man so viewers will sympathize when he turns pitiless vigilante. Yet Castle's a cold fish from the start, hollowly expressing displeasure when his final undercover sting goes awry before he moves on to a peaceful life in the bureau's London office. The consequences are tragic for shady Tampa businessman Howard Saint (John Travolta), whose son is killed by the feds. Castle whines to his colleagues that no one was supposed to die, but in the leaden scenario co-written by director Jonathan Hensleigh, Castle clearly could not care less that someone else's pride and joy wound up on a slab. Egged on by his wife (Laura Harring), Saint gets payback with interest, killing Castle's wife, son, parents and dozens of other relatives at a family reunion. Castle himself is left for dead, but he recovers and returns as the Punisher, an avenging demon intent on making Saint and his loved ones suffer in spades. In the comics, Castle turned executioner of the wicked at large after losing his family in a random act of violence. In giving him a personal target, the filmmakers have turned Castle into the very thing he's hunting, a depraved killer out to spill as much blood as he can. Jane's inanimate performance doesn't help. His Castle only seems alive when he's butchering people; with his dead eyes and wooden dialogue, he's like a sleepwalker the rest of the time. The movie provokes unintentional laughs with its excessive violence and especially with its clumsy efforts to capture Castle shirtless as often as possible to show off Jane's chiselled torso. Travolta makes for a passable weasel of a heavy, and Will Patton has a moment or two as his faithful lieutenant, whom Castle sets up in a nasty ploy involving Saint's wife. Harring and the rest of the cast are generally just moving targets, including Samantha Mathis as Castle's wife and Roy Scheider as his dad. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Ben Foster and John Pinette are tossed in as kindly neighbors in a run-down tenement where Castle establishes his revenge headquarters. The three are there only to give Castle someone decent to fight for; otherwise, nothing on screen would differentiate him from the bad guys he's battling. The one loophole on the Eighth Amendment left by the filmmakers is on the "excessive bail" aspect. Thankfully, you can bail on this awful movie any time you like, and you should do it at the ticket counter by choosing another flick.

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VERONICA GUERIN. Rating : 3 stars. CATE BLANCHETT: A TROOPER RENEGADE.

Movies have always confused journalists with cops, and maybe the comparison isn't far off: Both jobs appear to be about unraveling mysteries, but both are really about paperwork. The difference, however, is that cops get shot more often. Not to belittle those journalists who put their lives on the line daily, but their movie brethren are a Hollywood fantasy of tough-talking, street-walking renegades without deadlines. Meet the patron saint of fantasy journalists: Veronica Guerin, real-life crime columnist for the Sunday Independent who was shot to death in 1996 for digging too deep into Dublin's drug trade. As played by Cate Blanchett, she's professionally relentless, meaning she'll wear black stilettos to get her story or storm into a room of junkies and announce, "I'm Veronica. Where did you get the gear?" Movie Guerin also never takes a single note or uses a tape recorder. When she's shot in the first few minutes -- the movie is one big flashback -- one wonders if the killers are revenge-seeking fact checkers. The hack coating that clings to this compelling story is courtesy of director Joel Schumacher. The man behind Bad Company and the two worst Batmans (yes, he made the respectable war pic Tigerland, but he'll have to give us several dozen Tigerlands to make up for Flawless) is a cinematic bully; his greatest pleasure is to get in his audience's face and roar, filling every possibly thoughtful moment with a loud noise. Schumacher is faithless; he doesn't believe moviegoers could care about Veronica Guerin unless those out to get her are cackling cartoon baddies.

Photo: 'HEAVEN' FORBIDDING Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi cut to the chase.

The drug-addled city is in the palm of John Gilligan (Gerard McSorley), an explosive gangster with a fondness for horses. He's surrounded by grunting leather-jacketed thugs, each indistinguishable from the next. To get to Gilligan, Guerin uses her favorite source, John Traynor (Ciarán Hinds), a low-level hood with a hunger for publicity. Their relationship is the most interesting in the film: each parasitic, each slightly enamored with the other. Blanchett, who plays Guerin as an overly sparky plug, doesn't really connect with anyone the way she does this greasy guy with the bad dye job. Her husband is a shadowy chastiser who says almost nothing except "be careful." Which begs the question: How exactly is it different for a woman to play the hero? According to this film, it's no different; absent mother is just like absent father.  But several moments hint at a more interesting response, and a more interesting movie: When Guerin's little boy shows her a skateboard at his birthday party, she asks who gave it to him. "You and Dad," he says, and Mom looks guilty as hell. If Guerin's love for her family is so strong, why then does she shrug off police protection and run headfirst into danger? Because, of course, she's not really a journalist, she's a movie journalist, which means she's a cop. Except, of course, she was a real journalist, and therein lies the film's great offence: phoniness. Inadvertently (one hopes) Schumacher paints Guerin as irresponsible -- not just a martyr, but a selfish rogue who abandons her family. It's hard to imagine Daniel Pearl getting the same treatment in his crusading journalist biopic.

FILMS OF SUBSTANCE OF THE YEAR

Mystic River Rating :

Photo: Sean Penn in Mystic River.

Self-doubt, ethical compromise and moral ambiguity are on the cards when three childhood friends are reunited following the murder of one's daughter  Clint Eastwood's latest movie as a director is a stolid, masculine thriller bearing the lineaments of tragedy - something classical or even biblical. It's a film where work, good and bad, is done by men, with women getting to play the tremulous wives or daughters. Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are childhood buddies from a blue-collar Boston neighborhood whose friendship is torn apart by a grisly crime that happened when they were boys. They grow up and drift apart to become respectively a cop, a reformed hoodlum, and a moodily difficult loner, but a new and even more horrible crime intertwines their destinies once again.-Peter Bradshaw.   This is a film with no small opinion of its own importance as an exposition of real men's emotional lives; its soundtrack strives for grandeur and there are plenty of giant, overhead shots of the principals and their hometown, as if from the gods' Olympian viewpoint. Its muscular conviction often commands assent, especially when it comes to Sean Penn's very strong performance and Kevin Bacon's no less impressive and characteristically un-showy contribution. Robbins' twitchy persona, all drooping shoulders and neurotic glances, is a little harder to take, though he has one outstanding scene in a police interrogation room. Eastwood's drama is substantial, but monolithic, like a handsome, well-made piece of traditional American furniture.

Eastwood brings a dark edge to Boston in a mature, complex thriller that ranks among his best.

Not many directors do their best work in their sixties and seventies. But Clint Eastwood, who has been a major and beneficent force as actor, director and producer for more than 30 years, has made few better films than the beautifully crafted Mystic River, directed in his seventy-third year. Several things set it apart from most of his other movies. The first is that the setting is working-class Boston. Something of an adversary of the East Coast establishment, Eastwood prefers the West and the South for his settings. I can think of only two previous pictures of his that are set in New York and New England, and both are about outsiders - the Arizona cop visiting Manhattan to pick up a fugitive criminal in Coogan's Bluff and Charlie Parker coming to New York from Kansas City in Bird. Another thing is that in the majority of his movies the antagonists have been raging psychopaths. But like the western Unforgiving, which brought him Oscars for best film and best direction in 1992, there are no born villains in Mystic River. Everyone is the creation of the community in which they were reared and the moral struggle their background engendered. The movie is adapted by Brian Helgeland (who wrote the screenplay for Eastwood's last picture, Blood Work) from a novel by Dennis Lehane, and it begins in the late 1970s when three Irish-American schoolboys, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine and Dave Boyle, are playing street hockey near their houses. When their ball goes down a sewer they're distracted by a square of wet cement on the sidewalk, and the dynamic Jimmy suggests scratching their names in it. He's first off followed by Sean, but Dave has got only as far as the first two letters of his name when a police car pulls up and a plainclothes detective starts questioning them. He orders Dave to get into the car to be driven home for admonishment by his mother. But the cops are in fact sadistic pederasts. After four days in a cellar, Dave manages to escape from his abductors. The traumatic experience is as firmly etched on his mind and has become as ineradicable a part of Jimmy's and Sean's experience as those names preserved in concrete.

This subtle, brilliantly handled opening places the boys in their social context, and its deliberate pace sets the tone for a long, dark, detailed, involving movie. Without any announcements about the passage of time, the film leaps forward to the present with the boys now in their thirties. Dave (Tim Robbins) is a troubled man, taking casual jobs, being over-protective of his small son, and having an edgy relationship with his wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden). Jimmy (Sean Penn) runs a small convenience store, has a 19-year-old daughter Katie by his first wife, and two other girls by his second (Laura Linney), one of whom is about to make her first communion. Sean (Kevin Bacon) has moved away from the boyhood neighborhood and is a successful homicide cop, though his obsession with his profession - as is so often the case in movies and so-called real life - has driven his pregnant wife to move to New York without leaving an address.

Then suddenly the trio are drawn together again when Katie is found brutally murdered in a local park. Sean is assigned to investigate the killing with his partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne). Suspicion gradually falls on the disturbed, guilt-ridden Dave, because that night he sustained several wounds from a mugger, or so he tells his wife. The vengeful Jimmy, it transpires, has a criminal record - having gone to jail for armed robbery as a teenager - and he turns vigilante, calling on some former underworld associates to help him track down the murderer. The result is a cleverly plotted and convincing police procedural thriller. Within its margins, there's a delightful performance from Eli Wallach as the elderly owner of a liquor store. But the film is much more than that. It's a complex exploration of painful relationships between fathers and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and old friends. The unfashionably slow editing style and the concentration on close-ups and two-shots allow Eastwood to scrutinize his characters as they are forced to dig into themselves. The performances have a rare depth, intensity and rawness.   The movie recalls in some ways a 1996 film, Sleepers, in which a group of New York youngsters, abused at a reform school, reunite as adults to exact revenge on their tormentors. But that was a glib, lumbering work. Mystic River brings more closely to mind the Catholic, blue-collar, suburban Boston of corner-cutting cops, petty criminals, dubious lawyers and working-stiffs that George V. Higgins charted in some 20 thrillers, only one of which, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, has been filmed. The movie's title directs us to this darker world. The Charles River separates historical Boston from the intellectually lofty Cambridge, and the oarsmen from Harvard and MIT perform on its waters. But further north is the Mystic River, bordered by docks and wastelands, its name minatory, its waters black and threatening. One of the film's climactic scenes takes place at night along the Mystic River, beside an Irish bar that resembles the dockside headquarters of Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront. It carries a tragic weight of feeling and experience that goes to the heart of this complex, compassionate film. Details: 2003, USA, Drama, cert 15, 137 minutes, Dir: Clint Eastwood . Cast: Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins.

INTOLERABLE CRUELTY. Rating:  

It is traditional, when considering the films of the Coen brothers, to remark on their versatility, and their ability to pastiche and corrupt genres, while also remaining true to their chosen form. There is some truth in this notion, but, as a means of understanding their output, it is increasingly unhelpful. The Coens’ films - of which Joel is the listed director, and Ethan a screenwriter - are more easily seen as reflections of a cinematic imagination. They have an old-fashioned belief in the importance of character, and a playful interest in storytelling, and both qualities are rendered with an imagination informed by B-movies and pulp fiction. Their work is not just an academic trawl through genre: from thriller to police procedural to - ahem - bowling opera and depression-era Homeric chain gang comedy. This does not make them realists, and Intolerable Cruelty takes their work to a new level of whimsy. That it succeeds is largely due to the performance of George Clooney, a leading man who now has the confidence to mock the notion of leading men. Clooney is Miles Massey, a grinning lawyer who specializes in expensive divorces, but who is also in the midst of a mid-life crisis which he is reluctant to acknowledge. He defines life as "struggle and challenge and the destruction of your opponent" and considers marriage to be a concept in which obsolescence is inbuilt: "Time marches on. Ardor cools." He is also a workaholic. In his first scene , he is at the dentist, talking turkey through a rubber gum dam, and there are several scenes in which he checks the brilliance of his smile. Details: Directed by: Joel Coen. Starring: George Clooney; Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Clooney seems to be wearing prosthetic teeth for the part, which is a comic parody of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, and even includes a keynote speech spoofing Gekko’s "greed is good" mantra, in which Massey asserts that "love is good". (The speech is to the National Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys Nationwide, whose slogan is "let NOMAN put asunder".) There is, then, a degree of ironic pleasure to be taken from the fact that the love interest is supplied by Catherine Zeta-Jones, wife of Michael Douglas, who played Gekko. While Douglas gave a performance full of such oily intensity that it was hard to locate the irony, Clooney does something better, playing an insincere, unprincipled fool, who remains breezily likeable. On ER, Clooney didn’t act so much as mug intensely.

His repertoire was a smolder, a shrug, and a curious neck-crick to signal emotional discomfiture. Now, he has perfected the chemistry in which the swagger, the voice, and the Brylcreem combine to make a winning parody of a hero. He has a nice way of narrowing his eyes. He cleans his teeth squeakily with his finger. His timing is spot-on: see the scene where he encounters a breathless assassin, and asks: "Are you ... Wheezy Joe?" (The pause being filled by the assassin’s labored attempts to commune with his lungs). As the money-grubbing vamp, Marylin Rexroth, Zeta-Jones is a cosmetic success. Normally an offensive screen presence, she manages here to evince a dreamy flirtatiousness, without quite becoming a Dynasty villainess. She smolders well, which is enough, as smoldering is her main purpose. Another actor on the verge of self-parody, Billy Bob Thornton, does well as the idiot oilman, Howard D Doyle of Doyle Oil, who is tricked into marrying Marylin. Geoffrey Rush, as cuckolded TV producer Donovan Donaly, is less endearing, though there is a moment of satisfaction when he is attacked with his daytime television lifetime achievement award. The most subtle performance comes from Miles’s sidekick Wrigley (Paul Adelstein), while Jonathan Hadary is winningly overstated as Heinz, the Baron Kraus von Espy, a fop with a fluffy dog. At the start of their career, the Coens had trouble bringing warmth to their films. Intolerable Cruelty finds them at their most accessible, but, as a love story which celebrates divorce, it is not without its subtleties. It is also a film of great, inexplicable scenes - Clooney in a kilt; a psychotic waitress taking umbrage at an order for baby fried greens - and witty detail (note Clooney’s face as he peruses a copy of Living Without Intestines magazine). As befits a film in which one of the biggest laughs comes from a guitar-playing minister, off screen, singing the opening line of Simon and Garfunkel’s Punky’s Dilemma, the tone is more oddball than screwball, with the comedy coming from a place slightly to the right of left field. "Wish I was a Kellogg’s Cornflake," the minister sings, "Floatin’ in my bowl takin’ movies." He talks, I think, for the Coen brothers. He may even be sincere.

TIME OF THE WOLF

The central image of the 1921 film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, its origins in the Bible and medieval iconography, put before the public a vision of a world on the brink of total destruction. Perhaps the first film to show our civilization reduced to ashes was Things to Come in 1936 which prophesied a Second World War resulting in total annihilation. Since Hiroshima, however, the post-apocalyptic movie has become a worldwide sci-fi genre, ranging in Australia alone from the pious solemnities of On the Beach to the comic-strip rumbustiousness of the Mad Max flicks. Directed by the gifted but earnest Austrian Michael Haneke, Time of the Wolf is art-house apocalypse, a somber, self-important picture that begins in media res and ends without reaching any climax or resolution. After some unexplained catastrophe that has led to a total social breakdown in an unidentified country, a middle-class family consisting of a strong-willed father, his wife Anne (Isabelle Huppert), a teenage daughter Eva and a 10-year-old son Ben, arrive by car at their country cottage to discover it occupied by an armed stranger, his wife and children.

After some tense talk about what provisions the visitors have, the father is suddenly killed by the intruder. After this shocking start, Anne and the children flee with a bike and the clothes they stand up in. Their desperate journey takes them through a silent, hostile village where all the farm animals have been killed, across a deserted  landscape, and they end up by attaching themselves to a small colony of fugitives living in a warehouse at a remote rural railway station.   The land is mist-enshrouded, there is no electricity to brighten the nocturnal gloom and life has been reduced to barter - exchanging watches, jewelry, cigarettes and sexual favors for potable water, a little food and additional clothing. Crackling news on transistor radios suggests that some sort of life is going on elsewhere and everyone's hopes center on the possibility of a passing train transporting them to a better place. Meanwhile, life limps on with every small act of generosity matched by one of callous exploitation or dishonesty. There are exciting moments such as the little boy Ben getting lost in the night and Anne and Eva searching for him, and a confrontation with the man who shot Anne's husband. But they are few, in a deliberately depressing film. What most engages Haneke, in dramatic terms, is the legend of the Just, a self-perpetuating sect of 36 people who since the beginning of time have been prepared to sacrifice themselves by self-immolation to preserve mankind. Details: 2003, France/Rest of the world, Drama, cert 15, 110 minutes, Dir: Michael Haneke. Cast: Anais Demoustier, Beatrice Dalle, Daniel Duval, Hakim Taleb, Isabelle Huppert, Lucas Biscombe, Patrice Chereau

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. Rating:

Wacky ideas don't get wackier than the one behind The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, originally a graphic novel co-written by Alan Moore, who brought us From Hell. This is a similar Victorian counter-factual adventure, or make that counter-fictional adventure. It's 1899; an evil kingpin called Fantom is stirring up trouble, so an A-Team of super good-guys muster to defeat him. Executive producer Sean Connery plays Allan Quatermain from Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines; there's Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, RL Stevenson's Dr Jekyll, Mark Twain's grown-up Tom Sawyer, Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and Rodney Skinner, a new "sequelised" character from HG Wells' The Invisible Man - the original presumably being the only one not yet quite out of copyright. Vampiress Mina is allowed to swoop around biting people, though apparently without turning them into vampires too; Mr Hyde is a bizarrely bulbous and non-scary Hulk, to distinguish him from the essentially similar Dorian Gray who is given the extra superpower of indestructibility. It's just so silly you have to like it. Sort of. But once the novelty wears off, you are left with a very over-egged pudding low on real thrills. Shekhar Kapur's dull Four Feathers and Simon Wells' ho-hum Time Machine shows that doing Victoriana straight is a stretch for Hollywood. But Alan Moore's funky pre-postmodern fantasies aren't working too well either.

BOLLYWOOD QUEEN. Rating:

A spirited attempt to make a British musical in the Bombay style, Bollywood Queen is a Romeo and Juliet story about a liberated Indian girl (the fetching Preeya Kalidas) having a love affair with a Somerset yokel (James McAvoy) in the rag-trade world around Brick Lane. There are good moments (notably the heroine escaping from a window using bolts of red, yellow and blue silk as a chute) and it's generally watchable. But rather than bending it like Beckham, Bollywood Queen puts the ball way over the crossbar. Details: 2002, UK, Drama/Comedy/Musical, cert PG, 89 minutes, Dir: Jeremy Wooding. Cast: Ciaran McMenamin, Ian McShane, James McAvoy, Preeya Kalidas

FRIDAY NIGHT (Vendredi Soir). A Film by Claire Denis.

Friday Night is a sensual and beguiling story of romance between strangers from master director Claire Denis (Chocolat, Beau Travail). It's Friday evening in Paris. Laure (Valérie Lemercier) has finished packing and shuts the door of her apartment behind her. The next morning, the moving men will be on the doorstep and she will move in with her boyfriend. She jumps in her car to go to dinner with friends, only to get stuck in a huge traffic jam, having forgotten that a mass transit strike has thrown the city into chaos. But Laure feels good in her car, the only place she has for herself right now. As she takes in the sights and sounds around her - the blare of horns and arguments, the shimmer of lights and camaraderie - a stranger (Vincent Lindon) approaches the car, calm and self-assured.

She jumps in her car to go to dinner with friends, only to get stuck in a huge traffic jam, having forgotten that a mass transit strike has thrown the city into chaos. But Laure feels good in her car, the only place she has for herself right now. As she takes in the sights and sounds around her - the blare of horns and arguments, the shimmer of lights and camaraderie - a stranger (Vincent Lindon) approaches the car, calm and self-assured.

 She opens the door to the man who that night will change her life. Exquisitely shot by Denis' longtime camerawoman Agnès Godard and with a lush score by Dickon Hinchliffe of the Tindersticks, Friday Night is a subtly erotic and lyrical ode to unexpected pleasures, to the independence of one's true self, and to the most beautiful city in the world. About Claire Denis: One of the world's most exciting and innovative directors, Claire Denis first won international acclaim in 1988 for her debut feature, Chocolat. She has since directed six other features (No Fear, No Die, Nenette Et Boni, I Can't Sleep, Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day, Friday Night) as well as a number of documentaries, short films and productions for French television. A filmmaker of great sensitivity and visual mastery, Claire Denis has been described by Jim Hoberman of the Village Voice as "intuitive and knowing, supremely tactile and deeply humanist, but what sets her apart from the current generation of American directors, both commercial and independent, is her interest not in making movie-movies but in committing the texture of life to film."

TROY

Film critics in the US and the UK have given mixed reviews about Wolfgang Petersen's latest movie Troy. Los Angeles Times: It should be said that Troy is only half silly. It is also half serious, not to mention half bloody and half talky, half well-acted and half walked through, half faithful to its venerable sources and half wildly invented. Yes, that's an awful lot of halves, but this is a movie that's nearly two and three-quarter hours in length. Washington Post: Just don't go into Troy expecting adherence to the subtler details of The Iliad. (This movie is to Homer's original what Charlton Heston's The Ten Commandments was to the Old Testament.) For starters, the gods are pretty much gone. No Zeus or Hera. No Aphrodite and the golden apple she offers to Paris. There's frequent mention of the sun god, whose temple Achilles desecrates at one point. But it doesn't seem to mean much that Achilles has sacked the place. There are no consequences. And there's no sense that the deeds of men are intertwined with the will of the Gods, possibly the most significant element of the original. The Guardian: The second story - or rather storey - is missing: that of the immortal Gods above, presiding capriciously over the humans' fates and disputing among themselves. Their presence is entirely excised, perhaps on the grounds that yet more snowy-haired Brit actors, wandering round up to their ankles in dry ice carrying thunderbolts, would undermine the sweaty, ardent seriousness of Brad, Orlando et al down below. But there is a case for cutting the humans and just making it their story:

The Passion of the Zeus, performed entirely in ancient Greek. Screen Daily: If, in the end, Troy fails to stir the heart as much as it dazzles the eye, it is nevertheless one of the most intelligent and ambitious tentpole blockbusters to come out of Hollywood in some time. After all, it took some guts and not a little hubris to take one of the cornerstones of literature, Homer's Iliad, and turn it into an audience-friendly summer movie. But powerhouse film-maker Wolfgang Petersen has never been intimidated by a challenge, and Troy impresses on more levels than it disappoints. Daily Telegraph: It's a disgrace. As an adaptation of The Iliad, it's a pathetic joke. But even on its own crude, blockbusting terms, Troy feels like a depressingly ordinary Lord of the Rings spin-off, peppered with uninvolving battle scenes and self-important intrigue. San Francisco Chronicle: The precedent for Pitt's Achilles is not to be found in Homer but in the Hollywood anti-heroes of the 1970s. Too cool to believe politicians, too cynical to fight for an ideal, he has no hope, just a fatalistic equanimity, and believes only in courage as a value in itself. When it comes to conveying smirky confidence, cocksure heroics and the in-the-moment intensity of a lover who knows who could be dead tomorrow, Pitt is magnetic. His performance falters only when he has to convey Achilles' rage, the mysterious and thinly veiled source of this warrior's effectiveness. Pitt just can't locate the anger, not convincingly. Hollywood Reporter: To remove the Gods from what is, after all, a Greek myth, is to gut your story. By playing down the divine, you lose the story's sense of fate, destiny and tragedy. Chicago Sun Times: Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue. The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek Gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies. Better a couple of hundred sweaty warriors than two masses of 50,000 men marching toward one another across a sea of special effects.

SHATTERED GLASS. Rating: 4 Stars out of 5

Sketching the highbrow world of American political journalism with confident strokes, this real-life morality tale slowly builds into an All The President's Men for the Clinton era. In the 60s, investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstein brilliantly exposed President Nixon's lies. In the 90s, Stephen Glass followed the president's duplicitous example, reaping the benefits of a world more interested in image than truth.

AGAINST THE ROPES. Rating: 2 Stars out of 5

BON VOYAGE. Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Originally titled The Road To Bordeaux, Jean-Paul Rappeneau's follow-up to Cyrano De Bergerac and The Horseman. Set during the Fall of France in June 1940, it's a rollicking adventure yarn with a stellar cast and an engaging Hitchcockian flavour. If there is a hint of 'Allo 'Allo in the rather farcical intrigue, it's a small price to pay for such a well-crafted and spirited caper. With Paris occupied by the Germans and the entire capital relocating to Bordeaux, it's clear that the problems of the little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. For young writer Frédéric (Grégori Derangère), however, this pivotal stage in history takes a backseat to his devotion for pampered screen star Viviane (Isabelle Adjani, filling in for the pregnant Sophie Marceau). Only after he agrees to carry the can for the murder of her boyfriend does he realize that she's played him for a sap.

Ed Harris makes Radio. Cuba Gooding Jr. has the showy title role of a mentally handicapped youth - so called because of his love for the wireless - but Harris provides heart and soul as the high school American Football coach who befriends him. Normally a stalwart supporting player, the crinkle-eyed character actor carries the movie, his still, sure presence providing emotional truth to a based-on-fact story that could have suffocated in schmaltz. Cynics should still skip it - and its racial politics seem too good to be true - but its innocence and charm make for warmly enjoyable entertainment.  Coach Jones (Harris) first spies James 'Radio' Kennedy (Gooding Jr.) watching football practice. And after star player Johnny Clay (Riley Smith) and his pals abuse the simple-minded loner, the teacher decides to compensate by involving him in their sporting set-up. "I'm not sure that he's not being used as some sort of glorified mascot," says the head mistress (Alfre Woodard) and she has a point: Radio does little more than goof off in front of the crowd and smile a lot. But his smile is infectious and even though Gooding Jr.  tries a little too hard to be winsome (it's a difficult role to pull of without seeming cutesy), it's credible that this tender outsider should enrich the lives of the supposedly 'normal' folks around him.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... And Spring. Rating: 4 stars out of 5

"KI-DUK IMPRESSIVELY FUSES STYLE AND CONTENT": Ki-Duk, who himself takes on a key role in the Winter segment, impressively fuses style and content. He doesn't judge the actions of his characters or rely on Buddhist sermonizing to convey the film's ideas. Instead he achieves a sense of serenity through ravishing images of nature, contemplative pacing and the elegance of his storytelling, without losing sight of the burdens of our existence. In Korean with English subtitles.

The Football Factory. Rating: 2 stars out of five

"OBSCENE VIOLENCE, GRUESOME SENTIMENTALITY": Narrated train spotting-style by Dyer's cocky twentysomething Tommy Johnson, The Football Factory instead focuses on the fierce tribal loyalties which set Frank Harper's west London crew on a collision course with a rival mob from Millwall. For Tommy, life is a non-stop orgy of lager, drugs and brutality, with no room for work, family or relationships. Until, that is, a series of harrowing nightmares make him wonder if he's got what it takes to be part of "The Firm". Love expertly captures the self-doubt and insecurity that lies beneath his characters' swaggering bravado, while the fight scenes have a visceral intensity that reeks of authenticity. The writer-director should also be commended for assembling such a persuasive ensemble of mean-looking, shaven-headed gorillas. Alas, no amount of style or veracity can excuse the obscene glamorizing of senseless violence, while the avuncular presence of Tommy's grandfather (Dudley Sutton) introduces a gruesome streak of sentimentality that's just as unpalatable.

GIRL YEARNS FOR ADULTHOOD AND GETS IT

13 Going On 30. Rating: Four Stars                                                  

LORD OF THE RINGS