Synopses for Friday, May 16th openings:

(full reviews Saturday a.m.)

"The Chronicals of Narnia: Prince Caspian"   (2:54) -- Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Liam Neeson.
      Based on the seven C.S. Lewis book series, this is the second installment. Again the setting is World War II England and the Pevensie siblings -- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy -- are again magically transported back, this time from a country railroad station, to an island in the fantasy land of Narnia. Since the last episode, more than 1300 years have passed in Narnian time. But these four kings and queens will find that over those centuries the Golden Age has faded away and disappeared.  In its place is the dark, evil world of  the evil King Miraz and his army of the Telmarines. Miraz (Caspian's Uncle), is the tyrant who murdered Caspian's father (Caspian IX) and has claimed the monarchy.
       Presently, the four children come upon the young Prince Caspian who is hiding under threat to his life. He is the rightful heir to the throne and Miraz, his uncle, is attempting to kill him so that Miraz's own newborn son can inherit the throne.
      As allies, the four kids will pick up Glenstorm the Centaur, the kindly dwarf, the bold and brave talking mouse Reepicheep, the badger Trufflehunter and the Black Dwarf named Nikabrik. Led by the knights Peter and Caspian, they press onward to rescue Narnia from the cruel tyrant Miraz and restore magic and glory to the land. They will meet with initial setbacks. But now Peter, the good "king," challenges Miraz. As both his army and that of Miraz gather, Peter and he will draw swords and duel. A battle of armies now happens, fighting for control of the land. Tree spirits dance, the

river god is awakened, and the "merry maidens" will celebrate. 

"Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" PG-13 (adventure violence and scary images) -- Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchette. And now famed archaeologist-adventurer Dr.Henry "Indiana" Jones is summoned back into an adventure involving a nefarious plot by the evil Soviets to probe into the world-shaking secret behind artifacts known as the Crystal Skulls.

Recent Reviews:

"What Happens in Vegas"

"The Visitor"

"Iron Man"

"Made of Honor"

"Baby Mama"

"What Happens in Vegas"  (Quality rating:  5)
Director: Tom Vaughan
Screenplay: Dana Fox
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Aston Kutcher, Dennis Farina, Rob Corddry, Queen Latifah,
Dennis Miller, Lake Bell, Treat Williams
Time:  1 hr., 39 min.
Rating: PG-13 (sexual content, crude material, vulgarity, one drug reference)
     

       Loud in delivery, lazy in concept.
      A fast pace, sloppy slapstick in nutsy situations, and venomous hostility barely cover for the fact of this film's lack of any well-conceived comedy energy. Hero and heroine go at each other artlessly and mostly laughlessly, but their brute force energy
won't let you take your eyes off the screen. It lurches all over the place with,
admittedly, a few well-targeted slam-bang conflicts that manage to score via the old adage about heaving you-know-what against the side of barn. The plot, with all the subtlety of an anvil, nonetheless lets Cameron Diaz, generally a pro at comic timing, do a reasonable run-through of rough-edged sitcom stuff.
      Only in Las Vegas, natch. After a night of decadence and sex in free abandon, two down-and-out total strangers, party loving Jack Fuller (Kutcher) and commodities trader Joy McNally (Diaz), happen to awaken together, hung over, in a motel to discover that at some point in the night they got married. They immediately despise each other.
       To add spice to the situation, he now hits the $3 million poker machine jackpot -- using her quarter. Each, of course, feels entitled to all the loot. So now, with lots of  outside help, they plot and counterplot against each other in order to grab the winnings, this making their now attempted divorce very tricky. Judge Whopper (Miller) has contempt for both, sentencing them to stay married for six months instead of granting them an annulment, this recollecting the old vaudeville gag that marriage isn't a word; it's a sentence. 

      Living together, of course, is not loving together, and this'll get dicey as they educate each other in the matter of sharing an apartment. For one matter of tension, she's on the verge of a major promotion from her boss (Dennis Farina) while he's just been fired by his boss, his dad (Treat Williams). Other characters will add their advice: his friend Hater (Corddry), her friend Tipper (Lake Bell),  Jack's father, Joy's boss
Banger, her snob ex-fiance Mason and savvy shrink Dr Twitchell (Queen Latifah). This is not going to go as the judge had planned. Nor, obviously in this very predictable movie, will their hostility last -- you know what's coming.
     You can, not surprisingly, hang up your brain before you enter the theater.  You won't need it at all. One exception is Queen Latifah as a marriage counselor, a bit that holds onto some quality.    The rankled duo shoot barbs at each other shotgun style, not communication style, raising a commentary on the advantages in such a situation in which each party to the
fray can be themselves and let loose.
     In a sense, the film does stay true to itself; it doesn't promise anything special. Expect little and your expectations will be fulfilled. You may feel trampled by hostility and venom that wasn't very rewarding. 

"The Visitor"  (Quality rating: 8)
Director:  Tom McCarthy
Screenplay: Tom McCarthy
Cast:  Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira
Time: 1 hr., 48 min.
Rating: PG-13 (brief vulgarity) 

       Making no grandiose statements, no pretensions at profound observation, "The Visitor," a post-9/11 drama of the heart, will settle deeply into your psyche by sheer honesty.  It is essentially a story of polar opposites organically coming together in a gripping and fast-growing garden of emotions. 
      The setting is New York City not long after the great calamity, and the scenario concerns the suddenly precarious lives of immigrants whose presence here is somehow in question. The interactions of up close and personal human conflict has never been so tenderly yet powerfully examined. Most startling, most arresting about the film is the naturalness of performance in its lead characters, as is caught on candid camera, such that you may feel at times embarrassed as eavesdropping into their presence.
      Widowed 62-year-old college prof Walter Vale (Jenkins) has lost all interest in life after the death of his wife. It has become no more than a dreary daily process of going through the motions. He's lost his love of teaching and writing, has abandoned his new manuscript, and is now indifferently trying his hand at classical piano, the profession of his beloved late wife. 

     One day he's asked to come to a conference at NYU. He's been away from his Manhattan co-op for awhile and now visits it for his stay. But somebody's moved into it. A young couple, tricked by a real estate con
artist, thinks they're the rightful tenants. Tarek (Sleiman), a Lebanese-Syrian man, and Zainab (Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend, have no other place to go. Walter, having ejected the couple onto the street with their meager belongings, feels disarmed by the couple's honesty and pathetic plight.  He reluctantly allows them to remain with him. Zainab, by contrast, is reflexively repelled by him. Tarek, a good man, feels obligated. A talented musician, he prevails upon Walter to let him teach him the African drum.
He's a pro, playing the djembe with jazz bands as Zainab sells custom-made jewelry at a Soho flea market. This instrument, played with skill and spirit, projects a rousing sound. The vibes re-ignite Walter's flagging life's energy, introducing him then to the vigorous world of Central Park drum circles and local jazz clubs. The camaraderie between Walter and Tarek is becoming so profound, so deep, that their differences in age, culture and personality gradually vanishes.
        A situation arises when, stopped by the police in the subway, Tarek is arrested, by mistake, for fare-beating. It's discovered that he's an undocumented citizen.  He's held for deportation. Zainab, also undocumented, has to keep out of this. This becomes Walter's new life's cause. Adding to the complexities is that Tarek's beautiful mother Mouna has just arrived in search of him. And Walter finds himself romantically
attracted to her.
       Director Tom McCarthy's challenge is clearly in steering his film clear of over-reaching into dangerous waters of sentimentality and too much idealism. He's not always successful in that. But his film's strength is very much in first creating a strong human bonding  imperiled by the coldness of immigration officials acting within a milieau of underlying panic. One recollects Abraham Lincoln's famous adage, "There is nothing so terrible as ignorance in action."
      Sometimes a joltingly powerful statement is made, one bursting forth from the scene in the detention center in which there is a mural showing the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center next to each other, a double-symbol fraught with meanings to the harried immigrant just trying to live life. New York, the portal, has changed. But Walter has hardly noticed. What he has noticed is that he's being compelled, goaded, into taking action against an injustice.
         The film loses some of its pathos as Walter begins realizing his own humanity. But just dwell with the breathtaking performances.  
 

"Iron Man"  (Quality rating:  9)
Director: Jon Favreau
Screenplay: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow
Time: 2 hr., 6 min.
PG-13: intense high action, vulgarity, sexually suggestive content)

   Yeah!!
     A colossus of a movie, "Iron Man" is to high-tech action films as "Star Wars" was to outer space films.  In a word, it's a sudden sea change in a genre. This is boldly inventive extravagant spectacle impressively filled out with a serviceable human element and sentiment, this with a commendable try at a real story not beset by teenage magical superheroes. It is spiced exhiliratingly with invigoratingly witty dialogue and adequate

performances.
      Far diminishing Batman in the self-made hero category, this guy is as dazzling as the film itself is occasionally implausible. Yes, sadly, there are noncredible sequences. These do not involve the hero himself, which, since the days of superhero comic books is allowed broad license, but rather the details of the iron man creation.  But, more on that later . . .  
      Super-rich industrialist philanthropist Tony Stark, hard drinker and harder womanizer, the heir to the Stark Enterprises fortune, runs the colossus along with his dad's partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). An inventor of Da Vinci status, he has specialized in the most advanced thinking in technological weapons. 
       Now, on a demonstration trip to Afghanistan, he's ambushed and kidnapped by insurgent thugs. Taken to a cave, he is mortally threatened, this with the order to make them his latest weapon, a super missile delivery system. Under close scrutiny (and this part is quite implausible), he still manages to secretly create a high-tech armor suit that will enable him to foil his captors and fly off into the desert. How he could possibly do this in terms of his being observed and having the requisite tools and facilities is,

frankly, distracting. This is no ordinary shell of armor; it not only sprays the area with machine gun and laser fire but also a sweeping flame thrower. Having destroyed his captors, he crashes in the desert.
      Rescued by U.S. forces, Tony soon arrives back home as a changed man. He says that his captivity made him realize that he is capable of doing something more in his life than exploding people. "I have become part of a system that has zero accountability," he observes ruefully, his girl Friday, Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow), not knowing what to make of this.
      He begins immediately on his new and improved iron man, a terrifying suit of armor able to send him into flight at dazzling speeds and stratospheric heights and bring super-advanced weaponry on evildoers.
       But this startling departure from the lucrative arms business will send the company's stock into a nosedive. Worse for him personally, partner Obadiah proves to be a formidable adversary, now finding himself compelled to destroy Tony.  This will involve, of course, creating an even greater iron man, a quest aided by the fact of the surviving Afghans having found the pieces of the iron suit. 
    Robert Downey Jr. is just marvelous as the convincing, smart-mouthed,

total-control CEO who delivers a lightning response for every comment, statement or word that comes his way. Jeff Bridges looks like he's having all the fun in the world as a world-class baddie. Gwyneth Paltrow glides over the screen in svelte sexiness, her delivery in perfect cadence with the hard-driving Tony Stark.
      Every second of every frame of every scene blasts energy -- quality energy.  The film radiates its rhythmic, pulsating power into the total awareness of audiences of all ages, flooding your senses and eyes with riveting images of the first magnitude of pulsating fury.
      With a canny sense of pacing, director Jon Favreau never lets the action go cheap or hackneyed.  Given the technological power of Iron Man and his adversary, you can be spellbound. The bar has now been raised by many a notch in high tech delivery, certainly in the quality of the slam-bang action but also for the sheer imagination in its sci-fi concepts and its willingness to let its stars take control at the fertile moments. It's short on perfection in its loose, almost frivolous hero development in the cave sequences and some other areas, but, never mind. Go for this.  Big.

 "Made of Honor"  (Quality rating:  6)
Director: Paul Weiland
Screenplay: Adam Sztykiel, Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont
Cast: Patrick Dempsey, Beau Garrett, Michelle Monaghan, Sydney Pollack
Time:  1 hr., 41 min.
Rating PG-13 (sexuality, vulgarity)

     Widely criticized for being a simple retread in the over-crowded comedy romance genre, "Made of Honor" deserves a better shake. Yeah, it is a theme that has been reworked time and again, but in the way that movie entertainment fascinates, that point is of questionable value in figuring whether or not you're going to have a good time. Once the film gets underway, the performances are good, the dialogue clever if not

witty and the characters appealing. You really don't think about whether this is an old theme. It's there. It's fun. It's enjoyable. From an unpromising opening, struggling along for awhile to get its bearings, pulse and tone, it builds a very appealing conflict.  It is funny and fun although short on gag lines.
       So here, well now, it's time for womanizing Tom Bailey (Patrick Dempsey), a glib, highly attractive single rogue for many female types, to fish or cut bait. He's been stringing his "friend" Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) along just too, too long, actually since they were age 10. Trembling at the word "commitment," he steers clear of the

most indomitable fact of his romance life, namely, that she can't wait forever for his absurd inaction and, truth be known, has never even been certain that he's the one. 

There's plenty of guys out there who can move into his place. And one does. Seems that Hannah, an art buyer, is sent to Scotland for some acquisitions. Tom, meantime, over the objections of his equally noncommittal buddies,

has had it with the vacuousness of single life and gears up to pop the question when Hannah gets back in New York.
      And now she's back. But her cheery phone call to Tom inviting him to a bar to meet her will cause him to drop his jaw and his flowers -- and his plans for proposing to her.
      For there she is, at the bar with wealthy Scotsman Colin McMurray (Kevin McKidd). She introduces Colin as a Scottish estate owner from whom she has accepted his marriage proposal.  Worse for Tom, he's to be very close to this wedding event, now having been asked by Hannah to be her Maid Of Honor.  Tom, distraught within, agrees. But somehow he must show her that he, Tom, is her natural life's companion, not this stranger. Tom maneuvers for advantage. Trying simultaneously to pretend that he's dedicated to this Maid of Honor role and angling for the tactical strike

continuously, this can be unfalteringly humorous. 
      Yeah, yeah, you've seen it before. But yeah, yeah, you'll hang in there again. You can't but be amused by the bridal shower (the New Age wiffty therapist doing the "cranial chakra" bit is choice) and the event of the other bridesmaids' outfit shopping.
       The film's premise is small, but it touches base with every possible

comedy-sensitive moment. Educating Tom in what a bridesmaid is supposed to do in the process is worthy of a dozen chuckles.
      The Scottish scenery is to die for and the Scottish traditional wedding procedure with bagpipes, regalia and Highland Games at a castle is eye-popping spectacle.
      Not a moment's monotony in this. 

"Baby Mama"  (Quality rating:  7)
Director: Michael McCullers
Screenplay: Michael McCullers
Cast: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sigourney Weaver, Dax Shepard, Greg Kinnear,  Steve Martin
Locations filming: New York City and Philadelphia
Time: 1 hr., 36 min.
Rating: PG-13 (crude and sexual humor, vulgarity and a drug reference)

             Mostly off the top but generally adequate, though not uproarious, "Baby Mama," with its clumsily and almost impossibly contrived happy ending, is a fairly fun chick flick . Its male-written and directed quality shows in its shortage of meaningful female issues. Being a firm believer that men, in these complex modern times of never-simple relationships, should not attempt scripting, much less helming, a primarily women themed film, I'll just say that this could be worse. It never feels like it's getting at essence, but as a superficial comedy it'll do.   

        Surrogate motherhood is in the spotlight in this light comedy-drama involving Philadelphia 37-year-old single Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey), an organic food market chain exec under CEO Barry (Steve Martin), a man regarding himself as the high guru of natural foods. 
        Kate has come slowly to decide that in her childless life she is missing something big. But, sadly, she's to learn that because she has a "T-shaped uterus," her chances for pregnancy are but a million-to-one odds. A determined woman, however, she finds a South Philadelphia working girl, Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler), to be the incubator for her artifically fertilized eggs. Since Angie has apparently dumped her dim-bulb, white trash common law husband Carl (Dax Shepard), the sympathetic Kate has invited her in as her apartment-mate. Bad move. The two are not exactly of the same social, intellectual and cultural levels and this conflict in itself will head for unsurprising bitter banter, especially when it comes to Kate's constant admonishments to Angie to stop eating and drinking trash food and drink that will pass through the fetus. Angie, for her part, finds wholesome food inedible.
        Kate monitors Angie's progress by the surrogacy center's info and soon learns that Angie is pregnant. Now to go into education mode, like learning what responsible and enlightened child-rearing is all about. A disciplined executive by career, she dives into baby-proofing the apartment, reading childcare books and researching top pre-schools.
      It is at this point that a sinister element arises in that Angie and her vulgar and boorish boyfriend Carl have not exactly been straight on this process.
      Both Tina Fey and Steve Martin, aided by inept and know-nothing scripting,  make the usual idiotic stereotypes of organic foods and meals, and Greg Kinnear as a juice bar owner is decidedly underscored.  One comic plus is the birthing support group. Sigourney Weaver's character as chief of the elite adoption agency is a real hoot. 
      This is a caricatured treatment, played out with superb timing between Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The film clearly struggles with how it's going to resolve this, and it's still struggling as the final credits roll.