Hall Pass

Men and women, as every chick flick and buddy-slob comedy will tell you, don't just come from different galaxies — they're locked in a battle for supremacy. But Hall Pass, a light comedy of horny marital woe from directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly, makes a novel statement about the sex wars: It says that they're essentially over. And that the guys — in case there was any lingering suspense about it — have lost.

Rick (Owen Wilson), a real estate agent who dresses in amazingly dweebish plaid shirts, and Fred (Jason Sudeikis), a life-insurance salesman as genial and square as Howdy Doody, are suburban schlubs devoted to their wives and (in Rick's case) family. When Rick isn't taking out the trash or disciplining his children with textbook New Dad sensitivity, he, like Fred, has one topic on the brain: all the sexy, gorgeous women who, as faithful and loving husbands, they will never, ever get to sleep with.

All of which, I know, makes them sound like the most common and boorish of male movie characters. Except for one thing: These two, though they spend their hours fantasizing about straying, would never dream of actually doing it. They're like neutered dogs who carry their own leashes. When it comes to satisfying their libidos, they're whipped, defeated — by the demands of family life (who has time for sex when you're trying to get the kids to bed?) or just by their loyalty. The raunchy chatter spills out of them, and some of it is funny, but mostly because it's so pathetically vicarious.

Hall Pass presents these men as a new archetype: the frustrated middle-aged husband as randy adolescent virgin. Wilson, geeked out in super-square hair, knows how to use his gentleness to turn himself into a figure of soft desperation. And Saturday Night Live's Sudeikis, in his first major movie role, has an agreeably dorky, bootlicking officiousness. (Fred thinks that he's scored a victory if he figures out how to look at a woman's behind without his wife seeing him.) They are so domesticated, the joke is they don't even know their pent-up sexual frustration is driving them nuts.

It takes their wives, Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate), to figure that out, and, under the influence of a pop psychologist (Joy Behar), to propose a solution: They will give their husbands a ''hall pass,” a week off from marriage during which the two will be allowed to sow their wild oats — and, in theory, purge all those demons of roving-eyed desire. It's a kind of high-concept therapy for a high-concept comedy that views the hidden and buried lusts of married men in the age of Internet porn as a ticklishly normal state of affairs.

The Farrellys, working from a script they co-wrote with Pete Jones and Kevin Barnett, set all this up with an innocent dirty-minded aplomb. Still, if Rick and Fred's dilemma is the film's amusing appetizer, the main course ought to be what they actually do when they're let loose. And the punchline is: Out on their own, Rick and Fred are such hapless, inept womanizers that even when ''freed,” they're still trapped — imprisoned — in their overgrown-teenage heads. They treat Applebee's as a pickup joint and eat themselves into a food coma. They scarf pot brownies on a golf course, with even uglier results. And when they do try to hook up, they're so wild-and-crazy clueless about how seduction now works (''R-O-C-K in the USA!” says Rick, thinking that he's just said something cool, which makes you want to dive under your seat) that women look at them as if they were another species.

That, however, is a joke of diminishing returns. Hall Pass would like to be as dunked in reality as Judd Apatow's best comedies, but the movie is thin. The Farrellys can't quite nudge the characters from two dimensions to three. When Rick and Fred get lessons in humanity, the movie seems to be about two sketch-comedy characters learning they have souls. As one of the girls they keep approaching might say, Ewwww! It would have helped if the women on screen, from the wives to the ''perfect” Aussie coffee-bar babe (Nicky Whelan), were remotely interesting. But they're not. Which raises the question: How shrewdly can a comedy satirize the arrested male gaze when the movie itself is trapped in it?

Drive Angry

Shaven-headed men in tattoos and ugly goatees. Pretty girls who punch guys out. Hash-slinging diners and trashy neon honky-tonk bars. A jet-black 1969 Dodge Charger. A cherry-red 1970 Chevelle SS 454. (Wow, just writing that made me feel like I know something about cars.) Nicolas Cage in thatchy frosted-blonde Owen Wilson-as-biker hair. (Another Nic Cage hair joke? I bring it up only because there's nothing else to the character.) A devil-worshipping apocalyptic fundamentalist cult, led by a rapist in Jim Jones glasses, who murdered Cage's daughter and now wants to use his baby granddaughter for a blood sacrifice. A plot that's not so much off and running as off the rails and galumphing. 3-D that, except for a few bullets coming at the audience, doesn't exist.

After all the bad Nicolas Cage movies I've sat through, I got lured into seeing Drive Angry because the trailer made it look like it might have a certain shameless, demolition-happy American Mad Max excitement. It tries to, but it's simply not... well done. The car chases are rote and sparse, the gunplay is the usual lock-and-load fetishistic onslaught with heavy-metal trimmings, and even the film's one ''original'' twist is just a desperate attempt to link it up to Ghost Rider, the only lousy Nicolas Cage action film that is actually spawning a sequel. Cage has gotten too old for this stuff, yet one of the reasons people mock him for it is that, after dozens and dozens of paycheck thrillers, he still never looks a hundred percent comfortable in a movie like Drive Angry. His voice is too naturally expressive to lend credence to a somber howler like, ''Hell already is walking the earth.'' Cage has forged his own hell, and it's called: the movies he's addicted to making, even when they trash his brand.

Tanu Weds Manu

Why should you watch "Tanu Weds Manu"? For R. Madhavan who will win you heart as a sweet lovable NRI doctor Manu who has the misfortune of falling in love with a Kanpur-girl Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) who not only rejects him as a suitor but also uses him to elope with her ruffian boyfriend.

Hiding his heartbreak and disappointment behind a smile, Madhavan fits into the role of a goody goody NRI like a glove. He is hopelessly in love with Tanuja who doesn't miss a single opportunity to hurt him. Rules, they say, are meant to be broken and that's what Tanu's agenda in life is - to break all rules that a middle-class family swears by.

Well, an NRI coming home to find a suitable bride for him is very common in Indian society and director Anand Rai's comedy opens with the same. He tries to be as close to reality as possible - from the backdrop, to clothes, to character artists - all bring out the element of a middle-class setup perfectly.

With a marriage in the background providing a perfect place for Tanu's second chance meeting with Manu, the movie traces the relationship between the girl and the NRI. Surely, perfect material for sentimental romances with 'comedy ka tadka'.

But there is something missing to make it a perfect romantic comedy. First, the script is punctured, then their is no chemistry between Madhavan and Kangana and if that was not enough, the narrative doesn't flow at the desired pace - it's slower than it should be.

Though the director picked up an interesting subject, he has not succeeded in executing his story effectively on screen - there are not enough laughs in the film. Whatever funny scenes are there, credit goes to the chemistry between Madhavan and Deepak Dobriyal who plays his friend Pappi.

Kangana's dialogue delivery puts you off and she lacks the spunk and spark to play the free bird that she is in the movie. In fact, Swara Bhaskar, who plays her friend Payal, holds the fort as the Bihari girl who is marrying a sardarji (Eijaz Khan) who also happens to be Manu's best friend.

Payal is impressed with Manu and even tries to drill some sense into Tanu's head but Tanu, a rebel, doesn't want to admit her feelings for the man who is picked by her parents.

Critics won't appreciate the plot but Madhavan fans would find enough material to enjoy the film.

Music plays an important role in a wedding-based romantic comedy and the director could have got it right if he had opted for fast-paced peppy numbers.

In the performance department, full marks go to Madhavan, Deepak and Swara. The supporting cast of K.K. Raina, Rajendra Gupta and Navni Parihar don't have much to do, but whatever role they have, they carry it well. Jimmy Shergill as Kangana's ruffian boyfriend is wasted, so is Ravi Kishen as his sidekick.

If you are looking for a great romantic comedy, this is not the one, but watch it for Madhavan and his chemistry with Deepak.

Of Gods and Men

Gravely serene and suffused with tenderness, Of Gods and Men takes the simple, profound stand that how a person of faith lives matters more than the circumstances of his death. I stick with the male pronoun here because this superb, award-laden French drama — a surprising omission among this year's Foreign Language Film Oscar nominees — is so essentially about how men behave in the name of religious conviction.

The movie is loosely based on real events: In 1996, seven French Catholic monks in an Algerian monastery were kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and then disappeared, the circumstances of their murder unsolved. Prior to the abduction, the monks in Of Gods and Men know they're in danger — even though they have lived in friendly harmony with their Muslim neighbors for years. For the group decision of whether to leave Algeria or stay, every man must first decide for himself, and the movie grants each the dignity of individual struggle. (The understated cast is led by The Matrix Reloaded's Lambert Wilson as the elected head monk and Michael Lonsdale from Munich as the monastery's aging doctor.) But it is their shared strength as a band of brothers humble before their Christian God — and indeed before the God of Islam — that may stir viewers to an awe that transcends skeptical opinions about religion or politics. That devotion is never so movingly expressed as when the men join in the beautifully plain chant that fills the soundtrack. Tchaikovsky trend alert: Secular music makes one emotionally climactic appearance when, having absorbed the consequences of their choice to stay in North Africa, the men share wine and listen to voluptuous music on an old tape deck. Their selection: Swan Lake's grand theme, a button pusher in Black Swan.

The Last American Virgin

When the teen T&A comedy Porky's scored at the box office in the spring of 1982, Hollywood quickly realized there was an audience — largely male, teenage, and horny as hell — itching to see guys as clueless as they were willing to humiliate themselves in the quest to get laid. Most of these knockoffs were god-awful. But a few, like the three in a new MGM '80s box set, added heart to the hormonal high jinks.

The Last American Virgin (1982, R, 1 hr., 
 33 mins.) Porky's rip-offs don't come more shameless than this tale about a trio of sex-hungry high school pals gunning to lose their virginity (it even has a locker-room peephole scene). But Virgin is also one of the few Reagan-era romps that could put a lump in your throat, as loser Gary (Lawrence Monoson) watches his skeevy best friend (Steve Antin) steal his dream girl. Thank-fully, the Cars keep things fizzy by shaking it up on the soundtrack.

Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

There's no point explaining the flimsy buddy-com clichés that force an FBI agent (Martin Lawrence) and his son (Brandon Jackson) to go undercover at an all-girls art school in Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, a follow-up to 2000's Big Momma's House and 2006's Big Momma's House 2. It's all an openly lame excuse for Lawrence to hop back into the eye-assaulting muumuus of his alter ego Big Momma, a wheezing, overripe hybrid of a Southern dumb-belle and a Julia Child drag impersonator. The trouble is, once the movie drops its cop-drama trappings, it doesn't do any better as a comedy. Lawrence's gender-bending jokes are played out, and his slapstick is wooden and slow. It's understandable: Clowning around underneath that fat suit must be exhausting. Almost as much as watching it.

Unknown

Has the dire situation in Unknown ever happened to you? You and the wife take a trip out of the country for a business conference in Berlin. When you get to your hotel, you realize you've left luggage behind at the airport — luggage containing your passport. (Who lets luggage containing their passport leave their hands? Not the point.) So you deposit the wife at the hotel reception desk, hail a taxi, speed back toward the airport, and (these things happen) end up in a crash that sends your car hurtling off a bridge into wintry German waters. When you emerge from a coma in a hospital bed (props to the taxi driver's heroic underwater rescue skills), you're pretty sure you know who you are. Trouble is, you've got no ID. And then, against your doctor's orders, you make your way back to your hotel, but the woman you know as your wife looks at you with utter incomprehension: She's never seen you before in her life. She's already got a husband. And he's got your name.

P.S. Assassins are now after you. What the #@*!?

Unknown says what the #@*!? too. Under the Euro-moody direction of Catalonian ad-and-music-video guy Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) and shaped by the big thumbs of producers Joel Silver and Leonard Goldberg, the movie whips up a big old puree of ingredients borrowed from other cinematic recipes. Then it dishes out the mildly spiced results as post-Oscar-quality snack food: You can sample a little identity confusion from the Bourne trilogy, wrong-man anxiety from Hitchcock, East German Cold War spy tactics from The Lives of Others, and a car chase from (insert favorite car-chase movie here). Continuing to pursue his options as an action hero, Liam Neeson runs around, angry and documentless, as Dr. Martin Harris. Mad Men's January Jones looks exceedingly blank and exceedingly blond as somebody's wife Elizabeth Harris. Aidan Quinn glowers belligerently as the other Dr. Martin Harris (with the passport to prove it). And Inglourious Basterds' Diane Kruger darts like a chicly scruffy Artful Dodger through the Berlin streets as the Bosnian-born taxi driver with the bad luck to draw Neeson's Dr. Harris as a passenger in the first place. By the way, at this point in his career, the appearance of Frank Langella — gray-haired, close-cropped, moving with vulpine deliberation — ought to trip audience triggers that the character he's playing has something up his sleeve.

To scrutinize the action-driven absurdities of Unknown is, surely, overkill in a movie in which Neeson barks,“Out of the way!'' with cartoonish ferocity as he pushes through crowds. (The screenplay is by journeymen scribes Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell.) Still, it's worth pausing to marvel at the chutzpah (as Berliners might not say) of tossing a soupçon of concern for illegal immigrants, nostalgia for the bad old days of East German secret police, and optimism about ending world hunger into a doozy in which Neeson also intones, “Do you know what it feels like to become insane?''

Memento

As much as I dig Christopher Nolan's Batman flicks, he's always been at his best when he's taking an eggbeater to moviegoers' brains. I'm talking about the Möbius-strip dreamscapes of Inception, the sleight-of-hand trickery of The Prestige, and most of all, his dizzying breakout behind the camera, Memento (2001, R, 1 hr., 53 mins.). Now marking its 10th birthday with a Blu-ray debut, Memento is one of those jigsaw puzzles whose pieces snap together more tightly with each viewing. Fueling it all is a performance by Guy Pearce that's as indelible as the tattoo ink covering his body. He's a mural of vengeance. Pearce's Leonard Shelby is a hero straight out of a '40s film noir — he remembers nothing...other than the certainty that he must track down and kill the person who 
 murdered his wife.

 Every time he wakes up, he's essentially starting from scratch with only the “facts'' stenciled on his body to guide him. Nolan, the merry prankster, unspools Leonard's story in reverse, so the audience is solving the case with him, always reevaluating whether to trust 
 the weaselly Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and the femme fatale Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss). The Blu-ray's extras are mostly leftovers from previous DVD editions, but the film itself has aged beautifully. It's a throwback to a time when indie upstarts like Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and David O. Russell were flipping the bird to the establishment, saying, Hey, here we come. The good news is, 10 years later, all three are up for Best Picture. They are the establishment.