Rating: 2 stars

What will Jim Carrey be forced to do next? In Liar, Liar, he played a lawyer who, after being put under a spell, couldn’t tell a lie. In Yes Man, he plays an anti-social loan officer who makes a covenant with a self-help guru to embrace the power of yes. So what will it be? Switch places with his dog? Embrace his inner child? Do everything his Rice Krispies tell him to do? (I shouldn’t give Hollywood any ideas.)
The premise actually works—to a point. Everything that’s good about Yes Man, you’ve already seen in the trailer: It’s funny when Carrey’s Carl says yes to flying lessons, yes to Korean lessons, and even yes to a mail order Iranian bride. And the film’s philosophy of affirmation actually resonates, especially when Carl grudgingly gives a ride to a homeless guy and ends up meeting the girl of his dreams (Zooey Deschanel).
But Yes Man simply isn’t funny enough—several of the bits go on way too long (like the one where Carl tries to save a suicidal man by singing to him) or are simply awkward (like the icky sexual encounter beween Carl...

Rating: 2.5 stars

Nothing Like the Holidays delivers on its promise: It’s an overstuffed, warm-hearted holiday movie about a Puerto Rican family, with lots of family melodrama, a few group hugs, a healthy dose of ethnic humor, and not a single untelegraphed moment. Chekhov it ain’t, but it has a certain comfort-food-like appeal (only in this case, the comfort food is plantains and rice).
The always earthily charismatic Alfred Molina plays the patriarch of the Rodriguez family, who are together for Christmas for the first time in years. But will it be their last? Oldest son Mauricio (John Leguizamo) is a distracted Yuppie lawyer with a gringo wife—Jewish, no less!—played by Debra Messing. Daughter Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito) is an aspiring actress who has been living in Hollywood. (Her family thinks she’s bigtime because she’s done some commercials and a straight-to-DVD movie.) Finally, there’s Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez), just back from Iraq and scarred both physically and emotionally.
Papa Rodrigeuz simply wants his family to enjoy each other, but...

Rating: 3 stars

Cadillac Records, about the trailblazing black blues musicians of 1950s Chicago and the Jewish white man who supported—and possibly exploited—them, is almost great.
It sure gets the music right—it’ll have you stomping your feet and howling along with the blues and early rock classics.
And it casts some great actors to depict these musical legends. Jeffrey Wright is Muddy Waters, the Mississippi sharecropper whose talent at bedding women was almost as great as talent on the guitar. Mos Def is the cocky, cheeky Chuck Berry, who knew he was the best and watched with bitter cynicism as white boys like the Beach Boys stole his riffs. Beyonce Knowles is Etta James, a junkie torch singer with a daddy complex. And Columbus Short is Little Walter, the gifted harmonica player with a hair-trigger temper.
Adrien Brody plays Leonard Chess, the likeable, self-made record executive who paid his talent in shiny new Cadillacs. But the film is ambivilant about Chess’s true nature. Does he genuinely care for his musicians? Or is he a musical parasite?...

Rating: 2 stars

Australia is all mythology, no movie. Its director, the extravagant Australian stylist Baz Luhrman (Moulin Rouge), simply has too many lofty ideas: He wants to make a film that captures the sprawling, rugged landscape and maverick spirit of his homeland. He wants to make a film that condemns the treatment of Australia’s indigenous people, the Aborigines. He wants to make a film that echoes classic American films—westerns for sure, but mostly Gone With the Wind and, curiously, The Wizard of Oz. Indeed, he wants to create nothing less than the Great Australian movie. He might’ve started with a better script.
Almost everything in Australia seems borrowed from other, better, sources, as if Luhrman thinks that presenting cinematic archetypes imbues his film with a kind of timelessness. It just makes his characters clichés.
We’ve got Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), the English aristocrat who arrives in Australia during World War II hoping to convince her husband to sell his cattle ranch. Instead, she finds her...