![]() ![]() For good measure, there is a wicked auntie (Angela Lansbury), an evil would-be stepmother (Celia Imrie) and a kindly maid (Kelly Macdonald). Their frenzied, widowed father (Colin Firth) has burned through 17 nannies before finding the magical McPhee (Thompson), with her bulbous nose, warts and protruding tooth. The seven Brown children, led by eldest boy Simon (Thomas Sangster), are naughty beyond belief. (PG 97 min.) Emma Thompson follows up her Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility screenplay with this utterly predictable, yet garishly charming children's tale, adapted from Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda books. This demonstration of Penn's range may break him out of low-brow comedy material he's been stuck in since Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. There's a devastating image of an extended-stay room that's as white as death, and the tour of the Taj Mahal is a triumphant passage. Still, director Mira Nair ( Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding) draws on all of her experience as a filmmaker to visually link Calcutta and New York. It is startlingly akin to Jewish assimilation novels of the 1950s and is awfully hard on the WASPS. Circumstances draw him back into the roots he knew, and cared, little about. Their first-born, Gogol (Kal Penn), becomes an architect at Yale, and flirts with joining the power elite. Based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, it follows Ashoke (Irfan Khan) and his wife, Ashima (Tabu), making their way in New York and raising a family. (PG-13 122 min.) The journey of a first-generation Bengali-American. This spectacular yet nonjudgmental melodrama by Sam Fuller has an unforgettable beginning the film was just plain too much for viewers of the time, and Fuller only worked in America twice in the next 16 years. (1964) Constance Towers plays a prostitute with an exceptionally sordid past who tries to relocate to the small town of Grantville, only to face prejudice and violence. The inventiveness of the visuals, however, keep you from walking out. Nadja's endless, languid verbal flounceries ("I don't know anyone who doesn't have a hole in their heart") make you long for the heft of a good sharp stake. Director Michael Almereyda is outfoxed by scriptwriter Michael Almereyda. She's particularly obsessed with Lucy (Galaxy Craze), little knowing that Lucy's lover, Jim (Martin Donovan), is the nephew of Dr. (Unrated 92 min.) As Nadja, the daughter of Dracula, Elina Lowensohn prowls the bars of the East Village, where her angst and pallor naturally lure lovers to her. ![]() Hector Jimenez co-stars as Nacho's tag-team partner. Hess' blocky rhythms and offbeat pacing give way to many unexpected laughs, but Mike White's script (co-written by Hess and his wife Jerusha Hess) takes the characters through an all-too familiar arc. Only when he gives up glory for the sake of the church's orphans does he succeed (and win the love of the cute nun, played by Ana de la Reguera). Jack Black creates a sustained performance within the very loose guidelines of his character, a Mexican priest who dreams of fame as a masked wrestler. But as common wisdom says, you can't make a cult classic on purpose. (PG 91 min.) Jared Hess' strange, strange new movie seems willing to imitate the cult status of his previous film, Napoleon Dynamite. ![]()
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