A charming runt of a movie. It's not all it could be, but it's the best the pound had to offer this week.

If Intolerable Cruelty isn't a convincing love story, it's a hugely entertaining one, with comic relief -- in the form of Cedric the Entertainer as a voyeuristic private eye and Tom Aldredge as a decaying law-firm boss issuing directives while hooked up to life-support -- piled on top of the comedy.

This long-awaited movie has been unwisely chopped into two pieces -- the second is due in February -- when it really needed to be one long, delirious ride.

Director Uwe Boll wholeheartedly embraces the film's concept, and with some fancy editing and a pulsing soundtrack, the effect really is like watching a video game.

While it's not quite as satisfying as Chabrol's underappreciated "Merci pour le chocolat" (2000), it's still nasty fun at the expense of the upper middle class.

Billed as the first film to go from conception to the big screen within the Sundance program, Dopamine is an amiably slight independent film that probably should have gone directly to the Sundance Channel.

Nolot elicits the last response expected from a movie that's almost entirely about sex: a yawn.

The leads are all pros, but thanks to the increasing onslaught of shock humor about abortions and rape, among other things, what starts out amusing eventually becomes something of a drag.

The white-knuckle center of the movie is Sean Penn, who gives an utterly raw performance as Jimmy, father of the dead girl. It's one of the few times that a parent's grief has felt real on the screen through all its ugly permutations.

It is to Padilha's enormous credit that he steadfastly kicks aside our own culturally imposed frames of reference, insisting that we see the truth, and the humanity, within this very real story.

Other than the terribly miscast Posey, the cast is solid, with Dukakis wrenching the heart as a mother tested to the max by her son's request. But the movie didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

The tension of Matt having to work alongside his wife without being able to trust her provides the movie's real electricity, sexual and otherwise.

School of Rock may be to Black what "The Nutty Professor" was to Jerry Lewis, or "Groundhog Day" was to Bill Murray - that rare, perfectly tailored opportunity to play against one's broadest impulses. Not to neutralize them, necessarily, but to tame them and turn them into something very human and charming.

Of them all, only McCartney looks out of place, perhaps mistaking the venue for Vegas. There in a nutshell could be the answer to why the Beatles broke up.

Everyone involved can claim credit, but it's Dinklage, in an understated, outstanding performance, who turns this unlikely tale into art that will strike a chord with any open-minded audience.

It's hard to care what really happened on Wonderland Ave. when the audience hates the neighborhood.

Much of the film is sub-sophomoric, but Campbell and Davis give hilarious deadpan performances.

Stooping to low-rent laffs By ELIZABETH WEITZMAN SPECIAL TO THE NEWS Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore & Eileen Essel (on floor) DUPLEX. With Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore. Directed by Danny DeVito. Running time: 88 mins. Rated PG-13: Slapstick violence, gross-out humor. There are people who can look at a creaky, crumbling house and home right in on the solid framework and fabulous fireplace. In "Duplex," Ben Stiller is the fireplace. As for the structure, well, this rather rickety comedy boasts a solid base, though sadly, too much of it has been plastered over with moldy jokes and leaky plot devices.

The screenplay is laced with wit and sharp dialogue, and the supporting cast more than makes up for Johnson's inexperience and occasional stiffness.

Lane...is as stunning and changeable as that Tuscan countryside. Without her, this movie would be irksome, pandering as it does to stereotypes, including that of the American woman who goes abroad for easy sex with limpid-eyed hunks.

But for that one bright, incongruous yuk-fest in the classroom, Luther is deadly material, full of self-righteousness and devoid of balance.

Oddly, almost unrelentingly, grim.

Mystifyingly bad given the talent involved, Southlander is an in-jokey, hipster escapade that appears to have been made on a drunken weekend because there was nothing better to do.

It's hard to take this movie seriously. It's the cinematic equivalent of dotting your i's with a big heart, a very youngish view of life and death in which everything is too neatly wrapped up with a bow.

Green's aggressively whimsical autobiography, which he narrates entirely in rhyme, will challenge all but the most open-minded audiences.

The film is hampered by a somewhat shallow, soap-operatic climax. But Knoller is superb as a practical man trying to balance reason and emotion. Fox does an excellent job capturing the claustrophobia of army life, made all the more suffocating by having to hide one's true self.

Sharp, erotic performances are the mainstay of Olivier Assayas' unnerving Demonlover, a visually stylish movie that equates and fuses high-stakes corporate negotiations with the video-game mentality.

The worst performance in a film that diminishes even the talented Stockard Channing is given by Allen. He's never written a more unpleasant, vapid or irredeemable character for himself, and he makes it worse by overplaying.