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LANTANA An adult drama that could have been called Husbands and Wives or Scenes from a Marriage had Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman not already co-opted those titles, Lantana only looks like it's a murder-mystery; in truth, it's a galvanizing study of the complexities and crises that threaten to derail any given marriage. Anthony LaPaglia, a reliable character actor who emerges as a full-blown leading man here, is superb as an Aussie detective whose strained relationship with his sexy, sensible wife (Kerry Armstrong) leads him into a reluctant affair with an emotionally unstable woman (Rachael Blake). On top of this, the cop also has to contend with a baffling case that involves yet another troubled couple: a psychiatrist (Barbara Hershey) and academic (Geoffrey Rush) coping with the death of their daughter. The events that bind all these characters might seem like a gimmick in a lesser film, but here they're merely necessary stepping stones in a powerful drama about remorse, reparation and redemption. 
1/2
MONSOON WEDDING Seeing the moldy expression "feel-good" in relation to a motion picture generally gives me heartburn, but how else to describe this joyous work from Mira Nair, the director of Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala? A picture as full of emotion as the traditional ceremony it celebrates, Monsoon Wedding uses the title event as the backdrop for a work that, among other things, delineates the struggle between "old" and "new" India, examines the compromises that individuals must perform for the sake of family sanctity, and, in the tradition of Father of the Bride, takes a gently comic look at the headaches brought on by pulling the whole thing together. Naseeruddin Shah is cast in the equivalent of the Spencer Tracy role, as the family patriarch who must contend with all sorts of old-fashioned strife in new-fangled Delhi as he coordinates the union of his thoroughly modern daughter (Vasundhara Das) to a handsome man (Parvin Dabas) flying in from Houston to take part in this arranged marriage. Characters come and go, tense situations alternately explode or dissipate, and secrets are uncovered -- yet through it all, most of these ingratiating folks invariably manage to do what's best for themselves and for the family unit. Vijay Raaz steals the film as a wedding planner whose obnoxiousness gets vaporized by true love, and there's an infectious soundtrack that may warrant an immediate trip to your local music store. 1/2
RESIDENT EVIL Here we go again: yet another screen adaptation of a popular video game, and one that makes last summer's doltish Lara Croft: Tomb Raider seem almost Kubrickian by comparison. Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson, doubtless hoping that financiers will confuse him with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (of Boogie Nights fame), has made a career out of helming noisy sci-fi spectacles like Soldier and Mortal Kombat, and here he returns to the same dry well, concocting a shoddy product that tries to beef up its pinball-simple narrative by borrowing liberally from The Andromeda Strain, Aliens and George Romero's Dead trilogy. After an opening half-hour that ranks as the most excruciatingly dull 30 minutes I've sat through in at least two years (basically, expository scenes of a military task force trying to find out what went wrong at an underground genetic research facility), things get moving once our heroes get attacked by hordes of shuffling zombies, a pack of fleshless Dobermans, and a laughable, computer-generated mutant billed as "The Licker" (boy, there's a terrifying moniker). Except for one imaginative (albeit gruesome) sequence involving slice-and-dice laser beams, this isn't even fun on a trash level.
THE ROOKIE This G-rated Disney film comes with the tagline "Based On A True Story," but I'd much rather start seeing a tagline that reads, "Based On A True Story That Translates Wonderfully To Film." As it stands, the tale at the center of The Rookie was a great one when it first appeared on the pages of the dailies, but as a motion picture, it's an overly familiar formula film that won't move anyone who's already seen their share of motivational, follow-your-dream flicks. What little juice this gets comes courtesy of its actors, particularly Dennis Quaid in the leading role of Jim Morris, a high school chemistry teacher and baseball coach who, a decade after what was ostensibly his prime, takes one last shot at achieving his goal of pitching in the major leagues. With John Lee Hancock providing the sleepy direction and Mike Rich supplying a script that's almost as generic as the one he penned for Finding Forrester, there isn't much sense of joy surrounding The Rookie, as a leisurely running time of 129 minutes and too many golden shots of Texas skies and fields (John Schwartzman's camerawork is pretty but predictable) also result in the movie taking an unusually long time to tell its straightforward story. Indeed, for a motion picture meant to inspire us, the perspiration comes through more often than the inspiration.
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