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KISSING JESSICA STEIN With a storyline that's equal parts Woody Allen in his prime and Nora Ephron in a tailspin, Kissing Jessica Stein is an indie sleeper wanna-be that's content being merely OK even though greatness was seemingly within its grasp. Jennifer Westfeldt stars as Jessica, a New York journalist who's always had rotten luck with men, much to the dismay of her often overbearing mother (Tovah Feldshuh, doing her best to temper the broad Jewish gestures of her familiar character). Looking like Lisa Kudrow but sounding like Annie Hall, Jessica can never find a guy who meets her lofty expectations, so she ends up answering a personal ad posted by an art gallery manager (Heather Juergensen) in the Village Voice's "Women Seeking Women" section. The two ladies hit it off fabulously as friends, but it takes Jessica a while longer to determine whether she's ready to plunge into a lesbian relationship. Good performances by Westfeldt and especially Juergensen (both women also co-wrote the screenplay) and some refreshingly frank and insightful dialogue are often curtailed by trite plot developments as conventional as any found in such standard Hollywood fare as You've Got Mail. Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy grappled with similar material far more effectively -- and imaginatively. 
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
PANIC ROOM Just as Meryl Streep made The River Wild to satisfy the part of her that required one uncomplicated popcorn picture on her resume, we now have Jodie Foster taking part in a commonplace thriller by accepting a role that's less complex than usual. But Foster's participation isn't as puzzling as that of director David Fincher, who, after the jigsaw puzzle plots and moral messiness of Seven, The Game and Fight Club, seems only to be serving as a hack-for-hire. Still, his yen for technical trickery -- the opening credits alone are worth the price of admission -- suits the picture's primary setting, a spacious New York brownstone occupied by a divorcee (Foster) and her daughter (Kristen Stewart). When the two women find their home invaded by crooks (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam) searching for hidden loot, they confine themselves to the building's panic room, an impenetrable space with a steel door and a wall of surveillance monitors. A couple of plot twists might have made all the difference in this watchable but routine thriller, though production designer Arthur Max (Gladiator) should be commended for his imaginative and accessible set. As a burglar with a heart of gold, Whitaker delivers the best performance but also provides the most problematic character, inadvertently turning the film's creed that "Crime Does Not Pay" into "Doing Good Deeds May Be Hazardous To Your Health." 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.
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