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LAYER CAKE Until now, Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn had made his mark as the producer of Guy Ritchie's crime pics Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Yet here he goes and beats Ritchie at his own game by relying less on the crutch of flashy yet empty theatrics to punch across his film's entertainment value. Daniel Craig plays a dapper, low-key member of the London underworld, a cocaine distributor who plans to retire from this sordid business. But before he can make his great escape, he's handed two dubious assignments that may end up costing him his life. Craig, a frontrunner to take over the James Bond franchise, is coolly efficient in the central role. I still think the actor's too slight and pasty to portray 007 - given the number of oceanside assignments, shouldn't Bond always sport a beautiful bronze tan? - but for other upcoming projects, this newfound charisma indicates that Daniel Craig has officially been handed a licence to thrill.
THE LONGEST YARD Faithfulness to director Robert Aldrich's hard-hitting 1974 film, in which a former football star leads a ragtag group of convicts in a match against the sadistic guards, isn't the problem: Major plot points are kept intact, snatches of dialogue find themselves lifted wholesale, and characters' fates remain the same. But when this version does deviate from its source material, the results are disastrous - and kill any chance the film has in maintaining its modest pleasures. The leading character (Burt Reynolds in the R-rated original, Adam Sandler in this PG-13 piffle) has been softened considerably, while the rampaging homophobia is astonishing (and annoying). Insult comedy can be uproarious in the right hands, but here it's merely witless, the cinematic equivalent of the school bully giving a weaker classmate a wedgie and then declaring himself the epitome of fine-honed drollery.
LORDS OF DOGTOWN The excellent 2002 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which chronicles the rise of the Venice, CA, teens who almost single-handedly revived skateboarding as a national phenomenon during the 1970s, has now been given the fictionalized Hollywood treatment, yet the resultant film fails to capture anything beyond random surface pleasures. Initially, the choice of Catherine Hardwicke as director seemed inspired, but the ample party scenes that drove her gritty film Thirteen seem extraneous here and take the focus away from the real story. Lords of Dogtown is well acted (especially by Heath Ledger as the group's stoner-mentor), and Hardwicke ably recreates a specific time and place. Yet the movie rarely conveys the import of what these lower-income kids accomplished: As depicted here, their cultural revolution seems no more noteworthy than a day spent at the mall.
MADAGASCAR Unlike the banal Robots and Shark Tale, this animated delight strikes an appropriate balance: It's hip without being obnoxious, and it's sentimental without being cloying. Through a wild chain of events, four animal pals from a New York zoo - lion (Ben Stiller), zebra (Chris Rock), hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and giraffe (David Schwimmer) - find themselves stranded on the title island. Despite the ingratiating leads (Rock, for one, has never been better), despite the eye-popping animation, and despite the presence of other scene-stealers (check out the lemurs), the main reason to see this is to catch the penguins, four no-nonsense types who plan to dig their way to Antarctica but instead end up hijacking a ship. First Opus, then Sparky, now these guys - the lion may be comfortably ensconced as king of the jungle, but when it comes to the thick brier of popular culture, it's the penguin who reigns supreme.
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MOOLAADE The Charlotte Film Society, which previously brought 82-year-old Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene's 2001 effort Faat Kine to town, now does likewise with Moolaade, which earned an award at Cannes and placed on over two dozen critics' "10 Best" lists for 2004. Moolaade centers on a grotesque tradition still practiced in many African villages: the genital mutilation of little girls so they won't feel sexual pleasure when they eventually marry. When six small girls turn to her for sanctuary ("Moolaade"), Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly) decides that enough's enough and does her best to stop the madness. Like past Sembene titles, this one's about the surge of human compassion above all else, and the writer-director manages to share his yarn in the tradition of a great storyteller sitting by the fire, adding plenty of color and detail to keep the audience captive.
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