We will leave the sports metaphor to you, dear reader, when we say that the PG-rated Disney comedy The Game Plan defeated the odds-on favorite, The Kingdom (coming in #2). The only other new movie that charted this week was the dramatic comedy, Feast of Love, just out of the Top 10 at #11, though the Beatles musical Across the Universe did crack the Top 10, after a couple weeks in release. The rest of the list looks pretty much like last week’s, with last week’s top two, Resident Evil: Extinction and Good Luck Chuck, being bumped to #3 and #4, respectively. Late summer hits The Bourne Ultimatum and Superbad fell off the list after 8 weeks in release.

•••TOP 10 MOVIES: SEPT. 28-30, 2007•••

1. THE GAME PLAN - $22.7M ($22.7M total)
2. THE KINGDOM - $17.7M ($17.7M total)
3. RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION - $8 ($36.8M total)
4. GOOD LUCK CHUCK - $6.3M ($23.6M total)
5. 3:10 TO YUMA - $4.16M ($43.9M)
6. THE BRAVE ONE - $3.69M ($30.8M total)
7. MR. WOODCOCK - $3M ($19.6M total)
8. EASTERN PROMISES - $2.89M ($11.2M total)
9. SYDNEY WHITE - $2.65M ($8.5M total)
10. ACROSS THE UNIVERSE - $2.0 ($5.51M total)

OFFSIDE [PG]
A couple of Jafar Panahi’s earlier films were banned in his home country of Iran, but went on to great international acclaim. With this winner of the Silver Bear at Berlinale in 2006, Panahi has gotten pretty smart and made a comedy in which the political dangers are submerged in a way that circumvents censure at home, yet manages to make his point loud and clear. The film takes a lighthearted look at how teenage girls try to infiltrate a soccer stadium for a big match against Bahrain in the qualifying round of the 2006 World Cup. Forbidden to attend by Government decree to protect them from the swearing and bad behaviour that is expected of the men, they are keen soccer fans and inventive with disguise. Still, some get caught, and held in a makeshift pen until after the game. This is where Panahi sets the center of his action, and where he pits the girls’ arguments against the law, by putting a soldier in the position of having to explain the rationale for the law – and of course, thus reveal how ridiculous it is. It is a valid subject, and while it is a little light as the only propeller for the cinematic engine, Panahi manages to sustain interest with a combination of well directed action and a sense of fun that elevates the film’s editorial tone to an accessible pitch (pardon the pun). –Andrew L. Urban

THE KINGDOM [R]
The investigation by FBI experts Jamie Foxx (Miami Vice), Chris Cooper (Breach), Jennifer Garner (“Alias”) and Jason Bateman (Smokin’ Aces) of the bombing of an American housing complex in Saudi Arabia propel the story in this CSI whodunit to an astounding third act, a tense, three-stage action blowout with few cinematic equals. Director Peter Berg, whose popular 2004 football drama Friday Night Lights led to a hit TV series adaptation, balances the politics and action with a nice sense of drama, particularly the touching rapport shared by Foxx’s outraged family man and Saudi proxy, a cop played sensitively by Ashraf Barhom (Paradise Now). The film looks great, too, with production designer Tom Duffield helping Berg and Lions for Lambs writer Matthew Michael Carnahan create a palpable sense of place, a place that is both alien and foreboding. His Arizona backlot creation that doubles for the Saudi neighborhood-turned-battle zone (the real-life counterpart of which was off-limits to the production) is incredible, and is a star itself. Berg’s solid dramatic mystery may not be as high-minded as fellow war commentary In the Valley of Elah, but it is still comfortably thought provoking and very entertaining. –Robert Newton

FEAST OF LOVE [R]

Professor Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman) tells us in voice-over that the gods grew bored, and created humanity; then, still bored, they created love; then, curious, they tried love for themselves; and finally, in order help them, and us, survive it, they created laughter.

In Robert Benton’s adaptation of the Charles Baxter novel Feast of Love, the film’s literary roots are allowed to show, which makes for a quirky and sometimes uneven film in which people fall in love with a glance, or fail to see the obvious, or – as is the case with one couple in this movie – do both at the same time.

Harry is a nearly omniscent presence here, partly because he’s played by Morgan Freeman, and partly because he has a way of seeing what’s going on when even those in the middle of events don’t recognize for themselves the meaning of their actions and words. So it is that Harry spots the moment his pal Bradley (Greg Kinnear) loses his wife Kathryn (Selma Blair): when a sports-playing lesbian named Jenny (Stana Katic) swaggers over to their table and more or less smites Kathryn on the spot. Bradley, of course, is clueless, and when Harry goes home that evening to his wife Esther (Jane Alexander), he pretty much predicts how things are going to turn out. Sure enough, Jenny and Kathryn end up together, and Bradley ends up alone and reduced to stealing his nephew’s dog for companionship.
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THE GAME PLAN [PG]
“Just like Disney used to make” could refer to one of two things. There’s the cutting edge Disney that did the unheard of by releasing a (brilliant) feature-length animated film called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and heralding a golden age for animation – and there’s the days of the super-cheap, low-concept live action groaners like The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Million Dollar Duck. Even though star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s acting might be categorized as “cartoonish,” Disney’s attempt to neuter him like they did Vin Diesel in 2005’s embarrassing The Pacifier falls into the latter category. The former WWE wrestler plays a pro footballer for the fictional Boston Rebels, and his character is a vain and shallow muscle-head who learns what’s really important when the young daughter he never knew he had shows up on his doorstep. Slapstick, precociousness and fish-out-of-water antics ensue. Indulgent, saccharine and about 30 minutes too long, it is overloaded with the kind of on-the-nose imparting of Valuable Life Lessons that will make even the most ADHD-afflicted kids throw up their gummi hands and say, “Enough, already – I get it!” Boston area moviegoers will be on the lookout for the multiple local locations like a retooled Gillette Stadium, Worcester Airport and the Citgo Sign (edited with no consideration to geography), while everyone else will be on the lookout for a sign of another kind – the one that says, “Exit.” –Robert Newton

[Comedic Drama] - A trio of Oscar nominees and winners – Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear and Jane Alexander – head up a cast of familiar faces which also includes Selma Blair, Missi Pyle and Fred Ward. Wrangling them all is Oscar-winning writer-director Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer), delivering a story that explores love’s many faces set in a community in Oregon. A date movie if there ever was one, which looks like it might require an extra bundle of napkins from the concession stand. Also check out the Cary Brothers’ music video for “Honestly” from the movie. Rated R (for strong sexual content, nudity and language)

[Comedy] - Shot partly in Worcester, this clunky Disney comedy stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a pro footballer who meets the young daughter he never knew he had…until she shows up on his doorstep to live with him. Rated PG (for some mild thematic elements)

[Mystery/Drama] - A team of FBI investigators goes to the Middle East to find the bomber of an American facility there. Just watching the trailer makes you want to dab the sweat off your brow with a big wad of concession stand napkins. Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Chris Cooper and Jeremy Piven star. Rated R (for intense sequences of graphic brutal violence, and for language)

[Drama] - Adventurous Iranian girls just want to have fun watching their national soccer team play Bahrain, but run afoul of the security forces when they’re caught disguised as men sneaking into the stadium. The Circle director Jafar Panahi’s sly and deceptively simple comedy marks a return to popular form for Iranian cinema. English subtitled. Rated PG (for language throughout, and some thematic elements). Opens Tuesday, October 2 at Cinema 320.

[Comedy] - A French girl (Julie Delpy) brings her American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) to visit her parents in Paris on their way home from a trip in Paris. The film marks an impressive and consistently energetic debut of Delpy, who starred in local boy John Stimpson’s ghost story, The Legend of Lucy Keyes. In English and French with English subtitles. Rated R (for sexual content, some nudity and language)

BLACK BOOK - Dutch director Paul Verhoeven puts away the tricks he displayed in his flashy Hollywood days in movies like Basic Instinct and Total Recall and returns to his roots in barebones storytelling like when he was making lean little thrillers like The 4th Man and Soldier Of Orange. His story of Rachel (Carice van Houten), a Dutch Jew who narrowly escapes the Nazis during World War II, is a thoughtful and satisfying revenge drama, much like Gloomy Sunday. The setup is solid, and the characters are rich, so much so that … [read more…]

BUG - If there were an award for “Ickiest Performance,” then Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon would win for theirs in this disturbing drama. Audiences expecting the typical mindless gross-out suggested by the film’s marketing will be disappointed, but director William Friedkin, responsible for countless soiled trousers since his The Exorcist in 1973, really amps up the suspense and psychological terror here. Judd (Come Early Morning) plays Agnes, a lonely and highly impressionable woman who is smitten by kindly but deluded … [read more…]

CHALK - Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock presents this mockumentary that centers on three high school teachers over the course of a school year. It ain’t no Christopher Guest movie, though it is adept enough, with some inspired moments. Fans of “The Office” will probably like it, and teachers will surely go batty for its true-to-life depiction of their profession. Teachers/sketch comedians Mike Akel and Chris Mass know their stuff as far as teaching and comedy goes, even if they are a little green as filmmakers. –Klaus Hummersumpf

EVENING - Fateless director Lajos Koltai’s brilliant eye coupled with The Hours author Michael Cunningham’s refined screenplay, performed wonderfully by a storied, Oscar-fueled cast adds up to a lush and lovely story, a gorgeous family portrait spanning 50 years in the life of a New England clan. The regal Vanessa Redgrave is lovely as the elderly, ailing matron Ann, with Claire Danes (Shopgirl) fantastic as her darling, free-spirited young proxy. Mamie Gummer (The Hoax) looks eerily like her mother, Meryl Streep, who … [read more…]

KNOCKED UP - Every decade, movie audiences need a funny Hollywood Everyman. Tom Hanks ruled the 80s, Jim Carrey defined the 90s and now, it is Seth Rogen’s turn. He is not yet a household name, but in The 40-Year-Old Virgin director Judd Apatow’s latest comedy, Rogen proves that he has the chops for the job. He plays Ben, an unfocused, 20-something party boy whose one-night stand with Alison (Emmy winner Katherine Heigl), an up-and-coming TV anchor, results in unexpected fatherhood. … [read more…]

NEXT - The TV ads for this well-intentioned Nicolas Cage vehicle, about a man who can see a couple minutes into the future, boast, “You won’t believe the ending!” Of course, they suggest that the ending is meant to blow your mind. Instead, it just blows, in the insulting “Bobby Ewing turning up in the shower still alive” kind of way. Kiwi director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) gets the mechanics of the gimmick down, illustrating the schizophrenic nature of such a gift/curse, but the movie’s trio of screenwriters cannot … [read more…]

PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA - Director Christopher Metzler explores one of our worst ecological disasters – a resort community once known as “The California Rivieria” that has since become a fetid, stagnant, salty lake that serves only as a wildlife-killing reminder of a fading dream. Metzler finds humor amidst the tragedy, focusing on the few hearty souls who cling to that dream and insist that the Salton will make a comeback, which is why his getting oddball shepherd John Waters to narrate is just so perfect.

TEN CANOES - Breathtakingly innovative, Ten Canoes is a visually lush and groundbreaking Australian film, exploring the very fabric of that country’s indigenous heritage. Time is fluid as The Tracker writer-director Rolf de Heer’s unique work weaves color and monochrome in an intricate, complex tapestry. Giving an insight into the life and cultures of tribes in Arnhem Land (in the northeastern corner of the Northern Territory), the story … [read more…]

THE TV SET - There will never be another Network, though writer-director/Hollywood legacy Jake Kasdan (Orange County) gives his amusing enough skewering of the television business a good shot. He certainly has allies in David Duchovny (Trust The Man) as a writer balancing a new family with his artistic integrity and Sigourney Weaver (The Village) as the clueless boss who bastardizes his autobiographical series. Judy Greer (Elizabethtown) is also fine … [read more…]

[In Limited Release] - The producers of Touching the Void deliver this documentary about the first solo, non-stop, around-the-world boat race in the summer of 1968 and the psychological toll it took on the nine sailors who dared to accept the challenge. It looks a lot like a Heart of Darkness type of story, with the cast mad from solitude rather than from drugs, like in Apocalypse Now.

[In Limited Release] - Brazil may be a beautiful country, but in cities like Sao Paolo, one person is kidnapped every day and ransomed, and the outcome is seldom clean. In this Sundance award winner, the effects of violence and class-based economic divisions have on the Brazilian population is explored in depth, and the unsettling feeling it instills is best summed up in the last shot of the trailer in which a life-sized human dummy takes a bullet to the head.

[In Limited Release] - See L.A. like you’ve never seen it before – covered in radioactive ash and under martial law. When multiple dirty bombs are detonated in the city, a man played by Rory Cochrane (A Scanner Darkly) attempts to get to his girfriend, played by Mary McCormack (1408), who is all the way across town. Fans of ’80s nuclear annihilation movies like The Day After, Testament and Miracle Mile will certainly dig this flick, which is tense, moody and efficient and features the best ending…ever.

[October 17] - Go inside the establishment of the state of Israel in this historical drama that carefully reconstructs the events that led to and followed that controversial historic 1948 event. Anyone who needs a Cliff’s Notes version to understand what still echoes throughout the Middle East 60 years later, this looks to be the film for you. Based on historical accounts from the best-selling novel written by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.

[March 21, 2008] - Seldom does one get to use the words “heartwarming” and “illegal immigration” in the same sentence, but director Patricia Riggen’s family-oriented drama about a mother working in the U.S. for the sake of her son back in Mexico and their sudden need to reunite will warm more than a few cockles when it is released next year. Be sure to bring a handkerchief (or “pañuelo”), as this one looks to be tearjerker of the highest order.

Critic haters who point out that this weekend’s #1 movie, Resident Evil: Extinction , did not screen for critics in advance of its Friday opening and still managed a decent $24 million at the box office don’t often consider that studio Sony spent so much to promote it that a #1 spot would be as likely as gravity reversing itself. A distant #2 (insert poop joke here) is the Dane Cook-Jessica Alba comedy, Good Luck Chuck, with the only other brand-brand new release in the Top 10 being the #6 scoring Snow White spoof, Sydney White, starring the super-cute Amanda Bynes. Two remnants of summer – the #8 Superbad and the #9 The Bourne Ultimatum – continue chugging, up over the $100 million and $200 million marks, respectively (and respectably).

•••TOP 10 MOVIES - SEPT. 21-23, 2007•••

1. RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION - $23.7M ($23.7M total)
2. GOOD LUCK CHUCK - $13.7M ($13.7M total)
3. THE BRAVE ONE - $7.31M ($25M total)
4. 3:10 TO YUMA - $6.16M ($37.7M total)
5. EASTERN PROMISES - $5.6M ($6.4M total)
6. SYDNEY WHITE - $5.2M ($5.2M)
7. MR. WOODCOCK - $4.9M ($15.6M total)
8. SUPERBAD - $3.1M ($116.2M total)
9. THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM - $2.9M ($220.2M total)
10. DRAGON WARS - $2.6M ($8.7M total)

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION [R]
Former supermodel Milla Jovovich must have been on a quest to make a movie worse than the super-unwatchable 2006 floater Ultraviolet, because this third and allegedly final movie in the most-definitely-not Shakespeare series about a secret experiment-turned-zombie plague is a real contender for that crown of scorn. Two-time Highlander director Russell Mulcahy stumbles from scene to scene in this video game adaptation, blissfully unaware that game-crazy writer Paul W.S. Anderson has ripped pages from J.G. Ballard’s 1981 sci-fi novel, Hello America, wiped with them and stitched the fetid result to a half-hearted homage to master George Romero’s Living Dead quartet of genre cornerstones. The action is tired and uninventive, and when the wooden cast, which features fearsome “Heroes” belle Ali Larter and ham-fisted comic Mike Epps, recites their lines, we half expect a light breeze to knock them over, they are so cardboard. Things get really stupid when a flock of flesh-eating crows descends upon a caravan of plague survivors as they motor across the desert to the remains of Las Vegas (like no one in the audience has seen The Birds before). They get even stupider still when a lone Jovovich, make-up perfect after five years fighting and fleeing hordes of undead, battles a mutant scientist who wants to put his tentacles in her (like no one in the audience has ever seen From Beyond before). Even stupider than that would be us carrion on any longer discussing such empty rot. –Robert Newton