ADAM SANDLER'S EIGHT CRAZY NIGHTS Any critical goodwill Adam Sandler earned for Punch-Drunk Love will be negated by his participation in this animated feature for which he co-wrote the script, served as a producer, and voiced three of the central characters. Basically a frat-house version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, this shows how an anti-social slacker becomes a swell guy thanks to the efforts of a diminutive elderly man. As is par for the course, the movie turns faux-sentimental in time for the fadeout, but before that, we're subjected to the usual gross-out humor. The musical numbers (featuring lyrics like "I don't decorate no trees... But I'll give this old lady's melons a squeeze") are well-executed, but the movie's product placements travel far beyond the already shameful norm, as logos for (among others) Foot Locker and Victoria's Secret come alive to offer lectures on the meaning of Christmas. This corporate pimping is far more offensive than the scatological humor, which, had this been live-action rather than animated, would have earned the film an R rather than its benign PG-13 rating. 1/2

ANALYZE THAT With Robin Williams ceasing his whoring ways with the one-two punch of Insomnia and One Hour Photo, it's now squarely Robert De Niro who's doing his best to keep the world's oldest profession flourishing in Hollywood. In yet another take-the-paycheck-and-run example, the once respectable actor shamelessly mugs his way through a needless (not to mention unfunny) sequel to 1999's Analyze This. In this outing, his mob boss is released from prison into the care of his hapless psychiatrist (Billy Crystal) on the condition that he go straight, but it's not long before he's up to his arched eyebrows in gangland shenanigans. This sloppy sequel requires De Niro to gleefully mangle tunes from West Side Story and wave his "sausage" at middle-aged ladies, and it's impossible to feel anything but embarrassment for the actor. 1/2

DIE ANOTHER DAY Just as it took Roger Moore a couple of movies to grow into the part of James Bond, so too has it taken Pierce Brosnan a while to satisfactorily pull off the role at the center of the most successful franchise in film history. His newfound conviction (he's become less the Moore playboy and more the Sean Connery hardass) is only one of the reasons that this 20th entry in the 40-year-old series easily emerges as the best of the Brosnan Bonds -- and, in effect, the best 007 outing in over a decade. Except for one unfortunate "surfing" sequence late in the game (featuring arguably the worst special effects ever produced for the series), the action is tightly orchestrated and thus more exciting, and the various performers, including Halle Berry (the first Bond babe with an Oscar) as the enigmatic Jinx, all breathe vigorous life into their characterizations. Scattered tributes to past flicks in the series also add to the merriment.

EQUILIBRIUM Fahrenheit 451 plus 1984 divided by THX-1138 multiplied by The Matrix squared by Blade Runner and rounded off to Logan's Run -- but subtracting much in the way of compelling developments -- equals Equilibrium, a futuristic yarn in which anyone who expresses any feelings -- especially toward art, literature and puppy dogs -- is immediately terminated, leaving only a bunch of pill-popping drones to populate the planet. Naturally, a few folks decide to rebel -- if only to reintroduce The Three Stooges, MAD artist Sergio Aragones and Spuds MacKenzie back into society (well, OK, the movie laments the loss of William Butler Yeats' poetry and the Mona Lisa to make its point, but still...). Some nifty (if absurd) fight sequences and an appropriately iron-jawed turn by Christian Bale provide this otherwise forgettable yarn with its own sense of equilibrium.

EXTREME OPS For about an hour of its 90-minute running time, this feels like the longest, most expensive soft drink commercial ever made -- every five minutes, I kept expecting one of its nerdy heroes to take a break from skiing or snowboarding to whip out a Mountain Dew and down it in one gulp. Perhaps aware of this similarity, the scripters elected to make the leads involved in the filming of -- yep -- a TV commercial in the Alps. Grasping after a clueless length of time that audiences may start to realize they could be watching this sort of action for free on ESPN, the writing wizards then add what in a good movie would be called a "dramatic conflict": A Serbian war criminal hiding out in the area somehow mistakes these morons for CIA agents hot on his trail, and he orders his idiotic followers to kill them. From there, the inanities escalate, barreling past a climax so puny and rushed that the movie was over before I knew it. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

FAR FROM HEAVEN While many films sacrifice emotional investment for the sake of stylistic innovation and vice versa, this one fearlessly tackles both facets and emerges a winner on both fronts. In crafting what turns out to be one of the best films of the year, writer-director Todd Haynes (Safe) has made a glorious-looking picture that's almost fetishistic in its desire to replicate cult director Douglas Sirk's Technicolor-soaked melodramas from the 50s. Haynes pulls off this verisimilitude, yet he also nails the oversized emotions and barely repressed attitudes, resulting in one of the most affecting "weepies" of recent times. Julianne Moore, in what may endure as the performance of 2002, stars as a content housewife in 1957 Connecticut whose life starts to unravel once she discovers that her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual and that she's feeling an attraction for her gentle black gardener (Dennis Haysbert). Foregoing any semblance of irony or camp or even dreamy nostalgia, Haynes has instead come up with a straight-faced triumph that works as both a poignant love story and a piercing social commentary. 1/2

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS The second chapter in the Harry Potter saga concerns itself with the boy wizard's sophomore session at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There's an evil presence lurking in the halls of the venerable institution, and Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and best buddies Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) find themselves smack in the middle of the mystery. As before, groundskeeper Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) offers them friendship, schoolmaster Albus Dumbledore (the late Richard Harris) offers guidance, Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith) offers discipline, and Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) offers opposition. And there's even a new teacher on the premises: the vain Gilderoy Lockhart (scene-stealing Kenneth Branagh), who spends his time promoting himself as a hero-celebrity. Chamber of Secrets, on a par with its predecessor, cuts no corners as far as the visual effects are concerned, yet the real magic in the series remains the interaction between its human players, most notably the three perfectly cast kids.

THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE A documentary almost as colorful as its subject, this restructuring of Robert Evans' autobiography employs a witty style as it relates the long and winding road that led this Hollywood player to start his career as a shallow actor before morphing into an industry force as a producer and playmaker on the Paramount lot in the late 60s/early 70s. Evans had his hand in such smashes as The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and Chinatown, but personal problems (cocaine addiction, trumped-up ties to a Tinseltown murder) derailed his locomotive success. An opening quote from Evans wisely alerts us that all "facts" should be taken with a grain of salt, but there's still enough irrefutable history here to give us the sensation of being allowed a backstage pass into one filmmaker's often troubled, often triumphant mind.

SOLARIS Perhaps not since 1998's Very Bad Things has there been a Thanksgiving week release as stridently anti-audience as the latest from Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich); in fact, the screening I attended may have set a new record for the greatest number of walkouts. Obviously, this second adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel is a movie about ideas rather than action -- a noble sentiment, certainly, but one that could have been presented with a bit more oomph. George Clooney, struggling mighty hard in a role that's out of his range, plays a psychologist who's sent to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris to investigate some strange occurrences. Soon after arrival, he bumps into his wife (Natascha McElhone), a truly baffling phenomenon considering she had committed suicide years earlier. Give Soderbergh credit for trying something different, but for a picture that attempts to make some salient points about humanity's emotional pull, this is a chilly endeavor, with its glacial pace and murky leading characters working against its success. The only sign of life comes courtesy of Jeremy Davies, whose off-the-wall turn as a jittery crew member perks up the proceedings at regular intervals.

TREASURE PLANET Except on the occasions when they're aligning themselves with the Pixar company (Monsters, Inc.), Disney seems to have largely lost it when it comes to producing animated features that truly engage our imaginations. The latest case in point is this reasonably enjoyable but hardly awe-inspiring effort that adds a sci-fi twist to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Jim Hawkins is now a troubled teen into surfing across the skies, while pirate John Silver has been reconfigured as a cyborg. As expected, the animation is bright and the voice talents have been well-chosen, yet when it comes to the comic relief, the studio just might have set a new low for itself, as the late-inning addition of an insufferable robot named B.E.N. (voiced by Martin Short) cripples much of the film's momentum and renders many of the latter scenes near-unwatchable (a friend dubbed him "the Jar-Jar Binks of animation," and she's absolutely right). Kids will eat this up, but older viewers would probably have been content seeing their childhood classic neither shaken nor stirred. 1/2