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CURRENT RELEASES

BON VOYAGE Set during World War II, this French flick possesses the elan of those vintage all-star opuses like Grand Hotel, though its spirit clearly rests with Casablanca, another movie in which the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of -- well, you know the routine. Gregori Derangere plays a writer who finds himself implicated in a murder committed by a spoiled actress (Isabelle Adjani), aiding a scientist (Jean-Marc Stehle) and his shapely assistant (Virginie Ledoyen) smuggle contraband material to England, mixing it up with a waffling government official (Gerard Depardieu) and a secretive journalist (Peter Coyote), and somehow still finding time to write his novel. It's all about as believable as those comic shorts in which The Three Stooges smacked around Adolph Hitler -- and no less entertaining.

MEAN GIRLS Like Heathers and Clueless, here’s that rare teen comedy that refuses to be pigeonholed as a teen comedy. Even more remarkably, it’s also that rare Saturday Night Live-sanctioned film that’s actually funny. Scripter Tina Fey elected to adapt Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, along the way turning a nonfiction book into a fictional story spiced up with her own pithy, piercing observations. Lindsay Lohan stars as a naive teen who, upon making her public school debut after a lifetime of home schooling, finds herself being courted by the “bitch-goddess” crowd. Director Mark Waters and Lohan previously worked together on the Freaky Friday remake; I’m not prepared to elevate them to the level of Kurosawa-Mifune or Scorsese-De Niro, but they’ve clearly got a good thing going.

RAISING HELEN Director Garry Marshall makes shiny, happy movies for shiny, happy people — even Exit to Eden, a film about S&M, turned out to be about as threatening as a butterfly with a broken wing. Therefore, the plot of Raising Helen alone is enough to break even the most hardened of criminals and leave him blubbering in the corner: It’s about a perky modeling agency executive who’s forced to change her fast-lane lifestyle after her sister dies and leaves her in charge of her three children. The film is the sort of sitcom-by-way-of-Hallmark material we can expect from Marshall, yet it’s marginally easier to take than one would expect from this reliably clumsy moviemaker — for that, he can thank Kate Hudson and especially Joan Cusack for contributing with conviction. 1/2

SHREK 2 While most sequels slide down that slippery slope of diminishing quality, the eagerly awaited Shrek 2 is on a par with its predecessor. In this outing, newlywed ogres Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz), with the self-professed "annoying talking animal sidekick" Donkey (Eddie Murphy) in tow, travel to the Kingdom of Far, Far Away to receive the blessing of Fiona's human parents, King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews). Little kids will enjoy the colorful characters, while older audiences will dig the inspired sight gags and sly references to other films. But the movie's real ace is Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas), a debonair swashbuckler -- or at least when he's not busy coughing up hairballs. In a movie filled with imaginative bits, he emerges as the cat's meow.

TROY This liberal retelling of Homer’s The Iliad is a big, brawny movie that scores on a handful of levels: as a rousing epic that puts its budget where its mouth is; as a thoughtful tale in which men struggle with issues involving honor, loyalty and bravery; and as a topical treatise on what happens when soldiers blindly follow their leaders into war. Director Wolfgang Petersen never allows the epic to overwhelm the intimate: The battle sequences are staggering to behold, but the talky sequences are equally memorable. As Trojan hero Hector, Eric Bana delivers the best performance, followed by Peter O’Toole as his wise father, King Priam. By comparison, Brad Pitt is never wholly convincing in this ancient setting, but he exhibits enough charisma and resolve to make a passable Achilles. 1/2

VAN HELSING Never mind comparisons to the classic horror flicks: Watching this movie, you begin to wonder if anybody involved has ever actually held a book in their hands, let alone read one. The text of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley is treated as nothing more than toilet paper in the outhouse of writer-director Stephen Sommers' imagination, soiled and shredded beyond all recognition. Van Helsing, a movie whose contempt for its predecessors is matched by its condescension toward its audience, exclusively draws from modern touchstones of pop culture: It's Indiana Jones and James Bond and Star Wars and Alien and so on, all presented as an endless video game with no human dimension but plenty of cheesy CGI effects. As monster killer Van Helsing, Hugh Jackman has been stripped of all charisma, while Richard Roxburgh may very well deliver the worst performance as Dracula in film history.