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LAST HOLIDAY There's very little innovation on view in this predictable picture (a remake of a 1950 comedy starring Alec Guinness), but Queen Latifah and her supporting cast -- to say nothing of the eye-popping shots of delectable food dishes -- go a long way toward making it digestible. Latifah plays a store clerk who, upon learning that she'll die in three weeks, cashes in all her assets and heads off to a swanky European resort to spend her final days in luxury. The message of the film is that everyone -- no matter their lot in life -- should be treated with dignity and respect, but after watching Latifah receive endless massages, hit the snowy slopes and chow down on lobster and lamb, most moviegoers will be forgiven for believing that the real message is that (duh) it's better to be rich than poor. Rating: **1/2
MATCH POINT An upwardly mobile tennis instructor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) in London woos a rich woman (Emily Mortimer) but finds himself lusting after an American actress (Scarlett Johansson). Writer-director Woody Allen may have caught a showing of Fatal Attraction before embarking on his screenplay, but more likely, he was inspired by classics of film and literature (most notably Crime and Punishment). Given his reference points, this finds him in a contemplative mood, examining the tug-of-war between love and lust and allowing his protagonist plenty of opportunities to mull over the degree to which blind luck shapes our lives. The film is exceedingly well-written and exquisitely performed (Johansson stands out in her best performance to date), yet for all its dissimilarities to past Allen films, it still ends up playing like a remake of Crimes and Misdemeanors: Allen could have offered more surprises and still retained his thematic stance. But for the most part, Match Point delivers on its premise, and it's gratifying to see Woody back in the game. Rating: ***
MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA Director Rob Marshall's adaptation of the Arthur Golden novel plays like a Disney version of a Zhang Yimou movie, though the end result isn't as dreadful as that designation might suggest. While set in Japan, this examines many of the same sorts of clashes as Zhang's Chinese epics, yet Marshall (Chicago) isn't able to transform his film into anything more than a lush melodrama filled with pomp and pageantry. As movie artifice, it's above average, but it goes no deeper than that. The struggles of the characters -- particularly the penniless foster child who grows up to become the legendary geisha known as Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang) -- make for adequate screen entertainment, though the movie curiously mutes the tragic dimension of women being bartered over and sold like trinkets in an open-air marketplace. The entire cast is fine, but the best performance comes from Gong Li as the seasoned geisha who makes life difficult for Sayuri. Rating: **1/2
MUNICH Steven Spielberg's Munich is largely a fictionalization of the events that transpired after that tragic day at the 1972 Olympics in Germany, when a group of Palestinian terrorists slaughtered the Israeli athletes they were holding as hostages. The movie reveals that the Israeli government sent a select band of assassins to eliminate everyone who was responsible for the massacre. But these characters aren't positioned as Israel's version of The Untouchables, with clear-cut visions of right and wrong. Instead, as they carry out each hit on their eye-for-an-eye agenda, each man reacts differently to the consequences of their actions. Is this brand of retribution just? Or are they in effect embracing the same ideology that drives the terrorists? Spielberg's muddying of the moral waters is already drawing heat, but it's to his credit as a filmmaker of consequence that he asks the hard questions and doesn't flinch from any unsettling truths that might emerge. Rating: ***
THE NEW WORLD It seems almost incidental that Terrence Malick uses actors and scripts and props while creating his works, because what he's producing are visual poems. As always, the cameraman is the star, yet any ambience created in tandem by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and Malick repeatedly dissipates in the face of the plodding treatment of fascinating material: the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and, more specifically, the relationship between lithe Native American girl Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher) and sensitive English settler John Smith (Colin Farrell). Hitchcock once cracked that actors should be treated like cattle, but Malick seems to have adopted that statement as philosophy: His indifference to the accomplished performers milling around the set (Christopher Plummer and Christian Bale among them) is so apparent that one almost wonders why he didn't just cast this with mannequins (he seems equally bored with prose). Where's a mischievous raccoon when you really need one? Rating: **
