We Offer A Bird's-Eye View of the Big, the Bad and the Barest Movies of the Holidays

By RICHARD CORLISS, Richard Schickel

This time of year, the interests of Hollywood folks travel on parallel tracks: totting up the blockbusters and anticipating the Oscars. Start with the money. The year's top-grossing films in North American release were two sequels (the sixth Star Wars, the fourth Harry Potter) and a remake (War of the Worlds). Another remake (King Kong) may join their ranks. Stay tuned for more of the depressing same.

The remorseless familiarity of most movies is one factor cited in the slumping box office: down 7% in 2005. In the U.S. and Canada, that is. But Hollywood films are a global affair, and in the rest of the world, business is fine; theatrical revenues continue to rise. And even that is only a sliver of the story, since studios now make six times as much money from the home market (DVDs, pay-per-view, etc.) as they do from theaters. No moguls need open a vein quite yet.

So the bosses can look without distraction to their end-of-year prestige items. Just as the summer block-buster has become its own genre, so has the December "film of quality." Typically, it has a remote setting: a Pacific island in the 1930s for Kong, World War II London for The Chronicles of Narnia and Mrs. Henderson Presents. It may be based on fact (The New World) or fiction (Memoirs of a Geisha). It may even have similarities to warm-weather fare. Steven Spielberg's winter drama, Munich, like his summer fantasy, War of the Worlds, portrays a deadly surprise attack and the ambiguous human response to it.

Herein, two critics weigh in on eight holiday films. One nice thing: none is a sequel.

KING KONG Starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody. Directed by Peter Jackson. Opens Dec. 14

It's not beauty that kills the beast this time. It's--sorry for the fancy literary phrase--"the anxiety of influence." Confronted with the task of remaking one of the best and most beloved movies of all time, director Jackson wishes to both pay homage to the original 1933 version and improve on it, which has caused him to edgily throw around money and technology to mixed avail. His homages to the original's most famous scenes are sometimes spectacularly expansive. Where once the Big Guy had just a handful of prehistoric creatures to deal with, he now has herds of them. But Jackson's other improvements are ludicrous, most notably the fate of poor Ann Darrow, the actress who becomes Kong's victim/love object. In the original, Fay Wray came to sympathize with the beast. But Watts plays Ann as a seductress, consciously leading the big lug on. Suffice it to say that King Kong has lost its divine innocence. And our response to the ape's doom, once touched by authentic tragedy, is now marked by relief that this wretchedly excessive movie is finally over.

THE NEW WORLD Starring Colin Farrell, Q'orianka Kilcher, Christian Bale. Written and directed by Terrence Malick. Opens Dec. 25

Malick is the movies' foremost naturalist. His films are uniquely alert to the earth's sights, sounds and textures. Shooting without artificial light, capturing the rush of wind and the rustle of birds, he turns each location into an artful landscape, each image into a snapshot of a new world. So the meeting of Englishman John Smith and Algonquian princess Pocahontas is a fit subject for Malick--just his fourth film in 32 years, after Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line.

Landing in Virginia in 1607, Smith (Farrell) is intoxicated by the land's abundance and awestruck by the grace of Pocahontas (Kilcher). In their sylvan rapture they could be the American Adam and Eve. Or is he, as the envoy of European civilization, the snake in her Eden? She may need another, steadier gallant, John Rolfe (Bale), as her heart's compromise.

This is no breathless film fantasy; its pulse is stately, contemplative. But anyone who has keen eyes and an open heart will surely go soaring and crashing with the lovers lost in Malick's exotic, erotic new world.

THE PRODUCERS Starring Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell. Directed by Susan Stroman. Opens Dec. 16

In case you didn't notice, The Producers, in its several incarnations, basically benignly blesses the low-business heart of anything-goes show business. The film-from-a-musical-from-a-film is a hard-driving hymn to crooked producers, manic sight gags and a complete indifference to questions of good taste and large meaning.

Stroman's transfer of her direction of Mel Brooks' Broadway musical about a lunatic producer (Lane) and a neurotic one (Broderick) trying to put on a musical so bad it will be a flop is quite literal and jolly. There's no attempt to address the show's endemic weak spots--a slow start and a contrived end. Mostly Stroman just lets it rip. But in some respects the movie is an improvement on the show. Thurman and Ferrell bring a winning naivete to their parts; Gary Beach is unimprovable, repeating his role as a sweetly inept director-star; and the movie gives Stroman, who also choreographed, an apt setting to honor Hollywood dance masters from Busby Berkeley to Fred Astaire. A good time is had by all, and the spirit is infectious.

CACHE (HIDDEN) Starring Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche. Directed by Michael Haneke. Opens Dec. 23

Someone is trying to scare a decent family: TV host Georges (Auteuil), his wife Anne (Binoche) and their 12-year-old son. And doing a fine job of it. The surveillance videotapes of their home, dropped through a mail slot, announce a threat both pernicious and patient. It's time for Georges to show grace under pressure. But unlike the standard film hero, Georges is a flawed, troubled soul. Pressure brings out his shakiest instincts. As the clamp tightens, he is reminded of a long-repressed shame. Could his tormentor's motive be not simple sadism but righteous revenge?

Haneke, an Austrian who now works in France, is a master of elegant film pranks. (He called one of his movies Funny Games.) Hidden is a creepy, complicitous thriller that ratchets up the tension even as it asks us to study the mechanics of film fright. Haneke's camera, so quietly predatory, is the herald of disaster. And we the viewers are its beneficiaries, watching and waiting for something awful to happen. Here it does, first subtly, then spectacularly. The twist is not revealed until the last shot--if you keep your avid eyes open.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE Starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Tilda Swinton. Directed by Andrew Adamson. Now playing

Well, the beavers are cute. And that about exhausts the felicities of the Disney version of C.S. Lewis' allegorical Christian fantasy about the siblings who find a realm of wonder and peril in the back of a strange armoire. The child actors are mostly grating; the pacing is a thing of lurches and languors; and Swinton, usually an actress of molten power, tamps herself down as the villainous White Witch, so that she seems less a malefic force of nature than a frosty schoolmarm. Director Adamson, fresh from the Shrek megahits, should stick to animation; his live-action work is not in the least lively.

Disney is trying to lure the disparate audiences of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (kids) and The Passion of the Christ (Evangelicals). But on either level, Narnia fails. There's no fire, no passion and not much fun.

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Opens Dec. 14

Pete Perkins(Jones), a taciturn ranch hand, befriends an illegal Mexican worker named Melquiades Estrada (Cedillo). They have soulful exchanges and a certain amount of guy fun. After Estrada is shot to death and dumped into a grave by Mike, a sullen border-patrol cop (Pepper), Pete forces Mike to dig up Estrada and go on a very strange journey to Mexico to bury the body.

The Three Burials is one of the year's oddest movies--half brutally real, half curiously surreal, with just an unspoken touch of homoerotic passion. It's hard to tell whether Jones, working from a script by Guillermo Arriaga, intends this to be a black comedy or a sober study of a simple man gripped by emotions that he finds unexpected and inexplicable. The film comes uncomfortably close to risible. But it also achieves moments of real power. It's worth a wary look before it attains midnight cult-movie status.

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS Starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins. Directed by Stephen Frears. Now playing

Mrs. Henderson (Dench), a cranky recent widow with too much time and money on her hands, spies the abandoned Windmill Theater and wonders if a flutter in show biz might cure her blahs. The manager she hires, Vivian Van Damm (Hoskins), is at least as flinty as she is, and he does not take kindly to her idea--that they exhibit naked women onstage. Thanks to a social connection with Britain's official censor, Henderson is allowed to put on her show. But the discreetly lighted showgirls are not permitted to move.

Mrs. Henderson Presents, written by Martin Sherman, is an utterly charming fiction based on fact. During World War II, the Windmill was for a time the only theater open in London and a beloved stopping place for lonely servicemen. Frears' film catches the conflict between the gentility and the raffishness of its operations, Dench and Hoskins bicker with an affectionate ferocity that helps defuse the story's inherent sentimentality, and the result is an admittedly minor, but authentic, holiday treat.

MATCH POINT Starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Opens Dec. 28

Slick and pretty, Chris Wilton (Rhys-Meyers) is an ex--tennis pro with the schemer's gift of diffident charm: he seems to need so little that the upper class lavishes its largesse on him. What he wants is to be rich, so he weds Chloe (Mortimer), an heiress. But he also loves danger, as incarnated by a fellow outsider, luscious Nola (Johansson). "What I have is sex," she observes. "No one's ever asked for their money back."

Allen's sharpest film in a decade (granted, a pretty weak decade) amasses all the fixings of a sexy thriller: a sly young man on the make, a femme fatale worth killing for, an inconvenient pregnancy, a secret diary. By relocating his milieu to England, Allen has an ideal setting for class animosity and intrigue in the lightly lethal spirit of Kind Hearts and Coronets. There's sultry chemistry between the leads: Rhys-Meyers, who has the pouty sensuality of a Jude Law left out to spoil, and Johansson, with the humid allure of a classic noir blond. When they get to canoodling and conniving, you won't ask for your money back.