Movie Cricket

Eight movies - count 'em, eight - opening in Salt Lake City today.

The big news is "Gentlemen Broncos," the latest from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-and-wife team from Salt Lake City who brought "Napoleon Dynamite" onto an unsuspecting world. This one's nearly as demented, and just as funny (for those of us who thought "Napoleon Dynamite" was funny). It stars Michael Angarano ("Sky High") as a home-schooled teen whose science-fiction novel is hijacked both by low-budget student filmmakers (Halley Feiffer and Hector Jimenez) and by a famous author (Jemaine Clement, from "Flight of the Conchords"). Clement is hilarious, but the scene-stealer is Sam Rockwell, playing two versions of the science-fiction story's hero in some deliciously cheesy re-enactments. (Read the Cricket's interview with the Hesses.)

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" is nearly as funny, and has the benefit of being at least partly true. It centers on a naive reporter (Ewan McGregor) who meets a defense contractor (George Clooney) who claims to be a "supersoldier" — and proceeds to tell the reporter about a secret U.S. Army program involving psychic research, led by a wigged-out officer (Jeff Bridges). Comparisons to the Coen brothers are inevitable, thanks to Clooney's deadpan performance and Bridges' Lebowski-like character. The director here is Grant Heslov, an actor turned producer and screenwriter (usually working with Clooney, on "Good Night, And Good Luck," "Intolerable Cruelty" and "Leatherheads").

"The Fourth Kind" purports to be true, with its "based on the actual case studies" tagline and the mixture of actors' re-enactment and supposedly "real" video and audio. It's all a lot of hooey, and an irritating way for director-writer Olatunde Osunsanmi to dress up a standard alien-abduction story. Milla Jovovich stars.

There's yet another version of "A Christmas Carol" in theaters, this one backed by Disney's marketing muscle and directed by Robert Zemeckis — using the motion-capture computer animation that he's been enamored with lately (see "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf"). Jim Carrey provides the voices and motions of Ebenezer Scrooge at various ages, and of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. The Tribune's Vince Horiuchi was less than impressed.

The best of the art-house slate is "Coco Before Chanel," French director Anne Fontaine's biography of the early life of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, who went from saloon singer to kept woman to legendary fashion designer. Audrey Tautou ("Amelie," "The Da Vinci Code") captures Coco's flinty personality with a carefully modulated performance, which has a sense of minimalism that the "less is more" Chanel might have appreciated.

"Ong Bak 2: The Beginning" brings Thai martial-arts star Tony Jaa back to the screen — though the link to the first "Ong Bak" is tenuous at best. This time, Jaa portrays a young man, born to nobility but trained to fight by thieves, battling a warlord in 15th-century Thailand. (The first movie was set at the turn of the 20th century.) Plot and story don't matter much here, anyway, as Jaa (who co-directs and choreographed the action sequences) just piles on one outlandish fight scene after another.

Two more movies opening today weren't screened for critics: "The Box," directed by Richard Kelly ("Donnie Darko") and adapted from a Richard Matheson "Twilight Zone" story about a couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, pictured) who are offered $1 million if they press a button that will kill someone; and "Motherhood," a comedy (which played at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival) about a working mom (Uma Thurman) on a very stressful day.