A remake, yup, another remake: first Miami Vice, now this. To the jeers, hoots, catcalls and snickers of critics across the country, the latest hashed rehash, The Wicker Man, writer-director Neil LaBute’s reworking of a cult British movie from 1973, limped into cinemas over that Hollywood graveyard better known as Labor Day weekend. Clumsy, poorly plotted, and scarred by performances closer to catalepsy than acting, this unintentionally funny film is more Scary Movie than horror pic. The story, such as it is, revolves around Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage), a California highway patrolman left traumatized and tranquilizer-dependent after witnessing a hideous [...]

Darren Aronofsky’s “Pi” was, for all its indie buzz and critical approval, muddled, pretentious, and, at roughly 80 minutes in length, roughly 80 minutes too long. His no less pretentious second effort, the morbid “Requiem for a Dream,” won even more awards (and, to be fair, a deserved Oscar nomination for Ellen Burstyn) but combined dazzling direction with leaden storytelling, preachiness that would embarrass the Drug Enforcement Administration, and, most unforgivably, ghastly treatment of pretty Jennifer Connelly. Mr. Aronofsky’s latest film,”The Fountain,” has so far faced a more mixed reception from the critics (it was booed at the press screening [...]

There are some desserts, just a few, that are perfection itself. There are plenty more, glutinous, sticky, cloying, annoying, that tip over into a sickly sweetness and simply disgust. Then, trickiest of all, there are those that teeter uncertainly along the edge, promising delight on one side, threatening nausea on the other. They generally end up delivering both. In this respect they resemble nothing so much as Marc Forster’s sharp, saccharine, original, clichéd “Stranger Than Fiction,” a film that infuriates and enchants, and is, without doubt, the best date movie I’ve seen this year. So far as saccharine is concerned, [...]