After all the critical hosannas rained down on their Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men last year, the Coen brothers received a much chillier response to Burn After Reading (Universal), which was dismissed as minor at best, frenetic and condescending at worst. But the Coens, as usual, might have the last laugh: Repeat viewing reveals their colorful twist on the D.C. techno-thriller to be a savagely funny takedown of Bush-era greed, pettiness, and incompetence. Don't be surprised if its cult reputation grows on DVD…
Even hardcore ABBA fans may wind up overwhelmed and dubious over Mamma Mia! (Universal), Phyllida Lloyd's ultra-gushy screen adaptation of the hit musical. When a girl invites her three possible fathers (Stellan Skarsgård, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth) to her wedding, mom Meryl Streep deals with the overabundance of emotion by twirling around and belting out a lot of ABBA songs. It essentially takes place in the shiny, artificial, loud, but inherently good-spirited grown-ups' equivalent of the High School Musical world…
Diane English's remake of the 1939 classic The Women (New Line) is similarly full of girlish squawking from women old enough to know better, and high spirits that feel more like a perfume marketing ploy than any emotion real people have ever experienced. But it lacks the fantasy element of a musical, and it replaces it with shrill hatefulness poorly disguised as humor…
One of these days, Anna Faris will find a role worthy of her Lucille Ball-like ebullience, but until then, she'll just have to be the best thing about dire comedies like The House Bunny (Sony), which is dumb-dumb to her smart-dumb. As a ditzy former Playboy model who transforms a sorority full of ugly ducklings into the campus swans, Faris resembles a real-life Barbie doll who looks like she was magically animated just a few days earlier…
The perpetually boyish Brendan Fraser—who, by this point, has logged so many hours in front of green screens that his children probably have traces of CGI in their DNA—returns in The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor (Universal), a feverishly unanticipated second sequel to the passable 1999 blockbuster. Jet Li shows up as the villain, but Rachel Weisz had the good sense to stop at two. She's replaced by Maria Bello and her wobbly British accent.