Dustin Hoffman at the 'Luck' premiere (Getty Images)

In keeping with the new zeitgeist of renewing shows very early on (a la Game of Thrones on HBO, or Boss on Starz), HBO has granted a second season to its prestigey drama Luck, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte in a horse-racing milieu. The ten-episode second season is to launch in January 2013.

Michelle Williams--who will be nominated. Who else will join her? (Getty Images)

Tomorrow morning will bring that early-morning announcement of this year's Oscar nominees--with the attention-desperate wrinkle that no one knows how many nominees there will be. Herewith, our predictions, for last-minute entries into your office pool (if yours is the sort of office at which Oscar nominations are the subject of a pool. Ours is not, which is why we're writing a blog post).

Best Picture

The Artist

The Descendants

The Help

Hugo

Midnight in Paris

We know any number of films between five and ten can be nominated for Best Picture, but with The Artist and The Descendants sucking up so much oxygen and so many first-place votes, it's easy to imagine no sixth choice gathering enough steam. The likely sixth entry, if there is one, would be Moneyball--but aren't many of those voters who love "adult dramas" more likely to vote in the buzzier Descendants first?

Best Director

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Alexander Payne, The Descendants

Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Mr. Allen, Mr. Scorsese, and Mr. Hazanavicius are clear locks, and Mr. Payne will get in on the strength of his film's reputation. For the fifth spot, Mr. Fincher and Steven Spielberg seem the likeliest (The Help's debut director, Tate Taylor, did not particularly distinguish himself), but the total fade of War Horse's repute gives the advantage to Mr. Fincher for what would be his third nomination in four years.

Best Actor

George Clooney, The Descendants

Jean DuJardin, The Artist

Michael Fassbender, Shame

Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March

Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated for all manner of precursor awards for his role in J. Edgar, but that movie's disappeared from theaters and from the minds of viewers who've seen many, many better movies by now (J. Edgar really is uniquely terrible). Anyone who loves biographical films about controversial figures gets to vote one in with Meryl Streep in Best Actress--and the surprise nominee might be Ryan Gosling, who does nothing too special in The Ides of March but who'd be a big enough star to stand alongside Mr. Clooney and Mr. Pitt.

Best Actress

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

Viola Davis, The Help

Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Ms. Streep, Ms. Davis, and Ms. Williams have all won early awards, and Ms. Close helped produce her own movie, in which she plays a traditionally bait-y role as a female impersonating a male. The notion that four people in Oscar-bait roles would be joined by Tilda Swinton in the avant-garde We Need to Talk About Kevin stretches credulity--silent for long stretches and chronologically disjointed, this doesn't seem like the sort of role that gets an actress to the Kodak. The narrative around Rooney Mara--plucked out of nowhere in the most extensive casting search since Scarlett O'Hara--seems to coalesce towards a surprise nomination.

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn

Armie Hammer, J. Edgar

Jonah Hill, Moneyball

Nick Nolte, Warrior

Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Mr. Plummer is so far ahead here that the rest of the nominees seem plucked from thin air--an impersonation of Lawrence Olivier? Sure! A fairly quiet turn by a popular comic? Definitely! An attempt at a comeback in a movie no one saw? Okay! Armie Hammer's nomination seems the least likely, but the energy he brought to J. Edgar could make him the one element of the film they nominate.

Best Supporting Actress

Bérénice Bejo, The Artist

Jessica Chastain, The Help

Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids

Octavia Spencer, The Help

Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

Three movies with huge amounts of apparent support carry their supporting stars towards a nomination, with the addition of Melissa McCarthy, taking the spot that some believe might have gone to Janet McTeer in the little-seen Albert Nobbs.

Best Original Screenplay

50/50

The Artist

Bridesmaids

Midnight in Paris

Young Adult

This category seems fairly open--besides the two Best Picture nominees, the three other top entries are not traditionally Oscar-y comedies. The Writers' Guild of America nominated Win Win, a sort-of comedy also, here, but that movie seems even less up Oscar's alley than Young Adult, a movie in which past winner Diablo Cody deals with her relationship with fame.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Help

Hugo

Moneyball

This category, on the other hand, has the real heat--it's hard to imagine anything sneaking into a set of screenplays this popular. It's also one of the few categories with true suspense as to the winner--because the real speculation only begins on Tuesday.

Hardy and Edgerton. (Chuck Zlotnick)

It seems that all you need to land in a movie these days is a gym membership that twists and tortures a normal physique into that of Conan the Barbarian, with six-pack abs, a 28-inch waist and obliques the size of hubcaps. The result is usually a load of two-fisted junk; an exciting, well-made testosterone explosion called Warrior is a rare exception. Director Gavin O’Connor knows his way around a sports arena, and Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are two meatheads who can really act.

Playing two brothers who compete against each other for the same purse in a high-stakes mixed martial arts tournament in Atlantic City after being estranged for 14 years, they lend charisma and balance to the far-fetched plot of an otherwise predictable fight movie with such authority and, yes, sensitivity, that they prove irresistible, even to an audience familiar with this kind of stuff. Mr. Hardy, who made an impression in the otherwise incomprehensible Inception, plays Tommy Conlon, the younger brother, a former wrestling prodigy who returns to Pennsylvania from Iraq in unstable condition—an angry, hard-drinking Marine who inherited his violence from the reprobate father (Nick Nolte, putting the ravaged remnants of his once-handsome face to good use) who used to be his trainer before his alcoholism wrecked his family and drove his two sons apart. Joel Edgerton, the Australian hunk who got rave reviews from New York theater critics playing Stanley Kowalski opposite Cate Blanchett in last year’s acclaimed production of A Streetcar Named Desire, is Brendan Reardon, the older brother who took his mother’s surname. He’s now a retired boxer-turned-respectable Philadelphia schoolteacher with a wife and two kids, a daughter struggling with a heart defect, a mortgage default, a school board that suspends him without pay for going back into the ring, and endless money problems. Tommy’s unstoppable demons (he went AWOL after friendly fire that killed his best friend) and Brendan’s need to save his family from financial disaster lead the brothers to compete in the Sparta tournament, the Super Bowl of winner-take-all fights with a five-million-dollar jackpot. Their opponents include Olympic gold medalists and undefeated champions throughout the world, so the odds against them are overwhelming, but there can only be one winner, and the outcome is no surprise. Between the brawn and the broken bones, the film builds character among the brothers who need reconciliation, the father who seeks redemption, and a shattered family legacy that craves strength through bonding.

This territory has been traveled before in everything from Champion and The Set-Up to Rocky and The Cinderella Man, but in Gavin O’Connor’s direction and pungent screenplay the melodramatics are integral, the pace and timing never slow, and the big fight action in the cage contains some of the best staged combat sequences I’ve ever seen. The final bloody showdown between brothers is so relentless it seems to be happening in real time, and the circling camera is as much a part of the last round as a mouth guard or a rabbit punch. I was impressed by the technical proficiency, but I also found some of the show-business choices worth noting: Tommy swaggers aggressively through the mob to massive chants and cheers by a Marine choir, while Brendan enters the ring to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Rarely have two actors endured so much savage punishment on-screen, and they still manage to become real and three-dimensional people who are more than just punching bags. Skillfully made and adrenalin-fueled, Warrior is nothing like what I expected. It overcomes inescapable boxing and martial arts clichés and leaves you thoroughly sated, energized and wanting more.

rreed@observer.com

WARRIOR

Running Time 139 minutes

Written by Gavin O’Connor, Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorfman

Directed by Gavin O’Connor

Starring Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte and Joel Edgerton

3/4

Behind-the-Scenes Pedigree

Yes, everyone is excited to see a Martin Scorsese directed television show -- but how much input could he have had post-pilot when he's been busy working on a cadre of film projects? Based on that alone, Mann seems like he might be more invested in the success of Luck. And while everyone loves The Sopranos -- and though Matthew Weiner was able to break out on his own with Mad Men -- with due respect to Terence Winter: He isn't David Milch.

Advantage: Luck.

Cast

By sheer quantity, Boardwalk Empire wins in a landslide. Among the sprawling cast for the 1920s set Atlantic City epic are Steve Buscemi, Michael Shannon, Michael Pitt, Michael K. Williams, Kelly Macdonald, Paz de la Huerta, Dabney Coleman, Gretchen Mol, Michael Stuhlbarg and Stephen Graham. Still, Luck has its fair share of character actors, too -- Richard Kind, Jason Gedrick, Dennis Farina, John Ortiz -- and gets to boast about Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. And those dudes are movie famous.

Advantage: Tie.

Longevity

With its ensemble feel and expansive backdrop, Boardwalk Empire feels like a show that could be on for years to come -- continually winning Emmy Awards, critical praise and a devoted audience. Luck will have those three things too -- Jon Hamm better win his Emmy before Dustin Hoffman starts getting nominated -- but does anyone think this is a series destined for the long haul? Like Michael Mann and Dustin Hoffman won't have other things to do (read: movies). And that's to say nothing of the outsized personalities of Hoffman, Mann, Milch and Nolte, which might adapt as well behind-the-scenes as oil does to water. Luck figures to burn bright and fizzle quick -- and there's nothing wrong with that. However...

Advantage: Boardwalk Empire.

So, a tie. Which should have been expected, since with shows the the only losers are those people who don't have HBO yet.

Fox has gone bonkers promoting the heck out of this very special House episode … and we are totally on board! In the creepily titled episode “Locked In” (about the even more creepy Locked-In Syndrome), Mos Def guest stars as a man who is trapped inside his body but can’t move or communicate. Thank goodness there’s a hot, grumpy and brilliant diagnostician at Princeton Plainsboro hospital who got himself banged up in a motorcycle accident and is in the neighboring bed! The entire episode (which you can watch the first two minutes of here) is from the perspective of the patient, so expect lots of confessional moments from Dr. House, and all his little cottages. Also, prepare yourself for lots of icky discussion of the “brain stem” (shudder). [Fox, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

We have always been fond of the term “Pod People” to describe the men we date, but in fact this coinage dates back to the classic 1956 sci-fi horror/flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Set in the small fictional town of Santa Mira, Calif., the movie centers on a local doctor (Kevin McCarthy) who starts to see a bunch of patients who think their loved ones are impostors. At first dismissing the phenomenon as mere mass hysteria, with the aid of a friend (King Donovan) he comes to discover that people are actually being replaced by Pod People—which grew from “seeds drifting through space for years” (augh!)—who look just like regular earthlings except for the fact that they have no emotion (sound familiar, ladies?). [TCM, 9:30]

Wednesday: Make Me a Supermodel

We were totally prepared to pass on this reality crack pipe—a weird hybrid of America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway—until those evil geniuses over at weekend programming at Bravo got us sucked in with a marathon. What we’ve learned so far: Male models are just as vain as the ladies but somehow, they seem to be a lot nicer. Maybe because they’re not starving? Maybe because male models don't really matter? In tonight’s episode, the high-cheekboned lovelies get smutty with one another at a photo shoot and it looks like a tape measure will be used to see who’s hips are too effin' wide to make it. What would Tyra say? [Bravo, 10 p.m.]

Thursday: Romancing the Stone

Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice are both repeats tonight, and NBC is doing a monster ER series finale (but, on the plus side, Ernest Borgnine guest-stars!). If you're watching that, you should record the classic 1984 film Romancing the Stone. Remember this one? Kathleen Turner is a romance novelist who has to fly down to Colombia to rescue her kidnapped sister (Mary Ellen Trainor). Michael Douglas plays our swashbuckling hero Jack T. Colton, who promises to help but really might be after the map. There’s a giant green emerald involved! And Danny DeVito! Trust us, mud slides have never before or since been so incredibly sexy. [WE, 11 p.m.]

Friday: Friday Night Lights

Will everyone please, please, please watch this show already? Of course it airs on Friday night! But if you don't record it you are certainly missing out: There’s the hotness of Tim Riggins, the awesomeness that is Coach and Tami Taylor’s marriage, and after last week we can’t wait to see what the fallout is from the totally bananas father-slapping-son-around-in-the-Applebee’s-parking-lot. We’re at the penultimate episode before season three ends and the fate of this extraordinary television show hangs in the balance. Let’s go, America! Panthers go to State and we’re rooting for a fourth season!  Remember: Clear ears, full hearts, can’t lose. [NBC, 9 p.m.]

Michelle Rodriguez woke up her fellow guests at Florida's Mayfair Hotel by banging the door knocker to her room and screaming at her female "roommate." [R&M] 

Female employees of Hawaiian Tropic Zone are suing parent company Riese for $600 million over charges of physical and sexual harassment and rape. [NYP via Grub Street]

Christie Brinkley's ex-husband, Peter Cook, is finally sharing his side of the story in an upcoming interview with Barbara Walters. His explanation for having an affair with his then 18-year-old assistant?  "I was seeking a connection I could not find in my own marriage...I wanted a little acknowledgment, a little attention, a little thank you every now and then for my efforts, for the amount of time I took to care for her and my family, for the wealth I was building." [NYDN] 

Comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman seem to be back together, but they're "not defining" the relationship. [US Weekly]

Nick Nolte is recovering after being injured in a fire that destroyed his California home. [Star]

Christian Slater got a GED to set a good example for his kids. [P6] 

I suggest you see The Spiderwick Chronicles accompanied by a small child. Without the 7-year-old next to me, I probably wouldn’t have a clue what it’s all about. I still don’t. But the enthusiasm of the audience under 10 at the screening I attended was contagious. They sat rapt, soundless and well-behaved, like they were in church. They didn’t even scream when a monstrous 10-foot frog called Mulgarth that looks like a junior Jabba the Hut turned into Nick Nolte. That was pretty scary, if you ask me, and I don’t mean the frog.

Apparently, The Spiderwick Chronicles are beloved, best-selling fantasy adventures that sit in the bookcases of imaginative children right next to their Harry Potter books. Condensed at considerable cost into one movie, the story begins when an old man named Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn, looking a bit like Hans Christian Anderson) puts the finishing touches on his life’s work, a leather-bound tome of gothic tales that spills the secrets of creatures from another world. A fate worse than death awaits anyone who opens it. Suddenly the heavens open, lightning strikes, he is whisked away in a squall of fairy dust and his only daughter is dragged off to the nuthouse. The Spiderwick Chronicles remain under lock and key in a secluded old mansion in the woods, guarded by a loyal “Brownie” named Thimbletack (the voice of Martin Short). Visible to humans only when he wants to be, Thimbletack’s sole purpose in life: Protect that book against all intruders. It’s a job Thimbletack does superbly for 80 years.

The intruders are a family of New Yorkers who can no longer afford the rent. They include newly divorced Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker), a relative of the Spiderwicks; her daughter, Mallory (Sarah Bolger); and her 15-year-old twins, Simon and Jared (both played by the dangerously too-adorable but always camera-ready Freddie Highmore, Johnny Depp’s inspiration for Peter Pan in Finding Neverland). Strange things happen instantly. There’s salt on the windowsills. Enchanted critters live inside the walls. Hobgoblins threaten, the septic followers of evil forces led by the villainous, chameleonlike Mulgarth are working day and night to steal the sacred book and rule the universe. Fairies and humans alike are safe only as long as they stay inside the circle that surrounds the house. The only person who can help them is dotty Aunt Lucinda, who has grown up to be the great Joan Plowright. No one is safe against the ogre, who has only one goal—to become the most powerful monster in the universe. The charms, potions and spells are all contained in that sacred book, and now that little Freddie Highmore has read it, the horrors that await him make for a brew of breathless entertainment as one crisis follows the next.

Director Mark Waters distills maximum suspense from the antic plot twists, aided by animation, puppets and some pretty awesome computer magic. Anyone over 15 may feel gorged on a diet of buttercream frosting. Be forewarned: Acid reflux is almost guaranteed. But the Lilliputians among us will get their money’s worth. For a story aimed at the moppet market, The Spiderwick Chronicles is one that holds the interest without unbalancing the I.Q.

From Rita Hayworth’s show-stopping black-and-white Sexorama on “Put the Blame on Mame” (from Gilda) to Judy Garland’s historic Technicolor rendition of the Oscar-winning “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (from The Harvey Girls), Mary provides everything but the boom, dolly and camera angles. For a Catholic girl from California who married a boy from Manhattan with a show-business yarmulke (“He was born Jewish but raised Equity”), she has lived and loved and absorbed it all. So when she spurs old Trigger for some cowboy spoofing, don’t expect “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” (“Too creepy and mindless,” she sniffs): Expect an exquisite rendition of the way Ella Fitzgerald sang Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.” Eclectic is her middle name, so the leap from Roy Rogers’ boots and Stetson to Ethel Waters’ Harlem is an easy transition. The audience isn’t always as soignée as Mary is, but even if they’ve never heard of Lady Mendl or Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the ringsiders at the Café Carlyle are having one elegant good time.

Meanwhile, the Algonquin’s Oak Room is bathing the sultry Venus of a diva, Karen Akers, in a pink champagne spot through May 13. Songs by the sterling-silver team of John Kander and the late Fred Ebb are the focus, but don’t hope for “New York, New York” or the overworked hits from Cabaret and Chicago. Ms. Akers has sought more unjustly neglected songs from lesser-known scores like The Act, The Happy Time and Steel Pier to illustrate the variety, optimism, wistfulness, dazzle and dreams of the composers—and the singer herself. Lanky, elegant, cool in appearance but warmer in heartfelt emotion than I’ve ever heard her, this graceful gazelle with Jane Wyman bangs has obviously been wrongfully mislabeled “the ice sculpture” by mumpy critics in previous appearances. I am happy to say she has turned radiant, not melancholy, and displays a contagious sense of humor, not a stoic mantle of marble. Her burnished baritone is ideally suited to undervalued gems like “Isn’t This Better” (from Funny Lady) and “Sorry I Asked,” a ruminant piece of special material written for Liza Minnelli and never performed by anyone else—until now. (Even John Kander had forgotten it.) With wonderful support by pianist Don Rebic and Brian Glassman on bass, Karen Akers can ditch those suicidal old songs by Jacques Brel and Piaf. Discovering Kander and Ebb, she’s found a whole new audience and come home at last.

Oh, Maggie!

Maggie Cheung, the beguiling veteran actress who collected critical raves like daffodils in the films of such formidable directors as Wong Kar Wai, Wayne Wang and Zhang Yimou, won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 for Clean. Now that it’s finally opening commercially in the U.S., no need to ask why. Speaking French, Cantonese and fluent English, she catalogs every up and down on the carousel of a recovering drug addict with a mix of despair, pain, strength, realism and poignancy that is mesmerizing.

Ms. Cheung and Nick Nolte, challenged with demanding roles as mother and father-in-law, are both in good hands. French director Olivier Assayas, her ex-husband in real life, guides them through a psychedelic junkie fantasy world with cinematic brilliance. She is Emily, a once-promising singer whose career-demolished rock-star husband dies of a heroin overdose in a seedy Canadian motel room. After serving six months in prison for providing him with the drugs that killed him, Emily emerges a battered ruin on methadone. Moving to Paris to push some songs she wrote behind bars with a fellow inmate and lean on her old friends for support, Emily begins the long journey to clean health and redemption. Waiting on tables in an uncle’s Chinese restaurant, answering phones in a fashion agency, struggling to stay off heroin and rebuild her life, Emily has one goal: to reunite with her son Jay, who lives in the nurturing sanctuary of his grandparents’ rural home in Vancouver after the courts awarded them custody of the child.

The old man (a ravaged but effective Nick Nolte, with dyed orange hair, a white beard and a face that looks bulldozed) is sympathetic to Emily’s desire to see Jay, but insists she leave behind her dead-end lifestyle before he will allow a reunion. But the child (luminously played by an extraordinarily gifted tyke named James Dennis) has passionate and resourceful ideas of his own about the mother he never knew, the mother that might have been, and the mother whose future depends on so much forgiveness from so many.

Ms. Cheung shows the loneliness and frustration of a woman whose life has been rewritten so many times it has disappeared from the printed page. Trying valiantly to get through one day at a time, she makes the climb personal and human. Mr. Nolte and the illustrious Canadian stage actress Martha Henry, as the grandparents embroiled in an emotional chess match for the heart and soul of the young boy who means so much to them, give a strong stamp of universality to the film’s message of the power of love to triumph even in the most daunting of circumstances. Mr. Assayas wrote the elegant screenplay expressly for Ms. Cheung, and her transformation is riveting, her every move, statement and facial expression suffused with a fragile, complex grace. Her English is patrician and perfect, and she even performs her own musical numbers. Mr. Nolte is, in a word, endearing. Filmed in the scenic beauty of a Canadian fishing village as well as the bright lights of Paris, London and San Francisco, Clean is a stunning visual treat and a resounding testament to pragmatism and faith. Life-affirming without sentimentality, it’s an admirable accomplishment.

Lolita’s Revenge

Hard Candy is supposed to be another cautionary tale about the dangerous risks of online chat-room dating, but ends up being just another psychological horror flick about pedophilia in which Little Red Riding Hood turns the tables on the wolf. The title makes no sense, unless “hard candy” refers to the kind of lure dirty old predators dangle before the eyes of innocent victims. In today’s sick society, hard candy has been replaced by vodka martinis.

There is nothing innocent about smart, charming, 14-year-old schoolgirl Hayley (played by thumb-sucking Ellen Page like a cross between Elsie Dinsmore and Theda Bara) or sexy, good-looking thirtysomething photographer Jeff (played by all-American nice guy Patrick Wilson in a far cry from his starring roles on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park and Oklahoma!). She’s a precocious nymphet with a sense of adventure. He’s a horny wannabe pervert with a lust for naked girls and X-rated videos.

After meeting cute on the Internet, they make a date at a local coffee shop, and the flirtation leads to his bachelor apartment, where she mixes drinks and strips for an impromptu camera session. Jeff, who can scarcely contain his excitement, sees this as one photo-op destined for the bedroom. He may have always entertained a fantasy of seducing an adolescent, but this time the wrong teen responds. She pretends she’s out to punish a pedophile, but she’s really more twisted than he is. Hayley is really a little girl with a puckered rosebud mouth who stalks older men in chat rooms and drags around her own arsenal of weapons in her backpack. After drugging Jeff, tying him up and stripping him naked, she brings out a razor and shaving cream to prep her struggling, sweating and utterly terrified “patient” for the ultimate humiliation: total castration! What happens next is for you to discover. Suffice it to say, Mr. Wilson brings new dimensions to the word “vulnerability.”

Directed with white-knuckle tension by newcomer David Slade and written with elements of edgy, quirky surprise by Brian Nelson, Hard Candy is a neatly conceived detour on the familiar wacko-thriller road map. The actors are first-rate, the production values impressive. The problem for me is that the girl is so insane that I ended up sympathizing with the devious creep she sets out to destroy. There’s something oddly unbalanced about the equation when you want to punch out Red Riding Hood and save the wolf.

Unlucky Us!

On the other side of the moon, take my sage advice and run as fast as you can from a dismal, pretentious and brain-damaged piece of New Age junk art called Lucky Number Slevin. This overwrought muddle, derived from the worst elements of Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects and incompetently directed by Paul McGuignan, is a model of sloppy frat-house humor and incompetence and smart-aleck film-school experimentation that tosses plot points and disjointed characters around like Tinker Toys the dog chewed on. Everything in it—every confusion, every line of unspeakable dialogue, every red herring, every camera setup—has been borrowed from some movie you’ve seen before.

Bruce Willis snaps the neck of a young man in an airline terminal, then ships him in a truck to New York. Cut to Josh Hartnett, a vagrant named Slevin staying in a friend’s apartment. The girl next-door (Lucy Liu) is a coroner who lives on peanut butter. A mugger breaks Slevin’s nose, and he gets dragged off in a towel to see “The Boss” (Morgan Freeman), who has one leg and keeps corpses in his walk-in freezer. The black-gangsta cliché says Slevin owes him $97,000, but he’ll cancel the debt if Slevin will kill the gay son of his archrival, a gangster who is also a rabbi (Ben Kingsley). The Jewish-gangsta cliché says Slevin owes him another $33,000. Clearly a case of mistaken identity that drops dead while tickling the funny bones of a few gullible critics, nothing about this miserable gibberish makes one word of sense.

It’s not supposed to. The actors are all laughing while they try to speak their lines. They are all abominable. Josh Hartnett can’t even act clad only in a towel. No wonder. Here’s a sample of the idiot dialogue by Jason Smilovic: “I’ve gotta see The Boss by tomorrow morning.” “What are you going to tell him?” “I’m gonna tell him what any man with two penises tells his tailor when the tailor asks him, ‘Do you dress to the right or the left?’” “What’s that?” “Yes.”

From Rita Hayworth’s show-stopping black-and-white Sexorama on “Put the Blame on Mame” (from Gilda) to Judy Garland’s historic Technicolor rendition of the Oscar-winning “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (from The Harvey Girls), Mary provides everything but the boom, dolly and camera angles. For a Catholic girl from California who married a boy from Manhattan with a show-business yarmulke (“He was born Jewish but raised Equity”), she has lived and loved and absorbed it all. So when she spurs old Trigger for some cowboy spoofing, don’t expect “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” (“Too creepy and mindless,” she sniffs): Expect an exquisite rendition of the way Ella Fitzgerald sang Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.” Eclectic is her middle name, so the leap from Roy Rogers’ boots and Stetson to Ethel Waters’ Harlem is an easy transition. The audience isn’t always as soignée as Mary is, but even if they’ve never heard of Lady Mendl or Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the ringsiders at the Café Carlyle are having one elegant good time.

Meanwhile, the Algonquin’s Oak Room is bathing the sultry Venus of a diva, Karen Akers, in a pink champagne spot through May 13. Songs by the sterling-silver team of John Kander and the late Fred Ebb are the focus, but don’t hope for “New York, New York” or the overworked hits from Cabaret and Chicago. Ms. Akers has sought more unjustly neglected songs from lesser-known scores like The Act, The Happy Time and Steel Pier to illustrate the variety, optimism, wistfulness, dazzle and dreams of the composers—and the singer herself. Lanky, elegant, cool in appearance but warmer in heartfelt emotion than I’ve ever heard her, this graceful gazelle with Jane Wyman bangs has obviously been wrongfully mislabeled “the ice sculpture” by mumpy critics in previous appearances. I am happy to say she has turned radiant, not melancholy, and displays a contagious sense of humor, not a stoic mantle of marble. Her burnished baritone is ideally suited to undervalued gems like “Isn’t This Better” (from Funny Lady) and “Sorry I Asked,” a ruminant piece of special material written for Liza Minnelli and never performed by anyone else—until now. (Even John Kander had forgotten it.) With wonderful support by pianist Don Rebic and Brian Glassman on bass, Karen Akers can ditch those suicidal old songs by Jacques Brel and Piaf. Discovering Kander and Ebb, she’s found a whole new audience and come home at last.

Oh, Maggie!

Maggie Cheung, the beguiling veteran actress who collected critical raves like daffodils in the films of such formidable directors as Wong Kar Wai, Wayne Wang and Zhang Yimou, won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 for Clean. Now that it’s finally opening commercially in the U.S., no need to ask why. Speaking French, Cantonese and fluent English, she catalogs every up and down on the carousel of a recovering drug addict with a mix of despair, pain, strength, realism and poignancy that is mesmerizing.

Ms. Cheung and Nick Nolte, challenged with demanding roles as mother and father-in-law, are both in good hands. French director Olivier Assayas, her ex-husband in real life, guides them through a psychedelic junkie fantasy world with cinematic brilliance. She is Emily, a once-promising singer whose career-demolished rock-star husband dies of a heroin overdose in a seedy Canadian motel room. After serving six months in prison for providing him with the drugs that killed him, Emily emerges a battered ruin on methadone. Moving to Paris to push some songs she wrote behind bars with a fellow inmate and lean on her old friends for support, Emily begins the long journey to clean health and redemption. Waiting on tables in an uncle’s Chinese restaurant, answering phones in a fashion agency, struggling to stay off heroin and rebuild her life, Emily has one goal: to reunite with her son Jay, who lives in the nurturing sanctuary of his grandparents’ rural home in Vancouver after the courts awarded them custody of the child.

The old man (a ravaged but effective Nick Nolte, with dyed orange hair, a white beard and a face that looks bulldozed) is sympathetic to Emily’s desire to see Jay, but insists she leave behind her dead-end lifestyle before he will allow a reunion. But the child (luminously played by an extraordinarily gifted tyke named James Dennis) has passionate and resourceful ideas of his own about the mother he never knew, the mother that might have been, and the mother whose future depends on so much forgiveness from so many.

Ms. Cheung shows the loneliness and frustration of a woman whose life has been rewritten so many times it has disappeared from the printed page. Trying valiantly to get through one day at a time, she makes the climb personal and human. Mr. Nolte and the illustrious Canadian stage actress Martha Henry, as the grandparents embroiled in an emotional chess match for the heart and soul of the young boy who means so much to them, give a strong stamp of universality to the film’s message of the power of love to triumph even in the most daunting of circumstances. Mr. Assayas wrote the elegant screenplay expressly for Ms. Cheung, and her transformation is riveting, her every move, statement and facial expression suffused with a fragile, complex grace. Her English is patrician and perfect, and she even performs her own musical numbers. Mr. Nolte is, in a word, endearing. Filmed in the scenic beauty of a Canadian fishing village as well as the bright lights of Paris, London and San Francisco, Clean is a stunning visual treat and a resounding testament to pragmatism and faith. Life-affirming without sentimentality, it’s an admirable accomplishment.

Lolita’s Revenge

Hard Candy is supposed to be another cautionary tale about the dangerous risks of online chat-room dating, but ends up being just another psychological horror flick about pedophilia in which Little Red Riding Hood turns the tables on the wolf. The title makes no sense, unless “hard candy” refers to the kind of lure dirty old predators dangle before the eyes of innocent victims. In today’s sick society, hard candy has been replaced by vodka martinis.

There is nothing innocent about smart, charming, 14-year-old schoolgirl Hayley (played by thumb-sucking Ellen Page like a cross between Elsie Dinsmore and Theda Bara) or sexy, good-looking thirtysomething photographer Jeff (played by all-American nice guy Patrick Wilson in a far cry from his starring roles on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park and Oklahoma!). She’s a precocious nymphet with a sense of adventure. He’s a horny wannabe pervert with a lust for naked girls and X-rated videos.

After meeting cute on the Internet, they make a date at a local coffee shop, and the flirtation leads to his bachelor apartment, where she mixes drinks and strips for an impromptu camera session. Jeff, who can scarcely contain his excitement, sees this as one photo-op destined for the bedroom. He may have always entertained a fantasy of seducing an adolescent, but this time the wrong teen responds. She pretends she’s out to punish a pedophile, but she’s really more twisted than he is. Hayley is really a little girl with a puckered rosebud mouth who stalks older men in chat rooms and drags around her own arsenal of weapons in her backpack. After drugging Jeff, tying him up and stripping him naked, she brings out a razor and shaving cream to prep her struggling, sweating and utterly terrified “patient” for the ultimate humiliation: total castration! What happens next is for you to discover. Suffice it to say, Mr. Wilson brings new dimensions to the word “vulnerability.”

Directed with white-knuckle tension by newcomer David Slade and written with elements of edgy, quirky surprise by Brian Nelson, Hard Candy is a neatly conceived detour on the familiar wacko-thriller road map. The actors are first-rate, the production values impressive. The problem for me is that the girl is so insane that I ended up sympathizing with the devious creep she sets out to destroy. There’s something oddly unbalanced about the equation when you want to punch out Red Riding Hood and save the wolf.

Unlucky Us!

On the other side of the moon, take my sage advice and run as fast as you can from a dismal, pretentious and brain-damaged piece of New Age junk art called Lucky Number Slevin. This overwrought muddle, derived from the worst elements of Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects and incompetently directed by Paul McGuignan, is a model of sloppy frat-house humor and incompetence and smart-aleck film-school experimentation that tosses plot points and disjointed characters around like Tinker Toys the dog chewed on. Everything in it—every confusion, every line of unspeakable dialogue, every red herring, every camera setup—has been borrowed from some movie you’ve seen before.

Bruce Willis snaps the neck of a young man in an airline terminal, then ships him in a truck to New York. Cut to Josh Hartnett, a vagrant named Slevin staying in a friend’s apartment. The girl next-door (Lucy Liu) is a coroner who lives on peanut butter. A mugger breaks Slevin’s nose, and he gets dragged off in a towel to see “The Boss” (Morgan Freeman), who has one leg and keeps corpses in his walk-in freezer. The black-gangsta cliché says Slevin owes him $97,000, but he’ll cancel the debt if Slevin will kill the gay son of his archrival, a gangster who is also a rabbi (Ben Kingsley). The Jewish-gangsta cliché says Slevin owes him another $33,000. Clearly a case of mistaken identity that drops dead while tickling the funny bones of a few gullible critics, nothing about this miserable gibberish makes one word of sense.

It’s not supposed to. The actors are all laughing while they try to speak their lines. They are all abominable. Josh Hartnett can’t even act clad only in a towel. No wonder. Here’s a sample of the idiot dialogue by Jason Smilovic: “I’ve gotta see The Boss by tomorrow morning.” “What are you going to tell him?” “I’m gonna tell him what any man with two penises tells his tailor when the tailor asks him, ‘Do you dress to the right or the left?’” “What’s that?” “ Yes.”

Like Clark Kent in Superman , Billy Batson in Captain Marvel and Peter Parker in Spider-Man , there's a mild-mannered wimp behind the humongous, rampaging creature called the Hulk. He is Bruce Banner (played by Australian actor Eric Bana), a nice, brilliant, desperately poor, idealistic but strangely moody young scientist whose girlfriend and pretty lab partner, Dr. Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), is horrified when Bruce's emotional detachment changes dramatically after a sudden, deadly dose of gamma radiation. Betty doesn't know it, but guys in the audience who used to be teenage boys obsessed with the Hulk before they learned to pad their Speedos already know what's coming next. Bruce starts acting like something other than a Bruce. Terrible headaches lead to blackouts that leave him sapped. Something is stirring inside. Suddenly he expands like a blowfish, destroying freeways, turning his science lab into toothpicks, punching the walls out of his house with bare knuckles. Looking like a cross between King Kong and a two-ton Arnold Schwarzenegger overdosing on neutraceutical hormone-replacement shakes, the Hulk goes ballistic. The reasons behind this Jekyll-and-Hyde mutation are so convoluted that none of them make much sense, but in flashbacks we get shards of childhood torture in which his demonic father used Bruce as a guinea pig in human regeneration experiments, injecting the little boy with chromosomes from starfish, jellyfish and sea cucumbers. Bruce grows up with a powerful genetic immune system that he's unaware of until a weird janitor shows up at the lab and starts messing with the test tubes. Jumping Jolly Green Giant! The mop-pusher is really Bruce's demented Dad (Nick Nolte), a fiend who has been locked away for 30 years. It's never clear just what this lunatic wants from the grown-up Bruce, but they are both pursued with a vengeance by the insane U.S. military, led by Betty's father, General "Thunderbolt" Ross (Sam Elliott), and archvillain rival scientist Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas, last seen as Reese Witherspoon's handsome hillbilly husband in Sweet Home Alabama ).

But enough about the interminable plot, which lasts no more than half an hour of the two-hour-and-19-minute running time and remains rigidly resistant to logic. It's more fun to cut to the interminable action sequences, which consist of split-screen computer graphics and all manner of visual tricks that are entirely too terrifying for any child under 12 years old. (Not to mention incomprehensible.) The metaphysical mumbo-jumbo about molecular biology, cellular penetration and enzyme replacement is just padding inserted to drag out the script by John Turman, Michael France and James Schamus, without a trace of educational enlightenment. The high points are the secret government lab in Pop Art Crayola paint hidden behind the entrance of an old drive-in movie theater, and the incredible Hulk himself, like a green rubber ducky the size of Mt. Rushmore, using the mountains and canyons of the Mojave Desert as his personal trampoline, tossing U.S. military helicopters through the sky like Frisbees, kicking armored tanks off the sand dunes like footballs, and bouncing off the Golden Gate Bridge in time to reduce the city of San Francisco to Tinker Toys at rush hour. Like I said, none of this makes one bit of sense (what does the Hulk want, besides a chance to hold the terrified Jennifer Connelly in the palm of his hand like Fay Wray?), but it's fun to spot Lou Ferrigno, the Muscle McGurk who played His Hulkiness in the TV series, in a cameo appearance, and a recommended suspension of disbelief will pay off in a few unintentional laughs, especially when Mr. Nolte is on the screen.

On the downside, The Hulk could benefit mightily from a pair of scissors. It seems somewhat beneath the talent and vision of its director, Ang Lee. (Hard to believe this is the same man who directed the unforgettable The Ice Storm , even though he did demonstrate an enthusiasm for escapism with the more imaginative and far superior Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon .) Finally, like all comic-book flicks, The Hulk is not about acting, so the impressive cast is hugely wasted, but do check out the weird, hysterical and howling histrionics of Mr. Nolte. Instead of treating The Hulk like the overpaid job it is, he works the role of a babbling old nutcase like it was King Lear. Looking like a cadaverous Albert Einstein stoned on hallucinogenic mushrooms, he misses the fun, overcompensating for the material's intellectual paucity in a kick-ass riot of bad acting.

Writer's Block

A bogus, smile-free comedy called Alex and Emma is a real head-scratcher. It's been decades since Rob Reiner played Meathead on All in the Family , but has he lost every trace of his once-famous comic timing? Can this dirge have been directed by the same Rob Reiner who immortalized When Harry Met Sally ? In the field of humor, he comes by his credentials seriously. None of the experience shows here. Alex and Emma is a boring, hapless cinematic corpse that deserves a eulogy by Billy Crystal.

Nobody survives. Luke Wilson, the more appealing of the two current Wilson siblings (and a much better actor than brother Owen), plays Alex, a writer with 30 days to write a complete novel he hasn't even started yet, thereby earning a publisher's advance that will save him from death at the hands of the Cuban loan sharks to whom he owes $100,000 in gambling debts. Kate Hudson, who is making so many movies she's in danger of wearing out her welcome fast, plays Emma, a stenographer who arrives to take dictation. While she jots down dialogue, corrects errors, ruins his train of thought with annoying questions about character, structure and trajectory (all valid, if you ask me), and casually points out hundreds of clichés, the plot changes by the hour. In no time at all, it looks like a movie made with a rewind button. In fictional inserts, he becomes his own hero and she becomes all of the peripheral romantic objects of his lust. Playing Swedish, German, Spanish and American au pairs, Ms. Hudson shows off different wigs and accents from scene to scene. Eventually, she gets so involved with the fictional characters that she falls in love, her attention wanders, she loses a chunk of the manuscript in a mud puddle, he has to start over, they break up …. It goes on and on in a marathon of tedium, with no hope of igniting anything that vaguely resembles audience attention.

In a movie with lines like "The mind is an ethereal web of contradicting emotions" and a plot about a bad writer working on a book of mind-boggling ineptitude, anemia is fatal. The book Mr. Wilson is dictating is so boring you can't even hear it read aloud without dozing. People all around me were checking those watches that have light-up dials. One man snored incessantly. Whatever were these people thinking? Alex and Emma isn't funny, clever or interesting. It has no tempo, energy or pulse. It isn't even contrived enough to be aggravating. It just arrives on a slab, ready for the autopsy. This is especially sad for Kate Hudson. As a romantic leading lady, the daughter of Goldie Hawn lacks her mother's sparkle and huggable charm. I don't think she's ready to carry a whole movie by herself at this point in her career, but bad movies are happening too fast and she's starring in entirely too many of them at once. Take a little time to learn something, honey. Acting careers have a shelf life, too, and with a few more bombs like Alex and Emma , the expiration date on yours could mature before your pension.

Aussie Posse

I could watch Australia's tempting and versatile Rachel Griffiths read the Melbourne phone book aloud and never glance at the clock, but there are times during the gritty crime drama The Hard Word when I would rather be reading it myself. In her Golden Globe–winning performance on HBO's Six Feet Under , Ms. Griffiths' clear, precise American accent is as perfectly edgy and neurotic as any native-born Californian's. Back in her homeland for The Hard Word , you could cut the density of her flat, hard-boiled Australian dialect with a hedge trimmer. The same goes for Guy Pearce, who went from the lisping, hilarious Sydney drag queen in his breakthrough film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert , to the callous cop in L.A. Confidential with amazing ease. These people can do just about anything. But when it comes to success, they're still at the mercy of script and direction. The Hard Word , written and directed by Scott Roberts, needs more of both. In a nutshell, this latest entry in the overworked crime-family genre is about three brothers in the same prison cell (a credulity strain for starters) serving time for armed robbery. Now they're about to be released from prison at the same time (yeah, sure), but first their longtime, arrogant and very crooked criminal lawyer, Frank Malone (Robert Taylor), blackmails them into one more multimillion-dollar heist. Dale (Guy Pearce), the dominant brother and gang leader, risks everything to find his way back into the arms of his sexy blonde wife, Carol (Rachel Griffiths), unaware that she has been screwing around with Frank while he was behind bars. Betrayed, felled by food poisoning and running from both Frank and the cops, the brothers knock off the Melbourne Cup, dismantle the video surveillance system, cuff the guards, rob the bookies of millions and head for Sydney in the hijacked car of a lady meteorologist. Everybody underestimates Carol, who knows her way around the jungle and will stop at nothing to get her share of the profits, including murder. There's an incredible chase through traffic, a daring escape that culminates in a leap from a bridge onto a moving freight train, and a series of snafus as Carol moves from bed to bed, using every natural attribute at her disposal to score. The movie has its distractions, but it reminded me of a tamer, less convincing take on the great Raoul Walsh film, White Heat , with Mr. Pearce in the James Cagney role and Ms. Griffiths as Virginia Mayo. It's the kind of predictable programmer that used to fill the bottom half of double bills, but it's worth the effort to catch Ms. Griffiths as the kind of seductive siren who lures men to the edge of the cliff with their headlights on, ready to die with smiles on their faces. In the New Age mold of Lizabeth Scott and Lana Turner, she's just swell as a trashy, curvaceous carnivore with Farrah Fawcett hair and a heart beneath her tank top that beats like a cannibal's tom-tom.