Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (**)
GOTTA LOVE THE JOKE ABOUT THE UNDEAD MONKEY. Gotta be peeved that Keith Richards doesn’t show up as Jack Sparrow’s dad until the third installment, months down the road. Mr. John Depp also does wonders with the line, “I feel sullied and unusual.” Yet, as a continuation of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl, with most of the crew and cast intact, Dead Man’s Chest feels both too much and too little. While I really, really liked Gore Verbinski’s goofy, erratic first edition of three Pirates pictures, the result here, at 150 minutes, is like Three Stooges auteur Jules White being given Breughel as a production designer, and the borrowings, in the form of digital settings and CGI creatures—such as a squid-faced Davy Jones, voiced by Bill Nighy—and ranks of images drawn from work by Terry Gilliam, Dave McKean (Mirrormask) and Matthew Barney, are both overscaled and underwhelming. Keira Knightley has tomboy gleam, but most members of the cast—Jonathan Pryce, Orlando Bloom, Jack Davenport, Stellan Skarsgard,a racial caricature played by Naomie Harris—are overwhelmed by the Bruckheimer scale of the production, and where the mascaraed Mr. Depp made antic hay through Black Pearl, there are only three or four moments here that betray similar, if modest and quickly passed over, comic inspiration.

Superman Returns (** 1/2)
You’ll believe a Christ can fly. Beautifully shot and lovingly crafted, Superman Returns’ eye candy made me content for its 157-minute running time, even with the loudly sighing and sniffling middle-aged fanboy in the seat next to mine. Come the next morning, it was a different “Passion of the Reeve”: while watching Bryan Singer’s third superhero feature, what seemed charmingly sleek feels chilly and undernourished. But that’s not to fault the consummate visual craft on display: from its tiniest details to its most gargantuan set-pieces, Superman Returns is an eyeful even as its heart, worn on its burgundy cape, seems smaller than small. The low-key mix of tones, from near-camp to heroic feats of special effects, at first seems assured, but then grows enervated when you realize how little dialogue of passion or poetry is spoken: it’s left to Kevin Spacey’s bald, middle-aged Lex Luthor to purr and play patty-cake with his madman gab, with Spacey’s solipsist crusty gusto. There’s a streak of the el serioso that doesn’t hold water by morning light, either, with a punishing brutal beatdown of the Caped One by his enemies that approaches the brutality of The Passion of the Christ. The muted colors of the new Superman costume are also suggestive of a range of Renaissance painters, and the postures of levitation and flight often resolve into Crucifixion-light attitudes. As Superman and Clark Kent, Brandon Routh is quite tall; Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane is wanly charming yet forgettable, and Lois’ fragile young son doesn’t have much to do, either. With the late Marlon Brando (sound and image drawn, respectfully, I suppose, from Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman), Parker Posey (as Kitty Kowalski, Luthor’s dizzy squeeze and inconsequential character), Frank Langella (a frightfully bottom-line Perry White at a gloomy Daily Planet), Eva Marie Saint, Sam Huntington (Jimmie Olsen), a mute Kal Penn and James Marsden, who ought not speak. Still, there are inspired touches, including a light-fingered piano duet of “Heart and Soul” between a child and a thug, and the bizarre appearance of a cannibalistic Pomeranian. The joys are various and sundry but with an intelligent filmmaker like Singer and a production and distribution budget rocketing toward $300 million, how can there not be memorable moments? Widescreen. 157m.
The Devil Wears Prada (***)
Manhattan ingénue lifestyle porn: bring it on! Based on Lauren Weisberger’s best-selling roman-a-clef about her brief tenure as an assistant to Vogue magazine’s demanding editrix Anna Wintour, directed by David Frankel (“Sex and the City”) and shot within a hem of its darling life by cinematographer Florian Ballhaus (also “Sex and the City” and Flightplan as well as son of the great Michael B., who shot Goodfellas), The Devil Wears Prada is chic, shallow marzipan fun. Anne Hathaway, fresh from her spring-loaded performance as Lureen in Brokeback Mountain, neatly inhabits a coltish, Audrey Hepburn-styled role as the drab gosling abused by controlling boss Meryl Streep, and who, under the tutelage of a fairy godfather (fashionista Stanley Tucci), blossoms into pampered Manhattan-style young womanhood. Her Andy Sachs does well by this Princess Diaries all-grown-up archetype, embellishing it with loads of perk-quirk quizzical expressions. Streep’s Miranda Priestly, black-clad with silver hair, resembles a deracinated Cruella da Ville, but her underplaying is epic, and Mr. Tucci does no wrong with character, comedy or the temptation of stereotype with his fathering fashionista.) As a colleague described after a screening, contemporary movies that find their protagonists facing off with corporate evil almost invariably find a way to heroically turn from the path of darkness and move toward the light of self-actualization, rather than embracing the darkness (or at least dandling the narrative with a tickle of irony). Yet Frankel & Co. find joy in details, gesture, bright colors and the streets of Manhattan, and amid the rubble of name-checking and attitude-dodging, it remains a quintessential New York narrative of progression and moving past one’s early 20s into a still-amorphous version of adulthood. Emily Blunt is also consistent comic bliss as another harried assistant, conveying levels of fluster and frustration with tactile immediacy.

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The Road to Guantanamo (***)
We live in a country where our leaders believe that it befits the great traditions of our land to incarcerate, for life, anyone dubbed an “enemy combatant,” on the good word of unidentified judges. We live in a country where the Supreme Court has said such behavior by a “unitary executive” is illegal, unconstitutional, and contravenes international treaties like the Geneva Convention; “the very definition of tyranny,” Justice Stevens wrote, quoting Madison’s Federalist 47. We live in a country where the congressional majority intends now to craft legislation to make presidential secrecy without oversight and the activities at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, legal. A country where the congressional majority suggests that a permanent record of all phone calls and email ever made within our borders should be kept in a government database. (That would be the Hon. Senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, who told USA Today, “It’s difficult to say you’re covering all terrorist activity in the United States if you don’t have all the [phone] numbers. It probably would be better to have records of every telephone company.”) A country where our President says that “the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people.” Englishmen Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ staggering, brutal, aggressive, infuriating, exhausting, necessary agitdoc/drama, The Road to Guantanamo, recounts the stories of “The Tipton Three,” a trio of Muslim friends, British citizens held for two years without charges at Gitmo. The film doesn’t question the men’s rendition of what happened, but recounts their capture and torture through harrowing recreations and after-the-fact interviews with them. This is incendiary stuff, but what of the hell of injustice that is being depicted? Say a prayer to Kafka for me. 97m.

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Strangers with Candy (**)
Amy Sedaris, who, without her customary disfiguring makeup appliances, is far from a gargoyle, lives to be weird and off-putting, and in the fitfully funny adventure in serial tastelessness, Strangers with Candy, the film version of her Comedy Central series (written by herself, Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert), manages to surpass the series’ epic self-disgust with underwhelming zeal. Sedaris, repeating her role as Jerri Blank, a 47-year-old ex-convict with “thirty-two years of depravity” behind her) who returns to high school to finish her education. With Colbert as a Bible-hugging science teacher, with the memorable line, “I wasn’t pushing you away, I was pulling me toward myself.” Also: Deborah Rush, Gregory Hollimon, David Pasquesi, Dan Hedaya, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Ian Holm, Allison Janney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Ten minutes have been cut from the film since its Sundance debut, which may or may not be because of a legal battle over obtaining releases for certain jokes and references.) 86m.

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The War Tapes (****)
More epic intimacy on the field of war: The War Tapes, Susan Scranton’s eye-opening, hands-on documentary (edited by Hoop Dreams’ Steve James) collages a thousand hours of video shot over the course of a year by three New Hampshire National Guardsmen at war in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. The result is powerful, and an important, non-judgmental contribution to the understanding of what goes on behind the closed doors of the military and the media about our role as a nation waging war in the Middle East for the indefinite future. “I love being a solider,” one man says. “The only thing about being a soldier is that you can’t pick your war.” It’s the kind of simple yet complex insight that makes the insult of Sam Mendes’ would-be war poem Jarhead ever more lamentable. The War Tapes captures the essential absurdity of war, which ripples from even an offhand observation like “I don’t smell burning dead guy.” 97m.