CJ7 - Opens March 7

In his last movie, 2004’s Kung Fu Hustle, director Stephen Chow combined the clichés of Asian cinema with the cartoonish hi jinks of Road Runner and Wyle E. Coyote to scare up enough box-office clout to make it the most successful film in Hong Kong history. That the movie itself was wildly uneven and lacked the finesse of a more mature filmmaker was evidently of little concern to the ticket-buying public.

Four years later, Chow’s back at it and seems destined for the same pratfalls with CJ7—an unfocused “family film.” In the film, he borrows heavily from touchy-feely sci-fi flicks like Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Joe Dante’s Gremlins to relay the story of a young boy named Dicky (who is, rather convincingly, played by a young girl, Jiao Xu) whose dirt-poor father (Chow, again casting himself in a lead role in his own film) brings home a mysterious “toy” he found in the local junkyard. Turns out the toy is actually a cute and cuddly extraterrestrial life form that was left behind by a spaceship, and which begins to wreak all kinds of havoc in young Dicky’s life. You get the idea. And that’s the problem: The movie offers nothing new. It just retells an oft-told story, but in a crude, over-the-top manner.

The movie suffers from the same cartoonish shenanigans that—to this reviewer, anyway—marred Kung Fu Hustle. Where Chow could have made the choice to focus on more organic storytelling, he chose to goose it up by giving school children super-human characteristics (Look! One of them can fly!) and focusing more on the outlandish than the ordinary. His downfall as a filmmaker remains his overactive imagination. Would that he were to just calm down and focus more on things like characterization, he might be able to deliver an emotionally satisfying experience that equaled those of his obvious influences. C- —Ken Knox

Paranoid Park - Opens March 7

I wish Gus Van Sant would figure out what kind of a filmmaker he is and return to the glory days of his earlier, better works. For the past few years, he’s been vacillating between big-budget Hollywood weepies (Finding Forrester) and “experimental” indie flicks (Elephant, Last Days) with equally drab results. Paranoid Park is yet another entry in the latter category—a self-conscious indie flick that parades itself as a movie with “something to say,” but delivers very little of anything.

Newcomer Gabe Nevins plays Alex, a skater rat who is disaffected and detached from everything in his life, including his family and his girlfriend (Gossip Girl’s Taylor Momsen). One night, while whooping it up with a skater punk from Portland’s crime-ridden Paranoid Park, Alex inadvertently causes the grisly death of a security guard, setting into motion an investigation and what is supposed to be Alex’s guilt over the incident.

The film is based on Blake Nelson’s young-adult novel of the same name, which was written in linear fashion. But Van Sant, playing with cinematic storytelling conventions, mixes things up a bit, repeating scenes at some points and screwing with the chronology of the events at others. That’s all fine and good, but I do wish that he would have invested the same energy in creating an emotional reaction in his audience. Instead, he squanders an opportunity to say anything of merit about today’s youth by littering the film with infuriatingly long tracking shots of Alex skateboarding and walking and “moving the story forward” with hackneyed, university film class-level editing. The “performances” are unrefined to say the least. Working with a cast of newbies culled from a MySpace casting call, Van Sant seems completely out of his element as a director—and it shows. D+ —K.K.

Sleepwalking - Opens March 14

Nick Stahl has a wondrous face. He can look younger than his 29 years, old and haggard, and nearly embryonic, simultaneously. His elasticity is a great asset which he’s used in many roles over the past 15 years. But he’s never had a breakout role, relegated, it seems, to that strange sub-species of the young character actor.

His star turn in Sleepwalking won’t be his breakthrough, either—he’s preternaturally poised as the shell-shocked James Reedy, left alone to care for his negligent sister’s daughter. Yet while Stahl is solid, the film is riddled with flaws. Zac Stanford’s script is built on a house of clichés. The use of the phrase “today is the first day of the rest of your life” as a theme is particularly egregious since he never tries to reinvest the familiarity with a fresh perspective. And Bill Maher’s direction is stale, natural pictorialism: correct for characters who live below the middle class, but ultimately as repressive as their own circumstances.

Still, Stahl’s worth watching in what amounts to the title role (metaphorically, at least). AnnaSophia Robb—noteworthy in Bridge to Terabithia—makes a deep impression here as Tara Reedy, James’s niece. Woody Harrelson plays the ignorant sidekick again, but he does it well. And Dennis Hopper’s evil bastard routine still has the power to shock. Yet Charlize Theron, a stupendous actress, looks like she’s slumming. You get the distinct impression that her presence was merely to procure finance (she’s one of the film’s producers). But even if her work was a labor of love, it’s affected. She shows you something she’s never shown before: She shows you how hard she’s acting, which is the antithesis of sleepwalking. B- —Dan Loughry