SUPERBAD

Superbad, the wildly hilarious, subtly moving, and only-a-little-disappointing comedy about two youths hell-bent on securing booze for (and getting laid at) a high school party, is directed by Greg Mottola, but it's impossible to miss the imprint of its producer, Judd Apatow.

THE INTERPRETER

Why do Sydney Pollack's movies so rarely have the snap and directness of his acting? Pollack doesn't appear onscreen nearly enough, and when he does, it's usually only for a scene or two. (His intellectual lout in Husbands & Wives was a rare, marvelous exception.) But these extended cameos - in Tootsie (which he also directed), Death Becomes Her, and Changing Lanes, especially - show Pollack the Actor to be a quick-witted utility player with focus and drive; without the slightest apparent effort, he can steal scenes from Dustin Hoffman or Tom Cruise, and any movie he's in gains in intensity and sharpness when he's around. Pollack the Director is another matter entirely. In the years since 1982's Tootsie, he has churned out one logy, shapeless, middlebrow time-waster after another: Havana, The Firm, Sabrina, Random Hearts ... they all wear their "prestige" on their sleeves, mistake inertia for depth, and are painfully overlong. (It's the Out of Africa Syndrome.)

THE STEPFORD WIVES

As crummy movies go, Frank Oz's remake of The Stepford Wives is pretty darned terrific. The film has been plagued by rumors of trouble on the set and post-production nightmares and general confusion throughout, and you can practically see these turmoils on the screen; the movie is bizarrely assembled and terribly edited - characters' motivations change from scene to scene with little rhyme or reason - and it all falls apart before your eyes. Oz doesn't seem to have a clue how to treat the material, but one person does: screenwriter Paul Rudnick. He knows exactly what he's up to - a bitchy, campy tale involving a group of nerdy men who enact revenge on the successful women they feel inferior to - and individual scenes in this Stepford Wives are so hilarious and dead-on smart that you wind up enjoying the movie despite being aware of how awful much of it is. Like last summer's Rudnick-written Marci X, it's a perfect example of a comedy in which individual set pieces far exceed the whole, and it can be blissfully enjoyed on its own underwhelming terms.

THE HOURS

Stephen Daldry's The Hours is so meticulously crafted, so assured in its conception, and so insistent on its themes and motifs that it's bound to drive a lot of people bananas.