Considering the surprise success of An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount), Al Gore's terrifying feature-length lecture on global warming, it's worth noting that the environment was a virtual non-issue in midterm elections. Though Gore makes a convincing argument for global warming as the preeminent issue of our time—something that could cost many more lives than any war—it's still hard to convince voters to look beyond the country's most immediate problems…
There have certainly been worse CGI films this year than Ice Age: The Meltdown (Fox), but its middle-of-the-roadness just makes it less memorable. Ice Age's original cast of prehistoric animals is back for a story composed of leftover scraps from the first film. The tone is hyper and the jokes run thin, and the overemphasized subplot about whether two mammoths will boink and save their species is a little odd for a kids' movie…
How much you like You, Me And Dupree (Universal) depends to a large extent on how much you trust Owen Wilson's ability to transcend material that's beneath him. As an unmotivated slob who crashes with newlyweds Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson, Wilson puts his childlike whimsy to good use throughout the film, though the laughs tend to evaporate when he isn't around…
Woody Allen's films get more hit-or-miss every year, but they've reached a point where they work best when he stays out of them. Scoop (Universal) might be a serviceable, low-key thriller if not for his windy vamping. It's vaguely plausible when journalism student Scarlett Johansson recruits him to pretend to be her father as she tries to expose British aristocrat Hugh Jackman as a serial killer, but given that Allen constantly embarrasses her, himself, and the audience by improvising horrible, babbly stories about her as a child, it makes no sense when she doesn't dump him in disgust…
Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers (First Look) follows a band of inarticulate Salvadoran skate-punks as they travel from the barrio to Beverly Hills in search of a clean place to roll, and get sidetracked by the decadence of rich folks who want to exploit them. The movie is occasionally a dispiriting mess, but it offers some mild thrills, from the energized hardcore punk soundtrack to the voyeuristic look at the way racism differs in poor L.A. (where the boys are surrounded by hip-hop-loving blacks) and rich L.A. (where they're surrounded by eager-for-"authenticity" whites).