Though Wes Craven's original The Hills Have Eyes and the surprisingly effective 2006 Alexandre Aja remake pay some lip service to the origin of their cannibalistic mutants, it's important to note that those mutants are victims, too, having been malformed by nuclear testing around their homes in the New Mexico desert. So they have every reason to take out their aggression on humanity at large. The quickie sequel The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Fox) has a golden opportunity to restore some complexity to the mutants, with its premise involving the military returning to the scene of the crime. Instead, it reduces them further into mine-dwelling freaks who rape and murder, because, well, that's what they do…
For two movies straight, Sandra Bullock has played women whose lives have been split into two temporal planes: In The Lake House, she and her potential lover communicate from two years apart, while in Premonition (Sony), her husband is dead one day and alive the next. So which Bullock-disrupts-the-space-time-continuum movie is best? Easily The Lake House, which evokes genuine longing from the space between its would-be lovers. By contrast, Premonition rides its gimmicky premise through lame faux-horror setpieces, contrived melodrama, and one of the goofiest endings in recent memory…
An icy, sinisterly pragmatic Guy Pearce turns in a respectable addition to cinema's overflowing collection of Andy Warhols, but the overwrought Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl (Weinstein) is mostly of interest to camp lovers, who will especially enjoy Hayden Christensen's hilariously unconvincing take on Bob Dylan's soulful troubadour shtick. The wonderful/horrible moment in which Christensen sadly informs Sienna Miller's tragic party girl that her heart is as empty as her friend's soup cans belongs in the pantheon of pop-culture high kitsch…
In Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends (Strand), Thibault Vinçon plays a superstar grad student who becomes the spiteful Svengali to a circle of peers, all of whom want to be famous authors and electrify the Parisian literary world. Vinçon treats his friends' success as his own cockeyed work of art, and Bourdieu neither completely condones nor condemns his anti-hero. Instead, Poison Friends stays true to the heady, idealistic-to-a-fault world of academia, where lectures in the morning give way to bull sessions in the afternoon and noisy mating rituals at night.