In an impressive but misguided display of faith in a weak script, flop-magnet Kevin Costner sunk a lot of his own money into financing Swing Vote (Disney), a toothless would-be satire in which a presidential election comes down to the vote of one man: Costner, as a semi-loveable loser. Co-star Dennis Hopper complained that most of his role as the Democratic candidate ended up on the cutting-room floor. Considering the film's leaden Capra-corn, he should count himself lucky…
Since Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch laid the Western to a bloody rest, it's become a director's genre, revitalized only on those rare occasions when a filmmaker's vision carries the old stories across in a fresh way. Ed Harris isn't one of those visionaries. Appaloosa (Warner Bros.) is a fine enough yarn, telling the story of two lawmen-for-hire (Harris and Viggo Mortensen) brought in to clean up a town run by vicious rancher Jeremy Irons, but it can't shake the stale air of familiarity…
Although it will doubtless find detractors among fans of Evelyn Waugh's novel and the 1981 PBS miniseries, Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited (Buena Vista) succeeds handily on its own terms. It lacks the visual pyrotechnics of Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, but Jarrold's movie is otherwise a kindred spirit, stripped of voiceover and other markers of literary bona fides. It also resists the urge to cram its source material into a too-small package…
French horror maestro Alexandre Aja (High Tension) made a semi-successful Hollywood debut with his nasty Hills Have Eyes remake, but he goes far off the rails with Mirrors (Fox), a thriller that tries to do for reflective surfaces what Jaws did for the water. As Kiefer Sutherland smashes, shoots, hides, or paints over every mirror that comes into his line of vision, he secures at least 3,500 years of bad luck…
For the dozens of people who couldn't get enough of Good Luck Chuck, Dane Cook has returned with more or less the same high-concept comedy in My Best Friend's Girl (Lionsgate), again starring as a "rebound" guy whom women use as a springboard toward more meaningful relationships. Cook's shtick here is to use his anti-charisma to convince his dates to get back together with their former boyfriends, but it backfires on Kate Hudson. Sadly, Alec Baldwin makes an appearance.