Just when it seemed that Hollywood was running out of paint-by-numbers horror movie remakes, along oozes the half-baked “House of Wax” to leave its greasy smear on movie non-history. If the project was an independent label’s small budget scream-fest, with unknown actors and a rougher feel, then there might have been something gutsy to redeem this pallid, tasteless fare. Instead, the mega-budget excesses, the big-named producers, the WB’s hottest young things, and the writers who are experienced enough to know better have turned in a condescending slog of a flick, as mechanical and soulless as a wax golem.

Those savvy Warner Bros. execs are betting on the quick and dirty opening weekend draw typical of horror movies and, with the big-screen debut of little-screen’s bored, blond heiress, Ms. Hilton, they know a good sized crowd will go just to see Paris burn. At this screening (and reportedly at many others across the country), the crowd erupted in applause and cheers when Paris Hilton’s character, Paige, dies. Hollywood, please note that Paris Hilton’s novelty value is now officially over. Any other conceivable value she might add to a movie is yet to be demonstrated.

The plot is simple but relies entirely on the stupidity of the protagonists and our desire to watch them die. Six college-age kids set out from Florida to Louisiana on an overnight road trip to see a big football game. They take a shortcut which puts them within reach of a town that does not exist on maps or, more importantly, GPS. The small, quiet town is home to the titular House of Wax, not only housing wax sculptures but made entirely of wax itself. When the travelers meet the inhabitants of the town, it is just a matter of time before the wax — and blood — start flowing.

Most of the scenes focus on supposedly bright, successful, Carly (Elisha Cuthbert of “24” fame), and her mildly delinquent, “bad twin” brother, Nick (Chad Michael Murray, “One Tree Hill” heartthrob). Carly’s best friend is Paige (Paris Hilton, trying to project a down-to-earth sympathy), who thinks she might be pregnant but has been holding off on telling boyfriend, Blake (Robert Ri’chard, Coach Carter), the gung-ho football fan who brought the group together in the first place. Nick’s friend, Dalton (Jon Abrahams) seems to exist to show that Nick is really a good guy. Carly’s boyfriend, Wade (Jared Padalecki, “Gilmore Girls”), whose absurd curiosity dooms him to the most drawn-out of deaths, is one jarring example of badly written character development, literally sacrificed to further the plot.

The denizens of the town range from Southern Gothic of the Deliverance school of stereotype, to twin psychopaths, intent on keeping time from passing by freezing folks in wax. It gives nothing away to say that the writers, twins Chad and Carey Hayes, take the twin symbolism way, way too seriously, invoking unintended laughs with their heavy-handedness along the way.

The movies’ internal consistency, one or two visually interesting scenes, and a glimpse of some decent acting from Ms. Cuthbert are all that stand between this release and a road-kill pit similar to the one occupying an inordinately long scene toward the beginning of the movie. Even for horror and Hilton fans, “House of Wax” is better left unvisited.

Parents should know that this movie’s tagline “Prey Slay Display” is a fair indication of what is to come. Most of the characters die and they do so in manners ranging from bloody hunts to quick decapitation. There is near constant peril and lots of unnecessary–even for a slasher movie detail, ranging from a close-up of a victim’s skin accidentally peeled away to a character’s partial submersion in a fetid pool of dead animals. The characters make frequent sexual references and Paris Hilton’s past video indiscretions seem to be the inside joke in two scenes, including a brief strip-tease she performs for her boyfriend. Characters state they intend to have sex and there is a supposedly funny confusion about whether a character is performing a sexual act on her boyfriend as he drives. There is mild social drinking, as well as some admiration for one character’s “hard-core” attitude and delinquency. Characters have no hesitation about exploring and messing around with other people’s houses or property.

Families who see this movie might want to talk about theme of siblings, especially the theme of one sibling’s goodness compared to one sibling’s “badness”. The choice of the movie playing at the town’s theater is not accidental as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a much stronger study of sibling rivalry.

Families who want to see the inspiration for this movie should see House of Wax, 1953’s 3-D showcase thriller starring Vincent Price in his first horror role, or, if they can find a copy, the wry and witty Mystery of the Wax Museum(1933) or the screenplay on which it is based. Fans of horror movies should go elsewhere, perhaps to tepid new releases such as Amityville Horror which now look better in comparison (but only by comparison).

Everyone is angry. Everyone is scared. They all feel that something that belongs to them has been taken away and they don’t know how to get it back.

And in this movie, they say so.

“Crash,” the winner of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar, is an ensemble film with several intersecting stories, all of them about people who can’t quite seem to understand how things turned out the way they did or how they themselves turned out the way they did. Most of them find out, in the course of the movie, that they are capable of more — or less — than they thought they were.

Paul Haggis, the screenwriter for Million Dollar Baby has co-written and directed a devastating movie about people who are very much like us, with one important difference. It’s as though the drinking water in Los Angeles has been spiked with some mild de-inhibitor that makes people say what they are thinking. In this film, everyone says the most horrifyingly virulent things to everyone else: family members, people in business, employees, and strangers, reflecting a range of prejudice on the basis of class, gender, and, above all, race.

These comments are sometimes made angrily, sometimes carelessly or thoughtlessly, but often, and more unsettlingly, matter-of-factly. As vicious as the insults are, the part that hurts the most is that people don’t care enough, don’t pay attention closely enough, to know the people they are insulting. “When did Persians become Arab?” asks an Iranian, who cannot understand how people can hate him without taking the time to know who he is. A Hispanic woman explains to a man she is sleeping with that she is not Mexican. Her parents are from El Salvador and Puerto Rico. He tells her that it doesn’t matter because they all leave cars on their lawns anyway.

The movie is intricately constructed, going back and forth between the characters and back and forth in time.  There are small moments that create a mosaic in which we see the pattern before the characters do. The movie has big shocks but it also has small glimpses and moments of great subtlety. A black woman looks at her white boss while he talks to his wife on a cell phone and we can tell there is more to their relationship than we have seen. The daughter of immigrants we have only seen in one context shows up in another and we see that her professional life is very different from what we might have imagined, reminding us that racism may be inextricably intertwined with America, but so is opportunity.

Every character is three-dimensional, utterly real and heartbreakingly sympathetic. The characters keep surprising themselves and each other, for better and for worse.

A white upper class couple gets carjacked. He’s a politician (Brendan Fraser) concerned about how it will look. She (Sandra Bullock) is terrified and angry. She doesn’t trust the man who has come to change their locks because he looks like a gang member. A black detective (co-producer Don Cheadle) tells his Latina partner and sometimes girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito) that “in LA, nobody touches you. We miss that so much, we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

A black actress (Thandie Newton) tells her black television director husband (Terrence Howard) that “The closest you ever came to being black was watching ‘The Cosby Show.'” The white producer of a television sit-com (Tony Danza) tells that same director to re-shoot a scene because “Jamal is talking a little less black.” A character in an overturned car is caught in a safety belt, hanging upside down. A pair of black carjackers believe that what they do is acceptable because they are not robbing black people. One of the tenderest father-daughter scenes in years is the set-up for an explosive emotional pay-off later on.

The brilliance of the movie is the way it makes each character both symbol and individual. As a whole, the cast is neatly aligned along a continuum of prejudice, and yet each character is complete and complex and real. Just when we think we know who they are, they surprise us. We find ourselves sympathetic to those we thought we hated and disturbed by those we thought we understood. Just when we think we know what bigotry is, it, too, surprises us by being more about fear and loss and feeling powerless than about hatred and ignorance. The characters confront their assumptions about each other and they make us confront our own about them and about ourselves.

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Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman of “The Office”) is in his bathrobe one Thursday morning, bumping his head, burning his toast, and engaging in a completely ineffectual protest of the new highway by-pass that has a flank of bulldozers ready to mow down his house. It is ineffectual first because the bulldozer operators seem perfectly willing to mow Arthur down to get to his house. But it is ineffectual second because there is an inter-galactic by-pass about to be built and Earth is about to be destroyed to get it out of the way.

Fortunately, it turns out that Arthur’s best friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is an alien (the fact that he tried to shake hands with a car should have been a tip-off), so just before Earth explodes, Ford grabs Arthur and a couple of towels and sticks out his thumb to hitch a ride on a spaceship. And it turns out to contain Zaphod Beeblebrox, the president of the galaxy, (Sam Rockwell), Trillian, the woman of Arthur’s dreams (Zooey Deschanel), and a mopey robot named Marvin (voice of Alan Rickman).

Ahead of this group is a quest and a journey, and of course encounters with dolphins doing a musical number as they leave earth, thanking us for all the fish, aliens called Vogons, who terrify their captives by reciting the third-worst poetry in the universe, Humma Kavula (John Malcovich, or at least the top third of him, skittering along on hundreds of tiny metal prongs), who is still seething at losing the presidential election to Zaphod, and a supercomputer that has the ultimate answer to the ultimate question, if you could only figure out what that is. Ford and Arthur sort their way through it with the help of the title volume (voice of Stephen Fry), which is filled with helpful advice for every eventuality, starting with “Don’t panic!”

Adams’ book, written over 25 years ago, is a marvel of invention and understated humor that holds up very well but inevitably loses some subtlety in translation to the screen. There is a lot to look at, including aliens designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and spaceships and special effects that hit just the right balance between impressive and funny. But the balance between story and funny is not calibrated quite as precisely and the central characters, once established (Arthur is befuddled and over-cautious, Zaphod is implusive and relies on superficial charm, Marvin is despodent), replay the same notes. The brief appearances by supporting players, especially Malcovich and Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, are much more memorable and effective in capturing Adams’s wit and spirit. Purests will quibble about some liberties with the beloved (“and increasingly inaccurately named”) five-part “trilogy,” but overall the movie does a fine job of capturing both the wit and the heart of the books, and makes us, for a moment, miss Adams just a little less.

Parents should know that the movie has a lot of cartoon-style “action” violence, including space-age guns and other weapons. A character’s second head is removed (off-screen) and we see some blood. Minor characters are squashed and some creatures are injured. Characters drink in a pub.

Families who see this movie should talk about what information they would put into a guide for intergalactic visitors to Earth.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the hilarious outer space comedy Galaxy Quest, which also features Rickman and Rockwell, and the slightly more mature material in Tim Burton’s ghostly comedy Beetlejuice and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black. Families will also enjoy the novels by Douglas Adams, which are great fun to read aloud (note: some have strong language), and the BBC miniseries version, as well as Adams’ non-fiction book, Last Chance to See. Passionate fans of the series have created some informative and amusing websites like this one and this one. And they will enjoy the very funny books of Tom Holt, particularly Expecting Someone Taller.

Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman of “The Office”) is in his bathrobe one Thursday morning, bumping his head, burning his toast, and engaging in a completely ineffectual protest of the new highway by-pass that has a flank of bulldozers ready to mow down his house. It is ineffectual first because the bulldozer operators seem perfectly willing to mow Arthur down to get to his house. But it is ineffectual second because there is an inter-galactic by-pass about to be built and Earth is about to be destroyed to get it out of the way.

Fortunately, it turns out that Arthur’s best friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is an alien (the fact that he tried to shake hands with a car should have been a tip-off), so just before Earth explodes, Ford grabs Arthur and a couple of towels and sticks out his thumb to hitch a ride on a spaceship. And it turns out to contain Zaphod Beeblebrox, the president of the galaxy, (Sam Rockwell), Trillian, the woman of Arthur’s dreams (Zooey Deschanel), and a mopey robot named Marvin (voice of Alan Rickman).

Ahead of this group is a quest and a journey, and of course encounters with strange creatures like Vogans, who terrify their captives by reciting the third-worst poetry in the universe, Humma Kavula (John Malcovich), still seething at losing the presidential election to Zaphod, and a supercomputer that has the ultimate answer to the ultimate question. Ford and Arthur sort their way through it with the help of the title volume (voice of Stephen Fry), which is filled with helpful advice for every eventuality, starting with “Don’t panic!”

Adams’ book, written over 25 years ago, is a marvel of invention and understated humor that holds up very well but inevitably loses some subtlety in translation to the screen. There is a lot to look at, including aliens designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and spaceships and special effects that hit just the right balance between impressive and funny. But the balance between story and funny is not calibrated quite as precisely and the central characters, once established (Arthur is befuddled and over-cautious, Zaphod is implusive and relies on superficial charm, Marvin is despodent), replay the same notes. The brief appearances by supporting players, especially Malcovich and Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, are much more memorable and effective in capturing Adams’s wit and spirit. Purests will quibble about some liberties with the beloved (“and increasingly inaccurately named”) five-part “trilogy,” but overall the movie does a fine job of capturing both the wit and the heart of the books, and makes us, for a moment, miss Adams just a little less.

Parents should know that the movie has a lot of cartoon-style “action” violence, including space-age guns and other weapons. A character’s second head is removed (off-screen) and we see some blood. Minor characters are squashed and some creatures are injured. Characters drink in a pub.

Families who see this movie should talk about what information they would put into a guide for intergalactic visitors to Earth.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the hilarious outer space comedy Galaxy Quest, which also features Rickman and Rockwell, and the slightly more mature material in Tim Burton’s ghostly comedy Beetlejuice and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black. Families will also enjoy the novels by Douglas Adams, which are great fun to read aloud, and the BBC miniseries version, as well as Adams’ Dirk Gently stories and his non-fiction book, Last Chance to See. Passionate fans of the series have created some informative and amusing websites like this one and this one. And they will enjoy the very funny books of Tom Holt, particularly Expecting Someone Taller.

“Can I have the gentlemen tuck in their shirts, please?”

This is a question politely but firmly addressed to a group of underprivleged 5th graders in New York. And not in the 1950’s. Now. The 10 year old “gentlemen” do tuck in their shirts. And then they take their partners and they do the merengue and the foxtrot and the tango. They bow to their partners. And they love it.

A program to teach ballroom dancing to New York City 5th graders in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens sounds like the last thing in the world that would be interesting or relevant to today’s 5th graders. But the beauty of this movie is the way that it shows that grace, dignity, elegance, and pride in mastering a skill are important and as thrilling and transformational.

Fifth grade turns out to be the perfect age for these classes. The kids are old enough to pay attention and follow complex directions, but young enough that they’re not yet “too cool for school.” They’re willing to give the adults the benefit of the doubt and aren’t yet worried about looking dorky.

The movie follows teams through the year, from the early lessons through the citywide competition. There are brief scenes with the kids talking about dancing and about their lives. Whether repeating what they’ve been told or drawing their own conclusions about protecting themselves or about boy-girl relations, or how people become drug dealers because their parents don’t care, they are ineffably bright and endearing and filled with promise.

There are interviews with the teachers, two of whom begin to cry when they talk about how much they care about their students and what it feels like to see them try so hard and want so much. There are other glimpses of the life beyond the dance floor — a child whose religion prohibits dancing is assigned to act as DJ, a group of girls go shopping for skirts to wear to the competition and are told there is no way they are going to be showing their belly buttons. But the heart of the movie is seeing the kids learn to move to the music, to feel the rhythm, to learn the steps, to feel comfortable on the dance floor.

Just at an age when the difference between girls and boys is beginning to feel even more different, these children are told to hold onto each other, work closely together, and look into each other’s eyes “like it’s the last time in your life” (even when a boy only comes up to a girl’s shoulder) and smile at each other.

The teachers worry about whether it will harm the children’s self-esteem to participate in a very tough competition. Though the kids gamely promise not to “boast and brag about it because it will make other people feel worthless” in pre-competition discussion,” when the time comes some of those who don’t win are heartbroken. So are we. But the children learn what it means to be a part of something big, to give their hearts to it, and that losing is not the end of the world, and that’s almost as important as learning the merengue and the tango.

Parents should know that the children in this movie speak frankly (but briefly) about protecting themselves from child molesters and drug dealers. There are also references to pregnancy, puberty, and gay marriage. One of the strengths of the movie is its portrayal of diverse students and teachers and its recognition of the importance of male role models who show the boys it is all right to dance.

Families who see this movie should talk about the different views the teachers have about the benefits of competition. What is the most important thing the children learned from the dance lessons?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the documentaries To Be and to Have (about a one room schoolhouse in France), Paper Clips (about a small-town school’s study of the Holocaust), Spellbound (spelling bee), Small Wonders (violin), and the Oscar-winning He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ (ballet dancing). They will also enjoy the UP series of documentaries that track a group of English children every seven years from ages 7 to 42. The next film in the series, “49 Up,” is currently in production. And they may enjoy seeing Strictly Ballroom, Top Hat and other movies with great dancing.