Opening Films

by Inlander Staff


Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London -- Frankie Muniz plays the teenage secret agent, still plagued with debilitating shyness around girls. Quite frankly, we think this would be a lot funnier if he vomited, a la South Park's Stan, every time he got around a cute girl, but that's just us. This time around, our pubescent young hero has a new secret agent partner and an assignment in London. Rated: PG





Secret Window -- Johnny Angel... um Depp... plays a writer who retreats to the woods of Maine with his writer's block. We've seen these Stephen King motifs before -- writers who struggle to write, remote locales, scary strangers who find said writers -- and this time it's the excellently creepy John Turturro who claims Johnny stole his novel. Rated: PG-13





*** Spartan -- David Mamet's initially confounding, eventually fascinating story of a kidnapping, and the special forces group that's trying to foil it, gets more involved as it goes on. Val Kilmer is a tough former Marine Ranger who is called in to assist in the rescue of "an important man's" daughter, who might have been taken from her Boston school to the Middle East as a sex slave. But the case is full of dead ends, as well as violence. It seems that the closer he gets, the farther he gets. Plot twists galore feed the air of mystery. Riveting stuff with, as always with Mamet, sharp and bare-bones dialogue. (ES) Rated: R





Publication date: 03/11/04