Hanksy panky: Tom has fun as a Texas congressman in "Charlie Wilson's War".

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“It’s deja vu, only a thousand times worse,” notes one character about some unlikely twist of fate toward the end of the latest Woody Allen murder drama. If your mind doesn’t immediately flash to Woody’s achingly similar Match Point—golly, wasn’t that only two years ago?—that’s because it first leapt to a more recent familial crime drama directed by another senior citizen, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

Like Dead, Dream features brothers (here, Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell) who unwittingly find themselves turning to a one-off job that doesn’t go quite as planned. McGregor vies for upward social mobility. More working class, Farrell seeks only to curb his gambling addiction. In walks millionaire surgeon uncle Tom Wilkinson with a little offer: In repayment for past and future financial aid, they’ll whack an associate of his whose testimony may send him to jail. Family’s family, right? And so begins yet another of Woody’s chatty, rampantly philosophical studies of the existential despair of murder in a godless universe—a topic he’s covered not only in Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors, but even as far back as Love and Death.

Woody’s transatlantic relocation after Melinda and Melinda was a welcome attempt to breathe life into his rapidly decaying shtick. So far it hasn’t quite worked, but it’s nice to see him trying. Perhaps his next rejuvenating move should be to write a film without any of his patented expository/philosophical dialogue—always the flip side of his gift for comic one-liners. In Match Point, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ killer went it alone, yielding only a couple scenes of philosophical howlers. Having two murderers means there’s no shortage of the stuff, usually pouring out of the mouth of Farrell’s guilt-ridden, tic-heavy softie. “One day you reach a point and there’s no tomorrow,” he muses upon first spotting their mark. “Did you ever notice how unpredictable life is?” McGregor remarks after one particularly bald screenwriterly contrivance. Post-murder, McGregor asks Farrell what he’s thinking about. “I’m thinking what if there’s a God?”

Thing is, heavy and cartoonishly portentous as it can be (did I not mention the Philip Glass score?), Cassandra’s Dream is still preferable to the hollow gimmicks of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. After all, Woody’s slow-burn approach to his thrillers, carefully and methodically erecting his house of cards, has a satisfyingly square design to it. If the Woodman’s game is up, and it most likely is, he’s better off cranking out sorry dramas than far sorrier comedies.

In one of the more brilliant fake editorials in Onion history, a thoroughly yuppified Sting rhapsodizes about accidentally hearing some early Police in a store and realizing, “You know, I used to be kind of cool once.” Though you wouldn’t believe it watching her new movie Mad Money, Callie Khouri used to be kind of cool once too.

In 1992 she won an Oscar for writing Thelma & Louise, which managed to combine a lean genre piece with an angry, pissed-off screed about abused women in ’90s America. Jump ahead nearly two decades and you have Mad Money, which is to Thelma & Louise what the tiresomely content, lute-playing modern Sting is to the brash, anxious, creepy-song-writing Sting of the first Police album.

Based on a British TV movie called Hot Money—the title changed, no doubt, to ride the coattails of that show featuring the apparently amphetamine-popping lunatic who yells at the screen and pushes various buttons (it makes a cameo)—Mad Money stars Diane Keaton as an upper-class hausfrau whose cushy exec husband (Ted Danson) is abruptly downsized, leaving them seriouslyin the hole. College-educated but skilless, she gets a job cleaning toilets at the Federal Reserve Bank. There, she teams up with single mother Queen Latifah to hatch an elaborate scheme to periodically steal from the thousands of old bills destroyed every day. Completing the trio is Katie Holmes’ ditzy, perpetually dancing kook who pretty obviously should be played by Anna Faris.

Buried deep within Mad Money lies an angry, pissed-off screed about abused women in 21st-century America, be they aging and ignored (Keaton), low-income and ignored (Latifah) or whatever the hell Holmes is supposed to represent. Every now and then this hypothetical acidic satire rears its head, as when a loot-spending Latifah jokes with the nervous white dean of a classy prep school about whether she can pay her son’s tuition in crack. But mostly it’s a fluffy but low-wattage caper comedy whose fangs have been effectively whittled down.

It’s hard to fly the socialist flag when the character with the most screentime is a rich white lady who simply wants to remain a rich white lady, all while Latifah is sequestered into the kind of relaxed, sage black role usually reserved for Morgan Freeman. On the plus side, Khouri does refrain from cueing up either “Money (That’s What I Want)” or the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money” on the soundtrack. That, at least, deserves major commendation.

A sad but beautiful bridesmaid, tons of weddings, prettier-sister envy, and a hunky wiseacre journalist with a hidden, weepy sensitive side—it’s all almost enough to make you believe 27 Dresses was brainstormed in the outdoor smoking area during break-time at the office of a women’s glossy magazine, so thoroughly does it pander to every stereotypical single gal’s yearnings and hangups. It’s like porn, but for chicks.

Knocked Up’s Katherine Heigl stars as Jane, a perennial bridesmaid we first meet as she’s shuffling back and forth between her 26th and 27th wedding, performing quick taxicab costume changes yet somehow still not catching either bouquet. A tireless personal assistant to an outdoorsy clothing magnate (the ever-vapid Edward Burns, once again letting his haircut do the acting for him), Jane secretly pines for her boss and leads a life of such quietly desperate loneliness, one wonders how she ever made enough friends to get invited to so many damn weddings in the first place.

But things take a turn when her slatternly kid sis Tess (The Heartbreak Kid’s Cameron Diaz sound-alike Malin Akerman) drifts into town and sweeps Burns off his feet with a dazzling array of low-cut tops and bald-faced lies. Stuck planning the wedding for the man of her dreams to her duplicitous baby sister, Heigl’s Jane would probably be on suicide watch, were it not for the persistent unwanted attentions of James Marsden’s jaded “Commitments” columnist. The two get on each others nerves so quickly, we can tell it’s only a matter of time before they’re bound to hit the hay. (If you must know, large portions of alcohol and a “Bennie and the Jets” singalong are involved. Yeesh.)

Amateurishly directed by Anne Fletcher as a clunky collection of scenes that don’t quite fit together, the screenplay from Devil Wears Prada scribe Aline Brosh McKenna feels a few drafts shy of finished. 27 Dresses bumps and lurches about, squandering some surprisingly decent chemistry between Heigl and Marsden amid way too many screechy cartoon stereotypes, poorly blocked shots and shockingly substandard production values.

Although on the other hand, all the blatantly recognizable Providence, R.I., landmarks visible in what the movie repeatedly assures us is Manhattan are at least good for a few chuckles.

Not Reviewed

Cloverfield
A sneaky viral campaign, top-secret shoots and zero critic-friendly screenings? Better deliver, J.J. (Opens Fri., Jan. 18.)

Steep
A documentary tracing the history of extreme skiing. (Opens Fri., Jan. 18.)

Ongoing

Alvin and the Chipmunks
A film version of the ’80s cartoon, with CGI chipmunks and Jason Lee as Dave. (Not reviewed.)

Atonement
Adapted by playwright Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan’s breathlessly acclaimed, doom-laden love story spanning WWII and beyond. B (S.B.)

Old guise, new flicks: Jack Nicholson (left) and Morgan Freeman play themselves in "The Bucket List".

The Bucket List
Directed with an astounding lack of interest by the once-talented Rob Reiner, The Bucket List stars Jack as a brash billionaire who just so happens to act a heck of a lot like Jack Nicholson. But when cancer strikes, he winds up sharing a hospital room with Morgan Freeman’s wise, humble auto mechanic. Anyone want to bet that Morgan is going to teach Jack some valuable lessons about what’s really important in life? D- (S.B.)

Charlie Wilson’s War
Aaron Sorkin’s whip-smart, viciously funny black comedy about Texas Congressman Charles Wilson (Tom Hanks)—the hard-partying lovable letch who in the 1980s spearheaded U.S. efforts to covertly arm and train the Afghan mujahadeen, thereby grinding down the Soviets and helping win the Cold War. C+ (S.B.)

Diva In the rerelease of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s ’80s classic, a boyish opera-freak postman (Frédéric Andréi) secretly records a soprano (Philly-born diva Wilhelmina Fernandez) famous for her refusal to commit her singing to records. Around this time a pair of thugs dispense with a prostitute seeking to rat out a slavery ring, but not before she slips an incriminating tape into Andréi’s napsack. A- (M.P.)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Mathieu Almaric stars as Jean-Dominique Bauby, an Elle magazine editor and cad about town who suffers a sudden and debilitating stroke, finding himself completely paralyzed, save for one eye. B (S.B.)

First Sunday
Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan play petty criminals who attempt to rob a church and wind up spending the night with God. (Not reviewed.)

The Great Debaters
Based on the true story of Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington), a college professor in the segregated 1930s South who leads his debate team all the way to the national championships. (Not reviewed.)

I Am Legend
This is the third big-screen adaptation of Richard Matheson’s cult fave 1954 novel, this time starring Will Smith as Dr. Robert Neville, apparently the sole survivor of a vicious virus that’s transformed the rest of the population into ghost-white, drooling zombie-ish creatures. B (S.B.)

I’m Not There
Todd Haynes’ astoundingly dense, certifiably insane, preposterously entertaining attempted portrait of the ever-elusive Bob Dylan isn’t just the greatest celebrity biography ever made—it’s also a full-frontal formalist assault on the very concept of biopics. A (S.B.)

Juno
Juno starts off questionable, even off-putting, before heading off in an unexpectedly decent direction. Just try not to wince when the title character, a suburban 16-year-old who’s inseminated by meek running fanatic pal Michael Cera, responds to a dire turn of events during the film’s second half with, “Just do me this one solid.” B- (M.P.)

The Kite Runner
Marc Forster’s splashy Hollywood adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel, which details life in Afghanistan through three decades of totalitarian regimes. C (M.P.)

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Nicolas Cage is back as treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates, this time looking to uncover the truth about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. (Not reviewed.)

No Country for Old Men
Joel and Ethan Coen have at last gone back to their roots, infusing their astonishing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel with the clockwork meticulousness and parched landscapes of their 1984 debut Blood Simple. Doggedly faithful to its source, the film follows Josh Brolin’s Llwelyn Moss, a resourceful young man who makes the rather unwise decision to run off with a suitcase full of cash he stumbled upon in the desert. A (S.B.)

The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
Cartoon vegetables learn how to be heroes by traveling back in time and becoming pirates. (Not reviewed.)

P.S. I Love You
Hilary Swank plays a young widow whose dead husband (Gerard Butler) leaves her 10 messages over the course of a year with the goal of helping her move on. (Not reviewed.)

The Savages
Grimly funny and brazenly unsentimental, writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ follow-up to her raucous 1998 dysfunctional family comedy Slums of Beverly Hills stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as Jon and Wendy Savage, sourpuss siblings forced to face some difficult decisions once their estranged abusive father (Philip Bosco) takes a turn toward dementia. B+ (S.B.)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Just when we’d all but given up hope, director Tim Burton’s gotten his groove back for Sweeney Todd, a lovingly crafted, astoundingly gory adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s renowned 1979 slasher musical. Inspired by an age-old English legend, ’tis the grim tale of wronged barber Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), who sates his thirst for retribution by slitting the throats of his customers and tossing their corpses down a chute into the basement, where his daffy old landlady (Helena Bonham Carter) grinds up the bodies and bakes them into meat pies. B (S.B.)

There Will Be Blood
Villainous oil baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Paul Dano’s snaky reverend begin a passive- aggressive battle of wits that drags on for decades after Plainview attempts to extract oil from beneath the town of Little Boston. A new American century takes root and thrives all around Daniel Plainview, while he violently severs relationships with everyone who cares about him, growing only more isolated and alone—until the movie boils over with a finale so grandly insane, it’s like the twisted Actor’s Studio version of Magnolia’s climactic frog plague. A (S.B.)

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
A young Scottish boy (Alex Etel) finds an egg, which hatches into the mythical creature that inspired the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. (Not reviewed.)