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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.)