Caramel, Over Her Dead Body, Tre, The Eye

GO  LIBERTY KID Liberty Kid elevates that woeful genre, the 9/11 movie, by keeping a Wire-worthy ear to the street talk of south Williamsburg and maintaining a shrewd balance of the personal and the political for two full acts. It is, alas, a three-act narrative. No matter: Produced by indie stalwart Larry Fessenden, the sophomore feature from writer-director Ilya Chaiken stages an uncommonly acute, deftly played drama of the New York working class. Derrick (Al Thompson) and Tico (Kareen Saviñon) find themselves out of work on September 12 when their Liberty Island concession stand is shut down. Wage-slave indignity gives way to a grudging coke operation (and a hilarious batch of business cards offering “Party Favers”), followed by the inevitable rough-and- tumble rivalries, jealousies, seductions, and betrayals. The actors remain superb even as Chaiken triple-underlines every-thing in the bittersweet denouement. Kudos to Kid, nevertheless, for having something worth saying in the first place. (Grande 4-Plex) (Nathan Lee)

MEET THE SPARTANS No doubt you heard the gay jokes about 300. No doubt you made some of them. But never did you think an entire movie could be made from those mild titters. The writing-directing team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer thought otherwise. To this deadly duo, there is no joke so lame it can't be repeated. (Did you hear the one about how Donald Trump wears a wig?) They once again prove themselves to be the cinematic equivalent of that annoying friend who thinks repeating the jokes he saw last night on TV is the funniest damn thing ever. Meet the Spartans is a mild improvement over their Epic Movie, which is like saying that a debilitating fever is more fun than appendicitis, but what's shocking is how lazy it is, which is a shame for former U.K. child star/pop singer Sean Maguire, whose Gerard Butler impersonation is spot-on. Aside from the obvious gay jokes ("I Will Survive" performed twice, heh heh), what remains is an endless array of product placements masquerading as self-referential humor, and movie references that Seltzer and Friedberg don't even trust the audience to get. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)

Mobra Films/Adi Paduretu

With friends like these: Marinca as Months'resourceful fixer

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More About

• Nadine Labaki
• Daniel Cariaga
• Ella Taylor
• Miley Cyrus
• Abortion

GO  OVER HER DEAD BODY Henry (Paul Rudd) and Kate (Eva Longoria) were about to walk down the aisle when Kate was killed in a slapstick wedding-day accident. A year later, he's still mourning the escape from a life of browbeating, so his sister presses him to contact a psychic to put his mind at rest. Said medium (Lake Bell) turns out to be a tawny beauty molded like a Vicky's Secret contractee; romance blossoms anew, to the chagrin of Kate's awakened ghost, who commences with sabotage. Many a comic potentiality is underworked, and the film's prevailing tone is obnoxiously erratic — surely the supporting eccentrics (Jason Biggs and Lindsay Sloane) aren't supposed to be so off-putting? — but it rests safe when entrusted to the charisma of its principals. This is no career high, but it's impossible to actively dislike Rudd: Women want him (he's cozy-handsome, in a feasible imaginary-boyfriend-able way); men want to forward his viral video appearances around the office. And Bell — with her broad ducky lips, scrunched wince, and long arms swatting at the air — has promise as a winning comedienne. Nobody was clamoring for this Blithe Spirit revival, but, real talk, it's a fine hiatus from earthly life. (Citywide) (Nick Pinkerton)

RAMBO Gorier, meaner and uglier than anything Sylvester Stallone has made before, and as such damnably effective in rousing your blood lust, this wind-up groin kicker of a movie seems initially as wary of being pulled back into a dirty job as its reluctant hero. Once committed, though, Stallone and his embittered he-man mean to prove that nobody alive can explode more heads, aerate more guts and perforate more evil ethnic extras. Here the Vietnam vet turned universal soldier ends up rescuing some Christian mercy workers dumb enough to think they can bring humanitarian aid to Myanmar, only to end up in a leering Burmese warmonger's hellhole. Want to accomplish good works on the other side of the world? Stallone sez: Pack heat. As vehement in its stereotyping as World War II propaganda, Rambo climaxes with a neck-breaking howitzer barrage of a montage as hundreds of enemy soldiers, hopelessly outnumbered by Rambo, go down in a battery of extrasquishy beheadings, explosions and mutilations. By that point, even the movie's love-thy-neighbor wimps are ready to pound skulls with rocks. The message? If killing is what you do best, just make sure you kill the right people. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)

STRANGE WILDERNESS Last and quite unforgettably seen as one of Rescue Dawn’s tragic POWs, Steve Zahn returns to the jungle to headline this innocuously awful, February-dumped comedy in his trusty but musty persona of the happy-go-unlucky, half-stoned schemer. On a South American search for Bigfoot as a last-ditch effort to save their failing TV wildlife program, host Zahn and his even more incompetent crew — a who’s who of slumming talent that includes Jonah Hill, Justin Long, Broken Lizard’s Kevin Heffernan, and Ernest Borgnine (!) — smoke dope, joy-buzz each other’s crotches, and wag their tongues at every skinny blonde or fake teat that passes their fratty gaze. Why former SNL writers Fred Wolf (who also directs) and Peter Gaulke would force such proven improvisers to stick to such drooling playground idiocy is a mystery not worth solving, as it concerns a script that smugly tries to squeeze a dozen rapid-fire punch lines out of a guy named Dick. (Alternatively, how can you screw up MST3K-style voiceovers of old nature-show footage with this cast?) No snob to low-brow ridiculousness when it’s actually unexpected, I’ll admit to being amused exactly once, when Zahn gets deep-throated by a gigantic prop turkey who, despite the mouthful, keeps on flapping. (Citywide) (Aaron Hillis)SUNDAY The rapidly rising Bollywood ingenue Ayesha Takia, who made her debut in 2004 in something called Taarzan: The Wonder Car and appeared in six major releases in 2007, looks like a cartoon of an eye-candy starlet, a bosomy kewpie doll so eidetically cute that the kawai-walas of Tokyo must be contemplating hara-kiri. But Takia also showed a subtler brand of sweetness, and some acting skill, in Nagesh Kukunoor's middlebrow art movie Dor (2006), and she's the only good reason to consider seeing Rohit Shetty's Sunday, a hyperactive and wholly synthetic crime comedy in which a trio of major actors (Ajay Devgan, Arshad Warsi and The Namesake's great Irfan Khan) laboriously tread water. Takia's linchpin character falls asleep after a wild night at the disco and doesn't wake up again until Monday morning; Devgan is a saturnine cop who believes the missing day holds the key to a couple of otherwise unrelated crimes. The plot machinations aren't as satisfyingly clever as they should be, and the computer-embellished car-flipping chase sequences are a mite clumsy, as if the one take the filmmakers could afford wasn't always optimal. We recommend sleeping in. (Naz 8; ImaginAsian Center) (David Chute)