Movie Reviews: The Girl From Monaco, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Kambakkht Ishq, I Hate Valentine's Day

NEW YORK The so-called “Bollywood strike” that has kept new Indian commercial movies off international screens for the past two months was more like a lockout — an odd one, too, in which no workers were involved and one branch of management was pitted against another. Exhibitors on the new urban “multiplex” circuit demanded a larger percentage of the gross, and the major production companies retaliated by withholding their masterpieces. It’s a wonder the home audience is still willing to put up with these tantrum-throwers, especially when the hiatus is broken by the likes of Kabir Khan’s New York, a predictable, brow-furrowing drama (sadly songless except for a couple of Sunday-in-the-park montage sequences) about the effects of 9/11 (and 9/11 paranoia) on some South Asian immigrants living in New York. At the outset, the movie promises something much more interesting, when Omar (Neil Nitin Mukesh), a Manhattan cab-company owner, is framed on a weapons charge and blackmailed by the feds into cozying up to a suspected terrorist. The rub is that, a decade ago, the accused sleeper-cell organizer, Samir (John Abraham), was Omar’s closest college chum, and is now happily married to Maya (Katrina Kaif), the paragon whose romantic choice broke Omar’s heart. When the couple invites Omar into their home, the atmosphere should be clogged with desire, resentment and paranoia, an emotional maze worthy of Hitchcock, or at least De Palma. Quite apart from the fact that none of these performers is capable of smoldering with conviction, there’s no terror or sensuality in director Khan’s images. He’s a specialist in redundant visual prose, in underlining the obvious. The great Irfan Khan has the meatiest role, a Muslim-American FBI agent who hates the Jihadis for giving his community a bad name and scourges them for it even more ruthlessly than his Anglo colleagues. Toward the end, he becomes the voice of reason, and says some sensible things about the vicious circle of violence. But by then, it’s way too late. (Fallbrook 7; Naz 8) (David Chute)

YOUSSOU N’DOUR: I BRING WHAT I LOVE Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour can’t have expected his 2004 album Egypt — proudly devout, musically uncharacteristic, and released during Ramadan — to pass without some comment among Muslim compatriots, yet the hagiographic Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love reads like a kind of defense. Playing up the religious opposition to the record, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s first documentary feature follows N’Dour on tour (powerfully compelling, muezzinlike) and on message (platitudinous and repetitive). The performance excerpts, starting with the head-clearing invocational introduction, are by far the most interesting part of the show, besides sumptuous photographed prayer calls at the holy Touba mosque and affecting moments with N’Dour’s grandmother and shadow-casting father. For all the singer’s sincere intentions to build secular-religious bridges, a straight-up concert film might have been a better approach, especially given viewer fatigue with those musicians and their causes. Indeed, the star’s avowal of noble intentions and surprise at the controversy tends, through repetition, to convey an air of entitlement to a positive reaction from fans. Still, N’Dour, who annually headlines the festive Great African Ball in New York, may be the only singer who can mesmerize Senegalese and Western audiences alike with a paean to a 19th-century Sufi hero. (Sunset 5) (Nicolas Rapold)