Movie Reviews: After the Cup, Shrek Forever After, Prince of Persia

GO  AFTER THE CUP: SONS OF SAKHNIN UNITED A sobering counterpoint to Clint Eastwood's feel-good reconciliation saga Invictus, Christopher Browne's sturdy documentary After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United shows not simply the ability of sports ability to inspire national unity but also the far more difficult act of sustaining such hope once the afterglow of winning has faded. In 2004, Bnei Sakhnin, a poorly funded northern Israel soccer club made up of Arabs, Jews and foreigners, won the prestigious State Cup and vaulted into the esteemed Premiere League, along the way becoming a symbol of Middle East coexistence. Director Browne (A League of Ordinary Gentlemen) opens with this euphoric victory but truly trains his gaze on the subsequent year, when elevated expectations, internal bickering, and mounting losses threatened to sabotage the squad's potential for fostering harmony in the hostile region. Throughout, the team's struggles on the pitch generate tension, but the film's most potent conflicts are off the field, whether it be captain Abbas Suan's attempts to live up to his nation-healing responsibility, or the way in which Arab and Jewish fans are drawn to root for their own. The resulting portrait is a cautionary rejoinder to typical sports-movie uplift, elucidating how athletics remain a dangerously precarious foundation upon which to construct lasting peace. (Nick Schager) (Music Hall)

KITES Indian-made and trilingual in Hindi, Spanish and English, Kites is set and was mostly shot in the American Southwest — although in its backlit visual overkill, complete with neon reflected in rain-drenched streets, it more closely resembles some of the most overwrought Hong Kong gangster romances of the late 1980s. Jay (Hrithik Roshan, one of Hindi cinema's most engaging leading men) rolls off a freight train with a gaping bullet wound and a lot of backstory to unload. A con artist, not as amoral as he thinks he is, Jay makes the mistake of falling hard for Natasha (Bárbara Mori), the fiancée of a spoiled, young Sin City prince of crime, setting up an impossibly beautiful lovers-on-the-run scenario that director Anurag Basu shoots like a series of windswept fashion videos. Even with the lights of the Vegas Strip forming a gauzy halo behind his tousled head, Roshan is a master at low-keying his enormous charm and shrugging off his blinding handsomeness. Mori, a Mexican telenovela star, is almost a match for him: She's a dead ringer for Megan Fox but warmer, less calculating in her sexiness. Not even the incoherent mishmash of plot (mostly faux Leone by way of Tarantino and Rodriguez, with periodic car-flipping chase sequences) can entirely dim the appeal of this match-up between a blue-eyed Punjabi and a blue-eyed Mexican of almost equal comeliness. Kites will be released Stateside both in this original 130-minute subtitled version and in a shorter, dubbed "remix" prepared by noted Bollywood aficionado Brett Ratner. You have been warned. (David Chute) (Beverly Center, Culver Plaza, Fallbrook)

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time's story hinges on a dagger that can rewind time, a narrative conceit that doubles as a taunt to those who endure this cacophonous, frivolous adaptation of Ubisoft's Arabian Nights–themed video-game series. Bruckheimered to the hilt with the same rollicking period-piece cheesiness that typified the producer's (and studio Disney's) Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, this Aladdin-indebted summer spectacle charts the efforts of noble prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) to clear his name after he's fingered for his father's assassination, a mission aided by a feisty princess (Clash of the Titans beauty Gemma Arterton) and a magic blade that, fueled by divine sand, gives those who wield it the ability to travel one minute back in time. Though too sweet and amicable a presence to radiate genuine ass-kicking machismo, Gyllenhaal carries out his hero's parkour derring-do with proficiency, but director Mike Newell is ill-suited to steward such sword-and-sandals adventure. Bogged down by more leaden ripped-from-the-headlines allusions than this flippant fable can withstand, most courtesy of a hammy Alfred Molina, it's merely a cash-my-paycheck-dammit film, embodied by a disinterested Sir Ben Kingsley, whose bald head and jet-black goatee position his stodgy scoundrel as a mini-me Ming the Merciless. (Nick Schager) (Citywide)

SEX AND THE CITY 2 Sarah Jessica Parker is now 45 years old, and, frankly, I cannot stomach another moment of the simpering, mincing, hair-tossing, eyelash-batting little-girl shtick she's been pulling ever since L.A. Story. While her BFFs struggle on with work-life challenges (Miranda), child-care dilemmas (Charlotte), and cougar body maintenance (Samantha), Carrie Bradshaw carries the movie's big-ticket question: How do you hang on to your marital bling once the newlywed bliss is over, especially if you don't want children and your husband has turned into a homebody? Why, talk it to death in ever-decreasing circles of inconsequential angst, then head for Abu Dhabi. There await the four Fs — fashion, food, furnishings and fornication — plus scads of cringe-making Middle Eastern stereotypes wrapped in a nominal shout-out to oppressed Arab women, who, guess what, like Versace and suffer from hot flashes just like us. Having raked in $400 million for the first SATC, Michael Patrick King can write his own ticket, which may explain why SATC2 runs a crushing 146 minutes of not very funny gag lines wrapped in episodic miniscenes that generate more embarrassment than sympathy. I get that "dignity be damned" is some kind of feminist mantra for King. But it's one thing to create pop icons as beloved as Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern were in the late 1970s. It's quite another to drag them well into middle age, dress them like mutton passing as lamb, and lumber them with female troubles culled straight from the mommy and single-lady blogs. (Ella Taylor) (Citywide)