Armed only with his mysterious mental connection to the feral minds of studio executives, the Movie Guru reveals just how good or bad this week's new releases will be:

Levity (R)
Manual (Billy Bob Thornton) returns to his old neighborhood after spending the last 22 years in jail for murder, At a community center he meets Pastor Evans (Morgan Freeman) and lost soul Sofia (Kirsten Dunst). Manual tries to come to terms with his past, through a tenuous relationship with Adele (Holly Hunter), the older sister of his victim. Then lo and behold, Adele's son falls into the same cyle that brought Manual down.
Prediction: A parable for redemption with Christ-story underpinnings, Levity has not gotten much good copy.

Pokemon 5 (G)
Ash, Pikachu and the rest of the Pokemon gang try to stop a pair of thieves.
Prediction: More adorable antics from the former trading cards.

The Bread, My Sweet (NR)
Scott Baio (yes, really) is Dominic, a corporate raider who must fire employees of the companies his company takes over. He also owns a bakery shop to provide employment to his two brothers. Over the shop lives an affectionate-but-feisty couple, Massimo and Bella. When Bella falls deadly ill, Dominic tracks down Bella's long-lost daughter, and the two young people contrive a marriage of convenience to make the old lady happy before she dies.
Prediction: Yes, the movie's sweet, probably too sweet, as it tries every trick possible to push your emotional buttons.

2 Fast 2 Furious (PG-13)
Moving from L.A. to Miami, ex-cop Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) gets a shot at redemption. His mission: Take down a drug czar (Cole Hauser), who, just coincidentally (as these things work out in movieland), digs underground racing.
Prediction: If you don't have original top-biller Vin Diesel and original director Rob Cohen, what does ya gots? Lotsa tricked-out dragsters and spiffy special effects, natch.

A Mystery Wrapped

Before he was a ballyhooed screenwriter, Tom Stoppard was a ballyhooed playwright. His works for the stage have been many and great, from the small-but-mighty After Magritte to the large-but-intimate Arcadia as well as the seminal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard has evolved into a writer who is equally at ease in both his left and right brains, parceling out plays that focus both on the artistic and the analytical. Magritte is also a lecture in physics; Arcadia and R&G, a quick course in quantum mechanics. But their braininess doesn't suck out their sense of fun or their keen insight into humanity. A Stoppard play is a feast.

Of late, his movies have been fairly filling as well. Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love took the cinema by storm a few years back, winning hearts both with its quick wit and lush characterizations. But his luck doesn't hold with Enigma (2001, R), his screen adaptation of Robert Harris' novel about British codebreakers during World War II. Here is a subject that should make Stoppard salivate; here he can explore two of his favorite tropes—magical numbers and wide-eyed geniuses. But he never quite manages to get his teeth into it and the resulting film is simply adequate. While Enigma is better than most of the stuff on the video wall, it lacks the sparkle that made Shakespeare or Stoppard's plays so intoxicating.

It's not the fault of the actors, really. Dougray Scott gives it his all as Tom Jericho, a mathematics whiz driven mad by a beautiful blonde. His Jericho is pale and weary, pulled back into the code-breaking game to take one last shot at the German's enigma machine, a fiendishly simple device that encrypts text messages into patternless letter groups. He, of course, uncovers a mystery, one that involves the woman who broke his heart and her roommate, chummily played by Titanic's Kate Winslet.

Film fans would be better served if they scrounged up Winslet's Hideous Kinky(1998, R), a coming-of-age drama set in 1960s Morocco. Winslet is charming in this warm, honest portrayal of a free-spirited mom who is looking for herself during the end of this turbulent, rootless decade. Kinky is as magical as really good Stoppard, which is saying a lot indeed.

—Adrienne Martini

June 5, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 23
© 2000 Metro Pulse