THE LADYKILLERS

Just about every Coen brothers comedy is more enjoyable on a second or third (or fourth or fifth) viewing than it is on a first; once you adjust to Joel's and Ethan's Byzantine plotting, affected wordplay, and in-your-face staging - culminating in a style that can make their works seem, initially, show-offy and too quirky by half - the brothers' filmmaking exuberance eventually wears down your resistance, and their scripts feature some of the funniest non sequiturs you'll ever hear. (Nearly every movie fan I know can recite reams of dialogue from Raising Arizona and Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?.) The Ladykillers, the Coens' adaptation of a 1955 Alec Guinness comedy, is mostly on the hit side of hit-or-miss, and I'm guessing that it, too, will eventually become a beloved treasure trove of quotable quotes, mostly because, on a first go-around, it takes diligence to decipher exactly what Tom Hanks is saying in it.

OPEN RANGE

What will it take for Kevin Costner to give a performance again? His new movie, the western Open Range, which he also directed, has a lot going for it - beautiful camerawork, impressive editing, a strong, simple storyline, a marvelously cantankerous Robert Duvall - yet smack at the center is sweet, dear, painfully inadequate Kevin Costner, looking and sounding so uninvolved with his surroundings and his fellow actors that he weakens his entire film. (It took great restraint to laugh at him only once, at his hysterically unmotivated reading of the cowpoke classic "Let's rustle up some grub.") Some will argue that Costner is actually deeply in character, playing an uncivilized man for whom conversation and companionship offer little comfort, but look at him onscreen: His Zen blankness is indistinguishable from a coma, and his "concentration" resembles nothing so much as a somnambulist struggling to stay awake. As usual, Costner is fine with rare moments of fringe comedy - reminding us why we once liked him in movies like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams and Tin Cup - but he's positively deadly in Open Range, and not because of his character's prowess with a gun.

2 FAST 2 FURIOUS

How did this happen? How, in a summer chockablock with megahit wannabes of all sorts, did the major studios agree to get out of Universal's way and allow 2 Fast 2 Furious to be the only new release of the June 6 weekend? Are the powers-that-be at Universal holding compromising photos involving the rival studio heads? Are they holding their pets hostage? Why, for the love of God, are Universal's competitors letting this terrible movie become a hit? Granted, the opening five minutes are fun, and there's a squirmy torture scene involving a rat attempting to burrow through a man's stomach.

THE RECRUIT

In Roger Donaldson's The Recruit, Colin Farrell plays M.I.T. graduate James Clayton, whose astonishing computer prowess catches the attention of C.I.A. agent Walter Burke (Al Pacino). Burke enlists Clayton to join the organization, bringing the young man to a top-secret, governmental compound nicknamed The Farm, where Clayton will train as a C.I.A. operative. While at The Farm - a hall-of-mirrors environment where, we're told ad nauseum, "nothing is what it seems" - Clayton falls for fellow recruit Layla (Bridget Moynahan), who, Burke later reveals, is secretly a mole, attempting to sabotage the C.I.A. from within; Clayton's assignment is to catch her in the act. Will Clayton's love for Layla threaten his allegiance to the C.I.A.? Does Layla even have a secret agenda? Is Burke really who we think he is? Is anything what it seems?