Righteous Kill: It could have been a dream match-up - Robert De Niro and Al Pacino strapping on the gloves and going 15 rounds - but neither of them flexes any new muscles in Jon Avnet's thriller about a pair of New York City detectives who are willing to bend a few rules in order to see justice served. The movie never decides whether it wants to be gritty or stylized, but the sense of rhythm the two Oscar winners bring to even the most banal line has a certain fascination.
The Wackness: Set in 1994, Jonathan Levine's coming-of-age story features Josh Peck as Luke, a lonely, depressed, dope-dealing kid on Manhattan's Upper East Side who'd like to get laid before starting college in the fall but who can't quite lift himself out of the funk he's been in throughout high school. Luke's way too good-looking to convince us he's in desperate need of deflowering, but the movie has a real lived-in feeling, and the relationship between Luke and his dope-fiend psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley) is one of the great odd-couple pairings, each of them the other's client.
