Jet Li

Capsules by Michael Sragow and Chris Kaltenbach. Full reviews at baltimoresun.com/movies. All the Kings Men, -- stars Sean Penn as Willie Stark, a veiled portrait of Louisiana Gov. Huey Long. The movie fails to capture Stark's electric connection with the voters, or how a democratic mass movement can turn fascistic; it also suffers from flat pacing, a pseudo-literary tone and a total waste of a promising cast. (M.S.) PG-13 128 minutes C- The Departed -- illuminates the tangled roots of urban corruption when a Boston Irish kingpin (Jack Nicholson)

Jason Statham's acting career began on the sidewalks of Argyle Street in London. Sitting on a milk crate with a suitcase of bogus jewelry, the young street hustler said whatever it took to persuade tourists to buy gold chains that would turn green by the time they flew home. "That was street theater. It was called fly pitching. You work with a team - some people in the crowd, some guys who stand lookout for the police. Those were the most lucrative days of my youth," Statham says. Later, Statham would be introduced to a young filmmaker named Guy Ritchie who was looking to pepper the cast of his new crime film with nonactors whose faces evoked London's seedier pubs.

Three yetis, a yak and a couple of yuks. That's all you get in the way of original entertainment in The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, an extravagant and frenetic third entry in the franchise about adventurer Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his continuing fights with the embalmed yet undead. It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace. It does have a sense of the ridiculous (one character declares "You guys are like mummy magnets!"

You'd think the first reason to remake The Three Musketeers would be to introduce a dashing new D'Artagnan - an actor-athlete on the level of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. or Gene Kelly, who brought humor and panache to stunts and swordplay. Unfortunately, aside from his swashbuckling duds, Justin Chambers as D'Artagnan in The Musketeer still appears to be the cool American WASP he played in Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights. There's no electricity in his body and no joy in his face - that is, when you can see his face.

1. A Prairie Home Companion. Is it an accident that Robert Altman's most optimistic film was also his last? Did the man know something? Probably not - except, that is, for the accumulated wisdom of a half-century of filmmaking, all poured with a smile and a wink into this sweetly elegiac look at how time passes and fads come and go, but creativity and passion always win out. 2. The Departed. After three decades as America's most gifted and (outside of, perhaps, Altman) most influential director, will Martin Scorsese finally get the Oscar recognition he deserves?

If you're looking for a way to add some guilt and stress to your life, here's a suggestion: Take your 85-year-old mother to a movie that's totally inappropriate for her. This is what I did on a recent visit to my mom's, when she decided we needed to get out of the house. "Let's go to a movie," she said. "You pick which one." Well, there wasn't much playing at the movie theater in the small town where she lives. There was a gross-out (Jackass Number Two) and a martial-arts (Jet Li's Fearless)