BREAKING NEWS
unrated, 90 minutes

Here’s a reliable formula: the greater the number of writers working on a movie, the worse that movie is. So audiences can be forgiven for feeling their hearts sink during the credits of “Breaking News” when they see that it was written by “The Milkyway Creative Team.” For those who know Milkyway, however, nothing could be better.

Hong Kong’s Johnnie To is one of the world’s great directors. Since 1996, his production company, Milkyway Image, has brought together a crack crew of writers, cinematographers, and actors to crank out a winning streak of 24 amazing films. “Breaking News” is minor league Milkyway, but Milkyway’s B-game is better than most filmmakers’ best efforts.

A satire wrapped in an action flick, the movie traps a gang of smash-and-grab bandits in a labyrinthine apartment building after a shootout with the obligatory hothead cop, Cheung (Nick Cheung). Taking refuge and hostages in an occupied apartment, the bandits are soon joined by two hitmen who had the bad luck to be holed up in the same building. The ensuing standoff with the cops becomes a media spectacle – there are few places on earth with a more carnivorous local press than Hong Kong – with each side trying to spin the press in their favor.

The film’s biggest liabilities are the two good guys: Mr. Cheung and Kelly Chen as his supervising officer. Mr. Cheung confuses grumpiness with iron resolve, and Ms. Chen’s idea of acting is to knit her brow. But the Milkyway Creative Team is on hand. The flick uses split screens the way Brian De Palma used to, and opens with a single, virtuoso, eightminute tracking shot that sees a sleepy city street erupt into a running gun battle as an undercover operation goes bad.

ROVING MARS
G, 40 minutes

“Roving Mars,” the new 40-minute about the rover robots NASA sent to Mars is an awe-inspiring spectacle. How could it be otherwise? Scored in high church by Philip Glass and shot on IMAX, the picture is more than 70 feet by 50 feet large, bigger than the human eye can suck in. As the camera dives down dry Martian canals and swoops across the endless Martian desert, you may actually experience motion sickness while your ears ring with Mr. Glass’s propulsive symphonic blasts.

“Roving Mars” is brought to us by George Butler, director of “Pumping Iron II: The Women,” and it is mostly a reverential grovel at the altar of Hard Work. It swoons over the folks at NASA as they build the two Mars rovers, which are pretty nifty engineering feats. There’s some nail-biting when it looks like the launch window will pass, and there’s more nail-biting when it looks like the rovers didn’t survive their landing. They did, and when you finally see the first pictures of Mars, the very fact of their existence is thrilling, even though Mars itself is something of a letdown – it looks like an enormous, unpaved parking lot.

Although the entire movie is NASA-approved and sourced from actual photos of Mars, most of what you see on-screen is extremely convincing, computer generated footage of the rovers going about their work. It may be a bit of a bummer, but the footage still looks fantastic. It’s like the Pink Floyd laser light show at the planetarium, only for sober pre-teens.

BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE 2
PG-13, 99 minutes

What kind of degraded and fallen world do we live in where Martin Lawrence makes movies?

For those who find nothing funnier than the mere existence of fat black women, there is “Big Momma’s House 2.” For the rest of us, there is only the continuing enigma of Mr. Lawrence’s career. His films regularly underperform at the box office, and the last tolerable movie he was in was 1995’s “Bad Boys.” Before that there was the original “House Party,” a bit part in “Do the Right Thing,” and then nothing but pain and suffering on the big screen.

In place of a plot, “Big Momma’s House 2” has plot points that the actors trudge through robotically. Something needs to be discovered, and only Martin dressed in drag as a middle-aged black mammy (Big Momma) can discover it. She does, and everyone learns valuable lessons about the importance of family.

Big Momma herself is a lousy creation, a rip-off of Eddie Murphy’s fascination with full body makeup that started back in his “Saturday Night Live” days that was perfected in “The Nutty Professor.” Mr. Lawrence’s Big Momma is not only an offensive racial stereotype, she looks like a lumpy ball of uncooked dough.

Besides putting on the drag, Mr. Lawrence does nothing except speak in a falsetto; the laughs are supposed to come at the mere sight of Big Momma’s cellulite-encrusted thighs and her enormous sagging breasts. And though Mr. Lawrence manages to set the performance bar remarkably low, the rest of the cast still can’t get that high.