LADY VENGEANCE
R, 112 minutes

Park Chan-Wook is Korea’s most exciting and innovative director, but in America his “Vengeance” trilogy – consisting of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy,” and now “Lady Vengeance” previously titled “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance”) – has earned him scorn from critics that insist his movies are little more than violent exploitation. An earnest philosopher with a gift for making engaging movies, Mr. Park is anything but an empty-headed thrill seeker. However, American critics have sentenced him to movie jail, and it’s unlikely that a movie as lovely, lumpy, and off-kilter as “Lady Vengeance” will bail him out.

Geum-Ja (Lee Young-Ae) gets the rap for her lover’s murder of a little boy and is packed off to prison for 13 years. Upon release, she’s greeted by a gaggle of Christian busybodies who offer her the traditional plate of white tofu, symbolizing cleansing and redemption. This being a Park Chan-Wook movie, Geum-Ja tosses the tofu and strides off to round up her prison buddies to engineer an insanely complicated revenge scheme.

Revenge is just another form of narcissism, however, and self-absorbed Geum-Ja isn’t remotely palatable in the first half of the movie. Finally giving up her private mission, she tries to orchestrate communal retribution against her ex-lover, but the gruesome event winds up feeling petty and small-minded – there’s even an argument over the bill. It’s only when she realizes that all revenge destroys your soul and wastes your life that she goes facedown in the biggest piece of tofu she can find, begging for forgiveness. “Lady Vengeance” is the first of Mr. Park’s movies to include a spiritual dimension, and it marks his transformation from an eye-for-an-eye Old Testament director to a New Testament auteur grappling with redemption.

– Grady Hendrix

CLEAN
R, 111 minutes

The major selling point of Olivier Assayas’s “Clean” is its star, Maggie Cheung. One of Hong Kong’s best actresses, Ms. Cheung appeared in almost 100 movies before marrying Mr. Assayas and shuffling off to Paris. Aside from a few art films, she’s been mostly absent from the screen ever since. While absence makes some celebrities grow large and legendary, Ms. Cheung’s retirement has made her shrink. At her peak, in 1992, she appeared in 11 movies, two of them – “Dragon Inn” and “Center Stage” – classics that established her reputation. These days she’s in one movie every few years – and, mostly, she just looks tired.

This whole movie is nothing if not tired. “Clean” starts promisingly in the world of eternal touring, amid aging rock stars. Ms. Cheung plays the Yoko Ono to Lee Hauser’s John Lennon, blamed by the world for his heroin addiction and sagging career. But the movie stumbles when Lee (James Johnston) overdoses and Emily (Ms. Cheung) goes to jail. She emerges, visits Lee’s dad (Nick Nolte), who has been taking care of their long-abandoned son, and then wobbles off to Paris where she tries to turn her life around – just like all the junkies in a million other movies.

The film is consistently uninteresting, though never actually awful. The movie’s best performance doesn’t come from Ms. Cheung, who has all the intensity of a burntout light bulb, but from Mr. Nolte. Looking like something extremely dead that the cat not only dragged in but had to dig up first, Mr. Nolte is a quiet surprise as a man whose hard life has given him lots of practice at forgiveness. This time it’s not Mr. Nolte who lets the movie down, but the movie that doesn’t live up to his performance.

– G.H.

AKEELAH AND THE BEE
PG, 112 minutes

After raking in cash selling CDs, Starbucks aims to cash in on all that movie money with “Akeelah and the Bee,” its first venture into movie marketing. Let’s hope it’s the last. Hopping on the spelling bee bandwagon a few years too late, “Akeelah” is a focus-grouped, market-tested, branded, packaged, plastic product that arrives on theater screens like a nonfat iced mocha with extra room for milk. Designed by committee, “Akeelah and the Bee” proclaims the death of auteur theory and the rise of “marketeur” theory: movies that reflect the vision and preoccupations of the marketing department.

Akeelah is a young black girl from a failing inner city school who happens to be a spelling prodigy. She overcomes great odds to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and if you think she stands a chance of losing, you’re giving this movie far too much credit. Laurence Fishburne, looking like he’s been pumping iron, plays her spelling coach, uttering Yoda-isms such as “I sense great potential in the child.” Also buff is Angela Bassett as Akeelah’s mother. Ms. Bassett seems to have built up her serious biceps and kicking deltoids by gesticulating wildly with her every line. Akeelah herself is played by Keke Palmer, who has a re laxed on-screen presence but delivers lines like the post office delivers letters: slowly and inefficiently.

There is literally nothing in this movie that hasn’t already appeared, safely and successfully, in dozens of other films. The script could have been generated by screenwriting robots – Akeelah has a dead daddy and Mr. Fishburne has a dead daughter: Will they heal each other?

– G.H.

THE WHORE’S SON
unrated, 86 minutes

Some movies tell you all you need to know in the title. “Snakes on a Plane” is one. “The Whore’s Son,” opening Friday at Quad Cinemas, is another. But this inert fractured-family drama could use a few snakes.

Little Ozren’s mother is a prostitute, and the rest you could write yourself. He is assigned to write a school composition about his parent’s job (a waitress, he’s told), discovers her with a client in the living room, and, some years on, loses his virginity to his mother’s plus-size colleague.

Mom (Chulpan Khamatova) loves him dearly at first, but things eventually go sour. Thanks to scant regard for character motivation or scene progression, we don’t know why. She goes from hugs, kisses, and anxious concern to chilly shrewishness and weekly visits (with a penchant for huge sunglasses and a wig).

The principals in this relationship don’t have much to work with, but Stanislav Lisnic as Ozren still shouldn’t come across as an ungainly, robotic man-child. “No!” he says during his initiation at the brothel, “I don’t want to make a whore’s son like me.” He straightens up, looks serious, and, as with so many other scenes, that is the end of that.

Ozren also has an Uncle Ante (Miki Manojlovic) and Aunt Ljiljana (Ina Gogalova) who look after him. This makeshift family, Croatian refugees from the Bosnian conflict, sticks together – a mixed blessing for us. Mr. Manojlovic, a Walter Matthau for the art-house set, is a Slav favorite and gets all the good lines, but Ms. Gogalova’s character is a tiresome schoolmarmish widow. A subplot about Ozren’s crush at school, a shell-shocked Croatian girl, is mercifully undeveloped.

– Nicolas Rapold