Harry's plan to kill his wife is straight out of the '40s -- the old switcheroo involving some poisonous powder. Of course, it is 1949 and Harry (Chris Cooper) says he has his wife's best interests at heart.

He's fallen, hard, for a young woman named Kay (Rachel McAdams, with upswept platinum blond hair) and he doesn't want his wife, Pat (Patricia Clarkson), to suffer when he leaves her. Makes perfect sense to him in this adaptation of the novel "Five Roundabouts to Heaven" by John Bingham, a one-time British intelligence officer and crime and mystery novelist.

"Married Life," a comedy of manners, marriage and murderous intent from director Ira Sachs, is narrated by Harry's childhood pal, playboy Richard (Pierce Brosnan).

Just when you think you know where this story is headed, it takes another bend in the road. And another and another, and one more for good measure, never rumbling off the road but gently drifting onto the shoulder.

Brosnan is back in fighting trim after a walk on the wild side in "Matador," and his voiceover provides a wry, light touch to the fable, a calming counterpoint to the scheming about crime and courtship.

Cooper's Harry looks old enough to be Kay's daddy, but he exudes sincerity, even as he pursues his lethal loop of logic, and Clarkson has yet to meet a role she could not master. McAdams' Kay is a mixture of accidental temptress and innocent, a woman old enough to be a widow and yet young enough to look as if she shouldn't have that cigarette and whiskey-and-soda in her hands.

"Married Life," which has a sheen of glamour thanks to such touches as homes invariably decorated with vases of fresh lilies, proves a mild pleasure in the end. Opening today at the Manor theater, it gently rakes over the secrets and soil (in every sense of that word) of civil unions in civilized fashion.

(Barbara Vancheri, PG movie editor)

PG-13 for some thematic elements and a scene of sexuality.

The title may ring a bell with you. It's a film that had audiences laughing and squirming simultaneously last year at Sundance, where it earned an acting prize for its fresh-faced, fearless star, Jess Weixler.

There's really no polite way to phrase this, so we're just going to throw it out there: It's about a teenage girl who discovers that her vagina has teeth. Yes, she is a living example of the vagina dentata myth, a concept that actor Mitchell Lichtenstein explores in writing and directing his feature debut.

Lichtenstein's movie, opening today at the Harris Theater, is a darkly funny homage to 1950s sci-fi flicks, but it's also a female revenge tale.

It's an interesting mix that goes haywire toward the end, when Lichtenstein seems intent on one-upping the gross-out factor he'd established early on. You do see severed, um, parts.

(Christy Lemire, Associated Press)

R for disturbing sequences involving sexuality and violence, language and some drug use.

The cast is talented, the performances solid and it looks good. But "Sleepwalking" is borderline dreadful, a somber and ponderous family psychodrama that wastes some terrific performers on what often looks like (but isn't meant to be) a parody of self-serious American independent moviemaking.

Joleen (Charlize Theron) and her daughter, Tara (AnnaSophia Robb), have been left homeless by a police raid on the house they were sharing with Joleen's drug-dealing boyfriend.

A sleep-around gal who can't think much further than her next drink or "date," Joleen has no option but to move in with her younger brother, James (Nick Stahl), a sweet but unassertive guy who works on a highway construction crew.

Before long Joleen, who wants to be a good mother but seems congenitally incapable of behaving like one, has disappeared in the dead of night, leaving a note that she'll be back in a month or so after she gets her act together.

James struggles to be a responsible adult, but the dual responsibilities of parenting and road-building are too much. He loses his job, and the social workers put Tara in a group home. James is reduced to sleeping in the basement of a good ol' boy co-worker (Woody Harrelson).

All he can think to do is snatch his niece from the clutches of the juvenile authorities and drive to the wind-swept ranch where he and Joleen grew up. There he and Tara are confronted by the father figure from hell (Dennis Hopper), who rules the ranch like an Old Testament prophet with a sadistic bent.

Then things turn really ugly.

By virtue of its cast and the general competence of its technical filmmaking, "Sleepwalking" suggests that its actually has something on its mind. But Zac Stanford's screenplay is maddeningly unfocused and dishes bad vibes to no particular end. And first-time director William Maher can't impose a vision or a reason on the material.

The performances are fine. Juan Ruiz Anchia's cinematography nicely captures the bleak, windswept barrenness of the small-town American West (it was filmed in Canada). But, like its title, this film is portentous and pretentious, claiming a significance it never earns.

(Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star)

R for language and a scene of violence.

Not screened for critics is this spoof of superheroes such as Spider-Man, Batman, the X-Men and Fantastic Four. It stars Drake Bell as Rick Riker, also known as Dragonfly, and Sara Paxton as the blond bombshell who lives next door. The cast also includes Leslie Nielsen, Tracy Morgan, Regina Hall and Pamela Anderson.

PG-13 for crude and sexual content, comic violence, drug references and language.