Amy Smart

Scott Mechlowicz plays Dan (which, sure; if an actor is playing you, you definitely want it to be the guy who is a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, only 20 years younger), a hotshot gymnast at Berkeley who is unhappy, despite being a star athlete with great grades and an endless stream of eager co-eds. One middle-of-the-night, Dan happens upon a full-service gas station manned by the gruff-voiced, mysterious Socrates (Nick Nolte), a man who speaks only in platitudes and riddles and seems capable of the impossible.

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He'd be right. If you're a 15-year old boy.

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The last place I'd expect to see a Shakespearean adaptation of Macbeth to occur would be in a backwater town in the middle of Pennsylvania circa 1972. But it provides a dark and menacing backdrop to this loose - and do I mean loose - adaptation of Shakespeare's ever-popular tragedy of a incompetent husband and power-hungry wife weaving murderously toward power and riches.

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In Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's ingeniously idiosyncratic showbiz semi-farce "Adaptation" there is a running gag about a typically bogus Hollywood-thriller screenplay called "The 3," in which a preposterous, nonsensical twist ending reveals the three main characters to be different personalities in a schizophrenic's mind.

In this week's "The Butterfly Effect," a superficially chilling high-concept horror movie full of paradox-packed time-loop contortions, the entire plot depends on just such cursory twists, none of which stand up to much intellectual scrutiny.

Stoner-comedy staple Ashton Kutcher -- who, like a young Keanu Reeves, is hard to take seriously in any non-stoner role -- stars as Evan Treborn, a double-psychology major (snicker, snicker) working on an memory assimilation thesis inspired by blackouts he suffered as a child during several traumatic events.

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After a generation on hiatus, the crazy, ensemble-cast chase comedy is back with an MTV vengeance in "Rat Race," a cornball marathon between a dozen second-tier stars vying for a $2 million booty.

The gimmick: To entertain his high-rolling clientele, a Las Vegas hotelier -- played by John Cleese with a slightly insane, toothy-dentured grin -- recruits an oddball assortment of zealous casino tourists to dash across the desert to New Mexico in search of a bus station locker where the loot has been stashed. The runners think it's all a zany promotion for Cleese's resort, but in the penthouse billionaires from all over the world are placing high-stakes bets on who will get there first, just for rich-guy kicks.

The players: Jon Lovitz is an chintzy, unemployed soccer dad who red-lines his minivan while dragging his family along, on the pretense of a job offer so he doesn't get chewed out for ruining their vacation. He catches hell anyway when the car breaks down outside a "white power" roadside attraction and they steal Hitler's limo to complete the pilgrimage.

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