If you smoke dope too often and for too long, you'll wind up acting like one-a dope, that is. The comedy Smiley Face is a day in the discombobulated life of Jane, a twentysomething pothead and wannabe actress who can't face the morning, or the afternoon and evening, without sucking on her bong. Her already precarious grip on everyday reality slips away entirely when she accidentally gobbles down a half-dozen pot-laced cupcakes in her refrigerator. Jane panics, not because the buzz inside her brain has grown louder than ever, but because . . .

Satire always needs a target, and the funniest satires usually have several. Hamlet 2 shoots widely but aims mostly at one social problem and one personality type.

For the fourth in a series of films made outside of his beloved New York, Woody Allen moves from Great Britain to sunnier climes. Set in Spain, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is an ocean away from his mature Manhattan comedies geographically, but emotionally it might as well be just across the Hudson. A rueful examination of love, desire and the impossibility of achieving happiness, VCB unfolds in a dreamy Europe where everyone is a poet or a thinker and great conversations spark to life around copious glasses of wine even in the humblest cafs.

Asia has become fertile ground for horror films. A steady parade of such movies from the Far East have been poached by Hollywood, gutted of their subtlety in clumsy adaptations and pushed into multiplexes, mostly to little acclaim. Remade from a recent South Korean film, Mirrors is the latest among the mediocre-bad attempts to transpose an Asian supernatural sensibility into an American popcorn flick. Kiefer Sutherland stars as Ben, a troubled ex-NYPD detective relieved of duty following a fatal shooting. Popping prescription medication to fight his alcoholic

It's not hard to imagine: Frank Capra, who directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life, would have made Swing Vote had he lived today. He might have made this civics lesson in American politics more concise and a bit sharper, but he would applaud the spirit, the message and the delivery. Swing Vote is a movie dramatizing the hopeful democratic idea that everyone's vote counts. Kevin Costner is no Jimmy Stewart but he's a plausible stand-in for Capra's other favorite actor, Gary Cooper. In Swing Vote, Costner's . . .

A remarkable revelation came to Kyle Buckley in a hotel room in the midst of a comic book convention. "If I'm going to make a stupid decision in my life, I might as well do it at 19," read the thought balloon that popped up in his head. Only five days before starting his sophomore year at Milwaukee School of Engineering, he made the potentially stupid decision to drop out, move to Los Angeles and seek work in movies. A few months later his brother Vincent, a cartoonist, followed him. This week the first film by Buckley Brothers Productions receives its world premiere in Milwaukee. Jake's How-To is a funny comedy by the twentysomething siblings about guys, girls and late adolescence . . .

In a little village in Bangladesh a wedding has been prepared for a couple that has never met. Nazneen's father has arranged her marriage to an older Bengali man living in London. Dressed in bridal finery, Nazneen is placed at the stern of a boat casting off from her birthplace. She looks out from under her veil with forlorn eyes at her unsmiling family watching her recede into the distance. It's a sad parting and the beginning of an uncertain future. Most of Nazneen's story, told in the sterling British production Brick Lane, takes place in a dreary London neighborhood crowded with Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants. Murmurs of English xenophobia against Muslims . . .

Warsaw, Ind., a little almost-all-white town on a flat stretch of Red State nowhere, is one of those fabled meridians of Middle America. The town, and especially its high school, is the setting for a documentary that was the talk of Sundance: American Teen. Directed by Nanette Burstein, whose rsum includes the amusing The Kid Stays in the Picture, American Teen is a polished film with beautiful swatches of cinematography, creative animated segments illustrating the fantasies of the principal actors and a breezy tone and pace. It tells a story of insiders and outsiders in that treacherous. . .

Evelyn Waugh’s meditation on faith and its absence, and the varieties of love and desire, found a new audience in the 1980s through a British television production of Brideshead Revisited. Readers of Waugh’s novel and fans of the 11-part miniseries alike will find some of their favorite bits missing from the new film adaptation. British director Julian Jarrold should be commended, however, for intelligently condensing an emotionally rich story spanning two decades into a two-hour movie. Some of my favorite lines were edited, it’s true, but the main themes and memorable scenes for the most part remain.

Mulder is hiding and Scully is a doctor in a Roman Catholic hospital. When an FBI agent goes missing and the only clues come from the visions of a disgraced Catholic priest, someone in the agency has the good sense to call the old team out of retirement. Scully knows where Mulder lives, and Mulder is the FBI’s only expert in the paranormal, even if they had succeeded in silencing him. That’s the premise of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, a disappointing coda to Chris Carter’s long-running television series. Believe isn’t overly long but sometimes seems that way. It rambles and lacks the tight drama of the show’s best episodes. An interesting idea or two stumble along with the movie as it zigzags down the icy back roads of West Virginia, where strange things are happening in the night.