Mane attraction You had fun in the sun, but your hair didn’t love it quite so much. What to do for your dry and lustreless locks? NYC mane maestros Bumble and Bumble use tropical butters to pump up their newest hair hydrator, Creme de Coco Masque ($32.25). And the coconut scent takes you back to the beach—well, almost. The experts at BeautyMark are keeners for the company’s latest styling spray, Spray de Mode ($32.75), too.

Mane attraction You had fun in the sun, but your hair didn’t love it quite so much. What to do for your dry and lustreless locks? NYC mane maestros Bumble and Bumble use tropical butters to pump up their newest hair hydrator, Creme de Coco Masque ($32.25). And the coconut scent takes you back to the beach—well, almost. The experts at BeautyMark are keeners for the company’s latest styling spray, Spray de Mode ($32.75), too.

Natsuo Kirino’s devilish suspense novel about five Japanese antiheroes and their mother trouble is not a murder mystery whodunit but a disturbing whydunit.

This comedy falls so flat so fast, the experience feels like a forehead tap from Javier Bardem’s cow killer.

If there’s one thing Anna Faris proves in The House Bunny, it’s that you can star in a film that’s got all the substance of a push-up bra and still demonstrate the blissfully inspired comedy chops of Lucille Ball crossed with Judy Holliday.

Starring Melissa Leo and Misty Upham. Rated PG. Opens Friday, August 22, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

One of the truly impressive things about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and its predecessor, the first Pants, is just how well four teenage girls can share a pair of Bedazzled blue jeans.

What Was Lost

Send in the bad clown: Heath Ledger is a psychotic revelation as Batman’s nightmare nemesis in the Dark Knight, with his sliced face and enough knives to supply a steakhouse chain.

It must have been fun coming up with Hancock’s titular tuqued crusader. The drunken, foul-mouthed antisuperhero (played by a charismatic Will Smith, with nary a flash of Hollywood smile) seems to spend much time passed out at L.A. bus stops.

We’ve finally hit the season when we can say “Life’s a beach” and actually mean it. And while whacking volleyballs around is all very well, what’s more fantastically, lazily beachy than planting your face in a really good book?

Atmospheric Disturbances

The Writing Class

Starring Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, and Ben Kingsley. Rated 14A.

All the Sad Young Literary Men

Sharon Calahan, photography director of Pixar's Oscar-winning Ratatouille, explains how she used the power of darkness to capture the cobblestones and ratty places and bring to life a vision of Paris not often seen in animation.

Starring Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, and Ian McShane. Rated G.

Viva la french sun savvy

Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon. Rated 18A.

Bernie Pollack and Mary Zophres, the crack costume designers on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, had little time to get hold of the right fedoras and icy grey jodhpurs for their stars.

Before filming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the man playing Indiana Jones needed a refresher course on his character's iconic weapon, and Anthony De Longis was able to crack the whip.

Starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, and Susan Sarandon. Rated PG.

Starring Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, and Mykelti Williamson. Rated 18A.

Dervishes

Starring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Steve Martin. Rated PG.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a new classic in the raunchy-sweet, slapstick-satire comedy genre, proves that you can’t underestimate the comic-shock value of a sudden inappropriate appearance by a certain dangling male body part.

Starring Abigail Breslin, Jodie Foster, and Gerard Butler. Rated G.

By Siri Hustvedt. Henry Holt, 306 pp, $28, hardcover

Starring Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, and Channing Tatum. Rated 14A.

This spring just might be extraordinary when it comes to shoes and the women who love them. You see, now is the season of the platform-shoe fabulous.

Butter up our nails, pleaseIt’s not just that butter London sounds so adorable, nor that its products have witty names like Prince’s Plums, Tea and Toast, and Frilly Knickers, nor even that, if you look closely, you’ll see that the crown-wearing illustrated crow on the Web site (www.butterlondon.com/) nods its head and blinks its little eye.

Maybe it’s a good thing that The Rain Before It Falls is relatively short as novels go, because once you begin reading it all sense of time will disappear and you’ll become useless regarding all the other things you’re supposed to be doing.

Asses are kicked, formulaic lessons are learned, characters are underactualized, and it all feels more like a drill bit to the noggin than the funnybone.

By Lauren Groff. Hyperion, 384 pp, $27.95, hardcover

Starring Djimon Hounsou, Sean Faris, and Cam Gigandet. Rated 14A.

Starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and Eric Bana. Rated 14A.

By Peter Carey. Random House, 288 pp, $32, hardcover

By Susanna Sonnenberg. Scribner, 273 pp, $28, hardcover

Starring Paul Rudd, Eva Longoria Parker, and Jason Biggs. Rated PG. Opens Friday, February 1, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

A documentary by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. Rated G. Now playing at the IMAX Theatre at Canada Place

By Esther Freud. HarperCollins, 279 pp, $17.50, softcover

Starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, and Edward Burns. Rated PG. Opens Friday, January 18, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters trounces the Jim Crow south, but how much more interesting it would have been if the white villains had been more than straw men

Through Conversations With Woody Allen, Eric Lax reveals how hard-working the nebbish director really is

If you're not familiar with Philip Pullman's fantasy novel, the beginning might confuse you. Don't let it, since the movie is a grand adventure. Just follow the heroine

Disney sends up Disney in the tune-packed Enchanted, complete with Central Park set piece

We like to think of ourselves as either shower people or bath people. And, since we're all a tad busy these days, the shower people are almost certainly multiplying like cellphones. But what we vertical soakers should know is that things are heating up for the bath people. Bath tubs , you see, have gone positively romantic of late and, frankly, sexy.

Finally, a kids' movie that's gentle and appealing and, you know, for kids

If, in the November gloom, you’re hankering for a romantic-comedy-drama—particularly one set in Manhattan, the city seemingly built to showcase the genre—director-cowriter Fay Ann Lee has fashioned a sweet, if simple, Cinderella story in Falling for Grace. This time, Cinderella is a Chinese-American Wall Street investment banker who has grown up in New York’s Chinatown with parents who don’t speak English. Prince Charming is a white-boy lawyer and only son in an upper-crusty Upper East Side family. Instead of that lost slipper, there’s a mix-up involving a dress from a Fifth Avenue boutique

Though Lions isn’t fond of dumb leaders, it’s not quite an antiwar film. Tom Cruise’s battle-minded senator earns points for pursuing his convictions just as Meryl Streep’s liberal journalist does for asking hard questions. Call it a passionate anti-apathy film