Keeping Up With the Steins
When your former partner and competitor throws a lavish bar mitzvah for his son, all you can do is try to top him. That's the premise for this movie, in which Jeremy Piven plays a slick Beverly Hills agent. He and his wife (Jami Gertz) vie to outdo his nemesis with an even bigger bash for their son.

"I don't want anybody jumping from a parachute," he says to the caterer. "Jews don't jump." Then he adds: "And Laker Girls are a little off-theme."

Then his long-absent father (Garry Marshall) and Dad's hippie girlfriend (Daryl Hannah) arrive. (Marshall's real-life son Scott directed the film.) While trying to reconnect with his family, Grandpa meets the rabbi (Richard Benjamin) and criticizes his teaching methods. When he begins by saying, "With all due respect ..." the rabbi replies, "Have you ever noticed that when people say that, they really don't respect you?"

That's about as deep as any of this goes. Everybody Loves Raymond costar Doris Roberts is the grandmother, Marshall's long-ago spurned wife, in this plot that heads predictably toward the big day. Some script rewrites would have helped beef up this mildly amusing statement of the obvious.

Return to Rajapur
When people describe a film as "an excellent effort for a first-time director," it's a left-handed compliment. But this picturesque romantic drama is better described as an impressive achievement for any filmmaker.

Calcutta-born New Yorker Nanda Anand has set her screenplay in an ancient city in northern India. This is a lush story about karma, life and death, and the circle of human existence. A young American traveler (Kelli Garner) has come to investigate a mystery in her past. The movie continually flashes back and forth over several decades in this journey of self-discovery.

Lynn Collins and Justin Theroux portray a bickering American couple. She falls in love with a local man they'd just met, and, at the dramatic highpoint, her husband faces a life-or-death situation.

The pacing is deliberate, but the windswept desert and sense of a faraway time and place are effective background characters. For romantics with wanderlust-and a bit of patience-this is an offbeat and rewarding film.

Poseidon
This remake of The Poseidon Adventure is a by-the-book disaster film of the type so popular in the '70s. A "rogue wave," as the captain of a luxury ocean liner calls it, suddenly overwhelms the ship just as midnight on New Year's Eve is striking.

Late in the movie, Kurt Russell informs us that he's the former mayor of New York City, an odd placement of an important fact in this routine screenplay. Phantom of the Opera star Emmy Rossum portrays his daughter, with a fiancé on her arm. Josh Lucas costars as a gambler, adventurer, and conveniently, a former Marine. As the saying goes, there's no such thing as an ex-Marine, so naturally his character ignores the captain's orders to stay put in the now-upside-down ballroom, and he leads a group of passengers up toward the surface.

The group includes Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss as a gay architect whose lover has just dumped him. Also along for dramatic effect are a single mother with her terrified boy in tow. You can guess the rest. Kurt Russell-a consistent movie star for the past 43 years-turns in an entertaining performance, but this adventure is worth your time only if you're feeling nostalgic for an outdated genre. Otherwise, stay on dry land.

Broadway Takes

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
This is the second revival of the stunning play based on the 91-year-old Herman Wouk's 1951 book. It arrived on Broadway in 1954 and starred Henry Fonda and gritty '50s character actors like Lloyd Nolan and John Hodiak. The movie version, also released in 1954, starred José Ferrer in Fonda's role and, in one of his most famous performances, Humphrey Bogart as the paranoid Captain Queeg, commander of a Navy minesweeper in the waning days of World War II.

Friends costar David Schwimmer takes on the Fonda role of a Jewish defense attorney in the court-martial of Queeg's executive officer. The defendant had taken over the U.S.S. Caine during a storm when Queeg did nothing to save the ship from disaster. Issues of loyalty and duty are as relevant today as in 1954.

Zeljko Ivanek is a tad too subdued as the latest Queeg, but it's riveting theater with a top-drawer cast.

The Drowsy Chaperone is a witty spoof of chirpy '20s musicals ingeniously staged with outrageous characters coming to life in the narrator's apartment. It's the most fun on Broadway since Avenue Q.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a bizarre, gory, outrageous Irish comedy not for the faint of heart. But it's undeniably funny.

Faith Healer is a waste of Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones, and Ian McDiarmid in this series of irrelevant, hard-to-endure monologues.

Tarzan is an occasionally interesting musical taken from the Disney animated film. At best, it's for tourists who can't get tickets to The Lion King.