Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.’ Comedy about a TV star who heads South for a rowdy family reunion. With Martin Lawrence, Mike Epps, Mo’Nique. Director: Malcolm D. Lee (1:54). PG-13: Crude and sexual humor, language, drug references. At area theaters.

Having gotten all the sweetness out of his system with the 2005 sleeper “Roll Bounce,” Malcolm D. Lee caters to a wider audience in his raucous reunion comedy “Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.” He’ll probably find the success he’s looking for. Spiking sentimental family values with crude hilarity isn’t the recipe for an award winner, but it will feed crowds hungry for a good time.

Martin Lawrence is Roscoe, a Jerry Springer-style talk-show host with the seemingly perfect L.A. life: fame, fortune and a gorgeous fiancée named Bianca (Joy Bryant).

A recent winner of “Survivor,” Bianca sees life as one big competition - which is fine, since Roscoe does, too. This attitude brings him success, but it doesn’t leave much time for family. Still, at the urging of his son Jamaal (Damani Roberts), he reluctantly agrees to attend a 50th anniversary celebration for his parents (James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery) back home.

Of course, things don’t go quite as planned once Roscoe arrives in rural Georgia. Though he’s hoping for a hero’s welcome, nobody much cares that he’s a big star. In fact, everyone seems far more impressed by Clyde (Cedric the Entertainer), Roscoe’s car-dealer cousin and longtime nemesis. Making matters worse, Clyde is now dating Lucinda (Nicole Ari Parker), Roscoe’s childhood crush. As his brother (Michael Clarke Duncan), sister (Mo’Nique) and cousin Reggie (Mike Epps) point out, Roscoe needs to decide where his home really is.

In case that sounds a little too sugary, keep in mind that Lawrence’s co-stars are more than ready to provide salty humor while creating a loose, almost improvised feel.

Although Lee relies on too many lame gross-out jokes, this cast does know how to have fun - which may come as welcome relief to audiences desperate for laughs during a cold month at the movies.

Fool’s Gold: Romantic comedy. Starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. Directed by Andy Tennant. 

The funniest thing in “Fool’s Gold” wasn’t intended to be funny. It comes a third of the way in, and it’s the scene in which Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson tell about the shipwreck of a treasure-bearing Spanish vessel hundreds of years ago. This is the scene in which they, more or less, give you the story - the story that’s supposed to fascinate and enthrall you. But the story they tell is so intricate, so convoluted and so full of various character names that it becomes impossible to follow.

The funny part is that, at a certain point, they look as if they have no idea what they’re saying, too. And Donald Sutherland, who plays the rich man who might bankroll their expedition, looks as if he can’t follow it, either. They all have that funny look you’ve seen before, a look similar to the one actors get when they’re playing scientific geniuses and have to discuss their discoveries: Their smiles are fixed, the eyes are frozen and they’re white-knuckling it through the close-ups. They’re bluffing, and they’re miserable about it.

But then why should they have it any easier than the audience? “Fool’s Gold” is a romantic comedy and an adventure story, but in this case that just means it bombs in two distinct ways. It presents us with a photogenic but estranged couple and invites us to want them to get back together. And it shows the two of them collaborating in the search for ancient treasure. But from the opening credits to the unsatisfying finish, it remains a matter of profound indifference whether these people ever find love or wealth. Good for them if they do, but it would be no more pleasing than reading about strangers winning the lottery.

McConaughey and Hudson previously teamed in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” which had a funny setup and gave them a chance to work their charms. McConaughey is a charismatic actor, but in “Fool’s Gold” he plays a total washout, with big plans and a line of patter, but nothing much going for him. Essentially, he’s the comic character, but he’s much better at reacting than being zany, while Hudson spends most of the movie looking worried, when she’s potentially the more bubbly and skilled comic personality.

When a movie is this bad (and it is - this one seems an hour longer than its actual running time), the way to make it bearable is to find something, anything, interesting happening on screen. I found it in watching Hudson’s use of herself - of her eyes and her mouth as instruments of comic timing and information. As she gets older, she’s still only 28, Hudson gets more generic looking, losing the radiance of extreme youth and becoming pretty in a nondescript sort of way. But then a lot of comedian faces are nondescript in repose. The important thing is that Hudson’s confidence remains and her comic facility is improving, and if somebody would ever write her a decent script, she might actually make a good movie.

For McConaughey, he is too handsome to hide it, so it’s best when he plays someone who’s about more than his looks. But “Fool’s Gold” presents him in a beefcake-goofball role, in which he goes through most of the movie with his shirt off. He looks great, but in the end, the role is no more flattering to him than a bimbo role would be for Scarlett Johansson or Katherine Heigl. By playing up the most obvious aspect of his allure, the movie diminishes him.

It diminishes everybody. Even Donald Sutherland looks dazed and awkward, in the sentimental role of a lonely multimillionaire. The movie moves back and forth from light farce to disturbing violence, introducing a gangsta rapper character - played by 50 Cent look-alike Kevin Hart - who goes through the movie trying to kill the McConaughey character. After about an hour, I began to see his point.

There Will Be Blood is an old-fashioned beast of a film. A towering yarn about crude oil and God set in Texas at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a biblical parable about America’s failure to square religion and greed. But most of all it is a marvellously entertaining soap: a sort Dickens does Dallas, without the sex or swimming pools.

The year is 1898. Women have yet to be invented. And we are trapped at the bottom of a gloomy mine shaft with a familiar-looking loony who has a box of matches and a homemade stick of dynamite. This lonely prospector is Daniel Day-Lewis. He digs holes in the bleached wilderness, hoping to blast his way to a bottle of whisky if he can scrape enough silver from the rubble.

The day he accidentally hits oil is the beginning of a stormy, gripping drama about how fortune turns a hero into a monster. After bitter years of nothing, a starving ambition is uncorked in Daniel Plainview’s soul. Day-Lewis will win his second Oscar for this role. He takes possession of the film like some demonic force of nature. The rake-thin, hard-as-nails prospector shrewdly uses his first gusher to finance an empire.

By 1911 he is a fully-fledged business tycoon, mopping up oil-rich land from dirt-poor pilgrim farmers with neither the tools nor the nous to dig their own fortunes. It’s a masterclass in how the West was truly sold. Plainview wears his surname like a moral guarantee. He makes his pitches in church halls. He sells the dream of prosperity in the most benighted armpits of Texas. And he uses his 11-year-old son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), like a prop to underline his credentials as a father and respectable widower.

The poison is as carefully hidden as his past. Day-Lewis’s entrepreneur sounds as modest and straight as Abe Lincoln. The sonorous John Huston drawl sucks the fear out of gloomy rooms. Wary farmers are disarmed by his simple words and no-nonsense charm. His ghastly ambition becomes apparent only when he clashes spectacularly with a young, evangelical minister called Eli Sunday. Eli’s tiny parish sits on top of the biggest untapped reservoir in America. Sure enough, oil seeps to the surface when Plainview sticks a finger in the dust. He tastes it like wine. The self-made tycoon and the self-appointed scourge of God are acutely aware that this much oil can transfigure their less-than-divine ambitions.

The deal these two ego-maniacs eventually strike is duly blighted by horrific accidents and ugly betrayals. What makes Paul Thomas Anderson’s film such a magnificent watch is the quality of the hypocrisy. Paul Dano’s fire-and-brimstone preacher speaks the chilly language of a cult leader. His youth makes him infinitely spooky. Every week he exorcises the Devil from a hapless member of his terrified flock. The power gives him almost sexual pleasure, and a warped idea of his self-importance.

He is a marvellous foil for Day-Lewis’s driven oil man. But not remotely in the same league. Plainview doesn’t do redemption. It doesn’t seem to matter how many holes are drilled into his conscience, he fails to spurt an ounce of regret. His contempt for human weakness has no limits. His son ceases to mean anything when he suddenly loses his hearing. The emotional ties are sliced with breathtaking cruelty. Whisky blunts whatever is left.

There is something bleak and unexpectedly moving about this old-school anti-hero. The skill with which Day-Lewis builds his performance around Plainview’s frontier tics and mannerisms is a genuine, if slightly Spartan, pleasure. The tragic obsession with oil and God is still very much with us.

12A, 158 mins

John Rambo is a man of consistency. When Sylvester Stallone released Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985 there were some who felt that it has a slight right-wing bent. We don’t like to look for hidden meanings in a film where a man takes out a helicopter with a bow-and-arrow, but, hey, those yamheads on talk radio have to come up with something. Now it’s 2008 and the Rambo with no number, set in the jungles of Myanmar, is said to be inspiring students in that country to rebel against the socialist dictatorship that has ruled the country under a military junta for years.

Perhaps they just want to have Myanmar change its name back to Burma (or, at the very least, Burma: First Blood Part II) but Reuters announced this weekend that police in Myanmar are cracking down hard on anyone selling a DVD of Rambo. According to the report “people are going crazy with the quote ‘Live for nothing, die for something’” and are using it as a rallying cry for the growing democracy movement. See - we aren’t the only ones who are moved by Sly’s words!

In a statement released in Paris (Paris? What’s Rambo doing with the French?!?) Sylvester Stallone was quoted by the Associated Press as saying “Students have now used this film as a rallying point and are using the quote, thinking maybe the American military will intervene and save them.” UGO previously reported that Sly picked Myanmar as the setting for his latest Rambo installment after conferring with “Soldier of Fortune” Magazine in an attempt to find the least reported human rights abuses in the world.

We salute Sly for a) bringing the issue of the suffering Burmese (or Myanmarese or whatever) to light, for b) doing it in such a kick-ass way and c) for not getting all whiny like Lars Ulrich about the concept of pirated DVDs. Indeed, the film in question is not available in Myanmar through any “legal” means.

Rambo, however, is still playing at a theater near you. And he needs your support.

 Madame Tussauds Las Vegas announced that they have chosen Jamie Foxx, one of the most notable performers of our time, to officially open Black History Month in the attraction’s Spirit of America Room, with the official unveiling of his life-like wax figure.

The Foxx unveiling kicks off the “Madame Tussauds Black History” month-long celebration. Foxx will join other famous notable African-American figures already on display as part of the exhibit. Figures included are Muhammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, James Brown, Whoopi Goldberg, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jordan, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. Every figure on display will be accompanied with a biography that acknowledges the significant contributions that each of these individuals has made to shape American history. The exhibit is ideal in educating not only adults, but also students — with the attraction already having confirmed a number of field trips as a direct response to the exhibit.