Also Playing

-- D.T.

88 MINUTES

Al Pacino plays a playboy-forensic-psychologist-professor who, on the eve of the execution of the man whom he most famously testified against, receives a phone message that he has 88 minutes to live. He must find the putative killer and prevent his own death even as bodies are being uncovered in crime scenes that so replicate those of the man Pacino testified against it suggests that he may have helped convict the wrong man. The implausibility of the movie is only one problem; there are so many others. The truth hasn't been stretched, it has been drawn and quartered. (R, 105 minutes) Contains disturbing violent content, brief nudity and strong language. Area theaters.

-- Stephen Hunter

EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED

Using loaded language and loaded imagery, Ben Stein and Co. equate evolution with atheism, lay responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of Charles Darwin and interview and creatively edit biologists and others to make them look foolish for insisting that science, not religion, can explain creation. Stein and friends use scientists' need to speak in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes to undercut a scientific theorem that withstands test after test. The film relies on the viewer's inability or unwillingness to wrestle with a complex corner of science, double-talking its way toward a "must be a miracle" solution to anything that science may not claim to have an answer for. (PG, 90 minutes) Contains thematic material, disturbing images and brief smoking. Annapolis Harbour Center and Regal Fairfax Town Center.

-- Orlando Sentinel

* FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

Hou Hsiao-hsien's film is a work of art on the order of a poem by Yeats or a painting by Rothko. Juliette Binoche's performance as Suzanne, in what is ostensibly an homage to Albert Lamorisse's 1956 kid classic, is astounding. Suzanne's young son is Simon (Simon Iteanu), whom we see first, trying to coax his red balloon out of a tree by the Metro in Paris. He has recently come under the care of Song (Song Fang), a film-student-turned-child-minder who is everything Suzanne is not. The balloon in Hou's story plays a far smaller role than in its predecessor, but it means the same thing: happiness. The palette of Hou's film, uniformly earthy, is meant to make the color red pop, and once you key into it, you can ignore neither it nor its message: When you finally recognize happiness, you can find it everywhere. (Unrated, 113 minutes) Contains nothing objectionable. In French with English subtitles. At the Avalon.