At a punishing two-and-a-half hours, Sex and the City feels like an entire season's worth of the late, great HBO series condensed into one super-sized feature film. Since this could very well be the last hurrah for Carrie Bradshaw and company, did writer-director Michael Patrick King intentionally cram everything he could into this theatrical spin-off of one of the best-loved and most iconic television programs of the past quarter-century? By tidying up whatever loose ends may have been left dangling in the tube edition's 2004 closer, King makes damn well sure that no previously unresolved story or character thread is left to the imagination. If the slightly bloated, albeit lip-smackingly decadent end result is ultimately too much of a good thing — imagine gorging on chocolate eclairs and cheesecake at an all-night dessert buffet — no true S&TC fan in his or her right mind would dare complain.

Sure, it would have been nice if King had reimagined the series in cinematic terms (it still looks too much like a TV show), and maybe hired a cinematographer who could have given it the lustrous sheen its fashion-savvy cougars deserve. Yet I'm just grateful that the damn thing finally got made after years of aborted attempts to resuscitate the former HBO water-cooler sensation. Several years have passed since we bid adieu to New York's smartest, sassiest and, yes, sexiest ladies, and a nifty "where are they now?" segment played against the opening credits updates us on their lives. Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is now living on the West Coast with boyfriend/TV star client Smith (Jason Lewis), Brooklynite Miranda continues to struggle with her "wife" and "mother" duties with Steve (David Eigenberg) and little Brady (Joseph Pupo), and Charlotte is serenely content playing stay-at-home spouse/mom to Harry (Evan Handler) and Lily (Alexandra and Parker Fong), their adopted Chinese daughter. And Carrie? She and Big (Chris Noth) are still very much an item, and marriage looms on the not-too-distant horizon. (Or does it? No spoilers here.)

But this is Sex and the City, where, to quote legendary New Yorker John Lennon, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans," and nothing turns out quite as you might expect. If the characters seem slightly more melancholy and less boisterously ribald than you remember, that only makes sense. None of us are as young as we used to be, and priorities — personal and professional — have a way of changing over time. Furthermore, if Carrie, Samantha, et al had remained the same as when S&TC first premiered back in 1998, they'd be female versions of the arrested adolescent males currently populating movie screens. (Thank you, Judd Apatow.) Does the big-screen Sex and the City finally give fans closure? Only until the next chapter arrives. — Milan Paurich

Beaufort

Winner of the Silver Bear at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and a nominee for last year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Joseph Cedar's Beaufort is a different kind of war movie than we're accustomed to seeing these days. For starters, it's not about Iraq, or even a thinly veiled Iraq allegory. Based on the true story of Israel's 2000 evacuation of the titular Southern Lebanese mountain fortress, Beaufort is a lot less esoteric (and daunting) than it might sound. Viewers not up to speed on the nuances of modern Israeli history should still find it accessible and immediate. War is war, after all, and everyone can relate to the hellishness of it all, even if your only firsthand knowledge of combat comes from previous war flicks.

One of the smartest things Cedar did was cast so many good-looking young actors to enhance audience identification with the soldiers. Liraz, the group's martinet-like leader, is a deadringer for Gael Garcia Bernal. Another grunt (Arthur Perzev's Shpitzer) could be mistaken for Jake Gyllenhaal's distant cousin. In a movie where much of the action takes place in the darkness of night and where the characters wear a lot of bulky camouflage gear, every little bit helps. As Liraz's company prepares to pull out of Beaufort (for reasons none of them completely understand: It's not a soldier's job to question orders), they're subjected to an increase in mortar shelling from Hezbollah who want the Israeli evacuation to look more like a surrender. "Impact, impact," the loudspeakers drone whenever there's a nearby explosion. Since most of the anti-tank missiles cause only minor damage, the soldiers treat these routine aural pronouncements like a petty annoyance. But after a few squad members are killed during the bombings, a bunker mentality takes over the increasingly paranoid group as they begin to wonder if they'll ever make it out alive.

An Israeli veteran of the first Lebanon war, Cedar has clearly studied both cinematic and literary treatments of soldiers in battle. I recognized traces of films/authors as disparate as Castle Keep and Franz Kafka, Buffalo Soldiers and Joseph Heller, No Man's Land and Samuel Beckett, and even Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (both movies share the same loudspeaker leitmotif). Cedar, production designer Miguel Merkin and cinematographer Ofer Inov do a remarkable job of capturing the otherworldly eeriness of the stone fortress' stark interior. At times, it almost looks like the spaceship from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only thing missing is HAL 9000. "Did you want to be here, or did you get here by mistake?" one soldier asks a buddy just before the shit begins to hit the fan. "I wanted to be here; that was the mistake" is his disillusioned response. After five-plus years of watching the Iraq imbroglio unfold, it's a safe bet that even George Bush would agree (at least tacitly) with that answer. — MP

6:45 p.m. Thursday, June 5 and 9:10 p.m. Saturday, June 7 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.

The Strangers

Things go from bad to worse for James (Scott Speadman) and his girlfriend Kristen (Liv Tyler) in this horror movie loosely based on true events. After attending a wedding party, James and Kristen were to spend a romantic night at the rustic house where James grew up. In anticipation of Kristen accepting his marriage proposal, James has littered the place with rose petals and strategically left a bottle of bubbly in the bathroom. Problem is, Kristen didn't accept. Unsure of the relationship, she said she "needed more time," so they're both brooding and silent when they arrive in the early morning hours. In fact, they're so engrossed in their own predicament, they think nothing of a strange girl who shows up at the house asking for "Tamra." But after James makes a run for cigarettes (never mind what kind of small-town store would be open at 4 a.m.), a trio of masked marauders attacks the house. Kristen calls James for help but by the time he arrives, they go after him, too, trashing his car and taking the battery out of his cell phone. James and Kristen try to fight back, but they're no match for the disguised assailants.

Much like an old-school horror movie (the set-up is so slow, it's almost painstaking), Bryan Bertino's film takes things at a tepid pace before the bloodbath begins. Using handheld cameras gives the whole thing a realistic look, too. But in a movie in which character development and acting is supposed to be privileged, The Strangers comes up short on both. Speedman's James is a dour, soft-spoken guy who's never really convincing in his expressions of love and devotion. And Kristen is an equally soft-spoken nice girl who doesn't reveal herself to be anything more than a pouting damsel in distress. Even the attacks don't elicit any great acts of heroism from these two losers. It's all so non-consequential that by the end, you wonder what the film's point really was or if it even had one, especially when there's no real resolution in the final scene. — Jeff Niesel

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

With its washed-out colors and pedestrian cinematography, You Don't Mess with the Zohan looks like it was filmed some 10 years ago. Perhaps that's fitting as Adam Sandler, trying to redeem himself as a comedian with some box-office bang, also takes a step backward and attempts to create the kind of guileless character he did in hits such as Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy. While the character Zohan, an Israeli hitman who decides to leave his life of killing behind to become a hairdresser in New York, has promise, the film falls flat. Speaking in a Middle Eastern accent for the film's entirety, Sandler takes to Zohan much like Sacha Baron Cohen took to Borat. Oversexed and well-endowed, Zohan makes the same kind of off-handed salacious comments. But whereas Borat's reality TV approach worked right for Cohen, the fictional story in Zohan simply doesn't for Sandler.

The flimsy plot finds Zohan leaving Israel after faking his death in a fight with his arch-rival Phantom (John Turturro). He arrives in New York and first tries to find a job at the Paul Mitchell beauty salon. His lack of experience, however, doesn't get him the gig and he ends up mopping floors at a small shop run by a Palestinian woman named Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui). The striking Dalia doesn't fall for Zohan's usual advances (in fact, only older women are really drawn to the guy) and his attempts to "get sticky" with her don't go as planned. Still, Zohan persists and it's only after his attempts to get the Palestinians and Israelis living in New York to make peace with each other that she sees a different side of the hummus-loving hitman. Co-written by Judd Apatow (40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) and Robert Smigel (Triumph the Insult Dog), the film, which features cameos from Chris Rock, Rob Schneider and Kevin James, is so haphazardly strung together, you wonder if these guys didn't concoct the thing while inebriated. — JN