Youth Without Youth: After a self-imposed 10-year exile from movies, Francis Ford Coppola has returned to filmmaking, vowing to make nothing but personal pictures. This is most certainly a personal work, so personal in fact that I can't imagine anyone but Coppola being able to sit through it. A relentlessly dull and uninvolving fable about a linguistics professor (Tim Roth) who gains strange powers after being struck by lightning, the movie waddles in metaphysical hokum while forgetting to do what Coppola does best: entertain. -- Rene Rodriguez (violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult themes). 126 minutes.
Untraceable: Diane Lane and Billy Burke star in this competent but unremarkable crime thriller about a serial killer on the Internet. It's a neat idea, but the movie doesn't quite click. It does introduce one fascinating, troubling notion -- that Americans are so addicted to their media that they would happily become accessories to murder in order to get their daily fix of electronic thrills. -- Robert W. Butler, McClatchy News Service (grisly violence, torture, some language). 100 minutes.
Mad Money: If you're going to make a heist picture, then at least have the decency to make the heist itself interesting. Otherwise, do like Tarantino did in ''Reservoir Dogs'' and just skip it altogether. Then again, when your movie is as puny as ''Mad Money,'' cutting out the heist would leave you with a 30-minute short. Director Callie Khouri, who won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for ''Thelma and Louise,'' would probably tell you ''Mad Money'' is a feminist take on a traditionally male genre, but with characters this thinly written, the fact that the ''Mad Money'' protagonists are women means absolutely nothing. But there's never really anything at stake in the film, since you know a comedy this bouncy, populated by characters this perky, can only end happily. Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes don't so much form a trio here as share the screen together. -- Rodriguez (vulgar language, adult themes). 103 minutes.
