Raising Victor Vargas opens with a tightly framed shot of a teenage latino boy standing in front of a dingy wall. There is no music, just the sound of the city street outside. Victor Vargas strips off his shirt and licks his lips, casting a sensual gaze into the camera.  For the first few agonizing moments, I was afraid I was about to venture into Larry Clark (Kids) territory.

But then the camera turns and we see the object of Victor’s lust. An overweight and unattractive girl sits like a lump on an un-made bed beckoning for Victor to join her. Victor leaps across the room into her waiting arms. But as soon as he has started kissing her, he hears his friend shouting up at him from the street below. He peers out the window and accidentally reveals the fact that he has been messing around with the neighborhood’s least popular girl.

Thanks to Victor’s sister, word spreads quickly that Victor is screwing Maldonado. Victor finds himself the butt of everybody’s jokes. In order to get his reputation back he sets his sights on “Juicy” Judy, the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood. However, Judy is already wise to the way of men and she is more than a match for the lust-crazed Victor.

Director Peter Sollett uses Victor’s pursuit of Judy as a means for fleshing out Victor’s neighborhood and the community of people that surround him. Victor lives with his eccentric grandmother, annoying sister and younger brother. Victor’s grandmother loves the children deeply but can’t seem to make sense of the confusing modern world around her. She considers Victor to be a bad influence on the younger children and even tries to turn him into child services, not knowing how to handle such a supposedly wild kid.

By the second act of the film, I was no longer conscious of the ethnic traits or tough ghetto facades of the characters. Sollett has put us in a place where we totally empathize with everybody in the movie. Even Victor’s unrelenting lust begins to give away to genuine affection for his younger siblings and the beautiful girl who is genuinely hard to get. We get to see these characters at their best and at their worst and we are never given an artificially maudlin moment to make us feel better about things.

The entire film is cast with first time actors and frankly I was completely amazed at the quality of the performances. At times, the performances are so naturalistic and dead-on that the film feels like a documentary. Victor Rasuk is pitch perfect as Victor. This character could come off as a totally unsympathetic, nothing more than a horny teenager looking to get laid. Instead, Rasuk allows us to gradually witness the emotional maturation of this character.

In less talented hands, this film could have ended up as a preachy After School Special or sleazy teen sex flick. Instead the subject matter is handled so sensitively and realistically that it makes you remember what being in love as a teenager was really like - confusing, sexy, scary and sometimes pretty ***censored*** sad.

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The premise of The Core would have you believe that the inner core of the earth has stopped spinning, causing massive thunderstorms, electromagnetic surges that stop pacemakers and, well, something that causes birds in London to go absolutely mad. And that’s just for starters! College professor Aaron Eckhart believes that within a year, all life around the world will cease to exist.

Eckhart convinces enough military bigwigs that the situation is real and deadly, if they don’t do something – namely, drill down to the center of the earth and jumpstart the planet. Hey, whaddaya know, Delroy Lindo’s been working on just such a machine in the middle of the desert! So the two get in the ship (which looks like the world’s most dangerous dildo) with astronaut Hilary Swank, pompous scientist Stanley Tucci and a few others and get down to business.

Ludicrous, right? Of course. But isn’t all of science fiction? Men can’t go to Mars, scientists haven’t fused their DNA with flies and that whole time machine thing doesn’t work, either. It’s all about suspending your disbelief, and, for a while anyway, The Core plays it straight enough that you just buy into it. It’s not until the mission is well underway that said suspension starts falling apart, probably because the movie is just too darned long. And the mission – its Armageddon half – is actually the least interesting part of the movie. I much more enjoyed the setup – the Deep Impact half – where the disaster scenes carry a little mystery, the Space Shuttle is forced to land in a Los Angeles sewer ditch and citizens panic as all of Rome’s monuments are blown to model bits.

The acting isn’t all that bad, just the dialogue. Eckhart makes for a likeable all-brains hero, though this must be one of the easiest slum jobs for an Academy Award winner, as Swank has to do little more than sit in a chair and rattle off some numbers. The weakest link here, however, is Road Trip freak D.J. Qualls as a hacker named Rat. He likes Xena and Hot Pockets, and can do anything with computers – and is just plain annoying. He’s this film’s Jar-Jar

The DVD has a making-of documentary and several deleted scenes, but the movie itself is so padded, by the time it was over, I didn’t care to extend my Core experience. This film isn’t the disaster critics made it out to be; it’s just a disaster film that doesn’t know when to quit, but it’s certainly worth a rental.

The sly, rambunctious spirit of Evil Dead 2 lives on in Cabin Fever, an outrageous, balls-to-the-wall horror film that marks the directorial debut of David Lynch protégé Eli Roth. Without name stars, all bets are off as to who will survive (and what will left of them?) the flesh-eating virus that turns a week-long vacation into a nightmare.

Five college students (among them, Rider Strong of TV’s Boy Meets World and Jordan Ladd, the gorgeous daughter of Charlie’s Angel Cheryl) go to a remote cabin in the woods for a leisurely stay of sex, drugs and copious beer drinking.  Their bacchanalian plans soon go awry at the appearance of a hermit with sizzling skin. They “accidentally” set him on fire and he runs off, but their problems have only just begun. One by one, they start exhibiting the same symptoms, from oozing open sores to projectile blood-puking.

Though it has a few jolts, the film can’t truly qualify as scary, but Roth casts an ominous area throughout, even when it veers 180? into huge laughs. It’s part homage and send-up to ‘70s horror films, but never becomes in danger of stooping to the self-conscious level of Scary Movie. All the gags – from the kung-fu kid to the errant deer – work within the horror context; the humor doesn’t jar you out of the story nor does it wink at the audience. And nor would it need to, because you’re 100 percent into the ride.

Since I enjoyed every minute of it, Cabin Fever may be the most fun movie I’ve seen all year. Roth channels everyone from Raimi to Romero and whips up a zippy, delirious experience that hopefully is the start of a long and wonderful career.

In this English-language actioner from Hong Kong, two cops (one of whom is Aaron Kwok of Storm Riders, though they look so much like twins, I could hardly tell them apart) are out to quash a mob ring that, for the first time, is channeling drugs into mainland China. Heading the operation is cocksure Mark Dacascos (of Brotherhood of the Wolf and Cradle 2 the Grave), eager to work out the details of a $14 million coke transaction with his visiting supplier, played by rap star Coolio, who must’ve had it worked into his contract to have his character be named Coolio as well. Three times he says, “Man, I could get used to this ***censored***!” Assisting them is a mysterious cutie not afraid to strip naked when she’s accused of wearing a wire.

For all its flaws – not much of a story, Coolio – China Strike Force delivers in the action department. From the opening training sequence, the film moves to a foot chase on a busy highway with the pursued and pursuer eventually jumping from moving vehicle to moving vehicle. There’s also a great, high-octane car chase between a Lamborghini and a race car, plus several rounds of martial-arts showdowns. But the biggest and best stunt is saved for last, with the characters battling on a constantly tilting plate-glass window suspended high above the city.

Not surprisingly, old pro Stanley Tong – director of several Jackie Chan films, including Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop – is behind the camera. The affable leads all speak English very well, so no one can accuse Miramax of poor dubbing this time around. Be sure and stick around for the Chan-tastic ouch-takes at the end credits.

The DVD includes trailers for other martial-arts-related Dimension films, including Shaolin Soccer, Invincible, Equilibrium and Quentin Tarnatino’s hotly anticipated Kill Bill.

Following the overrated El Mariachi and the underrated Desperado, Robert Rodriguez’s Once upon a Time in Mexico completes a trilogy awash in grimy locations, power-packed shootouts and outrageous stunts. This entry had every right to best its predecessors, but comes up a few rounds short.

Antonio Banderas and his hair return as El Mariachi, the guitar-strumming gunslinger. He’s hired by a CIA agent – the occasionally three-armed Johnny Depp – to kill one Gen. Marquez, the military madman who brutally murdered El Mariachi’s wife (Salma Hayek) and child in cold blood. Meanwhile, Marquez is poised to overthrow Mexico’s new president, while Depp plays off and/or sets up informant Cheech Marin, retired FBI agent Ruben Blades, curvy cop Eva Mendez and dog-toting scumbag Mickey Rourke (now resembling a puffy orangutan), the right-hand man to drug cartel kingpin Willem Dafoe. How do all these characters fit together and what are their motives? I wish I could tell you, but this movie is so needlessly complex that it would take a finely detailed flowchart to figure it all out.

Because the story is so convoluted, it’s hard to invest much in Mexico for its often-slow first half. The pace quickens (and mood lightens) considerably in the home stretch, set during a chaotic Day of the Dead celebration-***censored***-riot. That’s when Rodriguez’s kinetic visual trademarks take spark. All of the action set pieces are over-the-top and first-rate, if a bit too choppy.

As he did with Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp elevates this movie to another level entirely. Without him, I’m afraid Mexico wouldn’t have enough to recommend, even with the tricked-out lethal guitars and Darkman-like character running around. He’s quirky and funny and relegates Banderas to a supporting character in his own franchise.

You’d think a flick with Hayek in one hand and Mendez in another would know how to juggle (and jiggle) properly. The previous films in this trilogy are models of simplicity, but here Rodriguez has too many things he wants to show you, too many tricks up his rolled-up sleeve. And in trying to cram them all within 90 minutes, he fails to sew the thread that gets you from Point A to Point B without any snags during the ride.