Zac Efron competes for teen crowds in '17 Again'

By Sarah Sluis

Teen girls must be in heaven. Hannah Montana one week, and Zac Efron the next? The hunky star from High School Musical appears in switcheroo tale 17 Again (3,255 theatres). The Warner Bros. comedy borrows a plot familiar to those who have grown up on the iterations of Freaky Friday and Disney TV movies: in this case, Matthew Perry transforms into his 17-year-old self (Zac Efron), using these rather extraordinary circumstances to meddle in his children's lives--when his daughter isn't trying to make out with him.

A star-laden film with highly managed expectations, State of Play (2,803 theatres) offers audiences a bit of that old-school journalism, the kind that had budgets to sniff out corruption. Its reviews have been middling, and it sounds as if the plot has some vertiginous plot twists. If you're less into expose journalism and more into your columnists, you can hold out until next week, and see Robert Downey, Jr. in The Soloist, playing a journalist who befriends a homeless, mentally ill musician (Jamie Foxx) and writes about it in his heartwarming columns.

Perhaps you've seen Bai Ling's outfits, but have you ever seen one of her movies? There's a chance to fix that with Crank: High Voltage (2,223 theatres), directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's sequel to their frenetic 2006 actioner. This time around, the chaos begins when muscular Jason Statham's heart is stolen and replaced with an inferior model. Also, there are car chases.

On the specialty front, the documentary Every Little Step releases in Manhattan and Los Angeles. It follows the making of the revival of A Chorus Line, a musical about the difficulties of casting and typecasting in the theatre business. The whittling down of the cast is a decidedly more subtle version of "American Idol" and its family of reality competition shows: slight changes in pitch, movement, and line delivery send some people to the next round and others home, and trying to figure out exactly what the casting directors notice is a process intriguingly maddening to both the viewer and the actors. Also opening on 20 screens is The Golden Boys, a period "indie romantic comedy" centered on three old men, an unusual premise if I ever heard one.

What if those gooey cocoons in The Matrix were something people--marginalized people, mind you--entered and left willingly to do manual work overseas, while still "safely" situated abroad. In sci-fi thriller Sleep Dealer (18 screens), Mexican workers do their work remotely via giant robot coccoons. Also political without being metaphorical, American Violet (61 screens) tells the real-life story of "a racist raid in rural Texas during the 2000 Presidential election." Oh, and despite this film, the perpetrator is still employed. If you prefer your political films to "[eschew] the violence and agit-prop that inform similar politically themed films, " perhaps Lemon Tree (NYC) will entice you: Director Eran Riklis uses a "strong sense of story, empathy with problems all too human, and a reasoned approach to issues and emotions that feed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Monday, we'll be back to see whose film has better captivated the teen audience-- Will it be Miley Cyrus or Zac Efron?