The Grand - One of the hottest tickets at this year's festival, Zak Penn's second film has a great comedy premise set in the world of tournament poker and wisely, Penn has surrounded himself with an ensemble cast of comedic actors that can deliver what ends up being a very funny movie. With a structure that falls somewhere between "Celebrity Poker" and Christopher Guest's "Best in Show," this one only partially disguises itself as a documentary while telling two concurrent stories taking place within the context of the high stakes poker tournament known as The Grand. The main story involves Woody Harrelson's "One Eyed" Jack Faro who must win the $10 million tournament to save his grandfather's casino-hotel, which was bought out by real estate developer Steve Lavisch (Michael McKean) with plans to destroy it. The other story involves the lifelong sibling rivalry between brother and sister Larry and Laynie Schwartzman (David Cross, Cheryl Hines) as they try to win the love of their father (played by the venerable Gabe Kaplan).

The movie starts out by introducing the wacky participants in the big tournament with interviews and bios of all sorts of poker archetypes including Dennis Farina as old school Vegas quasi-mobster "Deuce" Fairbanks and SNL's Chris Parnell as nerdy internet poker player Harold Melvin who carefully calculates every bet while quoting liberally from "Star Trek" as his mother (Estelle Harris) hovers over him. Then there's Werner Herzog (star of Penn's last excursion "Incident at Loch Ness") as "The German," a veritable Bond villain who strokes his pet bunny with maniacal glee. They're very funny characters, each of them fleshed out with back stories and insightful interviews, including Richard Kind and Judy Greer as the unassuming and overly eager Andy Andrews and wife, a couple from the midWest who accidentally wound up in the tournamet after winning on PartyPoker.com. He immediately moves to the head of the pack at the tournament purely by "being lucky."

There's lots of poker play in the movie, covered with color commentary by Phil Gordon and Michael Carnow's Mike Werbe, who is more concerned with hyping his poker book whenever given the chance. It's very much like "Best in Show" or "Dodgeball" where the gameplay is livened up with funny interaction between the smart, serious host (Gordon) and the outlandishly annoying host (Werbe), and as with both cases, it really keeps the laughs going.

"The Grand" really is Woody Harrelson's movie with Jack Faro being one of his better characters to date, allowing for him to play up his own mythos with Jack's womanizing excess that has had him married no less than 74 times. Although Harrelson is the hero of the piece, Penn found himself a true ringer in Gabe Kaplan, who sells his role as the head of the Schwartzman family, playing favorites with Cheryl Hines' Laynie, who is trying to raise 5 kids with her putzy husband played by Ray Romano, while David Cross plays Larry like the McEnroe of the poker table. These four actors offer lots of great improv, but the real ringer is Michael McKean, who has done so many of these movies in his career that Penn probably didn't have too much work to get some of the funniest moments. Even smaller cameos from the likes of Jason Alexander, Hank Azaria and director Brett Ratner are worth enough laughs to make you hope there's more of them on the inevitable DVD.

The movie is very different in tone than "Loch Ness" but equally brilliant, especially in the way it avoid normal sports movie cliches by having six of the characters playing the final game in the tournament for real. With that in mind, it's quite a bit harder to guess who might win and the outcome will certainly surprise anyone who thinks that it's all fixed. Either way, if you're a fan of watching poker on television and inventive comedy than "The Grand" is an entertaining experience that delivers on its premise even if it's hard to tell if it can become one of those movies that's referenced or quoted as much as "Spinal Tap." Rating: 9/10

Heckler - It must have been somewhat therapeutic for comedian Jamie Kennedy (Malibu's Most Wanted, Son of the Mask) to explore the life and attitude of the heckler and tangentially, confront the critics who have trashed his movies and attacked him for years. It starts simply by looking at hecklers from both sides of the stage with various comedians sharing their horror stories of those audience members who like to get in on the act, sometimes with good intentions but usually to try to cause trouble. It's a great start to the movie, offering lots of laughs not only from the heckles but also seeing how various comics deal with them. Things then start to get a bit more serious as it gets into the world of critics, particularly the internet critics who've cropped up in recent years, where anyone can say anything they want about any movie without fear of recrimination or response. Except that Kennedy does respond, putting the critics in front of the camera and confronting them about their hostile attitude towards him that seems to go far beyond the lines of professional criticism. Lots of well-known actors and celebrities express their opinions about critics and why they do what they do, and while some of them are spot-on, there are others who clearly seem to be more about getting revenge due to sour grapes. (I'm talking to you, Jewel!) Certainly the most surreal moment in the movie is when Jamie Kennedy interviews Carrot Top, who turns out to be quite an intelligent and well-spoken guy... who actually does get trashed a lot for no reason. The movie even shows the infamous boxing matches set-up by bad movie director Uwe Boll to face his own critics in the ring. Maybe I'm slightly biased since the movie deals with a topic that hits so close to home, but "Heckler" realy is a brilliant mixture of comedy and catharsis, and it could very well be the only good thing that Jamie Kennedy has done in his entire life. (Of course I'm just kidding, Jamie, but old habits do die hard.) Rating: 9/10

The Hammer - Once you get past the suspension of disbelief of former "Man Show" host Adam Carolla having ever been an amateur Golden Gloves boxer, this comedy directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld ("Kissing Jessica Stein"), is quite a charming and surprisingly sweet crowdpleaser. Despite the grainy low-fi digital video used to film it, this premise could have easily been done as a big budget comedy with a big name comic. Carolla plays Jerry Ferro, a former boxer who has just been fired from his construction job, and whose boxing talents are redisocvered by a shifty trainer who persuades Jerry to train for the 2008 Olympic team in order to get a free sparring partner for his true protege, Mike LeMat, a much younger guy who can't believe he has to compete with a 40-year-old to win his weight class. Along the way, Jerry has support from his Mexican sidekick Ozzie, a scene-stealing comic performance by Oswaldo Castillo, and his lawyer girlfriend Nicole (Constance Zimmer), but it's mostly safe laughs with very little heavy-lifting, and one doesn't have to strain their brain to be entertained. While the plot bears similarities with a little-seen Korean drama called "Crying Fist", also about a has-been former boxer who has to make a comeback against a much younger competitor, one can just as easily draw parallels to plenty other American boxing films with Wurmfeld doing a competent job with the PG-13 boxing scenes. For the most part, the movie is fairly predictable and obvious, but it's also fairly harmless and ultimately forgettable entertainment. Rating: 7/10

Descent - Rosario Dawson produced and stars in what could only be seen as a female revenge fantasy, playing co-ed Maya, who is raped on a date with the "perfect guy" and then finds a way to enact revenge when she runs into him down the road. There's so much potential in the premise of Talia Lugacy's debut, as one might expect that she would show how being betrayed by someone you trust can change your life. Dawson has such a wonderful presence on-screen who shines so brightly that it's not hard to immediately like her in the first act as she studies hard at school. Along comes Jared (played by Chad Faust), a dumb football player who sweet talks her into going out with him, and at first he would seem like the perfect guy, always knowing what to say and do, but when she resists his advances, we see him for what he is, a racist rapist looking to conquer his latest target.

Using the same seasonal act structure as Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, we skip ahead a few months to see how that fateful night affected Maya, who starts working at a clothes shop and going out to clubs drinking. It's during one of those binges where she encounters Marcus Patrick's Adrian, a tough drug pusher and manipulator, who somehow convinces her to join his crew. This whole second act is rather enigmatic, because it's not what we expect and it's never made clear what their relationship is, except that it allows Lugacy to shoot lots of sexy scenes of Dawson doing drugs and cavorting with men and women at the club. Before we've figured out what's going on, we're onto the third act where Maya runs into Jaret again (she's back at college for some reason) and convinces him to back to her place, where she gets him to take off his clothes and play a game of S&M that can only turn out badly. Without ruining it, the movie concludes with one of the most harrowing scenes of revenge that seems far more violent and cruel than the original rape, but mostly to the viewer, because it's a scene that's hard to watch and goes on forever. Any good will that might have been built up from Lugacy's strong visual sense or Dawson's strong performance is immediately tossed out the window after one is forced to endure a scene that is probably worse than even the harshest violence of "Irreversible." Jared is a scumbag for sure, but his punishment seems mite extreme.

Maybe there were good intentions behind this movie, but it almost seems like the entire second act is made unnecessary by the finale, and Maya's transformation seems so forced and unbelievable that one quickly loses empathy for her character even before she gets her revenge. Rating: 4/10