In theaters

MURDER BY NUMBERS, directed by Barbet Schroeder, written by Tony Gayton, 119 minutes, rated R.

The new Sandra Bullock movie, “Murder by Numbers,” features Miss Congeniality herself as a glum San Benito, Calif., policewoman out to solve a murder mystery with no mystery – at least not for audiences, who are handed the answer to the film’s crime right from the start.

Directed by Barbet Schroeder (“Single White Female,” “Our Lady of the Assassins”) from a screenplay by Tony Gayton, the film is inspired by the real-life Leopold-Loeb case of 1924 and, in turn, by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” Richard Fleischer’s “Compulsion” and Tom Kalin’s “Swoon.” It follows two young men trying to outwit the law with a cunning murder.

But that’s where the comparisons end. Unlike those films, “Murder by Numbers” is strictly standard issue, a film whose title not only speaks volumes for its predictable storytelling, but also for Hollywood’s growing cynicism toward those paying its bills. Indeed, if a studio’s sneer could be heard, it would sound an awful lot like “Murder by Numbers.”

In the film, Bullock is Cassie Mayweather, a pepperbox-wielding emotional wreck who enjoys her booze and tears almost as much as she enjoys her men. Weighted down with enough emotional baggage to confound even the likes of Oprah’s Dr. Phil, Cassie is a woman facing a troubled past, and her own looming psychological collapse.

But when two teen-age boys – the bookish Justin (Michael Pitt) and the wealthy high school stud Richard (Ryan Gosling) – decide to spice up their lives with a little strangulation, amputation, absinthe and murder, Cassie’s grimmer-than-grim life gets the unexpected lift it needs.

Along with her new partner, Sam Kennedy (Ben Chaplin), whom she immediately seduces in an awkward yet successful bedroom tumble, Cassie quickly finds herself in the thick of a murder investigation that actually builds to her being mauled by a baboon.

For whatever reason, Schroeder coasts in “Numbers,” but he’s too talented to let the film slip entirely away without first delivering a handful of moments that speak for what the film could have been if its script didn’t play it so safely and, yes, by the numbers.

Bullock and Chaplin have no chemistry, but Pitt and Gosling do. What Schroeder gets right are the homosexual undertones between the two – and how one boy’s seduction has the power to lead both into a senseless, irrevocable crime.

Grade: C

On video and DVD

BLACK KNIGHT, directed by Gil Junger, written by Darryl Quarrles, Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow, 95 minutes. rated PG-13.

Hopping onto the short list of last year’s worst movies is Gil Junger’s “Black Knight,” the stunningly bad Martin Lawrence comedy about a theme park employee who reaches into a moat to retrieve a chunky gold necklace – and is inexplicably transported back to 14th-century England for his trouble.

The film, certainly one of the laziest comedies Hollywood cranked out last year, is a cynical, unfunny, run-of-the-dump disaster whose one-joke premise consistently hits an uninspired wall of stupidity and falls flat on its medieval butt in the process.

After bombing earlier last year with Sam Weisman’s “What’s the Worst that Could Happen?” Lawrence finds out exactly what can happen when your legendary ego becomes bigger than your talent. You spin out one bad movie after another and gradually lose your audience.

His latest, a crude cross between “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” “Just Visiting,” “A Knight’s Tale” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” stars the actor as Jamal Walker, an inner-city flunky who zips into the past and finds himself in the middle of a Middle Age conspiracy, one that involves the murder of a king (Kevin Conway), the restoration of a queen (Helen Carey) and a whole lot of sex in between.

The amazing lack of attention Jamal draws as he struts through this world of knights and skullduggery is one of the film’s biggest oversights. Wearing jeans and a bright green football jersey, he’s greeted and treated as just another Moore from Normandy. Not Normandy, France, mind you – but the corner of Normandie and Florence, the infamous location of the L.A. riots where Rodney King was beaten by police. With Tom Wilkinson, Marsha Thomason and Vincent Regan in supporting roles, “Black Knight” is a black mark against Martin Lawrence’s career.

Grade: F

Christopher Smith’s reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, occasionally on Fridays on E! Entertainment’s “E! News Weekend,” Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.

THE VIDEO/DVD CORNER

Renting a video or a DVD? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

Behind Enemy Lines ? C-

No Man’s Land ? A

Black Knight ? F

The Deep End ? A

Domestic Disturbance ? C

The Man Who Wasn’t There ?

B+

Mulholland Drive ? A

Spy Game ? C+

Bandits ? D

13 Ghosts ? F

Donnie Darko ? B

K-Pax ? B-

Life as a House ? C

Original Sin ? F

Our Lady of the Assassins ? B+

Riding in Cars with Boys ? B-

Training Day ? B-

Heist ? B+

Joy Ride ? B+

Zoolander ? C-

A.I. ? B-

The Last Castle ? C-

Sexy Beast ? B+

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

? F

The Musketeer ? D-

The Taste of Others ? A-

Don’t Say a Word ? C-

Hardball ? C+

O ? B+

Hearts in Atlantis ? B

Life Without Dick ? D

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin ? D

Ghost World ? A

Lost & Delirious ? C-

Atlantis: The Lost Empire ? C

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

? B-

Lisa Picard is “Famous” ? B

Kiss of the Dragon ? B-

Rock Star ? B

American Pie 2 ? C+

Bubble Boy ? F

Glitter ? D

Sound and Fury ? A

Jeepers Creepers ? D

The Fast and the Furious ? B

The Glass House ? C

Greenfingers ? B-

What’s the Worse that Could

Happen ? D