In theaters

NEW YORK MINUTE, directed by Dennie Gordon, written by Emily Fox, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, 85 minutes, rated PG.

The new Dennie Gordon movie, “New York Minute,” stars those billion-dollar Barbies, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose previous forays into film include the straight-to-video favorites “So Little Time – Boy Crazy,” “Billboard Dad,” “Double, Double, Toil & Trouble” and “So Little Time – The Wheelchair.”

I’d love to tell you what all of them are about – especially that last one (does an Olsen get hurt?) – but when it comes to the Olsens, I’m as clueless about their body of work as they are about what it takes to make a film that deserves a theatrical release.

No doubt, there’s something about these 17-year-old starlets that has struck a chord with tweens and teens around the world. And really, you have to hand it to them. They started in the business the moment they sprung from the delivery room, and they’ve somehow kept it going in spite of the odds stacked against them.

Good for them.

What’s not so good for us is this movie of theirs, in which the twins find themselves in so many pratfalls and jams – most of which are ripped from famous scenes in other movies, particularly “There’s Something About Mary” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” – that the film is merely a compendium of other movies, with the Olsens trying to tart up their wholesome images in the process.

In the movie, Mary-Kate and Ashley are twins Roxy and Jane, respectively, who have grown so far apart, they’ve pointedly become opposites. Roxy is the wild one who plays drums in the bogus-looking band with the weak beat and bad vibe. She attracts trouble like a Jackson.

Jane is the prim, humorless geek trying to get a scholarship to Oxford while overcompensating for their mother’s death. She’s annoyingly rigid, a flavorless lollipop with no center, which of course means she’s going to get one here.

When the girls inadvertently miss school because Roxy wants to be an extra in a music video, truant officer Max Lomax (Eugene Levy) gets on the case in an effort to give them detention. How’s that for an element to drive the plot? Also humiliating himself is Andy Richter as Bennie Bang, a Caucasian who thinks he’s Asian and thus speaks with the sort of accent some will consider borderline racist. He’s here because of a music piracy angle that involves a hairless dog that swallows a valuable and illegal computer chip. The girls have the dog in their possession, but we’ll leave it at that.

Currently, the Olsens have such a clutch of projects and side ventures – their cosmetics line, their clothing collection at Wal-Mart, their music career at Columbia Records, and their creepy action figure line, which makes them look like Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings,” only with better clothes and hair – this movie feels too much like another pit stop along the way to another project.

It’s product for the sake of product, another way to feed this curious cash cow. To say it’s slight and dispensable is to be kind, but why start now?

Grade: D

On video and DVD

THE LAST SAMURAI, directed by Edward Zwick, written by Zwick, John Logan and Marshall Herkovitz, 147 minutes, rated R.

Edward Zwick’s “The Last Samurai” is a film at war with itself. It’s torn between what it wants to be – a big, sweeping epic – and what it can’t be because of the dramatic limitations of its star.

As such, the movie has its moments, some of which are bold, rip-snorting fun, nicely recalling the hypnotic greatness of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” “Ran” and “Rashomon,” while other moments are just plain dumb, ham-fisted and awful.

In it, Tom Cruise stars as Capt. Nathan Algren, an alcohol-soaked, Civil War wreck spending his downtime questioning his existence. When he’s recruited by a Japanese railroad magnate to train the imperial army in Yokohama to fight with a Western sensibility, he’s captured by Lord Kasumoto (Ken Watanabe), who senses in Algren a strong-willed man who might benefit from his tutelage. He’s right, and their friendship is born.

One of the film’s more curious spectacles is watching Algren go through detox, with Cruise writhing nearly naked on the floor and screaming for rounds of sake, which he hungrily gulps before his host family, led by the beautiful widow, Taka (supermodel Koyuki), shuts him off completely. Some will want to hug her for it, particularly since much of the movie finds Cruise trying so hard to express the depth of his character’s emotion, there are times when you fear he’ll have a stroke doing so.

That’s no joke. At one point in this uneven, 21/2-hour romp in Japan, Cruise trembles with such rage and grief, his eyes begin to cross and you sense that this is it. The man is going to be the first actor ever to pass out onscreen from overacting.

Since a good deal of the film relies on its superlative action scenes – the very sort in which Cruise excels – “The Last Samurai” is far from a wash. Still, it’s mostly a mixed bag of carefully packaged entertainment, with little room left for spontaneity or surprise.

Grade: C

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 Bangor and WCSH 6 Portland, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. 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. Those in bold print are new to video stores this month.

Anything Else ? B+

Beyond Borders ? D

Big Fish ? B

Brother Bear ? B

Calendar Girls ? B+

Cheaper by the Dozen ? B-

Cold Creek Manor ? D

Dirty Pretty Things ? A-

Fog of War ? A

Girl With a Pearl Ear- ring ? C+

Gothika ? D

Ghosts of the Abyss ? C+

The Haunted Mansion ? C

House of Sand and Fog ? B+

In America ? A-

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 ? A

The Last Samurai ? B

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers ? A-

Lost in Translation ? A

Love Actually ? B+

The Magdalene Sisters ? A-

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World ? A

Matchstick Men ? A-

The Matrix Reloaded

? A-

The Missing ? B+

Mona Lisa Smile ? B-

Open Range ? B+

Osama ? A-

Peter Pan ? B+

Radio ? C

The Rundown ? B

Runaway Jury ? B

Scary Movie 3 ? B

School of Rock ? B+

Shattered Glass-B+

Something’s Gotta Give ? A-

The Statement ? C

Stuck on You ? D+

Swimming Pool ? B+

Sylvia ? B-

Texas Chainsaw Massacre ? D

Thirteen ? B+

The Triplets of Belleville

? A

21 Grams ? A

Under the Tuscan Sun ? B+

Veronica Guerin ? B

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton ? C+