Here are the Mini Reviews from Cineman Syndicate for three films opening on September 19, 2008:

THE DUCHESS. Worth seeing if only for the magnificent costumes and sets, this rendering of Amanda Foreman's biography "Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire" rightly stays on the surface, not allowing modern psychology to dominate the power struggle within a celebrated 18th-century marriage. We're kept at arm's length just as the Duke ignored his clotheshorse wife (Princess Di's distant relation) except as a vessel for a male heir. Her splendorous, frustrating isolation is contagious. Keira Knightley tends to act with quivering chin and lower lip, but she and Ralph Fiennes are otherwise irreproachable. Hayley Atwell plays his live-in mistress, Charlotte Rampling and Dominic Cooper her mother and lover respectively. (R) GOOD BIOPIC. Director - Saul Dibb; Lead - Keira Knightley; Running Time - 96 minutes.

LAKEVIEW TERRACE. Fear and loathing in exurban LA. Neil LaBute's incendiary race drama pits an African-American cop against his new mixed-race neighbors. While a cynical vehicle for exploiting the underlying social issues, its partial resonance is due to Jackson, who brings Luciferian charm and gusto to the role. Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington play the interracial couple -- poster children for miscegenation -- whose marriage is tested by the hostile behavior of the belligerent, ultimately unhinged man in blue next door. Southern California's terrain is literally a tinderbox but when the smoke clears, the conflagration has raged mostly inside the heads of LaBute and his troubled protagonist. (R) FAIR DRAMA. Director - Neil LaBute; Lead - Samuel L. Jackson;  Running Time - 106 minutes.  

APPALOOSA. Laconic to a fault, this stiff buddy western stars director Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as gunslingers paid by a New Mexico town to keep a black hat (Jeremy Irons) and his gang in check. A lusty skirt (Renee Zellweger) enters the picture, but don't dare compare it to anything as vital as Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. While suitably brown and leathery, the handsome yarn frays because Harris seems to equate lethargic and world-weary. There's a lack of narrative energy and little sense of danger or urgency. Presumably, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, even if it means sitting still. (R) BORING WESTERN. Director - Ed Harris; Lead - Viggo Mortensen; Running Time - 107 minutes. (Limited opening on September 19; opens wide on October 3.) 

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(Photo: John P. McCarthy, editor of Cineman Syndicate.)