Michael Moore has more in common with Mel Gibson than he’d probably like to admit. Like Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which had both supporters and detractors in a tizzy before they’d even seen a minute of it, Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” has liberals and conservatives alike scrambling to spin the film’s content for their political and personal purposes.

And like “The Passion,” the director’s new documentary will reinforce whatever opinions people had when they walked into the theater. With a documentary that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, he suggests forcefully – with a selectively edited barrage of video footage, interviews and documents – that Bush was merely inept before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and manipulative and deceptive afterward. Moore’s trademark methods of mixing pop music with discordant images, and inserting himself in the actio , prove again that he’s a skilled entertainer. But the tone of such scenes often seems too snarky, too condescending. Rated: R for violent and disturbing images and for language. Rating: 2 1/2 out of 4 stars.

– Christy Lemire, AP Entertainment Writer
‘The Notebook’

Other than oohing at Rachel McAdams in a mind-boggling array of 1940s dresses and ahhing at Ryan Gosling with his shirt off, there’s really little point in seeing this because you’ve seen it before – more than once, and with more imagination. Wealthy, big-city girl Allie Hamilton (McAdams) meets local, working-class boy Noah Calhoun (Gosling) while spending a summer with her family on the Carolina coast.

He pursues her brazenly; and although their vastly different social strata should dictate otherwise, they fall in wild, teenage love. Naturally, her parents don’t approve. Allie and Noah fight about their future together, realize they don’t have one, and go their separate ways but somehow never get over each other. Their story is told in sometimes cringeworthy flashbacks in which James Garner reads to Gena Rowlands in a nursing home from the titular notebook. Based on the Nicholas Sparks book.Rated: PG-13 for some sexuality. Rating: One and a half stars out of four.

– Christy Lemire, AP Entertainment Writer
‘Two Brothers’

Director/co-writer Jean-Jacques Annaud, who made the lovely 1989 nature tale “The Bear,” returns to the difficult art of the live-animal adventure and delivers another winner. “Two Brothers” is a gorgeously filmed, deceptively simple story of tiger cubs separated in youth, then reunited years later, initially as enemies – all through brutish human action. Deliberately spare in plot and characterization, the film evokes a sense of childlike innocence and wonder without tumbling too heavily into sappy sentiment. The film stars Guy Pearce as a jungle adventurer whose expedition leads to the capture of cubs Kumal and Sangha. Reunited as adults in a duel to the death, the siblings teach a lesson to human captors ripe for a comic upbraiding by the animal kingdom. Rated: PG for mild violence. Rating: 3 out of 4 stars.

– David Germain, AP Movie Writer
‘White Chicks’

Marlon and Shawn Wayans play bumbling FBI agents who stumble into a gig baby-sitting rich sisters targeted for kidnapping during a weekend in the Hamptons. They end up going undercover as the Caucasian females of the film’s title. Plausible, it’s not. The Wayans’ tricks work best here when they lull you into complacency with extended scenes in “white chick” character, then bust out in moments of hilariously unexpected blackness. They work least when they stoop to purely physical comedy. What makes “White Chicks” special is the absence of conflict between black and white. Instead, the battle is between the haves and the have-mores. Rated: PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language, and some drug content. Rating: 3 out of 4 stars.

– Jesse Washington, AP Entertainment Writer