All courtroom dramas have the same theme: Will truth yield to dogged pursuit of it, followed by the villain’s comeuppance? The challenge throughout is to try to figure out who the villain is. Fracture, a chilly legal thriller from director Gregory Hobit (Primal Fear), presents a trite premise that’s a gateway to the jurisdictional world. Proud husband, unfaithful younger wife, her smug lover. Behold the ambitious assistant D.A. (Ryan Gosling) who must out-maneuver whoever pulled the trigger on duplicitous Jen Crawford (Junebug’s Embeth Davidtz in a role that is, by definition, brief).

Conviction is buried beneath the screenplay’s gimmicks and whatnots, some of which seem to have been plucked from an altogether different tool box. Anthony Hopkins gets star billing as wealthy structural engineer Ted Crawford, who spies on his wife through poolside shrubbery at her love nest. We learn that as a boy, Crawford did egg candling for his father, sorting out flawed eggs to be taken to the bakery while only the best ones were retained. “My first day, 300 eggs went into the basket to go to the bakery,” Crawford tells Willy Beachum (Gosling). Presumably, a much smaller number passed muster, so we can imagine how fastidious the adult Crawford has become.

As Crawford, Hopkins—sparse-haired and Buddha-bellied—suggests a mellowed-out sociopath who likes to play head games. “What’s the sound of a feeling?” he asks Jen affectionately in their sole scene together. Since he knows she’s been sidestepping, is he sincere or intentionally putting her on the spot? Maybe Crawford is just being cute. Whatever. Gosling’s performance is the one we’ve come to see.

At 26, fresh from a Best Actor nomination for Half Nelson, Gosling downplays the magnetism he used to such riveting effect in The Notebook that’s associated with hotshot pups in Hollywood versions of John Grisham’s novels, too. Unlike his crack-addicted high-school teacher in Half Nelson, Gosling doesn’t zone into himself, either. Instead of being the Charisma Kid, he’s the Kid. No complaints, no kudos; it’s just that we salivated for oh! so much more. In fact, other characters reveal more about Willy than he does about himself—that he used to write papers for students and publish them on the internet, that he had a 97 percent conviction rate in the prosecutor’s office and so forth. Gosling, a chameleon actor, isn’t prepossessing in terms of his looks. The role has to give him what he needs to be galvanizing. Here, the panoply is clues and red herrings. Fracture is The New York Times crossword puzzle as cat-and-mouse, and you know how that Times crossword is. As a brain-twizzler it’s unbeatable, but it doesn’t set the pulse to racing.

The generous explanation is that Gosling, who played killers twice (Murder by Numbers, The United States of Leland) wanted to wipe the slate clean by crossing over to the other side. Fracture has two surprise hooks that I won’t spoil by sharing, as well as a strong supporting cast headed by David Strathairn—another Best Actor nom as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck—doing that soignée thing he does so well as Willy’s boss. I don’t mean to undersell Fracture, although there’s something slow-boiled about its dramatic strands of violation and control. The good news: For anyone who’s sat through the hyperbole of Grindhouse, Fracture feels like a week at a health spa. Truth, if confined to a courtroom, is a luxury for those who just gotta have it.

That Blades of Glory—a preening slapstick farce starring a flabby Will Ferrell in glitzy spandex–blasted past Grindhouse at the box office says something about how Americans like their comedies. Anything horny, nut-brained, and tacky as spackling succeeds with the masses. Grindhouse, a double-feature tribute to trash cinema that’s not for the squeamish, summons the question: How entertaining can a send-up of 1970s B-movies actually be? In “Planet Terror,” part one of the directors-gone-wild twin bill, a giddy drag-strip gal gets the back of her skull blown off. “No-brainer,” a male character quips in a line that wangles laughs from the audience. Taken at face value, that’s sophomoric humor which, perhaps, is the point. Later, some rampaging zombies with pustulant faces feast on human flesh as if they were starving peasants at a pig roast. Fun bunch! Ultimately, “Planet Terror” is a sexploitation/splatterfest that summons a more specific question. Would Robert Rodriguez, its auteur, pay to see it if it were made by someone else?

The answer is yes, because Rodriguez (Sin City) and Quentin Tarantino, who crafted Grindhouse’s second installment, “Death Proof” (read on), set out to remake the sort of cheap-thrills classics they were weaned on way back when. (The term “grindhouse” refers to seedy movie theaters in Times Square that showed the schlock.) This new knockoff has more exuberance than the women-in-prison genre and cult faves such as Dawn of the Dead from that era. And the two maestros deliver the whole nine yards in three intermission-less hours of screen time. There are trailers for hypothetical coming attractions, such as “Werewolf Women of the SS.” Both full-length features are hobbled by intentionally missing reels, plus enough black-flecked spores to scare innocent viewers into thinking a detached retina has ruptured their eyesight.

In keeping with the B-movie ambience, Grindhouse employs a B-list cast. Rose McGowan (Charmed) appears in both features, as does Tarantino (who’s no threat to Clint Eastwood) in smaller roles. A weathered Kurt Russell, the best known of the bunch, helps make “Death Proof” the double feature’s better half by playing a bad-ass stunt driver you don’t want to climb into the passenger seat with. Tarantino plays to his Pulp Fiction strengths here, with plenty of trash-talking chicks who hang out in Austin bars, then hit the back country with all four tires squealing.

Eventually, “Death Proof” turns into an actual movie. The bad prints disappear and we’re left with one hellacious car chase that feminists will give a big thumbs-up. Meanwhile, some friendly advice on surviving “Planet Terror”: Keep in mind that all that flying blood-and-guts is really just red dye mixed with Karo syrup. Suck it up, blow it out.

Granted, Grindhouse is a slicker, more professional take on the low-budget crud it’s based on. If gore is your lure, then by all means go.

What’s a Best Actress Oscar worth in terms of parlayed currency? The Reaping deals Hilary Swank a rich slice of supernatural Southern cheese that’s heavy on the “Yuck!” factor. Swank is Katherine Winter, a former missionary-with-freight-turned-theology prof whose metier is debunking miracles. When Biblical plagues invade a Louisiana hick burg called Haven, Katherine hopes to prove there’s a scientific explanation for all those infestations that just keep coming like maleficent bowling balls dropped from on high. Anyone who has a nodding acquaintance with the Book of Exodus knows that Yahweh scourged the Egyptians with 10 plagues so Pharaoh would loosen the shackles on the Israelite slaves. (That Old Testament God knew how to work the crowd, big-time, from inside.) But The Reaping condenses those nasty plagues—locust swarms, head lice, a blood-red river, etc.—into 96 minutes running time. It’s overkill, literally. Fans of The Exorcist and Firestarter will not be shocked to learn that a skittish swamp miss who possesses strange powers may be behind all this hoodoo. Perhaps The Reaping is meant as a parable of faith, but all we’re left with is a queasy frisson.

Halle Berry walks a tightrope in Perfect Stranger, playing a Manhattan-based investigative reporter with several aliases trying to solve the poisoning of a girlhood friend. The trail leads Rowena Price (Berry) to ad agency titan Harrison Hill—a cybersex bird dog who, in the hands of Bruce Willis, oozes snarky charm from every pore as if come-ons were Armani cologne. The film’s setup makes for a good cabin-fever thriller, thanks to wiseacre one-liners and a third-wheel wild card: Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), a pasty-faced newspaper sidekick with a crush on the pretty prize scribe. Watch for kinks. Overall, Perfect Stranger succeeds at what it aims to deliver: a warning about the pitfalls of on-line hookups and sex with strangers-in-the-night. But director James Foley catches creeping Reaping disease toward the end, with piled-on twists and spooky flashbacks. You can almost hear the screenwriting gnomes yell, “One mo’ time.” The plot keeps ticking but its mind is mush.

As female actors go, Hilary Swank and Halle Berry are always game—and nearly always at the top of their game. But these ostensibly scrappy roles are wrapped in women-as-victim themes. The tables get turned in Rocket Science, the debut narrative from Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound), about a high-school stutterer who auditions for the debate team because the predatory ice princess who’s its star races his blood, if not his syntax. Rocket Science will be compared to Garden State—it’s set in Plainsboro, N.J.—but it’s a richer, funnier work starring no one you’ve ever heard of. I caught Rocket Science at the Philadelphia Film Festival. It’s scheduled to open nationally in late August.