(Entertainment Weekly) -- In the chemistry-challenged specimen of serendipity and romantic fate-tampering called "The Lake House," Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock), a melancholy but pretty Chicago doctor living in 2006, meets her soul mate, Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves), a melancholy but pretty architect whose only drawback as boyfriend material is that he's living in 2004.

And not just in his mind, but in reality: The man really exists in a world two years less spam-filled than Kate's. No problemo. Somehow, via wrinkles in the time-space continuum and fairy dust in the sugar bowl, Kate and Alex are able to communicate with one another from the past to the present. Or is it the present to the past?

Either way, the two bond over their love of the title piece of real estate, a melancholy but pretty glass structure as light-filled, camera-ready, and difficult to get to (it's built on piles thrusting up from the water) as a movie star's trophy weekend home designed by a celebrity architect.

Kate, who used to rent the place before she moved back to Chicago (to be lonely, work in a hospital, and absorb woman-to-woman advice from Shohreh Aghdashloo as her ER colleague), leaves a note for ''the next tenant.'' And the next tenant -- actually, of course, he used to live there in the past, when the structure was neglected -- turns out to be Alex, whose crotchety celebrity architect of a father (Christopher Plummer) built the joint in the first place. (It's so not worth being confused here.)

The only real magic in The Lake House is that Kate and Alex have never heard of e-mail: They write to one another in beautifully penned handwriting, on creamy stationery folded into crisp envelopes and stashed in a magic mailbox with an old-fashioned you've-got-mail flag right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Freaky! Maybe Alex and Kate actually simultaneously live in 1954 and 1956 and 2004 and 2006!

I never saw "Il Mare," the 2000 South Korean film picked up by producers Doug Davison and Roy Lee for export, dismantling, and American retrofitting. (The duo transformed the Asian thrillers "Ju-On" and "Ringu" into the American hits "The Grudge" and "The Ring.") So I can't report what East-to-West challenges -- not to mention Bullock-and-Reeves headliner requirements -- bested "Proof" playwright David Auburn as he wrestled the original into a shape suitable for an American audience.

But we've all seen Bullock and Reeves (apart and, once, together), and it's clear that Argentinean director Alejandro Agresti, best known in the U.S. for his sugary coming-of-age drama "Valentin," has put too much faith in audience fondness for that cute duo who starred in "Speed" a dozen years ago. Now the stars are doing "Slow" -- she's winsome on cue, he's pained.

It's as if "The Lake House" team decided that the easiest way to deal with the pesky time-warp thing would be to ram the notion through, counting on viewers sticking around for star smooching. Call me an unromantic logician, but I think the expectation is a leap too far.

EW Grade: C-

'Wordplay'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

It's a fact you can pack in your _ _ _ _ (small ornamental case): Because they're sedentary adults who work in stolid silence as they chase their letters, crossword puzzle tournament contestants don't generate nearly the same dramatic excitement as young spelling bee hopefuls who burst into tears when they mess up.

Patrick Creadon, who made the amiable brainiacs-are-cool documentary "Wordplay," knows this, and he does what any storyteller who isn't a _ _ _ _ (Hawaiian goose) would do to punch up the competition particulars of the 28th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT), which was held in 2005 at a Marriott Hotel ballroom in Stamford, Conn.: He enlists famous people.

Between timed bouts of puzzle solving (during which folks fill small boxes as fast as mind-eye-hand coordination allows), Creadon steps away and talks to the sex gods of the crossword-puzzle-addicted world about why the activity turns them on. Among the aroused: President Bill Clinton, Sen. Bob Dole, Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina, and king of most media Jon Stewart, who all speak passionately about their love of clues that go across and down.

But sexiest of all (within the species) is surely Will Shortz, the New York Times puzzle editor and NPR ''puzzlemaster'' who has been running the ACPT since its inception. Shortz's gentle manner and French-foreign-agent mustache go a long way toward making him a thinking girl's pinup nerd -- and this despite the man's pitiless insistence on making the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle ''tough as a _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.''

EW Grade: B

'The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift'

Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling

The third movie in the "Bad News Bears" series, a notable turkey, went to Japan. That trip spells certain doom for the Fast and the Furious franchise as well.

Dubbed "Tokyo Drift" (but let's call it "3 Fast 3 Furious"), this junker ships "Friday Night Lights' " Lucas Black abroad as punishment (to Tokyo? Lucky jackass!) after he hot-rods through a Phoenix housing development to the tune of that blasted Kid Rock ''Bawitdaba'' song. Once overseas, he tries ''drifting,'' a wavy, tractionless, sorta psychedelic, poky race style whose poorly shot appeal gets lost in translation.

EW Grade: D+

'Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties'

Reviewed by Scott Brown

Sad tidings, Dickens scholars: Despite its title, "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties," this unnecessary sequel to 2004's unnecessary "Garfield: The Movie" has little in common with "A Tale of Two Cities."

It's closer to "The Prince and the Petit Bourgeois": The furry bag of CG jelly strenuously billed as ''the world's favorite cat'' trades places with feline royalty, giving a host of British thesps (Bob Hoskins, Tim Curry) the opportunity to debase themselves as animal voices. In the ''flesh,'' Garfield himself (voiced by Bill Murray) is once again strikingly unlikable, a bloated, bingeing fascist.

EW Grade: C-