Balls of Fury You with scripts of badminton drama, kickball glory and tiddlywinks tragedy: Hurry to Hollywood. Hurry because this new ping-pong romp may signify the twilight of unlikely sport comedies. Written by Reno 911! co-creators Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant (who also directs), it stars the naturally funny Dan Fogler, a Tony winner for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. With long, thick curly hair, pointy mutton chops and a portly body, he has the look of someone who accidentally wandered onto a movie set, shrugged, and decided to play along. Fogler is Randy Daytona, a washed-up former pingpong prodigy performing table tennis tricks at a Nevada casino. Daytona is called upon by an FBI agent (George Lopez) to infiltrate the hidden lair of a criminal mastermind: the pingpong-loving Feng (Christopher Walken). It should come as a surprise to no one that Walken is well-suited to playing such a character. He greets his guests ominously, but departs by bidding them "toodles". Much of the film is an exercise in comedy excess which unfortunately overshadows its smarter slapstick surprises. PG-13 for crude and sex-related humour, and for language. 90 minutes. Two stars out of four. Jake Coyle

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The Nines John August's The Nines plays like an all-grown-up version of August's Go another intertwined triptych of tales with characters and catchphrases overlapping from one to the next. But it has more on its mind and in its ambitious sights than just exploring what happens when one decision leads to another leads to another leads to a fire in a Las Vegas hotel room and a shooting at a strip club. The long-time writer directs for the first time here, and in the past decade it seems his interests have turned towards the spiritual. His characters are still hip and contemporary and witty and multilayered but now, one of them also might be God. Well, maybe not THE God, but at least A god. Ryan Reynolds plays a different version of this figure in each segment (a distraught actor, a TV series creator who's the focus of a reality program and finally a character in that TV series) and each allows him to display a range we never could have imagined from the sarcastic comic persona he's honed in movies like Waiting . . . and Van Wilder. While the meaning and the end of The Nines are wildly open for interpretation, Reynolds' ability is a sure thing. Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy co-star. R for language, some drug content and sexuality. 98 minutes. Two and a half stars. Christy Lemire