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"The Hills Have Eyes" continues several bothersome contemporary trends. The fact that it's yet another remake of a "classic" 70s horror flick is at this point no surprise. Sure, when there are folks out there like M. Night Shyamalan and Lucky McKee who are producing original and effective scares, the sheer laziness of all this rehashing seems particularly offensive and tiresome. But what's truly troubling about films like "The Hills Have Eyes" is their seeming embrace of extreme brutality for its own sake.

Not having seen Wes Craven's original, I'm at a loss for comparison. I imagine a parable about the effects of US nuclear policy, though, would have packed much more topical resonance in the 70s. As it is, there are just a lot of things about this new version that make very little sense. Like why the film adopts a deliberate look and feel of decades past (the protagonists tow around an old-school Airstream trailer), but makes sure we know its characters are cell phone-equipped. Or what we're supposed to make of the nuclear mutants who stalk our unsuspecting travelers. "You made us what we've become," gurgles one from a bloated, twisted face. I don't know my history well enough to be sure when the last nuclear tests were in the American Southwest, but I know it was a while ago. Are we to assume they've just been happily reproducing through the years, even though sterility is one of the major effects of radiation? Otherwise, they should be elderly mutants. Or more likely, dead. And is it reasonable to believe that the dummy town they inhabit, presumably a former test site in a blast radius, would still be equipped with posed mannequins for post-blast study? There are too many silly inconsistencies with which to take issue. Possibly aware of this, "The Hills Have Eyes" does its best to plumb new depths of graphic violence. It's a particular fan of the Axe To The Head maneuver, which it deploys no fewer than three times. My issue isn't with such violence per se, but with the ends for which it's used. "The Hills Have Eyes" appears most interested in revolting us, which is very different from wanting to scare us, and a different species entirely from making us think. The film seems to fancy itself an updated allegory, but a throat-stabbing with an American flag does not a satire make.

I suppose it can be argued that the political and social extremes defining the current times are now being reflected pro rata in arts and entertainment; that increasing grotesquerie in movies is simply another facet of a culture currently debating to what inhuman lengths it will go in the name of safety and security. But films like "The Hills Have Eyes" play the insidious trick of cloaking themselves loosely with the language of social commentary and satire, without making a genuine effort to engage in them. Such dishonesty is the last thing we need these days.

Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" is a mournful, strange, intense movie. Part "Pulp Fiction," part Western revenge picture, the film feels its own currents acutely, and envelops us in its threads of loss, regret, and loneliness, so that we're left feeling wrung out.

The many characters of "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" share not an ounce of happiness between them. Jones creates an observant portrait of Texas border life, replete with lazy greasy spoon diners and depressing pre-fab mobile homes. Everyone in town seems overcome with an inexpressible melancholy. There's Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a young border patrol agent who seems drawn to the rough work to satisfy a semi-repressed sadistic streak. His young wife idles away the days in their trailer, and looks forward to trips to the mall. The local waitress beds seemingly half the men in town, including ranch hand Pete Perkins (Jones). And there's the title character himself, whom we first meet as a rotting corpse being munched upon by coyotes, but later see in flashback in the flesh.

The film's first half uses overlapping flashbacks to reconstruct the circumstances of Melquiades' death, as it constructs its large cast of characters. For a while, we're primed to expect some revealed truth regarding his death. As it happens, though, the shooting death of an illegal Mexican is no big mystery. Accidental or not, the border patrol and local PD are not going to bother themselves with a real investigation over one more "wetback." Perkins, though, was close to Estrada. We have the distinct impression that the Mexican was, in fact, his only friend. He certainly cares enough about the dead man not only to have him dug up in order to bury him in Mexico, as per his wishes, but to kidnap Norton, whom he's been told was Melquiades' killer.

The film here moves into a lengthy, lyrical sequence subtitled "The Journey," in which the two men run (or ride) for the border. Again, though, it has a tendency to zig when a zag is what we're expecting. It's not a road trip, exactly, though both are transformed by the experience. Nor do the men bond in classic movie fashion, although they do enhance their mutual understanding. The sequence is affecting in its imagery: a horse falling to its death off a cliff hardly fazes Perkins; the extreme measures, including fire and anti-freeze, Perkins uses to preserve his friend's corpse for the journey.

Jones in particular here gives an odd performance, imbued with detached sadness. His Perkins can seem a maddening cipher. At times I was craving some back story or buried detail that might illuminate a man's motivation and ability to go calmly to such extremes. We want to know what's going on in Perkins' head as he increasingly desecrates the body of a friend whose memory he is working to sanctify. Late in the film we're given as close to an answer as we'll get. In flashback, we see Melquiades lost in recollection of the life he left in Mexico. He holds forth about his family, about mountains close enough to hug, pure spring water, and overwhelming natural beauty with a sincerity that, at the time, makes Perkins laugh. Yet for a man who is surrounded by, and indeed embodies, such sorrow, Melquiades' fond wistfulness is something worth preserving. "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" occasionally leans toward the inscrutable, but it's a film that's hard to forget.

It's amazing that someone can make so many turkeys and remain as big a movie star as Harrison Ford is. Think about it – can you name the last good Harrison Ford movie? Didn't think so. "Firewall," incidentally, offers nothing to change that dynamic. This creaky, labored thriller sustains itself with a plot straight out of pretty much every episode of "Macgyver" or "Knight Rider," but without the neat improvised gadgets or closeted talking Trans Am. And as if that weren't enough, it asks us to believe that someone as old and crusty as Ford, and not some young, wired-generation type, would be the information security expert for a major bank. It's a sad day indeed when Indiana Jones is reduced to such mindless silliness.

"Firewall" sprinkles in bits of contemporary technology to try to mask the fact that it's just another "don't hurt my family" movie. But an iPod here and camera phone there just simply isn't enough to make it more than an excuse for Ford to put on his righteously indignant face for two hours. A film like "Cellular," for example, cleverly hinged its plot on the technological capabilities and limitations of its characters. "Firewall," though, rarely gets beyond someone pointing a gun at Ford's Jack Stanfield and telling him to type something.

The film tries to affect a breathless urgency that would leave little time nor need for character development, but very little actually ever happens. His family held hostage in a home invasion led by accented baddie Cox (Paul Bettany), Stanfield is told to go to work in order to embezzle $100 million from the accounts of his bank's 10,000 richest customers. Unappreciative of such democratic thuggery, Stanfield makes the transfer happen after a few half-hearted attempts at trickery, and some unanticipated obstacles. How? He types some things with a gun pointed at him. Egalitarian robbery aside, though, Cox isn't through. Stanfield's family is still in danger. Slipping through Cox's clutches, Stanfield manages to undo the transfer, telling Cox he'll rewire the money only after his family is released. So after nearly 2 hours, "Firewall" is back exactly where it started, but decides this time to treat the moment as climax instead of set-up.

That could work if we had any understanding of or regard for who these people are, but "Firewall" doesn't bother. Cox, for example, is just some guy with nothing more than arbitrary greed as a motive. Virginia Madsen, in particular, gets the short end here, going from a rich, nuanced, Oscar-nominated role ("Sideways") to a Screaming Wife. There's nothing here to engage us in the least with these characters, and not a shred of inspiration in the plot to keep us involved. Even the title seems chosen not for what it has to do with the actual film (essentially nothing), but because it implies violence and tension. "Firewall" goes through the motions in the worst way, giving the impression of being bored with itself. Those talking heads and articles that periodically surface decrying the crap that comes out of Hollywood? This is what they're talking about.

Eli Roth is either a satirist with an amazing poker face, or 12 years old. The man responsible for the execrable "Cabin Fever" is back now with "Hostel," another Dead Teenager movie. While the thought of anyone enjoying any aspect of the stinky "Cabin Fever" made one weep for the species, "Hostel" is a notch or two above that moist pile of rankness. Yet it's still an ugly, ugly movie.

First off, what is it with Roth and the "gay" epithets? He populated his first film with smarmy rich kids who called each other "gay" with every other breath, as if 1987 (indeed a fine year) had never ended. Now here's "Hostel," with its dopey frat types backpacking through Europe, dropping the casual g-bomb like it's gone out of style. A memo to Roth: IT HAS. As in "Cabin Fever," Roth has presented us with such loathsome characters that we're almost glad to see them get what he has in store for them. "Hostel"'s young jerkoffs seem like the types to take such a clichéd coming of age trip just to prove their masculinity to their brothers back home. I'm beginning to form a picture of Roth as a once-persecuted bookworm made good, who now can get back at all his childhood bullies and their "gay" taunts in multiplexes nationwide. I really hope I'm onto something, as the alternative implies that Roth is simply as retarded as his characters.

But anyway, there's a movie here. Our two young homophobes are Finding Themselves on a tour of the whorehouses of Europe, along with a giddy Icelandic drifter who would likely be played by Peter Stormare in an older, and much better, film. A guy in their hostel in Amsterdam quickly pegs them for the dumb f**ks they are and tells them about a joint in Bratislava; "girls you won't believe," "…will do anything," "love Americans," etc. Of course they're on the next train, and find themselves in the titular hostel, which is conveniently populated exclusively with young, nubile women of the type normally found online. The DKE brothers are beside themselves, doing everything short of shouting "boobies!" outright (and I can't even be sure that doesn't happen at some point). Drinks are laced, and the Greeks find themselves in one of those dank, wet movie basements in which the only thing not covered in grime is the glistening row of saws, drills, scalpels, and other instruments that are generally preceded with a stern call of "nurse…" Turns out one can still play the Most Dangerous Game in Slovakia, except the rules have evolved so that the prey is now handcuffed to a chair. I can't wish these gory punishments doled out by the unfeeling rich on anyone, but Roth really seems to dislike his characters, and wants us to as well. If that's the case, he has a lot of bottled up anger to deal with. If not, he's simply a sadist. Either way, "Hostel" is cloaked in a weighty unpleasantness that makes it hard to enjoy its few nice touches.

Roth occasionally flirts with statement-making in "Hostel." In his pay-to-torture men's club, taking one's aggression out on an internationally-despised American will cost considerably more than hacking up, say, a Russian or European. The idea of the socially numb elite dropping mad coin to slice people up just to feel something echoes, well, all of "Fight Club." Roth has some pretty usable material here, but is more interested in icky shock thrills than social commentary. By the end, our lucky survivor has gotten revenge on a character he couldn't possibly have known was involved, and we wonder exactly what is the point of "Hostel." It can be summed up in two of the film's favorite terms (after "gay"): "jugs!" and "ahhhgh!"

If real hit men had as many emotional problems as they do in movies, no one would ever get killed. "The Matador," another film featuring an assassin struck with fits of blubbering, self-doubt, and anxiety, seems itself to be in crisis. Writer/director Richard Shepard doesn't seem to know how he wants to handle his own material, and ends up lurching between comedy and hammy melodrama. The result is a clunky, poorly-paced retread of any number of similar films that tries to squeeze hipness from visual gimmickry. In other words, a typical product of Sundance.

Shepard shoots his action in bold, sharp primary colors. It's true his film looks good, but what there is to look at can't measure up. Instead of a standard title card informing us of the film's various locations, Shepard lets us know we're in DENVER, say, with a full-screen neon advisory. It's a bit too cute. Anyway, while in Mexico CITY on business, white bread Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) strikes up small talk in the hotel bar with the smarmy Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan), who looks like a "Saturday Night Fever" extra, and who alternately buddies up to and offends Danny, who was just being polite. They're both in town alone, though, so end up at a bullfight together where, after much cajoling, Noble finally consents to show Danny what he does for a living. He prepares the scene for a hypothetical hit on a stranger, walking Danny through exactly how he would do it. Danny is equally thrilled and horrified. He's just horrified, though, when Noble asks him to act as a confederate on a real job. All he has to do is trip in front of someone for $50,000. Danny, who appears to have lost a key business pitch to a competitor, could use the money.

Cut to six months later (not, please note, SIX MONTHS LATER). Julian shows up at Danny's door, wanting something. The lives of both have changed in the interval. "The Matador" keeps rolling, continuing through what seems to be one set up after another. Shepard's problem is that he provides little actual action, and hence no payoffs. Just when it seems that Brosnan and Kinnear are about to hit a nice rhythm of comic banter, Shepard throws in some buzz-killing human interest elements. A visually flippant move featuring slimy hit men might aim for screwball comedy, but doesn't need solemn talk of dead sons and financial worries. "The Matador" seems to be aiming for the comedic drama of something like Ridley Scott's "Matchstick Men," but is clueless about how to balance its sensibilities even as well as that deeply problematic film. I'm sure Shepard is trying to give his characters depth, but Brosnan and (especially) Kinnear may as well go through the film wearing "Character Attribute" placards around their necks.

"The Matador" is so bogged down by this thematic schizophrenia - is it a dramatic comedy, or vice-versa? - that nothing actually happens. The little action that does occur is treated in such broad strokes, and so strains plausibility, that we almost wish to return to the dead kid talk. There's certainly nothing wrong with trying to present fully-formed characters, but it amounts to very little if they're given nothing to do.

The revelation that Big Pharma may be wanting in the ethics department is about as surprising as finding bear poo in the woods. Price gouging, developing world access, and clinical trials have all been the focus of repeated real-world outcries. "The Constant Gardener," based on the John le Carrè novel, shines much needed light under these rocks of the pharmaceutical industry, but sustains itself more on the depth of its characters, for whom we become truly concerned.

Director Fernando Mireilles brings here the same energy that surged through his "City of God." Mireilles is a master of injecting vibrance into scenes of human and urban decay; his crowds swarm with life, and colors shout out their presence. In that earlier film, our senses were heightened to expect violence at any moment. In "The Constant Gardener," though, nefarious goings-on are orchestrated through official channels of both industry and diplomacy, and Mireilles slows himself down enough to allow both his characters and story to unfold around us.

Foppish British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) is eking out a career as a functionary in Kenya. The mild-mannered Quayle is no professional superstar, but is liked by his peers and superiors, at least to the extent he's able to reign in his firebrand young wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz). Tessa to them seems swept away with the misguided idealism of youth. She brazenly interrogates industry allies at diplomatic functions, keeps company with a rabble-rousing African doctor/activist, and generally sticks her uppity bleeding heart where it is definitely not wanted. Her death early in the film, then, is not all that surprising. Pay attention to how Mireilles holds the camera on Quayle as he's given the news of Tessa's likely murder. A lesser actor might have turned on the histrionics, but Fiennes remains nearly impassive, betraying only the slightest facial tics that hint at a hidden emotional storm. When he finally does speak, it's to empathize with his colleague about the difficulty of delivering the bad news.

Details emerge that point to corporate malfeasance in Tessa's death. It seems she had submitted a report to British officials documenting a series of haphazard clinical trials of a potential flagship TB drug by an international pharma giant. Never having much previously concerned himself with Tessa's causes, Quayle starts asking questions. It is quickly made clear that powerful interests would like him to stop.

Fiennes is pitch-perfect here as a man who uses his milquetoast demeanor to his advantage. His adversaries first buddy up to him, assuming it will be no problem to convince such an unassuming type not to go biting powerful hands. Yet the more Quayle learns, the more it's clear not only that Tessa was onto something, but that many of his own suspicions about both her sincerity and marital fidelity were misguided. Quayle is no hostage-taking, marauding Charles Bronson-style avenging angel. He just keeps asking questions, in spite of the increasingly severe resistance. Weisz, too, seen mainly in flashback, gives us a three-dimensional character who lives for her crusades, but who truly loves her meek husband, perhaps more than he knows.

"The Constant Gardener" is convincing in its portrait of diplomatic life, in which functionaries speak blandly in broad platitudes, and no one loses sleep over inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the details. It's easy to ache for the poor masses who are the casualties of such callous officialdom, but hard to imagine the film's bleak ending turning out any other way. "The Constant Gardener," along with "Good Night and Good Luck," "Syriana," and "Munich," among others, is part of a recent chorus of progressive-minded political films. There can't be too many. Their combination of compelling characters and stories with courageous dissent makes for quality films and much needed activism.

A lot of shooting, growling, and roaring happens in "Underworld: Evolution." This second installment of the centuries-old war between werewolves ("Lycans") and vampires ("Vampires") evidently picks up right where the entirely forgettable first part ended. Director Len Wiseman seems to appreciate that the particulars of the first film may not be so fresh in our minds, and helpfully includes a flashback montage that, I believe, is actually the entire first movie in fast forward. And there's still all of this one to get through. It's like an unintended double feature.

"Underworld: Evolution" opens in the 13th century, in what appears to be a department store Christmas village set. Vampires and Lycans fought then, too, but the vamps then wore "Lord of the Rings"-style chunky armor with nose pieces, rather than skin-tight leather. Right about here - that is, the beginning - I stopped knowing or caring just what the hell was going on. This film delves so absurdly deep into monster genealogy that one so inclined to be concerned with it all would need a flow chart to keep up.

We rejoin the pale yet comely Selene (Kate Beckinsale) from part one, on the run with her ally Michael (Scott Speedman), who is coming to grips with the fact that he's a new, evolved breed of wolf/vamp, with the happy result that he occasionally turns blue and grows long fingernails. Selene is intent on waking up original elder vampire Marcus from his tomb to catch him up on all of part one's treachery. Turns out that Marcus has already gotten up, though, and himself is intent on eating Selene, because her "blood memory" contains the location of the eternal prison of his brother William, the original Lycan. Marcus wants to free him. Also, their father is still alive, and lives on a ship with an army. Or something. At this point, some questions may occur to you, such as:

1. How come one brother was a wolf and one a vampire? 2. Doesn't blood constantly regenerate itself? How can it have a memory? 3. Did the effects team from "Land of the Lost" also work on this film?

The answers, as far as I can tell, are:

1. Because 2. This is VAMPIRE blood, remember 3. It appears so.

Surprisingly, though, "Underworld: Evolution" isn't as bad as the above implies. True, family trees are only interesting if they're your own (and usually not even then), and the film showcases the same goofy effects from its predecessor, but there's no denying that both films have a stylishness about them. The winged Marcus, whose appendages are weapons as much as transport, is a superior villain to the punky wolf and geriatric vamp of "Underworld," and the movie mostly keeps moving, making comprehension of its finer points utterly unnecessary. "Underworld: Evolution" contains some mumbo-jumbo to the effect that killing Marcus and William, the progenitors of their species, would destroy their entire lines. So by the end, when they're all chopped up and such, and Selene's voice-over starts talking about more battles ahead, we're again reassured that it's fine to just watch these films without any understanding of what they're about. Maybe it will all get cleared up in "Underworld: Intelligent Design."

Never having met George Clooney, I can't comment on his personality. He did once show up at a high-class restaurant, where my then-girlfriend was a hostess, and proceed to call her "doll," which admittedly has the assholish reek of someone acting like it's the 20s. I'm not inclined to look for reasons to dislike the guy, though, when he's made such a concerted, and mainly successful, effort over the last decade to appear consistently in good movies; such deliberateness has an endearing affect. "Syriana," incidentally, is no exception. Clooney's dumpy CIA operative Bob Barnes is but one element in writer/director Stephen Gaghan's remarkably layered and complex look at the contemporary geopolitics of the petroleum industry.

Gaghan here uses the same approach as "Traffic" (which he wrote), following a cog in every level of an intricate machinery that, far too powerful to be controlled by any one, ruthlessly disposes of them when they get in the way. As much as the execs of the future Connex-Killeen, whose proposed merger is being investigated by the Justice Department, or the young Saudi royal, or the CIA, try to exert control over arguably the most important industry on the planet, the main character here is oil itself. It dictates the terms of the creation of the world's 29th largest economy out of a business merger, determines royal lines of succession, and even ultimately decides who lives, and who dies.

Yet "Syriana" isn't ENTIRELY cynical; Matt Damon's energy adviser and his client, the possible future Saudi ruler, talk excitedly about the potential for oil rights to modernize society and help its downtrodden. Clooney's Barnes allows himself to be thrown back into the struggle in part to atone for a deadly mistake from an earlier assignment that still haunts him. But these are individual flashes of idealism and conscience, and are no match for the profit and power potential of the industry.

The message is that alternative energy movements will never be fully successful until every last drop of oil has been burned away. It's no secret to "Syriana"'s players that the global oil supply has begun to dwindle, it's simply irrelevant. Oil is power, and as long as it's there, someone has to control it. Better us, thinks everyone in the film, than the other guys. "Syriana"'s portrait is a depressing one, but it's hard not to think that it speaks a lot of truth.

"To be a geisha is to be judged as a living work of art," says the legendary Mameha midway through director Rob Marshall's "Memoirs of a Geisha." Marshall clearly has the same hopes for his film version of Arthur Golden's wonderful book, and to say he only partially pulls it off is more observation than criticism. The film is stunningly beautiful, but its narrative focus on plot developments comes at the expense of the small details that made Golden's book so engrossing.

"Memoirs of a Geisha" is as visually evocative and alive as any film in recent memory. We're transfixed by the endless pathways of explosively red arches through which young Chiyo runs after meeting the Chairman (Ken Watanabi), around whom she will focus her life, and put on edge by the gleaming severity of the bamboo corridor that leads to Mameha's door, to which Chiyo delivers a priceless kimono that she's been forced to deface by Mameha's rival Hatsumommo. Growing up in an okiya, or geisha house, Chiyo is surrounded by the accoutrements of glamour, though is herself little more than a slave. Constantly abused by the tyrannical house geisha Hatsumommo (Gong Li), it's all Chiyo can do to avoid being thrown on the street. She barely understands what a geisha is, but can see that these elaborately dressed, painted women wield enormous power in the okiya.

Herself destined for geishahood, Chiyo is selected for apprenticeship by Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), and given the nom de geisha Sayuri. The grown Sayuri (Zhang Ziyi) learns that geisha are not simply ornate prostitutes (though there is an element of that), but rather multi-talented performers who are masters of grace and precision. Golden lingered over these details; the exactness and specificity of kimono knots, hair styling, and makeup layering; the proper and improper ways to stand, sit, walk, and pour tea; the correct way to laugh at a client's jokes, and to make eye contact. In short, all the things that make professional socializing extremely difficult work. Marshall gives us glimpses of this, but by necessity is most focused on plot machinations. There's a lot to get through; Chiyo's childhood, conversion to Sayuri, infatuation with the Chairman, rivalry with Hatsumommo, complicated relationship with the Chairman's business partner Nobu, and the Second World War took Golden well over 500 pages. At 2.5 hours, "Memoirs of a Geisha" certainly takes its time, but viewers familiar with the book will notice what's missing as much as they'll enjoy what's on screen.

It's not that "Memoirs of a Geisha"'s plot is uninteresting; on the contrary, the war between Sayuri and Hatsumommo, conducted under public flirtations, smiles, and social niceties, is often riveting. Yet what made Golden's book so absorbing, and what could make this a great, not just good, film, is its setting in a world about which most of us know very little. The lives of geisha are a fascinating subculture under the already inscrutable (to Westerners) face of Japan. Without Golden's book, viewers of "Memoirs of a Geisha," while treated to a visual banquet and engrossing story, will ultimately learn little of its enigmatic subjects and their lives.

At first, Avner (Eric Bana) has few hesitations about his mission. Never mind that his wife is seven months pregnant; the men who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics are animals. They respect no laws. Now is the time for Israel to show the world its strength, and Avner is honored to serve his country. Meeting his team members, he exchanges pleasantries. One is a doll-maker. The men marvel at Avner's cooking. The camaraderie is more appropriate to a fishing or hunting trip which, in a sense, it is.

Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is neither a paean to the Great Sacrifices required by war, nor a testament to the human spirit. Brilliant as they were in their own ways, neither "Saving Private Ryan" nor "Schindler's List," his recent political movies, share the ruthless detachment that "Munich" demonstrates toward its subject matter. It's hard to argue against the savage brutality of the Munich assassinations, and it's no surprise, really, that Avner and his team relish their task of locating the architects of the raid. When they find their first target, on his way home with his groceries, the banality of the situation gives them only momentary pause. Maybe they were expecting to interrupt a wild-eyed Palestinian in the act of eating a Jewish baby, but what they find is a regular person doing errands. He's an animal, though, and must be liquidated. The same goes for the target whose little girl answers the exploding telephone before him, and for the PLO's KGB contact, who makes pleasant small talk with Avner on a hotel balcony before being incinerated in his bed. Yet Avner can't confidently say that the Arab world is awed by Israel's show of force, particularly when letter bombs start showing up at Israeli embassies across the world, and when his source provides him with a fresh target who turns out to be the successor to a man he's just killed. These people are replaced faster than they can be erased. The letter bombs are a PLO response to the assassinations, which are a response to Munich, which was a response to…

Spielberg takes no sides here, impressive for a director with a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve, particularly when it comes to portraits of his own heritage. "Munich" in fact seems less interested in the particular politics of the Arab-Jewish conflict than with the cyclical dynamics that propel people to fight savagery with savagery. Spielberg presents figures so fixated on breaking one another's will that they're blinded to the long view. Perhaps it's when his compatriot congratulates him on a successful hit and the birth of his daughter in the same breath that Avner begins to reconsider the wisdom of his course, or maybe it's when he realizes that the same source that finds him his targets could just as easily find him FOR his targets. As he ultimately says to his Mossad contact, though, "there's no peace at the end of this." Spielberg has reasserted himself in recent years with some of the leanest, most focused films of his career. With two hard-edged and one half-brilliant sci-fi pictures ("Minority Report," "War of the Worlds," and "A.I.," respectively), a coming of age story that managed to avoid pathos ("Catch Me If You Can"), and now "Munich," I'm reminded why the guy is the biggest filmmaker in the history of the world. "Munich" is sophisticated and remarkably restrained by Spielberg standards. It doesn't profess to have The Solution to Middle East turmoil, or any number of other like conflicts, but it lays bare the folly of the strategies by which they have thus far been characterized.

It's a bit unnerving when a studio declines to screen a film for the press before it goes into wide release. That many movies suck is no surprise, but when a studio itself admits as much ahead of time, the process of movie-going becomes a passion play of sorts. Consider it an early Christmas gift from Hollywood, then, that "Aeon Flux" isn't nearly the affront to taste and decency one might expect, given the above. Though ultimately overwhelmed by its flaws, it at least has (sort of) an idea with which to toy around. Too bad director Karyn Kusama seems to have little clue how to execute it all.

It's the future. There's been a plague. There is a dictatorship, and there are rebels. The latter are known as the Monicans, and far from being a cult of beret or tennis racket worshipers, they're into attempts to overthrow the former, called the Goodchild regime. The regime is occasionally mean to the citizenry, which is more than Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron) and her pals can stand. Through some sort of biochemical virtual reality technology, the Monicans receive orders from their dear leader (Frances McDormand), a mystical priestess-type who appears to have been cross-bred with a carrot. It falls to Aeon to strap on some form-fitting, futuristic spandex get-ups to carry out the High Carrot's orders, which are of course some version of "destroy the regime." Having years earlier watched her sister get liquidated by the Goodchilds, she needs little convincing.

Not surprisingly, things get complicated. The Goodchilds might not be quite what they seem, and Aeon herself might have an unexpected history with them. Though occasionally muddled, the film's central conceit (of which I won't reveal more) contains some neat notions about the nature of human existence and survival. There's room for much more examination of which the film doesn't take advantage, but the ideas are there, at least. The big problems of "Aeon Flux" are technical. Kusama has made the baffling decision to film nearly all the action so close that we can rarely follow what's going on. To make matters worse, it's edited in a flurry of jump cuts that leave us completely lost. The result is some serious spacial disorientation that takes over the film. "Aeon Flux"'s aesthetic is one of sleek costume, oddly-angled architecture, and nimble characters. Much of the action occurs in minimalist, open spaces that beg for some unbroken long shots that might convey the grace and athleticism implied by the above. Instead, we get split seconds of flying limbs, breaking glass, and accompanying sound effects.

There is a pretty good movie trying to get out of the morass of "Aeon Flux." Put this stuff in the hands of the Wachowski brothers, say, and the results could be quite different. As it is, though, I felt like "Aeon Flux" was willfully pushing me away from a movie I wanted to enjoy. This film is unattuned to its own strengths. Like a novice poker player dealt a royal flush, it somehow finds a way to lose in spite of its potential.

Everybody knows that war is hell. "Jarhead" wants us to know that waiting around for war isn't so great, either, especially when one is forced to do it from within a testosterone factory, full of young men who have been led to believe that they'll be shooting some dark-skinned, moustachioed types any minute. It's enough to make you crazy.

Enough to make Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenahll) crazy, at least. It doesn't take long for Swofford to second-guess his decision to enlist in the Marines. "Jarhead" opens with a sort of homage to the famous Paris Island portion of Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." No tragic murder-suicide in this case, but around when his drill sergeant starts slamming heads into walls and shouting about his sexuality, Swofford begins to assume a glazed, jaded look. He's as excited as anyone else when his unit is ordered to Kuwait as part of Operation Desert Shield, though predicts on the plane that they'll be back before they've digested their complimentary peanuts. He whoops and hollers with everyone else at a rousing speech by the commanding officer full of references to "the bureaucrats in Washington," kicking Iraqi ass, and other soldierly musings.

But the ass-kicking doesn't seem to materialize. There's plenty of running around in the desert, target practice, and football games. Swofford's Staff Seargeant (Jaime Foxx) loves to pull surprise gas raid drills. A few of these "jarheads," though, are sharp enough to notice that reality on the ground is quite a bit different than the official line, parroted gleefully by a lot of their comrades who can't wait to start killing Arabs. It's this cognitive dissonance that's at the heart of director Sam Mendes' movie. These guys have been pumped full of military hokum about the mysticism of their rifles, being killing machines, and the importance of the Corps, but life in the desert is largely consumed by domestic issues back home, and the killing of nothing more than time. There's a pressure-cooker of aggression here that's got no release valve. Swofford, at least, begins to lose his bearings. He shoves his gun in a comrade's face, and when the bombs do start falling, he can only stand there in a daze. As one marine points out, though, the war moves way too fast for troops on the ground. By the time they get mobilized, air strikes have pushed the front miles further back. Even the sight of a charred Iraqi convoy, strafed while trying to flee, arouses little emotion. The pilots are actually fighting the war; the grunts on the ground just sort of hang around it.

"Jarhead" at times feels unfocused, but I think that's the point. Combat and killing are psychologically scarring, but so is preparing people for such, then leaving them to wait in uncertainty. Back home in a victory parade, a Vietnam vet hops on the unit's bus to offer congratulations personally. He sits down, clearly having a moment of profound emotional connection with these new returnees. Swofford seems both to understand completely and feel miles apart. Combat isn't the only terrible thing war has to offer. While perhaps less intense in the moment, the buildup, aftermath, and peripherals exact a psychological toll as well, and create their own demons.

"Revolver" raises the question of whether Guy Ritchie has gone completely nuts. He took a press beating over his "Swept Away" remake a few years ago, but he was in the throes of newly married bliss. Cut the guy some slack, I thought. But this new movie, well, there's no other way to say it; "Revolver" makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

It's very difficult to write about a film in which I have no idea what goes on. This movie is stealthy. All the Ritchie crime flick hallmarks seem present for a while. There are some fearsome crime boss types, piles of money, wackily-nicknamed characters, and Jason Statham. Both "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch" were confusing for a time, too, but neatly cleared themselves up, so it appears this one will work itself out, as well. After a while, though, "Revolver" begins to show itself for what it is - a pile of elements with a whole lot of necessary parts missing. Early on, we find out that ex-con Jake Greene (Statham) has a rare blood disease that will leave him dead in three days. That leads him to a pair of loan sharks (Andre Benjamin and Vincent Pastore) who claim they can "help" him, which they do by using his gambling fortune as seed money for loans. Then they steal some coke from Ray Liotta, who himself is merely brokering a deal for the shady Mr. Gold. Then Greene finds out he's NOT dying. Then he starts hearing voices. Then it looks like he might be Mr. Gold, or that Mr. Gold doesn't exist. Then...see what I mean? "Revolver" features a lot of voice-over philosophy equating chess and con games. At times we get the impression that Greene is manipulating strings of a con only he's smart enough to pull off. AT others, it looks like he's the dupe. At still others, it's hard to tell if there even are any strings in the first place. there are five or six flashback montages that seem to be leading to a big reveal, Keyser Soze-style, but they always end instead in more chess, or with Liotta shouting at some underling to kill someone, because he doesn't give a f**k. There's a lot of bloodshed, too, but it means nothing when we can't even follow who these characters are, or what they're after.

Don't misunderstand me; "Revolver" isn't simply a caper with an intricate con that requires sorting out with your friends afterward. It's more like a series of outtakes or sequences that are shown together, but feel like they're not even from the same movie. Was there no one involved in this project with the wherewithal to stand up and declare "Mr. Ritchie, this film makes no sense"? The expectation that audiences will be able to comprehend this movie is as unreasonable as it is improbable. With "Revolver," Ritchie has left behind the unintelligible cockney of his earlier films that baffled so many audiences, and traded it in for unintelligible whole movie instead.

Between "Get Rich or Die Trying'" and "8 Mile," it's easy to think of hip hop as a golden ticket out of ghetto-based misery. NOw that these films have had their say, it's time for a story about one of the millions who unsuccessfully pin their hopes on superstardom of one kind or another. Remember "Hoop Dreams?" Suffice to say that poor Arthur and William aren't currently tearing up the NBA.

"Get Rich or Die Trying'," starring the absurdly musclebound 50 Cent, dutifully follows the formula used by "8 Mile" a few years ago. Helmed by a respected director (Jim Sheridan) and stocked with actual actors, it's competently made and generally well-performed. Sheridan films his NYC ghetto in which Marcus (Cent) scratches his way to the top in a raw glare that makes everything look unpleasant and menacing. But Sheridan hasn't solved the problem that bedeviled "8 Mile" either. At heart, this is a rather pedestrian and uninteresting story. Although it seems a bit odd to describe a road to success full of robberies, beatings, and multiple gunshot wounds as easy, that's what Marcus' transformation feels like. Sure, he goes to prison and has an Epiphany (ie he writes rap lyrics on his cell wall), but if becoming a rapper were as simple as interrupting some suit's phone call to hand him a demo tape, then just magically heading to the studio after getting out of the clink, methinks the current rapping ranks would be even more swollen.

Sheridan touches on a few details of the drug dealing life that are intriguing, though. Marcus' description of how hard a job it is, and how financially unrewarding in most cases, almost make us feel sorry for him. It's interesting, too, to see corner dime bag dealers portrayed as just another type of office grunt in a bureaucratic hierarchy. Even these guys have to endure team meetings. But since rhyming about the thug life is more profitable than living it, Marcus eventually shifts gears. It's amazing more hardscrabble types don't choose the same path.

"Get Rich or Die Trying'" is fueled by crass undercurrents. Were Marcus pursuing hip hop lucre to feed his family, care for a sick relative, or put himself through school, say, sympathy would come easier. Likewise, Sheridan passes up an opportunity to examine societal constructs that orient people, particularly poor, young, urban minorities, toward expensive cars, clothes,, and jewelry, rather than self-empowerment or political organization. But Marcus is most focused on getting sufficient coin for the latest Jordans and a pearl white Mercedes, for which he pays with a backpack full of cash. "Get Rich or Die Trying'" is essentially a feature-length music video. These movies always seem to resolve themselves somewhere in "Get Rich" territory, while the reality is that these things more often end up as some version, metaphoric or literal, of "Die Trying'." It's time to balance things out.

The "Saw" movies are alternately quite clever and very distressing. Taken together, they constitute an endurance test of brutality. These films challenge us not to look away at least once. So it's no surprise, for those versed in the first installment, when the various expendables of "Saw II" start digging into their own flesh, climbing into industrial ovens, and inadvertently shooting themselves in the face. These things sometimes can't be avoided.

The hook of "Saw II," like its predecessor, is a neat trick. The victims of Jigsaw, evil mastermind extraordinaire, are given legitimate – albeit gruesome – means of escape. Likewise, the police have the keys to these deadly puzzles right in front of them, if only they knew where to look. This time, Jigsaw is captured early on, in what seems to be a suspiciously easy fashion. Sure enough, he's arranged things so that he's calling the shots, even from police custody. He's rigged a series of monitors showing Detective Eric Matthews' (Donnie Wahlberg) son trapped, with 5 or 6 others, in a house that is to a normal abode what a roach motel is to the real thing. They're slowly being poisoned, and must navigate the house to find the antidote before they start to bleed from places they shouldn't.

As in the first "Saw," the film depends on an essentially omnipotent villain. This seems unfair; since we're dealing with god, it's a given that everyone in his clutches will be killed, horribly maimed, or otherwise put at his mercy exactly as planned. The "thrills" of "Saw II," if that's the appropriate term, come not from discovering whether these people will be disgustingly done in, but simply how. That leaves us with an ultra-graphic peepshow that exists for its own sake. It's morbid fascination taken to seriously grisly extremes.

Both these films are extraordinarily aggressive. They're far less interested in suspense than in making us squirm. The result are some lengthy, boring sequences of chatter between scenes of people getting offed in various death traps. There's little incentive to care about anyone when their ultimate fates are all but certain. As creative as these murder machines are (and they are creative, if you're into that sort of thing), they almost always depend upon impossible anticipation of character behavior and superhuman timing. "Saw II" comes with a nifty little twist at the end. I guess it works as much as anything else in the movie, but the body of the film gives viewers no conceivable opportunity to work it out themselves. All the characters here are given the tools they need, if only they can figure out how to use them, but the movie doesn't give us the same benefit. "Saw II" happens to us, rather than engaging us. With no stake in the outcome, we're turned into mere voyeurs. But the escape for audiences is hidden in plain sight as if it were one of Jigsaw's traps. It's at the back of the theater, and has a red "EXIT" sign over it.

Genetic engineering never seems to go well in movies. Rather than curing diseases or upgrading the human body, genome tinkering more often results in lock downs, quarantines, people gravely intoning "we don't know what we're dealing with here," and attacks in dark hallways by monsters that are mostly teeth. "Doom" is as muddled and stupid as any of its genre-mates, though is openly dismissive of any pretense of making any sense whatsoever.

So there's a lab, of course. It's on Mars, by the way, which means that the Rock and his platoon get to jump into a floating ball of CGI and fall out the other side to get there. These science types have dug up some Martian bones, and notice that they have a 24th pair of chromosomes. They've determined that this extra pair made the Martians pretty much totally sweet in every conceivable way: super smart, quick healing, etc. They clearly must be tried out on humans. According to "Doom," genetic material can not only be simply injected into the arm with a normal syringe, but will cause immediate physical mutations, like claws and lots of teeth. It turns out that, darn it, "C-24," as it's known, actually turns some people into video game monsters. Enter the Rock.

The rest of the movie consists mainly of "bang bang bang!" and "aaaaaagggghhhh!" I'm left to rely on sound effects for descriptors, as "Doom" is yet another movie in which you can see or follow almost none of the action due to thick darkness. Could someone PLEASE take a meeting with James Cameron - director of the only good "Team of Scientists/Marines/Monsters/Dark Hallways" movie ("Aliens") - before making another one of these things, to learn that "dark" doesn't have to mean "invisible?" Cameron proved the feasibility of using low lighting while keeping action visible, so I'm left to conclude that the makers of "Doom" and its ilk know their movies are turkeys, and deliberately obscure large parts of their films in the hopes that they'll be mistaken for "stylish." "Doom" does include one sequence that sets it apart. In its final minutes, it reverts to a First Person Shooter perspective made famous by its game counterpart. I suppose it may strike some as original, but to me it reeks of ultimate laziness. This film has gone beyond being "inspired by" a video game, and has actually just reproduced its demo sequence. If "Doom" truly wanted to break new ground, it could have provided for distribution of controllers to the audience, allowing us to play along. At least that way we could turn it off.

There are so many contemporary movies that lack any sort of narrative restraint. Not appreciating how less can be more, they hit us over the head with plot developments, surprises, and themes. "Flightplan," though, reminds us that oftentimes less is just less. That a film that seems so intriguing for so long can descend into almost willful banality feels like a deliberate joke. It's like a magician pulling nothing but the lining out of his hat.

Jodie Foster, as good at playing desperate resourcefulness as anyone in movies today, spends virtually the entire film tearing up and down the aisles of a monstrous trans-Atlantic airliner in search of her daughter, who's somehow managed to disappear while mom slept. This being an enclosed space, it wouldn't seem such a huge deal, except that no one actually remembers seeing the girl, and there's no record of her ever having boarded the plane. At this point, there are endless directions in which this could go. "Flightplan" tauntingly plays with the possibility that Foster's Kyle Pratt is simply an arrow or two shy of a full quiver. It's gratifying to see the film remember that there are loads of other passengers on board, most of whom quickly lose patience with this loud, disruptive mom with an entitlement complex. And while both the captain (Sean Bean) and an air marshal (Peter Saarsgard) are initially sympathetic, they're both soon firmly in the "Mrs. Pratt is a nutter" camp as well. "Flightplan" has us primed with our thinking caps on. I was so ready to be challenged by a momentous reality shift; a temporal phenomenon, supernatural occurrence, psychological freak out, anything.

But the film gets cold feet. Not only are its revealed mysteries boring, pedestrian, and absurdly intricate, but they reveal themselves with a half an hour of screen time to go, leaving us to try to stay awake through an inevitable Good Guys vs. Bad Guys scenario. It's insult heaped upon insult. Not only must we endure cat and mouse in the cargo holds (and "avionics," whatever that is), but we're asked to swallow a scheme which requires a planeload of people JUST HAPPENING not to have seen a little girl, an airline willing to pay a $50 million ransom, no questions asked (becase we know how flush airlines are these days), and a villain able to foresee the specifics of a main character's transnational funeral arrangements.

Finding ones'self invested in a film only to have the rug pulled out is in some ways worse than enduring an openly stupid one. A brazenly bad film may leave me muttering to myself, but at least it doesn't feel like a betrayal. A stealth dud like "Flightplan" stings. I would love to awaken to find this movie gone, but things clearly don't work that way. If you've got an itch that only an airplane-based thriller can scratch, see "Red Eye," a much tighter and more honest film. Deciding which pun is most appropriate for "Flightplan" is difficult: "can't get off the ground?" "Runs out of gas?" "Crash lands?" Whatever. It's not very good.

In the first fifteen minutes of "A History of Violence," we get a small town diner, a baseball game, and a sneering, varsity letter-wearing high school bully. Throw in an apple pie on a window sill and some kids saying bedtime prayers, and you've got the Saturday Evening Post. But this is the work of David Cronenberg, whose films so often explore the blurry – and icky – lines between biology and technology. So it's not surprising when this film, too, heads for the gray areas, this time between the sensibilities of Rockwell and Tarantino.

Small town diner owner Tom Stalls (Viggo Mortenson) runs the kind of place where you can eat at the counter, and "see you in church" is a standard goodbye. When he single-handedly foils a robbery and saves a few lives, then, the townsfolk are impressed and grateful, but not all that surprised. Tom is a Man, after all, and that's what Men do. But as David Lynch has taught us, pastoral postcard America often conceals deep weirdness and violence. The diner incident is of course big news in Anytown, USA, and Tom finds himself attracting not only local reporters who want to know "how it felt," but also the Reservoir Dog-type Mr. Foggerty (Ed Harris), who isn't surprised that Tom knows his way around a gun, and waxes nostalgic about good times in Philadelphia involving barbed wire and a guy named Joey Cusack. Foggerty seems to think Tom knows exactly what he's talking about.

Tom as "local hero" his family can handle, but after the Foggerty matter comes to a head, they do begin to wonder where these moves that would make Jeff Speakman proud are coming from. Perhaps more unsettling is the fact that they unconsciously sort of get off on their new image of dad. Junior soon finds in himself the will to flatten his jock tormentor, and wife Edie (Maria Bello) with some gusto acts out a rough rape fantasy with her hubby. Tom Stalls, indeed, but can't prevent the inevitable truth from coming to light nor catching up with him. That's shocking enough to his family, though maybe less so than the ways that knowledge affects them.

"A History of Violence" is fond of feinting toward familiar territory, only to veer away. Just when we think we've seen if before, in "Natural Born Killers," "Cape Fear," and the "just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in" tropes of countless mob flicks, it shifts its focus. For all its brutality, it comes across as a quiet movie. There is indeed more to Tom than he lets on, but less than his detractors might believe. He may be a liar in the strictest sense, but his protestations to his family and persecutors are sincere. The contemplation of violence, both pre and post-facto, rather than the acts themselves, drive the film. Whether the capability for, and indeed commission of, such acts permanently defines a person is left for us to decide. The film ends ensconced once again in small town tranquility, though this time seething with unspoken fear, accusations, and uncertainty. "A History of Violence" doesn't force itself with preaching or moralizing, but simply unfolds. It's another solid offering from the strong career of David Cronenberg.

"The Exorcism of Emily Rose" concerns the clash of medicine and culture, and the tragedies that can result. In her excellent book "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," about the gap in understanding between Western doctors and Hmong spirituality in the case of a severely epileptic Hmong child, Anne Fadiman documented the case of a child's demise in which all parties seemed simultaneously blameless and entirely at fault. Similar threads of ambiguity run through "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," though the film seems less sure how to approach them.

College freshman Emily Rose is dead as the film opens. We're told she died soon after an attempted exorcism by the Rose family's parish priest, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson). The state contends her death was directly caused by Moore's involvement, and presses charges in a controversial case that will, in essence, put the entire archdiocese on trial. Emily was epileptic and psychotic, alleges the prosecution, and died after following the priest's advice to discontinue medication. The defense counters that Moore's involvement was at the Rose family's request, that all involved believe Emily's torment to be spiritual, and aggravated by medication, and that Emily herself consented to the exorcism. Who is right? And more importantly, is being wrong a criminal offense? These are intriguing questions involving entirely differing worldviews, and the associated subjectivity of "facts." Yet "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" shies away from establishing ANYTHING as demonstrable true. Emily is either epileptic or she isn't, for example, and this is likely to be provable in court. Argument over the causes of a remedies for such is one thing, but it's hard to imagine such a fundamental point still in dispute at the end of a lengthy trial. It's also unclear what Father Moore's specific involvement was that may have caused Emily's death. We're told she died from various traumas, exacerbated by acute malnourishment. At least in the flashbacks of the exorcism we're shown, though, Moore rarely even physically touches the girl.

But while "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" goes to sometimes too-great lengths to remain seemingly ambiguous, it also repeatedly suggests it has its mind made up; Emily was possessed by demons that ultimately killed her, and which may have their sights set on the subsequent trial. Defense lawyer Erin Brunner (Laura Linney) keeps waking up at 3AM – the demonic witching hour, according to Moore – and a key witness is incapacitated after apparently seeing some otherworldly omen. Like all courtroom dramas, the film ultimately comes down to a verdict and, like most, tries to have it both ways. "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" seems to want to be an arty horror flick, but that would require it to take sides unabashedly. Doing so, or remaining truly undecided to leave the audience to its own conclusions, might have made it a more intriguing film.

Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" is a Gothic tale of a sensitive young man who chafes at the distinctions between living and dead. Considering that pretty accurately describes Burton's previous "The Nightmare Before Christmas," and that "Corpse Bride" is animated in the same stop-motion style, the gloomy director seems to be creating a sub-sub genre all his own. It's too bad he didn't take the time to flesh out (no pun intended. Seriously) "Corpse Bride" a bit.

There's a lot of visual invention in this film – not surprising in a Burton effort – but Tim and team seem to have spent all their energy on the visuals of "Corpse Bride," not noticing that their story is patchy and scatter shot. Young Victor and Victoria are introduced by their domineering parents just one day before their arranged marriage. Surprisingly enough, they quite like each other, making it all the more tragic when Victor takes a walk in the Dark Scary Woods to practice the vows he keeps flubbing in rehearsal. The film then settles into a standard "Boy Practices Vows, Boy Unwittingly Marries Rotting Girl Cadaver, Boy Tries to Escape from Land of Dead and Anthropomorphic-Maggot-Infested Girl" story. It's here the film gets all muddled. It takes a while to establish that Victor is trapped in what we're belatedly told is the land of the dead. Except he and his late honey can cast a spell that allows them to go back to the land of the living. And the entire population of the underworld later decides to pop upstairs because, um, they feel like it. We find out that poor bride to be Emily was killed – somehow, for some reason – while waiting for her intended in the very wooded spot where Victor makes his ill-conceived marital declaration. Although fated to lie in wait for her betrothed to declare his love, she also apparently lives in the bustling world below, which appears to be a pretty hip place to spend eternity, with its be-bopping jazz cat skeletons and party-on atmosphere. Meanwhile, on the surface, poor Victoria is about to be forced into marrying wealthy, and likely homicidal, Lord Barkis.

This stuff seems not very well thought out. "Corpse Bride" has flashes of inspiration, and some moments of sharp wit. Victoria's mother, breathlessly told by her daughter that Victor and a dead girl climbed through her window, scolds "he was in your ROOM?!" And Victor's own harried mother can't imagine "what corpse would want to marry our Victor." Yet for the most part, "Corpse Bride" seems to be making things up as it goes along. Being animated, it feels obligated to sprinkle in a few entirely forgettable songs, as well, interrupting what little narrative flow it establishes.

A lot of work and care goes into a film like this. Unfortunately, the only thing of which "Corpse Bride" seems sure is how it wants to look. It's easy to admire the craftsmanship behind the film, but no amount of technical expertise can make up for a movie that's just largely so unclear and uninteresting.

Air travel is an experience that seems uniquely designed to include as many hassles as possible. Between delayed flights, wailing babies, and getting stuck next to mercenaries who will have your father killed unless you help assassinate government officials, simply staying home seems more and more attractive. Those of us forced skyward, though, can readily appreciate that cathartic power of a good stab with a novelty pen to the noise box of a seat mate, hired killer or not. In short, when harried hotel manager Lisa (Rachel McAdams) uncaps her weapon of choice in "Red Eye," we feel her.

"Red Eye" is something of a departure for director Wes Craven. Trading in supernatural and self-aware slashers for claustrophobic and situational tension, Craven has concocted a derivative, yet lean and engaging strategic thriller. Anyone familiar with previous "chessboard" flicks such as "Panic Room" or "Cellular" won't find too much new ground here, but the basic formula remains a reliable one: cage up a reasonably resourceful person, and see what she can come up with to save herself and thwart her tormentors. Unlucky Lisa, the only person able to authorize a room change for the Homeland Security director at her hotel, finds herself scheming with fickle air phones and airplane bathrooms, and giving new meaning to the term "self-help book," to wriggle out of the clutches of laser-eyed, smooth-talking Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), her problematic seat mate who seems to have all the angles covered.

"Red Eye" withstands little scrutiny, but ultimately works by limiting its focus to the power struggle between the airborne seat mates. Most of its thrills are more or less logical and plausible; Lisa's attempts at trickery make sense, considering how little she has to lose that isn't already at risk. And though Jackson's assassination scheme borders on the absurd in its circuitousness, it's no sillier than trying to off Castro with an exploding cigar.

It's gratifying to see a film that at least seems to care about basic coherence. "Red Eye" doesn't cheat; it establishes a set of constraints, and confines itself to operate within them. When so many movies seem to pull their plot necessities out of the less-appealing bodily orifices, it's easy to give a flick like "Red Eye" a pass for its essential lack of originality. Better to riff on familiar material, and do it well, than to pummel audiences with formless drivel. "Red Eye" manages to be a good time while being instantly forgettable. Dubious praise for sure, but not bad by current standards.

To note that "Lord of War" falls short of its ambitions is less a criticism than an acknowledgment of a good effort. Writer-director Andrew Niccol always has something to say in his films, and here he plays mad scientist, cobbling together bits of "Goodfellas," "Three Kings," "MASH," and a host of other seriocomic socio-political stews to create a lurching, cynical, sometimes frustrating, often sharp portrait of the global arms trade. Niccol's films like to examine the nature of reality, but with "Lord of War," he drops the allegory to poke around the existing world, and those who make it such a violent place.

In the opening credits we follow a bullet from its birth to the death it ultimately causes (this bullet cam recalls, perhaps intentionally, the mischievous police siren from "The Naked Gun" movies). We then meet Yuri Orlov (Nicholas Cage), a Ukranian immigrant who makes a similar journey through the last few decades of global conflict, going from small time gun dealer to the self-proclaimed biggest merchant of death on the planet. Yuri's justification of the immorality of his trade is to practice it entirely amorally, with zero regard for politics, consequences, or loyalties. He explains all this to us in a running voice-over that stretches the entire length of the film, emulating Scorcese's device in "Goodfellas." At one point Niccol even throws in a police helicopter to tail Yuri around New York, an unambiguous tip of the cap to the gangster epic that "Lord of War" so fawningly emulates.

The film spends considerable time on Yuri's family and personal life, and it's here that it has trouble shifting gears. Though there are some good scenes with Yuri's coke-addicted, deadbeat brother (Jared Leto), these family sequences end up repeating themselves, with Yuri tossing out vague, half-hearted defenses of his trade, though it's clear he doesn't think it requires any. The idea is that a family treated with the same ruthless detachment as the gun running business is destined to be yet one more casualty of that callousness, but "Lord of War" gets torn between being a character study and a larger commentary on contemporary geopolitical realities. The film is at its best when following Yuri at work, and his efforts to stay one step ahead of dogged INTERPOL agent Jack Valentino (Ethan Hawke). There's a great, absurdly nihilistic scene in which Yuri, forced by INTERPOL to land a carrier full of guns on a dusty West African road, hops about on the deck, exhorting the locals to take all his cargo "free of charge," then watches over the next several hours as they also take away the plane itself, piece by valuable piece.

Nicholas Cage is just right for this material; his matter-of-fact drawl is perfect for explaining why an arms dealer is less dangerous than a car salesman. "Lord of War" feels like it has more it could say, though, were it less divided between its personal and professional stories. How can we condemn Yuri, it asks, without condemning the society and politics that produce and depend upon him? It's a shame that this film settles for being intriguing and engaging, when more was within its grasp.

There are some films that are so inconsequential that one forgets them as soon as they're over. Naturally, I can't remember any, but we've all seen plenty of them, sadly frequent as they are. "The Cave," though, is that rare movie that you forget as you're still watching it, so that by the end you have no idea what the hell you've been doing for the last two hours. This obviously makes a difficult task of a review. Compounding matters is the fact that the entire film takes place in a cramped, poorly-lit space, making it virtually impossible to follow the goings-on, were one so inclined. Every ten minutes or so, the soundtrack pounds furiously, the camera cuts rapidly, some lights flash, and people scream. What for? I dunno. Some observations:

1. We're told that the titular cave is home to an unknown parasite that mutates its host into a form ideally adapted to its environment. Strange that the team of scientists that pronounces this discovery doesn't note its similarity to another already-discovered phenomenon, known as "evolution." Although Darwin teaches us that mutations occur over long periods of time and many generations, this little bug is able to effect total physiological mutation in a single specimen. Clever girl.

2. Our intrepid braniacs realize, after discovering a pair of old boots, that the monsters hunting them are the mutated members of the last expedition to the cave. They are horrified to stumble upon a "killing ground" of human bones. So, if the monsters are the last team of explorers, to whom do the bones belong? This parasite may be deadly, but it's none too smart, mutating its hosts to depend on once-every-few-decades human visits to survive, rather than lichens or minerals or something that might occur abundantly.

3. The end implies ominously that the parasite may have escaped from the cave to the surface. Gasp! Imagine a population of creatures ideally evolved to life on the earth's surface! Wait a minute...

I could go on, but what would be the point? "The Cave" can't be bothered to examine, or even obey, its own dumbass logic. Even by the dubious standards of the Team of Scientists/Monster In a Wet, Abandoned Space genre, "The Cave" is a steaming load of nonsense. "Respect the cave," intones one explorer early on. It sounds more like a plea than a command, and it's hard to tell which is worse.

It would seem self-evident that certain things should be avoided during sex, simulated or otherwise: braces, pastries, super glue, zippers. All these items scream Sex Comedy, though, and have featured prominently in big Hollywood scores (no pun intended) in recent years. These flicks have managed to be more or less consistently pretty funny, although getting audience guffaws at the sheer relief of watching mortifying things happen to other people during sex seems like pinning the tail on the donkey with no blindfold. Regardless, now comes "The 40 Year Old Virgin," gamely continuing the palliative formula of sticking our collective carnal neuroses on some schmucky loser, and reaping the rewards of our horrified laughter.

"Virgin" succeeds largely on the dopey antics of star Steve Carrell, who makes an art form of creating comic centerpieces out of straight men. As Andrew, the titular touch-me-not, Carrell chortles and wheedles his way through innumerable conversations on which he has no expertise with an incompetent evasiveness worthy of Jeff Lebowski. A film that takes its central gag as its title is clearly not into wasting time, and "The 40 Year Old Virgin" rapidly settles into a series of sketches of ill-advised attempts to enter poor Andrew into the world of the violated. There's a disastrous round of speed-dating, a pick up lesson ("just keep asking questions," advises Andrew's buddy), and a transvestite hooker, all of which mostly comes off as standard, i.e. not very funny, fare. Even less amusing is "Virgin"'s insistence on detouring into unnecessary gay jokes, as well as the two caricatured Pakistani coworkers whose only function is to sound funny talking in heavily-accented street patois.

Carrell himself, though, is funny, and "The 40 Year Old Virgin" is at its best when focusing on Andrew himself, rather than his pratfalls or cadre of Wacky Friends. The painfully transparent false confidence with which he equates a breast with a bag of sand, for example, or tells a bar floozy "I hope you have a big trunk, because I'm putting my bike in it" is far more restrained and subtly hilarious than any of the genre's more preferred "semen in a…" gags. The film is smart to go light on the scatology (at least in comparison to its predecessors), instead finding much of its humor in the pathologies of involuntary celibacy. Bike-riding, action figure-collecting Andrew has a lot in common with Steve Buscemi's obsessive schlump from "Ghost World," though he does at times appear as much a victim of bad luck as of a defective personality.

"The 40 Year Old Virgin" is nothing new, but does its thing well, and is a perfect stage for Carrell's deadpan histrionics. The ability to elevate basically mundane material is a too rare gift with which Carrell is evidently blessed. Let's hope Hollywood notices.

It's a bit depressing to reach the age in which TV shows one actually remembers start getting rehashed into movies. Not nearly as depressing as the movies they become, though, if "The Dukes of Hazzard" is any indication. There's little point in comparing show to movie, which is always the temptation with film remakes, for there's no excuse for a movie to be this aggressively stupid; to actually go out of its way to find the lowest common denominator. The term has always implied a mathematical absolute, but the brazen vacuousness of "The Dukes of Hazzard" puts even that in doubt.

I suppose it's pointless to get worked up over it. After all, TV remakes are traditionally moviedom's remedial class. "Dukes," though, seems to be taunting us with its unlikeability. Take Bo and Luke Duke, played by lowbrow specialists Sean William Scott and Johnny Knoxville. Occasional exclamations of "woo hoo!" and a background of bluegrass don't disguise the fact that Them Duke Boys really are violent antisocial misfits. Hazzard county, a conservative's show room in which a little moonshinin' dudd'n kill no one, a bar fight is exercise, and blowing up police cars with molotov cocktails and explosive arrows is just Boys Being Boys, is a museum of the worst the United States has to offer. The repugnance of "The Dukes of Hazzard" is in its wanting us to laugh with and not at the good ol' boys behind these antics. But how can we sympathize with characters who not only still drive a car with a confederate flag painted on it, but who don't even understand its significance when challenged on it? And then there are the women. The little I've seen of Jessica Simpson creeps me out. She seems plastic, not in the surgical sense, but in the actually made of it sense, like those unsettling Duracell ads featuring the ghoulish, battery-operated suburban family. She's the reverse side of the Uncanny Valley effect, in which robots become increasingly discomfiting the more they approximate actual people. Regardless, her sole purpose here is to wiggle her assets for the men of Hazzard to get what she wants, always accompanied by a mock-exasperated eye roll that lets us know that a little grab ass actually makes her day. We're also treated to a tour of "the university" in Atlanta, in which every female has just stepped out of the shower, or is interrupted mid-pillow fight. The women in this movie exist expressly to giggle and bat their eyes in appreciation of living in a place where Men are still Men.

The plot. Who cares? Certainly not the film itself, which is most interested in T, A, and Yee Haw. "The Dukes of Hazzard" is dedicated above all else to celebrating ignorance, caddishness, and the heroism of simpletons, rather than satirizing such. Is all this some meta-joke that I'm missing? Is the gag that there are still people and places like this in 2005 America? If that's the case, there are many words to characterize it. "Funny" isn't among them.