Surely one of the more repellent creations to inhabit arthouse screens this year, Raúl Peralta is a glowering brute of a man. Unemployed and undistracted in Pinochet's Chile, he's one of those desperate characters the movies are drawn to, nursing big, illusory dreams about turning his life around through a stonefaced, stiff impersonation of Tony Manero, the working-class Brooklyn dancer played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He sits through mostly empty matinee screenings at the local cinema, then rehearses his moves on the old, rotting stage at a squalid little nightclub while putting the make on the three women in his life: the club's owner, Wilma (Elsa Poblete), his girlfriend, Cony (Amparo Noguera), and — why the hell not? — Cony's nubile daughter Pauli (Paola Lattus). And he's a rank opportunist who, as often as not, sees his countrymen each as minor obstacles between him and his next little stab at happiness.

The Hurt Locker opens in medias res, depicting a trio of soldiers working on the streets of Iraq. The movie doesn't stop to explain what they're up to or put their actions in context. The audience is left to infer the circumstance, but it's not hard to imagine the scenario. Judging from the cutting and the jumpy handheld camera style, we're looking at a tense situation. That robot rolling around by remote control, poking at a pile of refuse, is probably looking for a bomb. And when the robot breaks down and one of the men starts suiting up like Sigourney Weaver in the last scene of Alien, it's a sure bet he's about to play a game of red-wire/black-wire with a scary chunk of explosives. The tension is heightened, actually, by the fact that the movie has just begun. These characters are interchangeable and, because the movie has yet to present us with a formal protagonist, potentially expendable. That's how director Kathryn Bigelow gets way ahead of her audience in this film's very first sequence. Barely five minutes into her movie and already I was cowering in my theater seat, terrified that something was about to blow.

Either it runs in the family or Jennifer is one hell of a mimic, because there's an unmistakably Lynchian undercurrent to much of the goings-on in Surveillance, which lends some juice to a somewhat pulpy yet dry and familiar scenario. During the opening scenes, as Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond show up at a tiny police precinct wearing the kind of blue suits that denote FBI badgeholders, the younger Lynch adds an otherwordly soundtrack drone to the activity that flashed me right back to the first reel or so of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

It's less than 10 minutes into Riptide, and already Norma Shearer is decked out in insect-woman garb, adjusting the fit of the skimpy costume and complaining that part of it must surely be missing. Mary, the easygoing city girl Shearer plays, never makes it to the masquerade ball scheduled out on Long Island. Instead, she falls easily in lust with a lonely New York swell named Lord Philip Rexford (Herbert Marshall), equally ridiculous in an unrecognizable bug costume that fits him like a suit of chain mail might, if chain mail came with bug eyes a pair of antennae. As meet cutes go, it's a terrific pre-Code absurdity — the movie hasn't even begun yet, and already the leading lady is half undressed.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that has more sheer cinematic energy than Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. It's in the cutting and the camera moves, but also in the cacophonous, claustrophobic staging — he manages to put you in that little cabin out in the woods with the zombie girl locked in the cellar and all hell about to break loose. (The flamboyantly comic Evil Dead II, with such flourishes as its flying-eyeball tracking shot, is generally more prized by movie buffs but, Bruce Campbell signature schtick aside, I much prefer the grim original.) The first two Spider-Man movies are fine, but Raimi's traveled a long way in general from the kind of craziness that made his reputation and on which he built his career.

Because Pixar is known for so reliably hitting balls out of the park, every time, it's hard to think of what possible angle to take in a review as its latest slugger, Up, trots merrily around the bases of the multiplex, dances its way toward the hefty box-office returns that await at home plate, and basks in the warm glow of the adoration of millions of fans. For three years now, there have been stories in the financial press alleging that Pixar's latest is due to underperform because a) nobody wants to see a silent movie about a lonely robot; b) children don't want to play with plush rats; or c) nobody loves old people and fat kids. That's one reason why it's such good sport to watch the movies rake in the dough year after year.

Ostensibly a jazzy, nonlinear short story about the emotional life of a high-end Manhattan hooker, this latest entry in The Steven Soderbergh Eclecticism Project is less a sexy confection than a sly satire on capitalism. Or, more specifically, a satire on capitalists during a recession. The film takes place in the last days of the 2008 Presidential campaign, as the first shockwaves from the current economic downturn are still resonating. Just about everyone on screen is concerned about holding down a job, from the expensive call girl "Chelsea" (contemporary porn star Sasha Grey) who frets about the new batch of hookers who might be that little bit younger, more alluring, and more obliging, to her less affluent boyfriend, a bottom-rung personal trainer who keeps looking for an entr ée to gym management (though he considers himself too special and unique a snowflake to don the company T-shirt). Even the journalist who interviews her is involved, it is clear, in a kind of commerce. And what kind of job is journalist, really, in today's economy?

Summer Hours is what's generally referred to as a "small" film, but for Olivier Assayas, it represents a comfortable return to form after several self-conscious attempts at rethinking and reinventing the boundaries of his work. Demonlover was a sort-of thriller about the international sex trade; Clean was a combination Anglo/Francophone recovery drama; and Boarding Gate was aggressively marketed as a globetrotting thriller about a girl (Asia Argento) with a gun and a paucity of clothing. I haven't seen Boarding Gate (yet), but Demonlover and Clean both felt like somewhat contrived exercises in arthouse empire-building.

Taking the reins of the Star Trek saga, producer/director J.J. Abrams’ most impressive gambit is a self-consciously clever ploy. Faced with the task of acclimating new audiences to this venerably corny space opera, he simultaneously executes a franchise reboot and nostalgia play. Thanks to the miracle of time travel — in the context of the Star Trek cosmos, such gimmick doesn't even qualify as a stretch — Star Trek functions simultaneously as sequel and prequel. That is to say, while it brings with it the return of a notably wizened Leonard Nimoy as an elderly Mr. Spock, the eyebrow-humping logician who was arguably the signature character of the original TV series, it's also full of origin stories. If you ever longed to see the Trek-ian likes of Kirk, Spock, Sulu, "Bones" McCoy, and Uhuru as fine young things studying together at Starfleet Academy, this is your chance.

Revanche begins, puzzlingly enough, as a tale of two cities. To the policeman Robert (Andreas Lust), the town of Gföhl is his workplace, the environment he's charged with protecting. He lives just outside of town with his wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss), on a secluded, picturesque property where it seems it would take the better part of the afternoon just to mow the grass. And to Alex (Johannes Krisch), newly released from prison, Vienna is a sleazy and dangerous environment where lovely young foreigners like his Ukrainian lover, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), are drafted into the sex trade by greasy bosses who are well-versed in sexual and psychological gamesmanship. The film's second-saddest joke is the name of the brothel where both she and Alex work: Cinderella.

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther once complained of Stanley Kubrick's harrowing and hilarious Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, "Virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane — or, what is worse, psychopathic." Crowther's concern was not just that Kubrick was making a sick joke out of the idea of nuclear war, but that he seemed (to Crowther) to be out to undermine, discredit and mock the entire American military and executive establishment, depicting the U.S.A. itself as a dangerously deranged member of the global community. Dr. Strangelove is, of course, essential satire and a stone classic. Observe and Report is more derivative and less urgent. Still, it's quite something. Watching it made me feel a little bit like Bosley Crowther fussing over the Kubrick. "Somehow, to me, it isn't funny," Crowther wrote. "It is malefic and sick."

In the opening shot of Hunger, a small army of protesters — hunger-strikers, perhaps — is bringing the noise by banging empty soup bowls loudly against the ground. That scene is followed, lyrically, by a scene depicting an older, staid-looking gentleman eating his breakfast, tiny crumbs tumbling from his fork onto the napkin tucked away on his lap and then getting brushed away. He heads out to his car, looks up and down the street, and then falls to his knees and peers carefully at the car's undercarriage before opening the door and getting in. His wife watches from the front-room window, the tension on her face easing slightly as the car roars to life and her husband drives away. This man turns out to be a guard at a prison in Northern Ireland. We see this man washing blood from his knuckles, which have been torn raw by the force of some blunt impact. It's only later that we're shown the sadistic behavior that earned him those scars. In a scene that toys with an audience's mounting sense of dread, we see him taking a smoke break outside the prison walls, enjoying the tactile sensation of a light snowfall before heading back inside to do, we suspect, his worst. It's a tense, expertly fraught study in contrasts that dramatizes the difference between the haves and the have-nots — the fed and the hungry.

Notably only for a first act that credibly depicts a three-way — and, eventually, four-way — relationship among friends and lovers without tilting embarrassingly toward titillation and/or soap opera, the blandly titled The Edge of Love is only incidentally a Dylan Thomas biopic. Welshman Matthew Rhys (currently on American television in Brothers & Sisters) plays the poet, and although the film draws on Thomas' writings in voiceover (some of them the famous archival recordings in the poet's own voice), he's never the center of the drama. The film opens close in on a shot of Keira Knightley, playing Vera Phillips, a singer in a London nightclub during World War II. She meets Thomas, apparently an old childhood friend, and is charmed — but surprised when the poet's wife, Caitlin (Sienna Miller), arrives on the scene. The three of them — starving artist, wife and, perhaps, muse — move in under one roof. Vera also catches the eye of William Killick (Cillian Murphy), a good-looking but perhaps too earnest solider who's preparing to return to the front lines, and would like to take a wife before he goes back. She agrees, which makes Killick forever a member of this dysfunctional group.

Update 3/23/09: Via The House Next Door comes word that The Virgin Spring is available for free, legal online viewing.

In case you're unfamiliar with the film or its reputation, let me give you an idea of just how disreputable the 1972 Wes Craven version of The Last House on the Left really is. I saw it in film school, in a horror-film class that was being taught by a professor who had stepped in at the last minute, after the one who had actually programmed the syllabus fell ill, so he was unfamiliar with some of the films that had been scheduled. The semester went pretty well went pretty well until the day we screened The Last House on the Left. The prof — a fine teacher and an expert in film in his own right — stood in front of the class afterward and declared that he had always considered himself a First Amendment absolutist. Until that day. Screening Last House for the first time, he said, had convinced him that there was a good case to be made for censorship. His argument was essentially that the film was sadistic and utterly worthless, the product of very small minds, a debasement of not just its cast and crew but of the audience members as well. I complicated matters somewhat by raising my hand and noting that The Last House on the Left was based on an Ingmar Bergman film, The Virgin Spring. As a defense of the film goes, I admit now that's pretty weak sauce, but it's what I had. And it worked, to a degree. I don't think it necessarily changed his mind about the film, but it altered the tenor of discussion. Slightly.

When the original Watchmen comic-book series began publishing, with a cover date of September 1986, the Cold War was still reality. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a battleground where it faced off against the U.S.-armed mujahideeen, was still grinding on, and the threat of nuclear annihilation was nightmare material for anyone who lived near a big city in the U.S. The so-called "Doomsday Clock," a symbolic creation of atomic scientists that attempted to quantify the likelihood of global nuclear war, was set at three minutes to midnight. I was a teenager in Pueblo, Colorado, living about 35 miles from the NORAD facility inside Cheyenne Mountain, where the military kept an eye out for a Soviet nuclear-missile attack. Movies like Dr. Strangelove and War Games, which were partly set inside NORAD's war room, had a special resonance on the Colorado's Front Range. So did Watchmen.

I stared at a blank screen for a long time before I started typing this review, mainly because it was hard to think of how much I could possibly say about Sunshine Cleaning that would make it sound any different from or more substantial than the hundreds of other quirky American indie dramatic comedies and comedic dramas that clog the festival circuit each year. And it’s true this sounds deadly precious on paper. It’s the story of a single mom, dreams dashed, who’s having a tough time making ends meet while taking care of her impulsive, socially awkward son and keeping tabs on her lovably dotty father. She eventually pools resources with her sister to start a business dealing in death, which leads to a whole new perspective on life. It all sounds pretty banal. And then I had a realization: It’s the performances, dummy.

Let's see. Half an hour out of the screening and I'm already forgetting what transpired. Severed ear, check. Decapitation, check. An arrow through the head, check. (Did it come out through the eyeball? I can't quite remember.) Axe, thrown, to the upper back, subsequently shoved through chest from behind, check. Machete to the head, check. (Think this may have been a direct crib from the Savini stunt in the original Dawn of the Dead.) Meat-hook hanging, check. (Swiped from the original Texas Chain Saw.) Death by campfire? Check. Double-impalement coitus interruptus? File under missed opportunities, along with the inexplicable lack of a 3D version. Hockey mask, check. “Sister Christian,” check. Naked tits, check check check check check check.

This Henry Selick stop-motion fantasy is the story of young Coraline, a girl just moved into a multi-family house with her busy parents. Coraline is peeved that her parents don't have extra time to spend on her, or on the formidable task of homemaking, and she's more than a little lonely. When she explores the house, she finds a portal into an "other" reality where her other mother seems eager to dote on her night and day, fixing up calorie-rich breakfasts and keeping her dorky other father at bay. But the other world isn't as lovely as it seems — Coraline's other mother is scheming to trap her in the other world, where she will sew up Coraline's eye sockets, replacing them with buttons, and hold her captive.

The genius of Clint Eastwood is evident in the fact that nobody else could get away with this. Gran Torino is by most measures a pathetically undercooked melodrama, relying on stock characters, trite dialogue, and a lot of awkward performances by untrained amateurs and unseasoned pros. The backdrop of tradition-rich Hmong families struggling to adapt to the American midwest without losing both their culture and their souls is the kind of social conflict that could drive any generic indie picture, and Eastwood himself plays the kind of character whose arc can be described in a half-dozen words: crotchety coot gets heart of gold. Eastwood doesn't even turn in an especially adept performance from a technical standpoint, although I guess he never really does. He hasn't much range. Despite that, he's one of the greatest stars in contemporary cinema — a laconic, iconic presence who's come to represent both artisanal and populist impulses in American film, to simultaneously articulate conservative and liberal ideals, to split the difference between the gruff misanthrope and the sensitive man of letters. That's how, even when he's thrown a slow, wonky pitch like Gran Torino, he manages to pretty well knock the ball out into the bleachers just the same. The guy heading into the theater to clean up cups and popcorn bags nodded at me as I left and muttered, "Clint was robbed by the Academy, right?" That's star power.

This cut-rate release from the English studio Tigon, best known as a producer of second-tier horror (the terrific Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan's Claw) and sexploitation (Au Pair Girls, which is actually a bit of fun, and the SF-themed Zeta One), has the makings of an enjoyable countryside romp through ritualism and witchcraft, but it suffers from a split personality. Half of the film plays as a surprisingly straightforward nudie picture, with sisters Christine and Betty (Ann and Vicki Michelle, respectively) appearing reliably in various states of partial and utter dishabille. And the other half plays as a somewhat ambitious psychological horror movie about young Christine, the title character, who first submits to and finally dominates a coven of witches holed up in the woods outside London.

The last installment of the Angélique saga is one of the better ones — good news for anyone diving into the entire five-film series. Set mainly in Morocco, where the abducted Angélique (Michèle Mercier) seems doomed to live as an unwilling member of the Sultan's harem, the film once again relegates once-proud Angélique to the status of damsel-in-distress, but at least there are interesting goings-on elsewhere, as her husband Joffrey de Peyrac (Robert Hossein) — better known these days as the dread pirate Rescatore — leaves a trail of blood behind him as he struggles to discover her whereabouts. There's some solid pirate action, a daring prison break, and a nighttime escape from the Sultan's castle, and if Angélique's has been somewhat subdued, at least she's still spirited. Much is made of religious conflict, with Angélique refusing to renounce her faith to satisfy her captors, and earning the allegiance of a strapping blond Christian that the Sultan never quite decides to execute. The standout character this time around is Osman Ferradji (Jean-Claude Pascal), the Moroccan king's right-hand man who is tasked, finally and unsuccessfully, with the taming of Angélique. Unsatisfying as the end of an epic, but a decent enough adventure yarn in its own right.

An Angélique pirate movie sounds like great, trashy fun, but Untamable Angélique is nowhere near as imaginative as Angélique and the King, and given Angelique's status in earlier films as a beautiful, strong-willed female it's dispiriting to see her thrown to the wolves in this fourth installment of the five-film series. The title is translated from the French Indomptable Angélique, partly because "indomitable" is roughly as unfamiliar to U.S. audiences as, well, "Synecdoche," but also because "untamable" suggests an altogether more torrid affair. Indeed, this is arguably the raciest film in the series — not only does star Michèle Mercier offer more peek-a-boo nudity, but this film's events are almost completely outside the control of poor Angélique, who is captured and raped by pirates, tortured by a pack of angry strays, stripped naked for sale at a slave auction, and eventually abducted again. Not only is Angélique a frustratingly passive character, but the film ends on an abrupt cliffhanger that promises more misery to come. By far the shortest Angélique film, Untamable Angélique is sufficiently energetic and compulsively watchable — the sea-faring scenes, including some ship-to-ship combat, are intriguing enough — but it's odd to see how abruptly this popular series exhausted its emotional capital.

Angélique (Michèle Mercier) roars back to life in this lively third installment in the five-film series, which sees her becoming a crucial instrument in the affairs of Louis XIV, and thus the subject of much palace intrigue. When Angelique accepts a diplomatic assignment to the Persian ambassador Bachtiary-Bey (Sami Frey), she's rewarded with Peyrac's estate — now she has two manors — but ends up as a kind of political prisoner, the captive of Bachtiary-Bey, who intends to rape and perhaps murder her. Rescued in the nick of time (by a Hungarian prince!), she returns to the king's court, where she's regarded with dismay by the king's wife and actively scorned by the king's current mistress, who senses impending obsolescence. The second half of the film is the most brashly inventive part of the series so far, including one recurring character's death, another's return from the grave, multiple attempts on Angélique's life, and even a black mass.

This is a real comedown after the first film in the series, which ended with Angelique de Peyrac enduring an abrupt fall from grace and apparently aligning herself with the Parisian underworld, bent on vengeance. Wonderful Angélique, however, turns out to be a much more straightforward romantic melodrama, showing Angelique as a status-driven career woman and serial monogamist who pulls herself out of poverty as an entrepreneurial restaurateur and hitches herself to royalty by marrying her cousin, Philippe de Plessis-Bellieres (Claude Giraud). She starts the film in thrall to her old sweetheart Nicolas (Giuliano Gemma), eventually falls for the anti-authoritatarian provocateur known as the "dirty poet" (Jean-Louis Trintignant) — the kind of charming rogue who introduces himself by groping your breasts while you sleep — and finally settles for Philippe. There's a callback to the assassination plot from the first film, but the storyline feels much more middle-of-the-road-historical-romance this time around and the sense of rollicking, slightly bawdy fun has been diminished. Angélique's wardrobe is still an enticingly fabulous manifestation of costume drama and the whole thing is lovely to look at but somehow the woman herself seems to have lost a stake in the story as appealingly fierce edge of Michéle Mercier's performance has been dulled. A disappointment.

While the standard-bearers of the nouvelle vague were off making stuff like The Soft Skin, Contempt, and Muriel, le cinema du papa was cranking right along with this historical potboiler, a romance about the lavish and dangerous love shared between Angélique (Michèle Mercier), the daughter of a poor nobleman living in the French countryside, and Joffrey de Peyrac (Robert Hossein), a wealthy count with a reputation for deviltry who essentially buys her hand in marriage. Peyrac takes Angelique away from the common people she loves -- and from Nicolas (Giuliano Gemma), the strapping young fieldhand who first took her fancy -- but wins her over by declining to force himself on her. Instead, the cold, cold cockles of her heart are thawed when the limping, scarred Peyrac manages to perforate the chest of a rival in a swordfight. By contemporary standards, this is hilarious stuff -- yet somehow it's still stirring, swooning through its melodramatic paces with the speed and slippery, unstoppable heft of the proverbial greased pig. Think of a Francophone cross between Gone With the Wind and Barbarella.

This lowest-common-denominator remake of a minor slasher classic succeeds on purely technical terms — it's the first R-rated movie to be made in digital 3D! — but, despite the depth effects, it's a serious snooze. Horror aficionados and completists should definitely see this in a 3D theater, because the quality of current 3D DVDs and Blu-ray Discs leaves a lot to be desired (we're talking red-and-blue glasses, folks), and nobody should sit through a flat version of this.

There's a frightening symmetry to the process of aging that David Fincher, making his cruellest picture since Se7en, illustrates to eerie effect in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That the film's titular, time-unstuck protagonist is portrayed by Brad Pitt, that blue-eyed specimen of softly chiseled macho beauty, only adds to its implicit threat that we're all on the way to decidedly less-attractive ends. That its magical backwards-aging VFX work is accomplished through a technique so advanced that it becomes hard to know where Pitt's physical presence leaves off and the digitally enabled simulacrum takes over adds to the film's metaphysical chill. Coming out of the theater, not only are you three hours older than you were when you went in, but you get the sense that your too-human flesh is also that much closer to obsolete.

Silent Light, an unhurried, largely unmodulated story of faith and unfaithfulness in a Mexican Mennonite farming community, is fundamentally a study in opposites. Light and dark are considered in the images that bookend the film, twin tracking shots that depict, in time-lapse, gorgeous sunrise and sunset. So perfectly are these moments captured and compressed, despite the tricky decision to move the camera as they transpire, that the technical facility of director Carlos Reygadas and his crew, including cinematographer Alexis Zabé, is never in doubt. The pictures they gather, which find deep colors and a pregnancy of feeling in simple landscapes, stormy skies, and shadowy figures seen through windows and doorways, express meaning as the narrative progresses deliberately through its paces.

Timecrimes, a clever piece of storytelling from Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo, is all about Héctor (Karra Elejalde), a middle-aged man just moved with his wife, Clara (Candela Fernández) into a new countryside home. When the film opens, Héctor is already exhausted, but by the time it's over he'll be utterly drained, having lived through an extended ordeal with the sustained intention of trying to put his increasingly fractured life back together.

Old men are ugly. Young women are beautiful. There's the nut of House of the Sleeping Beauties, in which the film's director, Vadim Glowna, plays Edmond, a depressed, regretful businessman who still laments the long-ago death of his wife and daughter in an automobile accident that he suspects may have been an act of suicide. To help assuage his ennui, a buddy (Maximilian Schell) suggests that he visit an unusual kind of brothel, where lovely young women are stretched out, nude, in bed, thanks to the effects of a powerful tranquilizer that they allow to be administered by the mansion's Madame (Angela Winkler). Hope they're well paid. The scenario, based on a story by the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, stops short of rape fantasy -- penetration is expressly forbidden, though Edmond tests the boundaries by sticking a meaty finger into one woman's mouth.

Synecdoche, New York is a fascinating, thought-provoking film. Re-reading what I wrote about other films written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) I see that I've compared his work to origami pieces, and I still think that's apt. You can lose yourself in their multifarious layers and folds -- and sometimes, when imprecise fingers and thumbs finish modeling the creature, the thing doesn't really match what you saw on the instruction page. I wonder if Charlie Kaufman films are like that, too, born from screenplays so psychologically intricate and emotionally personal that the finished home his imaginings find on screen doesn't quite match the blueprint. This film is very much of a piece with its predecessors, but somehow the tone is different. It's more ceaselessly despairing, with little modulation of the overall grind.

After a recent screening of Rachel Getting Married in Pleasantville, NY, Jonathan Demme confessed that, for several years following his remake of The Manchurian Candidate, he lost interest in fiction films. (During that time, he made the documentaries Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Jimmy Carter Man from Plains.) That helps explain the directorial departure that is Rachel Getting Married, a film with a present-tense title that helps convey the immediacy of its documentary style. Shooting to HD tape rather than 35mm film magazines, Demme and his Man from Plains cinematographer, Declan Quinn, let the camera roll through long takes, staging a momentous family gathering and capturing it in a warm, disarming fly-on-the-wall style.

As a child of the 1970s and 1980s, I was imprinted early on with various doomsday scenarios that could ensue when an artificial intelligence became smart enough to outfox the humans who created it. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, it started killing astronauts. In Demon Seed, it raped Julie Christie. In WarGames, it nearly started World War III. So watching Eagle Eye -- dopey as it is -- is a little like coming home. This sci-fi thriller is all about a monstrous, HAL 9000-like supercomputer that collates information gathered under the auspices of the Patriot Act, becomes self-aware, and, upon reflection on the collateral damage caused by America's reckless "war on terror," decides, essentially, to effect regime change in the U.S. As an election-year riff on current events, it's moderately clever, even though it has no nerve whatsoever. (Last year's Shooter had more guts.) But I can't stress enough how goofy it is. The climax is essentially the Get Smart movie played with a straight face. That's Eagle Eye's biggest problem. DJ Caruso has enjoyably preposterous material -- it's sort of like Live Free or Die Hard for the left wing -- and he approaches it with a portentousness that kills the fun.

Director and co-writer Brad Anderson has crafted a Hitchcockian nailbiter about the mystery of human intentions set on an old-fashioned train speeding across the Siberian wilderness. Emily Mortimer stars as Jessie, an American woman traveling with her hayseed husband Roy (Woody Harrelson) from Beijing to Moscow. Along the way, they share a compartment with another young couple, Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and Abby (raccoon-eyed Kate Mara), who may have something to hide. Anderson may be a little too reliant on blatant misdirection to build suspense, but he does know how to tighten the screws on his characters, raising the stakes as the film moves methodically toward its climax. The best thing in the film is Mortimer's terrific performance in a rare leading role -- the director deserves lots of credit for singling out her winning combination of smarts, soulfulness and, as the film wears on, desperation. Harrelson is even more gentle and relaxed than usual, and Noriega smolders amiably in his role as the charming stranger. Some of the photography is lovely, although Lithuania stands in for the forested Russian landscape. The third act is a bit of a let-down, but otherwise this is tense and absorbing filmmaking. B