Audio commentary

Basic Instinct 2 sure has a funny way of holding your attention. It's not just Sharon Stone's trash-talk and occasional nudity that keeps you watching, but also the way she gamely earns every cent of her $14 million paycheck, vamping like a real pro in her second outing as mystery novelist and alleged serial killer Catherine Tramell. Now living in London, Catherine sets her lethal sights on Michael Glass (David Morrissey), the control-freak psychiatrist assigned to evaluate her as a risk-addicted suspect in the "accidental" killing of a star soccer player.

Bolstered by an OscarÆ-caliber performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role, Capote ranked highly among the best films of 2005. Written by actor/screenwriter Dan Futterman and based on selected chapters from the biography by Gerald Clarke, this mercilessly perceptive drama shows how Truman Capote brought about his own self-destruction in the course of writing In Cold Blood, the "nonfiction novel" that was immediately acclaimed as a literary milestone.

Millions wears its heart on its sleeve, and it wears it well. Two boys, still grieving the death of their mother, find themselves the unwitting benefactors of a bag of bank robbery loot in the week before the United Kingdom switches its official currency to the Euro. What's a kid to do? Director Danny Boyle takes a simple premise and, with the help of Frank Cottrell Boyce's sweet, smart script, finds something special to say about the hopes everyone has for the future of a changing world.

In his direction of The Hurricane, veteran filmmaker Norman Jewison understands that slavish loyalty to factual detail is no guarantee of compelling screen biography. In telling the story of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter--who was wrongly convicted of murder in 1967 and spent nearly two decades in jail--Jewison and his screenwriters compress time, combine characters, and rearrange events with a nonchalance that would be galling if they didn't remain honest to the core truth of Carter's ordeal.

It's hard to believe Ridley Scott's handsome epic won't become the cinematic touchstone of the Crusades for years to come. Kingdom of Heaven is greater than the sum of its parts, delivering a vital, mostly engrossing tale following Balian (Orlando Bloom), a lonely French blacksmith who discovers he's a noble heir and takes his father's (Liam Neeson) place in the center of the universe circa 1184: Jerusalem. Here, grand battles and backdoor politics are key as Scott and first-time screenwriter William Monahan fashion an excellent storyline to tackle the centuries-long conflict.

In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, director Wes Anderson takes his familiar stable of actors on a field trip to a fantasy aquarium, complete with stop-motion, candy-striped crabs and rainbow seahorses. And though Anderson does expand his horizons in terms of retro-special effects and a whimsical use of color, fans will otherwise find themselves in well-charted waters.

The two-disc edition of Sin City easily makes the earlier single-disc theatrical-cut release obsolete by including the regular theatrical cut on the first disc, recutting the movie into four extended segments on the second disc (separated by story line), then piling on an impressive load of bonus features. But there's a catch.

With a terrific cast at his service, director Phillip Noyce (Dead Calm, Patriot Games) turns the pulpy indulgence of Jeffery Deaver's novel into a slick potboiler that is grisly fun. Noyce expertly builds palpable tension around a series of gruesome murders that lead us into the darkest nooks of New York City. Now a bedridden quadriplegic prone to life-threatening seizures and suicidal depression, forensics detective Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington) gets a new lease on life with a sharp young beat cop (Angelina Jolie) who's a wizard at analyzing crime scenes.

Based on the true story of Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), daughter of film actor Laurence Harvey. Tired and unsuited to the pretentiousness of her high-society LA life, Domino leaves the glittarti behind and sets off to become a bounty hunter. She quickly falls under the wing of veteran hunter Ed Mosley (Mickey Rourke) and his crew and becomes an unlikely natural in the art of bounty hunting.

On the surface, David Cronenberg may seem an unlikely candidate to direct A History of Violence, but dig deeper and you'll see that he's the right man for the job. As an intellectual seeker of meaning and an avowed believer in Darwinian survival of the fittest, Cronenberg knows that the story of mild-mannered small-town diner proprietor Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is in fact a multilayered examination of inbred human behavior, beginning when Tom's skillful killing of two would-be robbers draws unwanted attention to his idyllic family life in rural Indiana.