Trailers/TV spots

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.

One of the best action movies ever made, in a cleaned-up print restoring crucial parts of the story. No cavalry ever rode in with more epochal impact than the Wild Bunch in the legendary opening scene. Their steel-eyed leader, Pike (William Holden), and his robbers in stolen army uniforms help an old lady across the street, and then spark a massacre led by Pike's old crony Thornton (Robert Ryan), sprung from jail to hunt down his old gang.

Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Tomas, the happily irresponsible Czech lover of Milan Kundera's novel, which is set in Prague just before and during the Soviet invasion in 1968. Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche are the two vastly different women who occupy his attention and to some extent represent different sides of his values and personality. In any case, the character's decision to flee Russian tanks with one of them--and then return--has profound consequences on his life.

The star of Caddyshack, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day headlines and co-directs this uproarious Big Apple heist-and-pursuit caper. Bill Murray plays Grimm, a frazzled urbanite who disguises himself as a clown - and sets out to rob a bank. Geena Davis and Randy Quaid play accomplices in Grimm's daring scheme and Jason Robards is the blustery cop caught up in Grimm's "Clown Day Afternoon." Swiping a million bucks is a snap compared to getting out of town.

A sterling cast and vivid direction give North Country an emotional heft to match its political convictions. Charlize Theron (Monster) plays Josey Aimes, who goes to work at a Minnesota steel mine after splitting with her violent husband. But the job proves to be almost as harrowing as her marriage; the male miners, resentful of women taking jobs, verbally abuse and play humiliating pranks on the female miners.

The dominant themes of director Sidney Lumet's distinguished career are in full force in this moral melodrama involving a young district attorney (Andy Garcia) who takes on a career-making case only to uncover his father's possible involvement in pervasive police corruption. Balancing personal ethics and political compromise in a high-wire act of power and its abuse, Lumet relies on dialogue and superb performances (including those by Ron Leibman, Richard Dreyfuss, and Lena Olin) to achieve a devastating impact.

The unflinching realism and searing performances of Monster's Ball are stunning in all the connotations of the word. Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) and Leticia (Halle Berry) inhabit stark, queasy realities of the contemporary South, he as a death row corrections officer and she as the soon-to-be widow of an inmate (Sean Combs) whose execution Hank helps conduct. In the aftermath of the execution, both lose their children to tragic deaths and they form an unlikely bond.

The lethal business of arms dealers provides an electrifying context for the black-as-coal humor of Andrew Niccol's Lord of War. Having proven his ingenuity as the writer of The Truman Show, and writer-director of Gattaca and the under-appreciated Simone, Niccol is clearly striving for Strangelovian relevance here as he chronicles the rise and inevitable fall of Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), a Ukrainian immigrant to America who makes his fortune selling every kind of ordnance he can get his amoral hands on.

Gene Wilder takes his most unusual role, a naive 19th-century rabbi sent from his native Poland to the fledgling Jewish community in San Francisco, in this warm-hearted comic adventure. The trusting soul is easy prey for the con men and criminals who prey on the immigrants arriving in the Philadelphia port and the rabbi, beaten but unbowed, continues his trek West solo: broke, underequipped, and hopelessly lost.