Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts, and Laura Dern in We Don't Live Here AnymoreWE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

Anyone who recently went to see Closer and walked away feeling underwhelmed is encouraged to rent the new-to-DVD-and-video release We Don't Live Here Anymore immediately.

Danny Huston and Nicole Kidman in BirthBIRTH

It's pretty easy to see why audiences hate Jonathan Glazer's Birth, which features Nicole Kidman as Anna, a grieving widow who believes that the soul of her late husband, Sean, is alive in the body of a 10-year-old boy with the same name.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut



Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in Sky Captain & the World of TomorrowSKY CAPTAIN & THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow might be the movie year's most refreshing surprise, especially when you consider how disastrous the results could have been.

Jet Li in HeroHERO

Does any moviegoer really care what Zhang Yimou's Chinese martial-arts epic Hero is actually about? You get to see adversaries battling one another while running on water! You get to see a woman warding off a bow-and-arrow onslaught using only her dressing gown! You get to see a guy splitting raindrops in half with a sword, for Pete's sake!

Tom Cruise in CollateralCOLLATERAL

Collateral's plot is so High Concept you can barely believe it hasn't been filmed before: A cab driver (Jamie Foxx) unknowingly picks up a hired assassin (Tom Cruise) as a fare, and spends a long, strange evening chauffeuring him from one execution site to another, all the while trying to prevent the killer from performing his rounds without, of course, getting himself killed in the process.

Bryce Dallas Howard in The VillageTHE VILLAGE

Nobody likes a know-it-all, so I have nothing to gain by admitting that I figured out The Big Twist in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village after about 15 minutes. But I'll venture that this popular writer-director has everything to lose by continuing to make his cinematic spook shows so repetitively, predictably "surprising." If you find yourself less than enthralled by The Village's narrative, you have far too much time to ruminate on how Shyamalan will attempt, yet again, to pull the rug out from under you; he's undermining his talent - and the man does have some - with his implied "Bet ya didn't see that coming!" finales. (It's becoming easy to respond with, "Oh yeah I did.")


Recently, some friends introduced me to the considerable pleasures of Freaks & Geeks on DVD, and I understood why the show barely lasted a season; it was a nearly pitch-perfect rendering of high school's everyday horrors and comic humiliations, and what mass audience, hoping for mindless entertainment, wants to subject themselves to that? And just like that sublime TV series, Mean Girls, the new teen comedy directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey, is so wickedly sharp and achingly funny that its target audience probably won't know what to make of it.(At the screening I attended, everyone laughed like hell at the overt physical comedy, but the movie's most hilarious dialogue fell on deaf ears.)

Irma P. Hall and Tom Hanks in The LadykillersTHE LADYKILLERS

Just about every Coen brothers comedy is more enjoyable on a second or third (or fourth or fifth) viewing than it is on a first; once you adjust to Joel's and Ethan's Byzantine plotting, affected wordplay, and in-your-face staging - culminating in a style that can make their works seem, initially, show-offy and too quirky by half - the brothers' filmmaking exuberance eventually wears down your resistance, and their scripts feature some of the funniest non sequiturs you'll ever hear. (Nearly every movie fan I know can recite reams of dialogue from Raising Arizona and Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?.) The Ladykillers, the Coens' adaptation of a 1955 Alec Guinness comedy, is mostly on the hit side of hit-or-miss, and I'm guessing that it, too, will eventually become a beloved treasure trove of quotable quotes, mostly because, on a first go-around, it takes diligence to decipher exactly what Tom Hanks is saying in it.

Johnny Depp in Secret WindowSECRET WINDOW

Even though the movie isn't all that good, Secret Window is one of those thrillers that you want to watch again immediately after your first viewing. But unlike, say, The Sixth Sense or Fight Club, where you're curious to see exactly how The Twist was pulled off, your desire to return to this Stephen King adaptation is based solely on one thing: the performance of Johnny Depp.