BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Michael Moore, even if, or especially if, you agree with his politics. Moore specializes in political theater, but his record on follow-up isn't great, to say nothing of his willingness to trim the truth to fit an easy argument. That's what makes Bowling for Columbine such a surprise: it's not afraid to ask questions it doesn't know the answers to. Calling it disorganized or inconclusive misses the point; Moore has deliberately taken on a subject -- the American propensity for violence -- that can't be explained, just to see how close to the impossible he can get. Ranging all over the place, both physically and thematically, Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore, an NRA member and former child marksman, pushes past that answer; Canada, he points out, has more guns per household, although nothing remotely approaching our gun deaths. Moore points fingers at retailers who offer cut-rate ammunition, at racial and economic disparities, and at a media that makes it seem like we're more violent than we actually are. He goes to Columbine, and to Littleton, interviewing people from Marilyn Manson to South Park's Matt Stone -- who, with his account of growing up bullied in Colorado, emerges as the movie's voice of reason -- to NRA President Charlton Heston, who blames the U.S.'s rate of violence on "ethnic mixing." Bowling is a sprawl, it's true, but it's ambitious, not confused.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

With his suspiciously pleasing grin and supernatural guilelessness, Leonardo DiCaprio is perfectly cast as teenage con artist Frank Abagnale. He now helps the government and corporations catch the kind of crook he used to be, passed himself off as an airline pilot, a pediatrician and an assistant D.A. (among other things), floating on a cloud of bad checks and public confidence until he finally fell to earth. For each new guise, Frank studies cheap novels and TV shows to learn the jargon, which makes sense, but the sequence where he stares up at a suave Sean Connery Bond and then buys a suit "just like the one in the movie" is pure Steven Spielberg, the perfect fusion of movies and dreams. Unfortunately, try as John Williams' score might to drag the movie into the era of Henry Mancini, Catch Me gets tripped up by the need to psychologize, to pin everything down to Frank's pain over his parents' divorce. As Hanratty, the FBI agent who spent years tracking him down, Tom Hanks becomes a surrogate father, which might be a nice grace note if the movie didn't have to hammer on it like a chimp on a toy piano. But the movie goes on far too long after Frank's stopped running, grinding its victories into the dirt. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bala; Bridge; Narberth; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

CHICAGO

Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, Chicago splits off Kander and Ebb's cracking songs from the rest of the story, setting them in a fantasy nightclub space that is interwoven with the real-life setting. Following in Stanley Donen's footsteps, Rob Marshall is a choreographer turned director, and the movie's dance sequences fall together like little bits of magic, though the faux-retro salaciousness sometimes comes off more Broadway crass than le jazz hot (and Catherine Zeta-Jones is too hippy for her high-cut costumes). Zellweger, though, proves to be an honest-to-goodness triple threat; while hardly a belter, she finds her way into Roxie's go-getter bite, and she's as light on her feet as any good comic actress. Who knew, what's more, that Richard Gere had been hiding a mean lyric tenor all these years? Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it's the best traditional movie musical in many a moon. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

DIE ANOTHER DAY

Ouch, ouch, ouch. As Die Another Day opens. James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is being tortured almost to death. Captured by North Koreans, following a chase scene that ends in the apparent death of young and vociferous Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee), Bond spends 14 months being half-drowned, stung by scorpions, electrocuted and kicked. By the time Bond is exchanged for another prisoner, the dastardly Zao (Rick Yune), he's hairy and beat-down. When M (Judi Dench) sees him back at HQ, she tells him she thinks he divulged info while drugged and that he's "no longer useful." Well, that's enough for Bond: Within seconds, he's escaped, trying to find out who betrayed him in North Korea and redeem himself. From here, the 20th film in the series delivers what you expect -- numerous stunts, excellent cars (Bond's turns invisible), fabulous ice and Madonna as Verity the fencing instructor. The Korean villain is so self-hating and driven to rule the world that not only does he engineer a satellite that's a combination artificial sun/laser-style weapon, he also engages in some genetic replacement. Bond's own issues also have to do with self-identity: Not only does he feel rejected, he's also looking older, he squints more and shows strain when engaged in major stunts. Brosnan carries all this well, but here enters Halle Berry, as Jinx, who's good with puns, a good shot and decently mimics Ursula Andress' infamous rise-from-the-sea. Aside from Berry's celebrity, Jinx brings into Bond's white-guy heroic world a black woman who can not only keep up and save him, but also whoop him. The downside is that the climactic sequences are spread over the two heroes' clashes with villains, inevitably leading to dilution, while Jinx looks cooler -- more threatening and slinkier -- in the formfitting camouflage than Bond does.--C.F. (Ritz 16; UA Riverview)

DRUMLINE

Devon (Nick Cannon), high-school band drummer, expects a good reaction when he gets to Atlanta A&T, the university that recruited him for his skills. The school's show-style marching band is legendary, even if it has fallen on hard times over the past few years. The stakes are high: In this world, the football game provides a useful context for halftime, when the show really starts. Initially thrilled to be where he always dreamed of being, Devon soon learns that, once again, he's slightly out of place -- a raw if brilliant talent whose resistance to rules makes his hardworking teammates anxious. His mother is supportive, but his father, a onetime drummer now working for NYC transit, has been absent. And so he clashes immediately with would-be father figures, including senior/drumline leader Sean (Leonard Roberts) and the band director, Dr. Lee (Orlando Jones). While Devon's gift has allowed him to get over for most of his life, at A&T he has to submit to the "tree-shaking" that ranks musicians and determines who is on the line for any given weekend. Scripted by Shawn Schepps and Tina Gordon Chism, Drumline follows a basic boy-learns-life-lessons plot, complete with familiar secondary characters: the wise and supportive dancer-girlfriend, Laila (Zoë Saldana); Jayson (GQ), the Caucasian bass player who learns to "appreciate" his instrument after rhythmic instruction from Devon; and the tough girl, Diedre (Candace Carey), who puts the boys to shame with her one-armed push-ups. These foils serve their purpose; they make Devon look relatively complicated. Most importantly, he is the focus of the film's fierce, fun energy and -- no small thing -- first-rate drumming. Its enthusiasm is hard to resist.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

EVELYN

I haven't checked to see if there's a Touched by an Angel Christmas special this year. If you have, and there isn't, by all means go see this movie instead. Fresh off his fourth Bondstravaganza, Pierce Brosnan has a license to swill as Desmond Doyle, an alcoholic, unemployed Dublin housepainter whose three kids are made wards of the state after his wife abandons the family. The oldest child, Evelyn, is sent to live with mean old nuns, and even after Doyle gets work and gives up the drink (you know he's sober when he starts shaving), a technicality of Irish law requiring the approval of both parents for release keeps Evelyn at the convent. Urged on by wholesome bartender Julianna Margulies and wholesome lawyers Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn and Alan Bates, Doyle takes his case to the media and to the Supreme Court. Ripped from 1954's headlines, Bruce Beresford's not-without-my-daughter paean to bland faith is cockle-warming enough to drive Miss Daisy to distraction. I don't know if it's more disturbing that the contents of a child's prayer were crucial to a major court case in a modern democratic nation, or that they're crucial to the plot of a movie that some people might actually pay to see. All but the most lachrymose should skip Evelyn; do yourself a favor and cry another day.--Ryan Godfrey (Ritz at the Bourse)

FAR FROM HEAVEN

Todd Haynes' magnificently obsessed version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama introduces Cathy (a blond, peppy Julianne Moore), the perfect suburban wife and hostess, with two children, a black maid (Viola Davis) and a hard-working husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid). But all is not well in the Magnatech household. Frank slips out of work one night, to a dimly lit underground bar. In a real '50s melodrama, this is as far (farther, even) than we'd go: Audiences of the time wouldn't have missed the implication that Frank was drifting into a life of sexual perversion, and he'd end up either dead or doomed by the final reel. But Haynes twists the genre against itself -- Frank's plight is portrayed as it would have been at the time, but we're understanding, not clucking our tongues. The resurgence of the passion Frank thought he'd quelled is hardest on Cathy, who turns to her gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) for help. Trouble is, Raymond is black, and in 1950s Hartford, their relationship is more than unseemly; as her marriage to Frank grows worse and eventually dissolves, Cathy's relationship to Raymond grows deeper, more emotionally intimate (although the two hardly even touch). Unlike traditional melodrama characters, though, Cathy isn't brought low because of her faults, but because of her strengths. However frowned upon for her relationship with Raymond, Cathy never actually cheats on her husband, even after she knows he's cheated on her. When Frank unburdens himself to Cathy, draped almost completely in the shadows of their split-level living room, Quaid's voice reaches an anguished pitch, but his body remains almost perfectly erect, as if he's so trapped by the codes of masculine behavior he can't draw breath. Far from Heaven is a stylistic marvel: though it's still a little more impressive than impassioned, the sophistication with which Haynes has intermingled the modern and postmodern is awe-inspiring.--S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

FRIDA

The innovative melding of art and biography grants Taymor's film -- written by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, and based on a biography by Hayden Herrera -- an uncanny and welcome grace. Certainly, some moments reflect the reasons for making the movie to begin with: the rich textures of the artist's experience, the grand scope of the legend that has since grown up around Frida Kahlo. They don't come often enough, so that the film lapses into mundane biopic structure. But when they do come, they suggest something of the artist's brilliance, as well as her struggles with perpetual, various pain. It's well known that Frida (played by Salma Hayek, who spent some eight years pulling this project together) suffered mightily and throughout her life, emotionally, spiritually and physically: a 1925 trolley wreck breaks her back and leaves her in a body cast for years. This pain became the primary source of her art (her many self-portraits are her most famous legacy) as well as a dreadful, inevitable focus. Throughout Frida's recovery, her photographer father (Roger Rees) dotes on her, while her mother (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) frets that her chance for proper marriage is over. This standard parental divide more or less sets up Frida's lifelong investment in genderfuck: She rejects expectations that girls should stay home and cook, throwing herself into her painting and politics (she and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) were dedicated Communists) with bracing enthusiasm. When Diego asks her to marry him (admiring that she is "a woman with cajones"), she articulates these principles and so, the film's thematic focus: If Diego, 21 years her senior, cannot promise fidelity, he must be loyal. He agrees, they wed, serial disasters ensue.--C.F.(Cinemagic; Ritz at the Bourse)

FRIDAY AFTER NEXT

"I look at myself and the movies I do as a brand," Ice Cube tells Variety. No doubt, he works hard for the money, but this subset of the brand is particularly weak. Just in time for "Christmas in the hood" (and the "ho, ho, ho" joke is too obvious and unfunny), first-time director Marcus Raboy has Craig and Day-Day (Cube and Mike Epps) start new jobs as rent-a-cops down at the mall. They're short on rent money, this time out because they've been robbed by a raggedy Santa in orange sneakers. Conveniently, Craig's Willie (John Witherspoon) and Elroy (Don "D.C." Curry) also work down at the mall, in their new BBQ joint. And on this Friday, they do what they always do: complain about their money situation, run from thugs, call each other names, smoke weed, flirt with a pretty girl, tangle with church ladies and fear the Tiny Lister stand-in (here, Terry Crews as a lunky ex-con with a hankering for sex with short men, say, a mini-pimp played by Katt Williams). And they end up throwing a party, where Clifton Powell brings girls and Witherspoon has bowel issues. In other words, nothing's changed, except maybe that you've seen this before, twice, and Chris Tucker has moved on to more lucrative jokes.--C.F. (Cinemagic)

GANGS OF NEW YORK

Martin Scorsese's tale of New York City in the mid-1800s begins in the Five Points, what today is part of Manhattan, but here is frontier country ruled by murderous, warring factions whose brutality is equalled only by their vocabulary. A snowy opening confrontation sets the anti-immigrant Natives, led by the mustachioed, cleaver-wielding Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), against the Irish Dead Rabbits, lead by by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), who's fond of dispatching his prey with a weighty iron crucifix. As Vallon lies bleeding to death in the snow, Bill proclaims him a worthy opponent. Big softie that he is, Bill spares Vallon's son, who grows up to be a goateed Leonardo DiCaprio, bent on revenging his dead father. Navigating the Five Points isn't easy, though; where there aren't gangs, corrupt cops (like the be-brogued John C. Reilly) rule the roost, themselves little more than uniformed street gangs. Trouble is, such a world requires characters of similar size, and rather than cast two titans, Scorsese uses a ham and a mouse, apparently hoping they'll balance each other out. Day-Lewis' Bill adopts a nasal bark of comical intensity, while, chin fuzz notwithstanding, DiCaprio is nowhere near convincing as a street tough with murder on his mind. Scorsese tries to soup up the action, stooping to techniques that hacks invented trying to imitate him (the use of AVID-spawned digital undercranking is particularly disheartening), but Gangs is all hue and no cry.--S.A. (Bala; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS

The first Harry Potter was perhaps the only literary adaptation in memory to be better loved by those who had read the books than those who hadn't -- Chris Columbus' literal-minded faithfulness may produce insufferably lengthy films (the new one clocks in at 2 hours, 41 minutes), but they also allow you to pass leisurely through J.K. Rowling's magnificent plots. (You can tell they're bad movies based on good books.) At least they continue to pick good actors to add to a cast that includes Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Alan Rickman and the late Richard Harris (who sounds as if he barely made it through production). This time around, Kenneth Branagh joins the cast as the pompous, vain Gilderoy Lockhart (funny how well Branagh can play an arrogant prick) and The Patriot's Jason Isaacs steps in as Lucius Malfoy, father of the bratty Draco. Columbus' pacing is still murderously slow, his ideas as pedestrian as the worst TV -- an evil character gets a band of light across the eyes, and so forth. More than the exits, what Chamber makes you impatient for is the day when Y Tu Mamá También's Alfonso Cuarón takes the helm with movie no. 3. Now that should be something to see. --S.A. (UA Grant; UA Riverview)

THE HOT CHICK

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

In an alternate

Universe, this movie will

Get Rob Schneider laid.

(AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

THE LION KING

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Poor little Simba,

his dad is about to die

on a big, big screen.

(Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS

Middle parts of trilogies don't have the best of reputations, composed as they are mainly of connective tissue between the introduction and the conclusion. It's no surprise that the characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers spend an awful lot of time walking. Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) spend at least an hour of screen-time being carried through the forest by an ambulatory tree, while more intrepid Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) make it to the gates of the dread forest Mordor before backing off and trying an alternate route. Even if you're not familiar with the scope of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, this can't come as much of a surprise. Having decided in The Fellowship of the Ring that all their hopes rest on the success of Frodo's quest to drop the ring of power into the molten heart of Mount Doom, destroying it and the dark lord Sauron with it, this is the characters' only objective. However, the reduced burden of plot actually allows The Two Towers to be a better realized and more satisfying experience than its predecessor. For all the sorcery and swordplay, the film really offers us is a chance to inhabit Tolkien's world, which this time we get to do without worrying about how we got there or where we're going next. It begins with a great bang, a dream flashback to Gandalf's demise, and ends with one, too: the battle to protect the human stronghold of Helms Deep, which in the book occupies only a few dozen pages, but is here expanded to occupy most of the movie's last hour, in one of the most elaborate and complex battle sequences ever committed to film. Gollum, the shrivelled creature who once held the ring, and has been reduced to a reptilian hulk by its loss, was created entirely digital (though based on the movements of actor Andy Serkis), and seems nearly as real as the furry-footed hobbits he shares scenes with. And in essence, that's the secret to Jackson's approach, emphasizing the physical combat and military maneuvering without losing the historical and ecological underpinnings of Tolkien's tale.--S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bala; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

MAID IN MANHATTAN

Written by Kevin Wade (Working Girl, Meet Joe Black) and directed by Wayne Wang, this "ethnic" revision of Pretty Woman uses the "iconic" Jennifer Lopez strategically. She plays Marisa Ventura, dedicated single mom, proud Bronx native. Every morning she rides the bus to school with her son Ty (Tyler Garcia Posey), then takes the subway to the Upper East Side, where she works as a maid at the upscale Beresford Hotel. Stunning in her form-fitting uniform, Marisa "strives to be invisible" and treats guests with utmost care and attention to detail. This sets up the film's basic Cultural Insight: rich, "upstairs" people are vain and selfish, and "downstairs" people -- including Marisa's maid-buddy Stephanie (Marissa Matrone) and butler/father-figure Lionel (Bob Hoskins) -- are earthy and compassionate. Boosted by them, Marisa looks fabulous: diligent, reliable, smart and energetic. Though she wants to apply for a management position, she also knows that maids are rarely moved up that particular ladder. Whatever Marisa's ambitions, this distinction between classes remains in place until she meets the man of her dreams, a classically beautiful scion of a wealthy political family and U.S. Senate candidate-to-be, Chris Marshall (Ralph Fiennes). The crossing-over is helped by the fact that he walks in on Marisa while she's trying on a Dolce & Gabbana white wool suit, and mistakes her for someone "like him." Chris is the cardboardiest of Prince Charmings, hanging on every word that Marisa utters concerning life in the projects (because, she admits vaguely, she grew up around there, and besides, he's plainly clueless and happy being so), resiliently unaware that Marisa is lying to him for days and, once they share a blissful night together, willing to marry her even when he learns of her elaborate deception. More tiresomely, Marisa's service-industry friends all aid in her deception: Ah, yes. In the world of "Jenny from the Block," this is an earnest fantasy.--C.F. (AMC Orleans; Bala; UA 69th St; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St; UA Riverview; Ritz 16)

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

Understandably, Dickens novels often make for weighty, overcrowded movies. The episodic structures, the huge casts of characters, the shifting locations -- all add up to lots of material to cover, and deciding what to trim can be as painful as actually trying to mount the whole business. Happily, Douglas McGrath (former SNL writer and co-writer, with Woody Allen, of Bullets Over Broadway -- not to mention the director of the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring Emma) is quite undaunted, indeed, quite in love with his material. He lets cleverly composed images carry much of the narrative (and develop relationships), while paring dialogue to approximate human rhythms, rather than speeches. As Nicholas, British Queer As Folk-er Charlie Hunnam more than makes up for his dreary turn as Katie Holmes' doomed beau in Abandon, evincing wry charm here. Even better, he's aided by a swell lot of troupers, including Christopher Plummer as Uncle Ralph, Romola Garai as Kate, Jamie Bell as Smike, the indefatigable Jim Broadbent as the one-eyed Squeers and Juliet Stevenson as the evil Mrs., Edward Fox as the snivelly Hawk, Tom Courtenay as noble Newman Noggs, Nathan Lane, Timothy Spall, and even Anne Hathaway (survivor of The Princess Diaries). As usual in Dickens, family extends beyond blood, but blood will do you in if you're bad. Here, the eccentric plot and character bits leading to such enlightenment range from kooky to horrifying, and are, for the most part, deftly drawn. --Cindy Fuchs (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

THE PIANIST

A Polish Jew hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw, sometimes looked after by friendly non-Jews, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the titular artist, is near starving, his hair hanging in clumps off his skull, his skin pale and gray. Commanded to play something by a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann), he's playing for his life, but it's difficult to know exactly what that life might mean now. Yet Szpilman will survive this encounter. You know this because Roman Polanski's film is based on his memoirs (published in 1946). Opening in September 1939, The Pianist introduces the young artist as he is playing, refusing to acknowledge that life is already changed forever, that the Germans had invaded weeks before. Tragically, Szpilman and his family stay in their apartment; they can't quite act. And so they wait, until they too are moved to a barracks, and then taken to a camp. The film mostly takes Szpilman's view, showing the atrocities he sees; Polanksi and cinematographer Pawel Edelman hardly linger on any of these images. Finally forced to evacuate, Szpilman spends the rest of the film keeping out of sight. While the "action," such as it is, now decreases, the film becomes almost unbearably acute, approximating the man's psychic state, his process of internalization. This attenuation -- Szpilman's diminished view, his simultaneous dread of seeing and need to see -- is The Pianist's most startling effect. Brody's physical and emotional reduction is part of it, but even more extraordinary is the paring away of the film's self-image, its presumed capacity to elucidate and illustrate. The Pianist attends to the senses in ways that grander pictures cannot.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

RABBIT-PROOF FENCE

Based on a true story, Rabbit-Proof Fence is set in Western Australia in 1931, when mixed-race aboriginal children were regularly stripped from their families by their government "protector," Neville (Kenneth Branagh), and sent to government schools, supposedly so the "half-castes" might be more readily bred into white society, thus preventing the creation of "an unwanted third race." (The practice, incidentally, continued until 1970.) The titular fence, called the largest in the world, ran the length of the Australian continent, and it was that fence that the story's three girls used to find their way 1,200 miles home. This brief tale, more effectively than the ponderous American, exposes the 20th-century fallout of manifest destiny's last gasp -- governments that sought to conquer through management and intrigue rather than all-out occupation. Rabbit-Proof Fence is a simple story, told mainly with non-actors, but if Phillip Noyce's technique kills the feel of neo-realism, it lends lyricism and poignancy. If not on the level of Walkabout or The Last Wave (both of which, like Rabbit-Proof Fence, feature actor David Gulpilil, who offers a perfect, near-wordless performance as the native tracker sent to find the girls), it's a solid, heartfelt work worth seeing before it quickly vanishes. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES

Ana (excellent America Ferrera) is graduating from Beverly Hills High School. But unlike her privileged classmates, she can't count on going to college. Though she applies to Columbia, with the help of her teacher (George Lopez), Ana must go to work: her mother Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros) and sister (Ingrid Oliu) need her to work at the sister's sweatshop. Equally stubborn and impassioned, Carmen and Ana argue vigorously -- about Ana's curvy body, Carmen's unlikely pregnancy, Ana's white boyfriend, and "real women's" expectations and desires. Written by George LaVoo and Josefina Lopez (based on her play), and winner of the Sundance Film Festival's Dramatic Audience Award winner, Patricia Cardoso's first feature is alternately soapy and rousing, predictable and resourceful. Everyone in Ana's family code-switches, speaks English and Spanish, performs one way for the white folks and another way with one another, and while they all want something "more," they're also caught up in getting through each day. Carmen can't imagine alternatives, and so she worries that Ana will move on and that she won't (as both possibilities reflect on her). Ana, for her part, wants both to show up her mother and support her family; she's equally afraid of failing and leaving what she knows, especially her beloved grandfather (Soledad St. Hilaire). A refreshing alternative to most high school movie girls, Ana has a sense of who she is and where she comes from. --C.F. (Bryn Mawr)

THE RING

The director of Mouse Hunt and The Mexican doesn't seem like the greatest choice to remake a cultishly popular Japanese horror movie, but The Ring is easily the most terrifying movie to come out of Hollywood in years. (That is not, by the way, a cue to gird yourself for the fright of a life, then come out and brag that "it wasn't that scary." Too many people ruined The Blair Witch Project for themselves that way.) Despite a foolish opening nod to Scream (which probably played a lot better in Japanese), The Ring is blissfully free of the deadend self-consciousness that has rendered American horror movies almost unwatchable. The premise is simple, creepy, and inescapable: a videotape which kills everyone who watches it after exactly seven days. Skeptical reporter Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) watches the tape after her niece dies mysterious, and then the clock starts ticking. Though Watts' investigation takes her all over gloomy Seattle (and even off the coast), you hardly ever see more than two or three people in the frame -- the film thrives on isolation, the product of a society centered around the TV. (At one point, Watts stands on her apartment balcony and gazes at the building across, each apartment with its television facing outward, communicating more than the back of the person watching it.) Though The Ring abuses the loud-noise scare, it successfully rachets up the tension and never goes slack, meaning you keep having to find new edges on your seat. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham)

SPACE STATION

Somewhere between the phantasmagorical revolving station of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame and the cramped quarters of a Volkswagen bug (and a major improvement over Mir -- the decrepit Soviet space home that deserved a tabloid headline of "Oy, Vey Is Mir") the International Space Station is lofty testament to the wonders of worldwide cooperation in the name of science. It also makes for some amazing cinematography. Space Station, the latest IMAX film, gives viewers the typical IMAXian bird's-eye view of things -- in this case, life aboard a space station -- with a twist. The film, a co-production of IMAX and Lockheed Martin, was shot by astronauts, who not only master the elements of space travel, but do a very fine job taking pictures as well. As astronaut Brian Duffy explained at a press conference, he and his fellow space travelers spent nearly three years not just training for their mission, but they learned the intricacies of filmmaking as well. All in all, Space Station is one small step for man, one giant leap for audiences.--Howard Altman (Tuttleman Imax Theater, Franklin Institute)

STAR TREK: NEMESIS

The fourth film to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Nemesis begins with a wedding, ends with a significant character's death and is filled with everything you'd expect from a Star Trek movie: ugly aliens, Kirk-style hand-to-hand combat, phaser battles, cloaking devices, starship Mexican standoffs, photon torpedoes, damaged shields, hull breaches and -- as if I have to mention it -- the obligatory dune buggy race. What has always distinguished the Star Trek shows and movies from more conventional sci-fi explodathons, however, is their concern with weightier issues than the mere fate of the civilized universe. A future filled with androids, shape-shifters, sentient holograms and perfect genetic carbon copies makes it clear that the final frontier isn't space, it's the uncharted bounds of humanity and identity. Case in point: the nemesis in Nemesis (Black Hawk Down's Tom Hardy) is Captain Picard's youthful clone, incubated and discarded by Romulans, only to take over their empire and seek the obliteration of Earth and the Federation. Writer John Logan (Gladiator) is shooting for the Shakespearean stars -- there are traces of Othello's jealousy, Macbeth's primal ambition, Lear's dissolution of family, Hamlet's Oedipal rage. It will surprise no one that this star soap is a positron more prosaic than all that, but for Star Trek fans, parting with your nine bucks will be no great tragedy. --Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

TALK TO HER

It's notable that Michael Cunningham's The Hours shows up on a bedside table in Pedro Almodóvar's newest movie, because in a way, it more fully seizes the notion of improbable emotional connections than the novel's upcoming movie adaptation. The plot takes so many turns, it's unfair to reveal too much, but its basis is the relationship that develops between two men -- Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) -- who are both attached to comatose women, the former professionally, the latter romantically. In fact, they first connect while watching a dance performance, when Benigno notices Marco tearing up, and it's a key clue to Almodóvar's real subject: the way fictions, either those created for us or the ones we create ourselves, fill the gaps between people, for good or for ill. Repeatedly making nods to other types of art -- including a mesmerizing silent-film interlude, filmed by the director, which is transportingly beautiful but hides a sinister meaning -- Talk to Her perhaps spreads itself too thin, but it's a movie about passions, so if they overrun, it's almost appropriate.--S.A. (Ritz Five)