After winning his Oscars, Kevin Spacey was offered the corniest roles in Hollywood, and unfortunately he accepted a lot of them. This time Spacey plays Prot, a patient at a psychiatric hospital who claims to be from outer space. Offering otherworldly words of wisdom and even curing his fellow patients, Prot is a shameless showcase

Beyond Oscar bait – more like one of those ludicrously bright fishing lures that turn a pond into a glistening discotheque – Pay It Forward shamelessly caters to American cinema’s top award both with its Oscar-friendly cast (Helen Hunt, Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment) and in its blatant emotional manipulation (there’s a death here that’s

If a good con man should never be smug – that would reveal he’s up to something – neither should a good con movie. Confidence oozes a sense of self-satisfaction, from its smarmy lead performance by Edward Burns to its overly clever plot. Burns plays the head of a con team whose latest scam involves

Charlize Theron may look to be mining for another Oscar here – she plays a defiant litigant in a fictionalization of one of the United States’ first sexual harassment lawsuits – but it is her movie that’s really after the gold. Theron delivers a tough, authentic performance, while director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) repeatedly trots

A nihilistic drama full of hip misery and forced edginess, Rules depicts the college experience as a land of loneliness, betrayal, drug abuse and sexual humiliation. A young cast (including James Van Der Beek of television’s “Dawson’s Creek”) desperately strives for indie credibility, but they all come away soiled by the sensationalistic sadism on display.

In following the adventures of Violet (Piper Perabo), a sweet wanabe songwriter who learns to exploit her looks as a flesh-baring bartender, Coyote Ugly wants to sell itself as a new form of feminism, in which women exercise their right to be thought of as pieces of meat. Too bad this dubious message is muddled

An ambitious directorial debut from John Malkovich, this is an unassuming adaptation of Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel about a violent guerrilla revolution in an unspecified South American country and the corrupt government’s attempts to quell it. Javier Bardem projects a quiet dignity as the policeman in charge of the investigation. His strong performance helps Malkovich wrestle

An overwrought adaptation of a Sam Shepard play in which a horse-racing scam from the past comes back to haunt three friends (Jeff Bridges, Nick Nolte and Sharon Stone, each giving showy auditions for an Academy Award).

Empire pits a Bronx drug dealer (John Leguizamo) against a yuppie broker (Peter Sarsgaard) after the broker coaxes the dealer to try his hand at high finance, only to disappear with the earnest money. What could have been a gritty exploration of cultural conflict instead spends too much time on the generic thug life of