Realizing you can’t shoot at a virus, director Wolfgang Petersen transforms this initially chilling scientific thriller into a generic action flick. Army disease expert Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) has enough on his hands while fighting a lethal African virus, but then he stumbles across a government conspiracy as well. Gunfights, helicopter chases and other predictable

This domestic thriller, about a couple (Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) who clone their 8-year-old boy after his death, could have gone in numerous intriguing directions, but it chooses the worst one of all of them. Almost a ghost story, almost a theological take on fate, Godsend instead goes for straight-out horror, with all the

Adrien Brody plays a Gulf War veteran who is accused of murdering a cop and sent to a mental institution for the criminally insane. He may be crazy, he may be innocent, he may, in fact, be dead. The Jacket offers all of these possibilities without following through on any of them. It wants to

If it wasn’t for the sleek, hilltop house in which the hostage situation of Hostage takes place, the movie would be a complete wash. As a thriller, Hostage disappoints, but it makes for a fairly gripping episode of HGTV’s “Dream Homes.” Bruce Willis plays a small-town sheriff negotiating the release of a kidnapped family who

Another ludicrous Ashley Judd thriller, and one that makes Double Jeopardy look like a model of logic. This time Judd plays a disturbed seductress who murders men because she was abandoned by her dad as a little girl. Ewan McGregor plays the high-tech detective who chases down Judd and who also happens to have lost

The comedic version of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, this Hollywood-fed pulp mystery comes from late ’80s, early ’90s screenwriting king Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), who makes his directorial debut by spewing whatever comic bile has been building up in his brain since his glory days. As Robert Downey Jr.’s thief gets caught up in a

This computer thriller, about a criminal mastermind (John Travolta) and the oh-so-hip hacker he corrupts (Hugh Jackman), showcases Hollywood at its most soulless. Full of nasty, empty attitudes and overblown, callous action, it even manages to drain the charisma from Travolta (who once again overacts while playing the bad guy). Also featuring Halle Berry’s breasts.

The middle 40 minutes or so of Out of Time offers some thrillingly intense moviegoing. Too bad its bookends are complete nonsense. The film stars Denzel Washington as a police chief who becomes wrongly implicated in a double homicide. His desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of the investigation has the claustrophobia of a

Brittany Murphy is full of tics – the acting kind – as a psychiatric-hospital patient with a secret in her head. There’s a convoluted suspense plot somewhere here – mainly involving a psychiatrist (Michael Douglas) whose daughter is kidnapped, with the ransom being the troubled girl’s secret – but Murphy’s wildly mannered performance (scratching walls,