Vertigo is too fussy and hermetic to be the best film from Alfred Hitchcock (that would be Rear Window), yet it certainly is his defining picture – the one that reveals the obsessiveness at the center of his art. Kim Novak is the center of obsession as Madeleine, a suicidal San Francisco socialite who is

Dreamcatcher begins as one thing, turns into something else and then becomes something completely different. None of them are any good. A clumsy adaptation of a Stephen King novel, the movie involves – among other things – alien worms, boyhood pals, telepathy, secret government forces, extreme intestinal irritation and the defiantly bushy eyebrows of Morgan

I wouldn’t dare reveal where The Forgotten goes, but suffice it to say the movie ends up in a place that is very, very far from where it starts. That’s too bad, for the first third of this increasingly erratic thriller works as a moody meditation on the nature of grief. Julianne Moore stars as

A botched remake of the 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant romance thriller involving lost money and mistaken identities in Paris. Thandie Newton does a serviceable Hepburn impersonation, but Mark Wahlberg couldn’t evoke Grant if he tried, so he doesn’t. Meanwhile, director Jonathan Demme is too busy making irrelevant references to films of the French New Wave

“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.” So says Thelma Ritter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. If she’s right, the movies are partly to blame. This is a movie about watching others – it taps into the very voyeurism that drives the cinema. Ritter plays Stella, nurse to James Stewart’s L.B. Jefferies, a photographer who

A riveting combination of thriller and social drama, Dirty Pretty Things steeps us in London’s exploited immigrant subculture. The story follows a doctor-turned-hotel clerk from Nigeria (a mesmerizing Chiwetel Ejiofor) who stumbles across a heinous black-market operation at his hotel and is forced to either participate or be deported. From director Stephen Frears.

You’ve got to hand it to a movie brazen enough to kill both animals and babies in bids for audience sympathy. The Butterfly Effect – in which Ashton Kutcher plays a student who can return to his childhood, alter an event and then awaken to a new future – relies on beatings, infanticide, the murder

Two bored high-schoolers (the equally creepy Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) find a way other than multiple-choice quizzes to test their considerable smarts by plotting the intricate murder of a random stranger. Sandra Bullock plays the cop on their trail, and the attention paid to all three characters gives this genre exercise a surprising resonance.