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.

Suspect Zero tries to resurrect the serial-killer thriller by sadly mimicking the television series “The X-Files.” It’s a double-whammy loser. Filling in for Scully and Mulder are Carrie-Anne Moss and Aaron Eckhart, both of whom deserve better roles than those of the romantically entangled FBI agents on the trail of a child-murderer here. Also questionably

A misstep for director Sam Raimi, this thriller about a psychic reader (Cate Blanchett) who investigates a murder in her backwoods Georgia town may cover similar territory as Raimi’s excellent A Simple Plan, but it’s as overblown as that naturalistic crime tragedy was understated. Unhappily misused here is a fine cast, including Keanu Reeves, Hilary

Val Kilmer gives what should have been a career-revitalizing performance in writer-director David Mamet’s Spartan, a government-conspiracy drama that casts an oblique eye on modern military politics. As Robert Scott, a government operative called in when the president’s daughter is kidnapped, Kilmer has just the right deadpan style for Mamet’s trademark dialogue. Deception proves to

Another woman-in-peril movie from Ashley Judd, very similar in its pseudo-feminist tone to Double Jeopardy, Eye of the Beholder and Where the Heart Is. This time she stars as a glitzy lawyer defending her husband (Jim Caviezel) against a military conspiracy. There’s plenty of emotional manipulation here (including the callously casual use of a miscarriage

As long as it stays ambiguous and messy – much like the international espionage it depicts – Spy Game is a smart, scintillating consideration of the prices that are paid for the sake of American national security. As a 30-year CIA veteran and his protege, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt make a fine screen team;