Runaway Jury depicts jurors as puppets – the drama lies not in their final decision regarding the case before them, but in who will win the battle to pull their strings. As a case study in manipulation, the movie fascinates. If unnecessary thriller elements take over in the end – this is a John Grisham

Remember that photo of Richard Reid, in which the would-be terrorist looked like he wouldn’t be able to light a cigarette, let alone a shoe bomb? Those are the kind of bad guys who drive the plot of Red Eye, in which a woman on a plane falls victim to an imbecilic hostage/blackmail/assassination scheme. Going

A creepy conceit – that the photo developer (Robin Williams) at a supermarket is secretly obsessed with a family whose pictures he handles – is left unexploited in this disappointing independent feature. At first, writer-director Mark Romanek seems firmly in control of his material, laying out this paranoid fantasy with careful framing and bright colors.

Angelina Jolie has always tried too hard to maintain her sexy reputation (few other people with lips as big as hers feel the need to do so much pouting), but she manages to outdo herself here as a conniving seductress who targets a rich coffee grower (Antonio Banderas) in turn-of-the-century Cuba. Trying to sexualize every

Because she has offered so many different public versions of herself – from Vietnam activist to workout video mogul – it is difficult to accept Jane Fonda onscreen as anything but a slight variation of her persona. In Klute she plays Bree Daniels, a New York City call girl being stalked by a client, and

With this thriller about married empty-nesters (Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford) living in a haunted house, director Robert Zemeckis was accused of aping suspense master Alfred Hitchcock, but he’s really reinvigorated the genre by giving it a modern twist. After the couple’s daughter leaves for college, she’s replaced by a ghost who’s trying to avenge

A first-rate thriller from director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) about a single mother (Jodie Foster) whose cavernous New York brownstone is invaded by three men. There’s a streak of feminism beneath Fincher’s fancy camera work, making Panic Room a guys’ movie fueled by girl power.

Blue Velvet sent a shock wave through the film world in 1986, just when Hollywood was in another one of its factory-production heydays. While most pictures were being engineered by studio marketing departments, here was a movie that seeped directly from its maker’s consciousness (a crazy consciousness at that). Blue Velvet opens in a satirically

Basic may set a record for plot twists, and the movie seems to think that’s a good thing. Simply having surprises is only half the battle, however. It helps tremendously if they’re clever. John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson star – Jackson plays an elite Army commander who disappears with some of his men in