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;

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