Adapted from an Armistead Maupin novel – Maupin had a hand in the screenplay – The Night Listener is an oddly inert thriller, a movie of shocking revelations and sneaky twists that somehow still never jars you. Part of the problem is Robin Williams, who tends to become inert when giving one of his ‘serious’

A shameless mishmash of classic, film noir archetypes and contemporary crassness, Femme Fatale follows a mysterious blonde (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) as she steals and sleeps her way through a series of sad-sack men, most of whom get at least one chance to beat her up. None of this is much fun, primarily because the movie’s prehistoric

When a by-the-book British bank clerk (Ben Chaplin) arranges for a Russian mail-order bride (Nicole Kidman), her lack of English is just the start of his problems. The movie works as long as it remains steeped in sexual paranoia and guilt, but soon the Hitchcock-like shadings give way to conventional thriller chase scenes.

Robert Redford gives this independent drama a jolt of star magnetism, but it’s not enough to shake it out of its psychological pretensions. Redford plays a wealthy executive who is kidnapped, and the rest of the movie follows two parallel strands: the executive’s increasingly abstract conversations with his abductor (Willem Dafoe) and his wife’s (Helen

Derailed belongs to the long movie tradition in which a basically good man makes a moral misstep that leads to his complete undoing, yet I can’t think of another movie morality play that details the undoing to such a ludicrous degree. A dependable if distracted husband and father (Clive Owen) begins an affair with a

Perhaps the high altitude explains why, after Red Eye, this is yet another ludicrously plotted 2005 airplane thriller. Just thinking about that thin air must mess with screenwriters’ heads. Flightplan – with Jodie Foster as a grieving widow whose daughter may or may not have been kidnapped mid-flight – is the far better picture because

If you like movies that work as dreams rather than narratives (meaning you’re in it for the experience, not the dramatic payoff), then don’t miss this conundrum from writer-director David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks). The ostensible plot follows an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) who tries to help an amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) recover her