A practice run for Woody Allen’s superior Match Point, this essentially has the same premise: an adulterer considers killing his mistress when she threatens to upend his placid domestic life. What Match Point wisely avoided, Crimes indulges in: overwrought philosophical pontificating, obvious symbolism and, most notably, the onscreen presence of Allen himself. Allen has a

Steven Spielberg’s career hit its creative stride with this television movie. Essentially a 90-minute dissertation on the slight embarrassment of being passed on the open road, Duel follows a milquetoast businessman (Dennis Weaver) on a trip who is harassed and eventually hunted by the mysterious driver of a massive tanker truck. Weaver’s ironically named David

Writer-director John Carpenter’s police thriller throbs with the sort of dread that can come from getting lost in a bad neighborhood. It brings to life our worst fears about the chaos that might erupt at any moment in the American urban wasteland. On the last night before a blighted precinct closes and police presence pretty

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