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After a limited release in theaters in 1998, this independent sci-fi film from Canada has garnered cult status since arriving on video. Using one set, director Vincenzo Natali creates both a claustrophobic mental torture chamber, as well as a mind-bending labyrinth. This sci-fi horror flick has gory bits for sure, but the mystery of the plot and what it means to the characters makes this film more exciting than all the slicing and dicing.

A man wakes up in a cube-shaped room with doors on all six surfaces. He moves to the next room and we learn quickly what happens when one ventures into the wrong room. Five other captives wake up in one of a series of interlocking cubes. Joan Leaven (Nicole de Boer, TV’s THE DEAD ZONE) is a Math student, who will be called upon to try and decipher the numbers engraved on the many doorways. Helen Holloway (Nicky Guadagni, LARS AND THE REAL GIRL) is a doctor with a big conspiracy theory involving the military industrial complex. Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH) is a cop with a superiority complex and a nasty temper. Rennes (Wayne Robson, AFFLICTION) is a fugitive escape artist who devises a way to check for booby-trapped rooms. David Worth (David Hewlett, TV’s STARGATE: ATLANTIS) is a young cynical man who doesn’t believe they’ll ever get out of the cube. Later the group will encounter Kazan (Andrew Miller, TRAPPED IN PARADISE), a severely autistic man with a secret gift.

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While it teeters between a post-PULP FICTION hip crime story and the complex family dynamics that will come to signify his later work, director Paul Thomas Anderson put on display his impressive talent in his debut film, HARD EIGHT. Many of the Anderson troupe are here — Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Ridgely and Melora Walters. As a writer, Anderson makes his central character Sydney a mystery, driving the story forward. Is he a guardian angel or a devil in disguise?

As the story begins, the 60-something Sydney (Hall, BOOGIE NIGHTS) offers the down-on-his-luck John (Reilly, CHICAGO) a cup of coffee and a cigarette. John, who has been trying to win money in Vegas to bury his dead mother, even suspects Sydney’s kindness as a come on, but the old man just wants to help teach the kid how to work the system and get him a room for the night. Time passes and Sydney has become a mentor for John as they travel around the country from casino to casino. In Reno, a pretty waitress named Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow, PROOF) catches the eye of John. Meanwhile, John’s new friend, the shifty security guard Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson, JACKIE BROWN), might be the key to discovering what lurks in Sydney’s past.

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Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic time-travel picture, 12 MONKEYS, is less overtly fantastic than many of his other films, but his oft-kilter underground future and his hyper-decaying present are strange in equal measure. Based on Chris Marker’s famed short film LA JETEE, the film takes the premise of the original, along with its irony and uncertainty, to create a paranoid tale that upon first viewing keeps the audience wondering is James Cole really from the future or just crazy.

It seems at first that Cole (Bruce Willis, DIE HARD) is a prisoner in a future where a deadly virus has forced humans to live, like worms, underground. The rulers choose “volunteers” from the prison population to collect specimens on the surface, which has now been reclaimed by the animals. Cole does such a good job at this that the leaders, who dress like twisted doctors, send Cole onto a special mission into the past where he is to collect information about the Army of the 12 Monkeys, the culprits behind the obliteration of the human species. However, Cole is sent too far into the past, where he is arrested and institutionalized. The kind doctor Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe, BAD GIRLS) takes Cole under her wing, because she has an interest in apocalyptic delusions, but isn’t convinced by his doomsday tales. In the asylum, Cole meets crazed patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt, BABEL), who spouts off conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. As Cole gets closer to the 12 Monkeys, the more he begins to doubt his own sanity.

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Despite it’s lofty title, IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH is actually a gripping murder mystery first and foremost. CRASH director Paul Haggis uses the investigation of this murder to comment on the demoralizing effects of war. It’s never a preachy tale, only a story of a father, who has seen the horrors of war himself, wanting to find out why his son returned from Iraq and ended up stabbed 40-plus times, dismembered and charred in a field in the United States of America.

Retired MP Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) gets a call that his son Michael (Jonathan Tucker, HOSTAGE) has gone AWOL. Hank packs his bags and leaves his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon, DEAD MAN WALKING) to find their boy. Hank first goes to the military base where he finds his son’s cell phone, which contains distorted video and pictures from Iraq. As he follows leads, he asks Det. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron, MONSTER) for help, but she explains that the military has jurisdiction over its missing soldiers. When Michael’s body is found, Emily is first on the case, but it is then turned over to military police, led by Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric, LOST BOYS). Hank can’t help but wage his own investigation, which brings new light to the case at every turn.

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The fiction films of Terry Zwigoff have all had a dark satirical bent to them that I love. What makes the comedy so special is the honesty that lies underneath. From GHOST WORLD’s look at high school grads entering the “real world” to BAD SANTA’s skewering of Christmas greed, there is a bite to his work that stings as only hard truths can. Now with ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, Zwigoff, reteaming with his GHOST WORLD screenwriter Daniel Clowes, takes a stab at art education and the larger modern art world in general.

Jerome (Max Minghella, SYRIANA) has lived in his art this whole life. He dreams of gaining fame and fortune through his paintings. But harsh realities set in when he arrives at college. His teacher Prof. Sandiford (John Malkovich, DANGEROUS LIASON) is a struggling painter himself, trying desperately to get a new show off the ground at every moment of the day. He tells Jerome that it has taken him 25 years to reach his current triangle period. Perpetual dropout Bardo (DODGEBALL) shows Jerome the collection of art school stereotypes from art chicks to hippies to butt kissers. Jerome’s view of his own future only gets dimmer when he meets former art school grad Jimmy (Jim Broadbent, IRIS), who now wallows his life away drunk in his filthy rent controlled apartment in the ghetto. The only bright spot for Jerome is Audrey (Sophia Myles, TRISTAN & ISOLDE), a beautiful daughter of a popular artist who poses nude for the aspiring artists. However, the world seems to spiral out of control as a serial murderer stalks campus and Audrey and the rest of the university fall in love with the crude paintings of pretty boy Jonah (Matt Keeslar, WAITING FOR GUFFMAN).

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Set in the bayous of Louisiana in 1962, the film launches with a voice over about memory and murder. The whole film is the reflection of a grown up Eve on her life as a ten-year-old girl — the year she killed her father. This admission sets the tone simmering with family secrets woven together by sex and violence. Just like her confession though, nothing is simple in this family drama, because the truth lies somewhere between various points of view and is clouded by the haze of time.

Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett, ROLL BOUNCE) was named after a slave who saved her master’s life and then gave him 16 children. Her family has lived on a vast plantation for decades since. Her father Louis (Samuel L. Jackson, PULP FICTION) is a doctor, who makes house calls to the lonely women in town. Eve is jealous of the way her father favors her teenage sister Cisely (Megan Good, WASTE DEEP). Louis’ philandering creates a volatile storm with his beautiful wife Roz (Lynn Whitfield, THE JOSEPHINE BAKER STORY), who is good friends with her husband’s sister Mozelle Delacroix (Debbi Morgan, COACH CARTER), who has the gift to see the future, however it has never worked for her, whose three husbands have all died tragically. The way Lenny Mereaux (Roger Guenveur Smith, DO THE RIGHT THING) discovers that his wife Matty (Lisa Nicole Carson, TV’s ALLY MCBEAL) has been sleeping with Louis will change the family forever.

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Okay, the original BASIC INSTINCT is a total guilty pleasure. It’s delectable trash. When the sequel was released, it was universally trashed. I wasn’t going to rush out to theaters to see it or even rent it, but I awaited its arrival on cable. I was expecting grand camp, and received some of that, but for the most part this is a lame thriller that twists and turns down obvious or illogical roads.

We begin with crime writer Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone, CASINO) driving over 100 mph down the streets of London as footballer (soccer player for the Americans) Kevin Franks (footballer Stan Collymore) pleasures her. Her excitement is so great that she drives the car off a bridge and into the river, where drugged up Franks drowns. Detective Roy Washburn (David Thewlis, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN) believes she did it on purpose. So he enlists court psychiatrist Michael Glass (David Morrissey, HILARY AND JACKIE) to rule on her mental state. After he meets the sexually provocative Tramell, Glass believes that she is addicted to risk. As things go with Tramell, she tries to seduce everyone around her, working her way into Glass treating her. Then people start turning up dead and Glass is thrust into a murder mystery that involves newspaper reporter Adam Towers (Hugh Dancy, ELLA ENCHANTED), his ex-wife Denise (Indira Varma, KAMA SUTRA), his colleague Milena Gardosh (Charlotte Rampling, SWIMMING POOL) and famed psychoanalyst Jakob Gerst (Heathcote Williams, ORLANDO).

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Novelist Louis Sachar adapts his own young adult novel into this strange, but emotionally honest story about troubled kids and friendship. The real surprising thing about this film is not the originality of its story, but the lack of pandering toward its intended audience. Thus, the film rises above the tween set and becomes something truly for the entire family.

Stanley Yelnats IV (Shia LaBeouf, TRANSFORMERS) is from a long line of cursed men in his family ever since his great grandfather didn’t follow through with the demands of the gypsy Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt, TV’s BATMAN), who was trying to help him win a wife. Stanley is blamed for stealing a pair of sneakers and is given the option of either going to jail or going to Camp Greenlake, a reform camp for troubled boys. Now Camp Greenlake has no lake in sight. There, caretaker Mr. Sir (Jon Voight, DELIVERENCE), counselor Dr. Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson, O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?) and Warden Walker (Sigourney Weaver, ALIEN), make the boys dig holes in the desert all day. As Mr. Sir states, “You make a bad boy dig a hole in the hot sun all day and you turn him into a good boy.”

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Widely considered the greatest film ever made, and for good reason, CITIZEN KANE matured filmmaking by combining established techniques with new innovations. No first film has ever been as influential as Orson Welles freshman turn behind the camera. The fact that he also starred in, co-wrote and produced the film only heightens the accomplishment. But does the label of “the greatest film ever made” hurt it? I’m sure the label and it’s stark black & white cinematography scare away younger audiences, who have all seen THE GODFATHER (which is often a close second as the greatest of all time). What those film viewers are missing is a thoroughly modern film. Made over 60 years ago, the film has not aged a bit.

In a now very common way, the film starts at the end. Charles Foster Kane dies, uttering only one word — Rosebud. Then a newsreel fills us in on Kane’s life. When the newsreel ends, a group of reporters argue whether the report really captured who Kane was. So they set out to discover the meaning of Rosebud. This begins a series of interviews of the people that knew Kane.

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Practically an anthology of five short films that share plot and thematic similarities, this gripping independent production shows how one particular brutal death effects many lives as well as universal issues of life and death. Director and writer Karen Moncrieff, whose first film BLUE CAR dealt with dark, touchy emotional territory as well, brilliantly constructs an episodic feature that feels like a whole, but could conceivably work as parts. This is a remarkably good film.

The story begins with Arden (Toni Collette, THE NIGHT LISTENER), a mousey woman who cares for her bedridden and mentally abusive mother (Piper Laurie, CARRIE), finding the mutilated body of a woman in a field. The media attention that surrounds the murder just upsets Arden’s mother more and brings Arden to the attention of an intense, tattooed grocery store worker named Rudy (Giovanni Ribisi, SKY CAPTAIN), who is obsessed with serial killers.

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