Released or distributed by
Dreamworks SKG

Red Eye

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Red Eye had the misfortune of being the film in last year’s “Hitchcockian thriller set aboard a jetliner” sweepstakes that didn’t star Jodie Foster. I haven’t seen Flightplan yet, so I can’t say which one was actually better, but that film will have to work hard to be as effective and efficient a thriller as Red Eye.

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The Haunting

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Rule #1 in telling a good ghost story: the less you show of the ghost, the better. Robert Wise understood that in 1963, Jan de Bont ignores it in 1999.

For the first half of this new adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel, the story follows the book and the original movie with reasonable fidelity, and thus for the first hour, The Haunting is reasonably effective and spooky. The ghostly manifestations are done with sound and suggestion, not ham-handed visuals. After that, however, the special effects take over and the film loses all narrative cohesion.

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The Island

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Take several parts Logan’s Run, add a few teaspoons of THX-1138 and shake it all together with a atypically restrained helping of Michael Bay, and you come up with The Island. This is a not-altogether original science fiction action movie that manages not to egregiously insult the intelligence of its audience. In other words, it’s not Armageddon, which is the minimum that I ask from a movie.

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War of the Worlds

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Stephen Spielberg‘s career seems to have gone in three different directions lately. There are the serious, mature films that began with Schindler’s List and continued with Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and this year’s Munich. On the flipside are the lightweight comedies that always seem to star Tom Hanks, like Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. Somewhere in the middle are the edgier science-fiction films like A.I., Minority Report and now his take on H. G. WellsThe War of the Worlds.

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