Scarlett Johansson (Getty Images)

It’s Oscar season, and you know what that means: films about noted historical figures with titles that are just the protagonist’s first or last name. In the wake of Ray, Capote and Lincoln, but preceding, say, Barack or Lohan, comes Hitchcock, the story of the iconic director as played by Anthony Hopkins (whom we loved in Nixon). The historical depiction is said to be destined for the Oscar that eluded its subject—and it premieres in Manhattan tonight, with stars including Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson and “Karate Kid” Ralph Macchio in attendance. We’re catching a cab in Gramercy and instructing our driver to head North by Northwest (the subway is for The Birds).

Invitation only.

The City of Your Final Destination, based on the novel by Peter Cameron, assembles many of the cherished Merchant Ivory values: meticulous writing by the Oscar-winning Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; an expertly drawn cast headed by Merchant Ivory favorite Anthony Hopkins; a languid and literary pace that elevates viewers without ever compromising their intelligence; gorgeous cinematography and art direction; and a cinematic elegance as rare in contemporary films as genuine wit. This is a typical James Ivory work, but more deeply wounding and emotionally involving than most. I was transfixed from beginning to end.

Mr. Ivory might work less than he did back in the day, when he was turning out masterpieces like A Room With a View and Howards End, but he has lost none of his style. You watch hypnotically as he unravels the gentle story of a handsome young Kansas University professor of Iranian descent named Omar Razaghi (Omar Metwally, who played the innocent Egyptian-born American engineer falsely accused of terrorism and tortured by the C.I.A. in the excellent Rendition), who is desperately seeking permission to write an authorized biography of an eccentric Uruguayan novelist named Jules Gund. After his request for permission is denied by the family of the deceased writer, Omar is urged on by his strong-willed, ambitious girlfriend, Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara), a fellow academic with a domineering personality, to travel to South America in person and hopefully convince the Gund heirs to change their minds. After an arduous and expensive journey across the pampas of Argentina, Omar arrives in Uruguay uninvited at Ocho Rios, the rambling, run-down Gund family estate, where he is met with suspicion and hostility by Gund’s embittered widow, Caroline (an unusually cold and caustic Laura Linney). She reluctantly allows him to stay as a house guest because there is no inn within miles to lodge him, but remains unyielding in her opposition to a book. The rest of the family consists of an odd group of characters more strange and exotic than the dead author himself.

His mistress, Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a former hippie missionary, agrees with Caroline and resents the intrusion until she falls for Omar’s charms. The dead man’s homosexual brother, Adam (Anthony Hopkins), believing the royalties from a biography would pay off property taxes and fearing the damage a nasty book written in retaliation could cause to his brother’s place in the world of letters, becomes Omar’s sole ally, later joined by Arden’s 10-year-old daughter and Adam’s Japanese lover, Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada, the puzzling spy in Ivory’s last film, The White Countess), who entered their lives at age 15 and stayed on as a retainer in the land-rich, cash-poor family for 25 years. Watching home movies of the divided and generally unfriendly family’s history—fleeing the Nazis, carving success in Uruguay as rich foreigners and foolishly squandering its fortune—Omar promises discretion, even as he uncovers enough family skeletons to fill several volumes, aided by a local gossipy dragon surrounded by beautiful boys who knows where the secrets are buried (played with bitchy Tabasco by the great Argentine actress Norma Aleandro). The shy, childlike Arden finds love. Always in need of money, wily Adam convinces Omar to smuggle his mother’s priceless jewels out of the country. Caroline reveals the lost manuscript she’s been hiding of Jules’ final unpublished book. After Omar nearly dies from a bee sting, the film sags slightly with the unexpected arrival of the irritating Deirdre, but her presence is important in explaining the film’s coda, when she meets Caroline years later at the opera and we learn what happened to everyone in the movie and discover the different directions where destiny took them.

Like most James Ivory films, The City of Your Final Destination moves in small, self-contained vignettes, like paragraphs in a novel, taking its time but covering a lot in each scene. As Omar becomes more familiar with the internecine strife between the various couples, the nature and content of his proposed book changes. Every complex member of the writer’s legacy has an agenda, with varying gains and losses, and the power of the film rests in the way it captures so many tangled lives as they cross and intersect at curious angles. The camera is literal, so the film sometimes fails to escape its roots of literary inspiration. This did not bother me. How many times do you get the chance to curl up with a good movie?

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 114 minutes
Written by: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Directed by: James Ivory
Starring: Laura Linney, Anthony Hopkins, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Omar Metwally, Alexandra Maria Lara

3.5 Eyeballs Out of 4

Valentine's Day

What's the story: How bad must the actors and actresses who didn't get the call from Garry Marshall to appear in Valentine's Day feel? Everyone—and we mean everyone—from Julia Roberts to Taylor Swift to Taylor Lautner to McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey) to even McSteamy (Eric Dane) co-star in this panoply of love lost and gained on one Valentine's Day in Los Angeles. Think of it as Love Actually but without charming British accents. The reviews have been scathing  (Rex Reed called Valentine's Day "lame," "contrived" and "boring"), but they won't matter. This thing is going to make bank on top of bank.

Who should see it: People who wore out their copies of He's Just Not That Into You.

The Wolfman

What's the story: This remake of 1941's The Wolf Man has been on the shelf for such a long time that we're surprised it didn't get remade as well. Originally scheduled for release in November of 2008, The Wolfman—no time for spaces here in the 21st century—finally gets to see the light of the full moon this weekend, almost 15 months after it was first scheduled to open. Benicio Del Toro stars as the titular lycan and Anthony Hopkins does his best "Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall" impression as his nefarious—and possibly wolfy—father. The reviews have been predictably ugly, but since there is supposedly plenty of gore, expect the horror buffs to show up in droves.

Who should see it: Frankenstein.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

What's the story: Say hello to the most under-the-radar possible franchise blockbuster ever. We had never even heard of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series of books—maybe because we graduated high school in the early '90s—but we kinda wish we did. Combining parts of Harry Potter, Greek mythology and C.S. Lewis, The Lightning Thief stars newcomer—and possible Tobey Maguire replacement in the Spider-Man reboot—Logan Lerman as he attempts to solve the mystery of who stole Zeus' lightning bolt while also searching for his missing mother (Catherine Keener). Parents take note: Ms. Keener isn't the only appealing adult in the cast. Be on the lookout for Pierce Brosnan, Uma Thurman, Rosario Dawson, Steve Coogan and Grey's Anatomy doc Kevin McKidd.

Who should see it: Harry Potter.

Running time 125 minutes
Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
Directed by Joe Johnston
Starring  Benicio Del Toro,
Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt

Rating: Two and a Half Eyeballs out of Four

Old monsters never die. They just keep coming back, in an endless series of unnecessary remakes. So get ready to hear once again legendary screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s famous line: “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.” The Wolf Man is back—and he’s not just another pretty face.

Based on the classic 1941 horror film The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence (Larry) Talbot, a soft-spoken British-born nobleman who returns from America to run the country manor of his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), and has the rotten luck to get bitten by a werewolf (Bela Lugosi), the 2010 retelling, for no logical reason, changes the spelling to The Wolfman. A lot of other things change, too, and not always in ways you could call improvements. The tense prewar setting is now an ornate and overproduced Victorian England in 1891. Larry, now a hopelessly adrift Benicio Del Toro, is no longer a California astronomy student but a New York actor playing Hamlet in London. (Don’t ask.) Sir John, his father, is now a weird, disappointing Anthony Hopkins. Chaney was a soft, fleshy actor with a wimpy voice and clammy skin, but he brought a sympathetic sweetness to the role of the ill-fated Lawrence Talbot. Mr. Del Toro may be a stronger screen presence than Chaney, but he mumbles and scratches so much that nobody in his right mind would ever believe him as Hamlet, and he looks so baggy-eyed and ravaged before the wolf ever appears that there’s nothing to build his character on. Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt) no longer runs the village antique shop, but is a mixed-up girl who was betrothed to Larry’s dead brother, and who has a sick penchant for wandering around in the fog, and makes the dumb mistake of thinking she can cure lycanthropy. As the titular head of one of England’s finest families, Mr. Hopkins displays a spectrum of curious accents that wander from Southern trailer trash to Irish brogue to Hannibal Lecter, sometimes all three in the same scene. With all due respect, he is no Claude Rains.

After the werewolf rampages through a gypsy campsite, attacking everyone who ignores the warnings of ancient fortune teller Geraldine Chaplin (where is Maria Ouspenskaya, now that we finally need her?), the movie makes a number of tactical errors from which it never recovers. The folks at the local tavern still wisely melt their silver into bullets and keep plenty of wolfbane handy, full moons still rise like white pumpkins and snarling creatures still pop out of the swamp with teeth that need a dentist, but any resemblance to Curt Siodmak’s 1941 script ends there. Siodmak was a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis and retained a lifelong hatred of the Germans; many symbols of horror in The Wolf Man were references to Nazi persecution, and the pentagram that appeared in the palms of the werewolf’s next victims was an obvious substitute for the Star of David. This time, there are no pentagrams to make your blood run cold. Elegant Talbot Hall is no longer a safe refuge from a world gone mad but a mausoleum full of cobwebs, candlelight and underground crypts; it looks less like one of England’s fanciest estates and more like the House of Dracula.

The monster is now a computer-enhanced behemoth in Rick Baker makeup that drools noisily, severs heads with a single claw and makes an awful mess on the carpet. Larry is hounded by a Scotland Yard inspector played by Hugo Weaving, one of the three drag queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and dragged away in chains to a gothic madhouse where a primitive brain doctor (the great English stage actor Anthony Sher) tortures his patients with horrors of his own—dunking Larry screaming into vats of ice and jamming footlong hypodermic needles into his jugular vein. (Think Fogg’s Asylum in Sweeney Todd.) While these lunatics treat lycanthropy as a self-induced delusion, you can hardly wait for them to experience their first full moon. In the resulting carnage, the Wolf Man rips out human kidneys and spleens with bare teeth in a bloodbath that is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, followed by a leapfrog across the roofs of London that looks like outtakes from Godzilla, King Kong and Mighty Joe Young.

The film’s biggest departure from the 1941 classic—and its silliest mistake—is making Sir John a werewolf, too. Yes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he killed his whole family and applied the fatal bite that turned his own son into a savage beast forever—a disease from poison fangs for which there is no cure. In an explosion of mayhem that leaves Talbot Hall looking like a slaughter house, everything leads up to the big showdown between father and son that gives you two wolf men for the price of one. There’s more, and some of it is effective enough to turn your hair gray overnight. But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”

In 1941, the Wolf Man was so popular he was revived in four more Universal horror classics, two with Abbott and Costello. He’s still entertaining enough to rise several notches above the dumb remakes of The Mummy and Dracula, but can history repeat itself? How scary is the Wolf Man in 2010, when half the people in the New York subway look like werewolves already?

rreed@observer.com

Tuesday: Warehouse 13
If you can’t wait until Fringe returns for season two on Sept. 17, then you might want to give Warehouse 13 a whirl. The new SyFy Channel series from some of the people behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica, stars Eddie McClintock (Bones, Desperate Housewives) and Joanne Kelly (The Dresden Files) as two F.B.I. agents banished to South Dakota to work in the spooky “Warehouse 13,” a large hanger that houses supernatural artifacts (think: the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark). Expect sexual tension and silly science; don’t expect Joshua Jackson. [SyFy, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: The Edge
Here’s a long-forgotten gem that reminds us that Alec Baldwin used to be a movie star. Go figure! Mr. Baldwin and Sir Anthony Hopkins star as two men stranded in the woods after a plane crash who also just so happen to be in love with the same woman—Sir Anthony’s wife, here portrayed by supermodel Elle McPherson. Needless to say, differences occur. The testosterone in The Edge is pitched high thanks to a tight script from David Mamet, and there are many scenes of the white-knuckle variety. And, hey, if that doesn’t sound good to you, there’s always Harold Perrineau (Michael from Lost!) in a brief-but-excellent appearance as future bear food. [Starz Edge, 5 p.m.]

Thursday: The Office
With the ability to watch our favorite shows on DVD and the Internet anytime we want, summer reruns don’t have nearly as much cachet as they did when we were kids. But, thanks to NBC, we can party like it’s 1989 all over again with their Thursday night reruns of both The Office and 30 Rock! This week brings one of our favorite episodes of the former show from this past season—“Lecture Circuit,” written by Mindy Kaling, which features Michael and Pam road-tripping to other Dunder Mifflin branches. Ms. Kaling—who plays the always-hilarious Kelly Kapoor on the series—is such an effortlessly funny writer that we’re more than a little upset no studio has snatched her up to write a movie. Or 10. At least NBC was smart enough to sign her to develop a comedy series. Say what you will about the network, but they definitely know funny women when they see them. [NBC, 8:30 p.m.]

Friday: Showgirls
Fact: Joe Eszterhas got paid $2 million to write the script for Showgirls, which features such amazing turns of dialogue as “Is there something wrong with your nipples?” Easily one of the worst movies ever, Showgirls needs to be watched every so often, just to remind you what fun a bad movie can really be. That exploitative Showgirls is airing on “WMax,” a channel described as providing “women with movie choices they can appreciate,” is an irony we hope is not lost on the people at Cinemax. [WMax, 3:15 a.m.]

[Wales Week schedule, www.walesweekusa.com; Afrology, Essex Street Gallery, 27 ½ Essex Street, 6 p.m.]

But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide.

Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

Spring weather wouldn't seem to be an inducement to hit the theaters, but Manhattanites got enough of the seasonal fever for lapping up Ryan Gosling in Fracture-that other movie where the knighted actor Anthony Hopkins plays a cultured yet homicidal maniac.

This time Hopkins kills his wife, which apparently played well on the Upper West Side: Fracture edged out Disturbia for the number one slot in Manhattan.

Disturbia, which is currently lording over the national box office, did not even take the number two slot in Manhattan. That honor goes to Hot Fuzz, a bobbie spoof from the makers of the hilarious Shawn of the Dead.

It had an impressive first weekend: It took the sixth spot in the country based on total gross, despite only being shown on 825 screens. (All the other top 10 films in the country are showing on north of 2000 screens.)

And Perfect Stranger continued its impressive Manhattan run. Despite poor showings nationally, the Halle Berry, Bruce Willis thriller was the number one movie in the city last weekend, and was fifth this weekend. Was it Halle? Bruce? She's a journalist; he's a businessman. Are we that predictable?

Fear not! March kicks off strong, with its first weekend (March 2) bringing the return of David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club). For Zodiac, he’s assembled a juicy, pale cast (Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and back-from-the-ER Anthony Edwards). The serial-killer storyline—based on the Zodiac murders in the Bay Area—is just creepy enough for Mr. Fincher to flex his suspenseful muscle. Then, on March 9, geek boys line up for 300, based on Frank (Sin City) Miller’s graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae. The same weekend brings the adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, about a Bengali couple who struggle with assimilation while their son, played by Kal Penn (24, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) tries to be both an American and a good Bengali son. Bring tissues!

Speaking of which, Reign Over Me (March 16), which was written and directed by Mike Binder (the star of the late, unlamented HBO series The Mind of the Married Man) and stars Adam Sandler as a man coping with the loss of his family on 9/11, will have to struggle mightily against inherent mawkishness to win over a New York crowd—though with Don Cheadle and Liv Tyler (finally!) co-starring, it might be hard to resist. Then get ready for Will Ferrell … on ice! Mr. Ferrell’s latest lovably inane venture teams him up with Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder in Blades of Glory (March 30), as two Olympic ice-skating rivals team up. It’s The Mighty Ducks meets Wedding Crashers!

In April, it’s all about welcoming back familiar faces. The big one is Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (April 6), which is not just one movie but two! The double bill, an homage to B-movie thrillers of the 70’s and 80’s, stars bosomy hotties Rosario Dawson and Rose McGowan alongside Kurt Russell. For those in withdrawal thanks to the yanking of Studio 60—both of us—there’s The TV Set (April 6), starring David Duchovny (who doesn’t love that guy?), a film about getting a television pilot on the air. (We liked it better when Seinfeld did it!) Then Richard Gere is back with The Hoax (April 6), based on the true story of Clifford Irving, who conned the publishing world with a fake biography of Howard Hughes in the early 70’s. Is it just us, or is Richard Gere, like Alan Alda, at his best when he plays a huckster?

Meanwhile, 2005 “It” boy Adam Brody tries on some leading-man pants with In the Land of Women (April 20), about a TV writer in shambles after a breakup, who goes home to care for his sickly grandmother (Olympia Dukakis!) and—wait for it!—forms a bond with his family that will change … his … life. M.I.A. Meg Ryan is on board, too!

O.K.! Where’s Scarlett Johansson, you ask? Everyone’s favorite ingénue—sorry, Gwyneth, you jumped the shark in Shallow Hal—is in The Nanny Diaries (April 20), playing an Upper East Side house slave under Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti. Meanwhile, fresh off his Independent Spirit Award, Ryan Gosling faces off against Anthony Hopkins in Fracture (April 20), a thriller in which Mr. Gosling plays an assistant D.A. who goes after a man who tried to murder his wife, but was set free due to technicalities. Whatever—it’s Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, O.K.?

Along with the spring flowers, May has the studios trotting out prized franchises, which means … Spidey’s back! Spider-Man 3 (May 4) seems to have all the requisite dazzling visual effects, plus something to do with a mysterious black Spidey suit. Shrek is also back with Shrek the Third (May 18). Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake may be no more, but their voices will be united on screen forever. In keeping with the threesies theme, the final chapter of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End kicks off Memorial Day weekend (May 25) with Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley and—the reason this whole shebang works—Johnny Depp. More squid faces, please! In non-franchise offerings, the movie that got Lindsay Lohan publicly spanked, Georgia Rule (May 11), co-stars Felicity Huffman and Jane Fonda and seems to be another personal-journey/lessons-learned picture, when a rebellious teenager (guess who!) is hauled off to the family’s Idaho farm in a Mormon town.

June brings 40-Year-Old Virgin’s Judd Apatow’s latest, Knocked Up (June 1), about a one-night stand that turns into a pregnancy and relationship (a.k.a., every man’s nightmare), which stars Grey’s Anatomy’s Katherine Heigl. In still more franchise news, Ocean’s Thirteen comes back (June 8), and we wonder how long Steven Soderbergh is going to ride this sick pony into the ground? At least it’s keeping Julia Roberts working—Ellen Barkin shows up, too!

Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (June 15) tries to follow the Spider-Man path of having the sequel be better than the original, as the superheroes fight a “planet-eating Galactus.” (Maybe played by Al Gore? Dude sure looks like he’s eaten the planet! Ka-POW!)

Just remember: The theaters will be air-conditioned!

Mr. Gosling is nominated for Best Actor in an already talent-heavy category. There’s front-runner Forest Whitaker, sentimental favorite and dark horse Peter O’Toole, the heartwarming Will Smith, and Leonardo DiCaprio with his apparently pitch-perfect South African accent (bling-bang!). Mr. Gosling, as a struggling, drug-addicted junior-high-school teacher in Half Nelson, is a welcome interloper.

The film was made for under a million dollars, gobbled up by ThinkFilm at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and quietly released last August. Thanks in part to Mr. Gosling’s much-raved-over performance, the movie has continued to build buzz throughout the awards season.

With his lanky good looks and emotive brow, the 26-year-old actor had already made a name for himself in the loveably sappy The Notebook, and won critical acclaim for 2001’s The Believer. But in Half Nelson, Mr. Gosling gives a startling performance. In a brief scene, his character finds himself buying crack from one of his young students in a seedy motel room. The moment is wordless, but Mr. Gosling manages to convey a lifetime of emotions: disappointment, shame, regret and devastating bemusement at the inevitability of life.

Half Nelson was filmed in Red Hook and Fort Greene, where Mr. Gosling lived, and where he worked on winning over the neighborhood, trying to sweet-talk the local ladies sitting out on their stoops. “They didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” he said, though he did start receiving some homemade carrot cake. “But they saw I was working so hard for it,” he said.

Mr. Gosling was talking via phone from his home in Los Angeles after a recent two-week trip to Uganda. He was scouting for a movie he’s written and will direct this summer, about the effect of war on children. On his trip he met a 3-year-old girl named Joyce who had once been wrapped in a carpet by the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and set on fire. Eighty percent of her body is now covered in burns, and she suffers from tuberculosis and H.I.V. Mr. Gosling is trying to set up a fund for her.

Of Hollywood’s latest interest in all things Africa, he said: “I just hope it’s not a fad, you know? I hope it’s indicative of a greater awareness of this [continent] that is in deep suffering. We live in plain view of all of them—in this completely excessive way—while they starve.”

He acknowledged that in the current climate of Angelina Jolie and Bono humanitarianism, celebrity do-gooding is often viewed with skepticism.

“It’s like people nominate regular people to be celebrities to live in a way they can’t and it’s like your job to live above your means and live excessively,” he said. “If at any point people try to move away from that and try to use all this excess luxury around them to help raise awareness of important issues, it’s almost like a betrayal. Like you’re not doing job of living it up … people are like, I didn’t make you famous to bum me out.”

Mr. Gosling was born in Ontario, Canada, and first got a whiff of showbiz life while co-starring with Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on the New Mickey Mouse Club talent show from 1993 to 1995.

“When I got hired on that show, they thought that I could do more than I actually could,” he said. “When I got there they instantly realized that I wasn’t as talented as the rest of them. You’d be hard-pressed to find me in that show; I’d come in at the beginning and at the end—sometimes a little something in the middle—but for the most part, I didn’t work very much. I spent the years riding roller coasters and hanging out in Disney World.”

But quite unlike his onetime co-stars, or other Us Weekly favored targets, Mr. Gosling manages to fly under tabloid radar—even with a romance with A-lister (and fellow Canuck) Rachel McAdams.

“We live a simple life—or try to,” Mr. Gosling said. “That’s what we come from, and that’s what we are. We try to maintain that at all costs. It sounds like it’s harder than it is. I think it’s probably exhausting to go out to all those places and get photographed. It’s easier not to. There are certain restaurants that you go to and know they’re going to take your picture.

“And,” he added, “the food’s not that good.”

Mr. Gosling is slated to star in three movies released in 2007, with the first one, Fracture, out in April. “Anthony Hopkins,” he said quickly, speaking of his decision to make the film. “How many opportunities am I going to get to work with Anthony Hopkins?”

But he’s continuing to duck and weave the blockbusters, choosing instead the smaller, quirkier projects and less-well-known directors. “It wouldn’t work out well for anyone,” he said, laughing at the idea of his playing a superhero, but he insisted that he doesn’t discriminate against budget.

“To be honest, I think I’m looking for something that there’s not a lot of,” he said. “Even if Hollywood movies pretend to be about people, they’re still science fiction. ’Cause nobody looks like that or talks like that. It’s fantasy. And independent movies are often so humorless and dark and bleak that they’re nothing like life either.

“I’m looking for something that strikes some kind of balance—things that aren’t about characters but about people,” he continued. “I think there are many stories I’d like to see that aren’t being made. Life is full of endless material.”

But in Red Dragon , Hannibal the Cannibal is just one of two memorable psychos to avoid on a dark street. In what you might call the prologue to a prologue, Lecter comes dangerously close to fatally wounding Will Graham (Edward Norton), the brilliant F.B.I. profiler and forensics expert who caught him and ended his reign of terror. Will is so shaken by this traumatic close shave with death that he leaves law enforcement and retires to Florida with his wife (Mary-Louise Parker) and son. Suddenly a new maniac is on the loose, slaughtering whole families on nights with a full moon, labeled the "Tooth Fairy" because of the jagged teeth prints he leaves in their flesh. Reluctantly, Will is lured back to work and forced to turn to his worst enemy for advice on how to solve the case. The rest of the movie is not for people with high blood pressure or prone to fainting spells.

It's no wonder the Tooth Fairy, a.k.a. the "Red Dragon" because of a mysterious Chinese symbol left behind at every murder scene, writes mash notes to Dr. Lecter's maximum-security cell in the asylum. He is Francis Dolarhyde, a shy, mild-mannered employee of a photo-developing plant who has a harelip and a massive inferiority complex. Secretly, however, he's a bodybuilder with a sexual-identity problem and a pyromaniac with a fondness for ancient tortures, whose toned torso is covered with the tattoo of a dragon from a 200-year-old drawing housed in the Brooklyn Museum. Ralph Fiennes, in one of his most lurid characterizations, is every bit as diabolical as the celebrated cannibal he hero-worships. When so many sick sisters put their damaged brains together, the horrors escalate, and director Brett Ratner literally piles on the Grand Guignol.

The excellent script by Ted Talley balances sharp, intelligent dialogue with vivid and intriguing characters, and the first-rate cast serves the material with real passion instead of souped-up histrionics. Emily Watson is marvelous as the lonely blind girl who almost turns Dolarhyde human before she lands in a terrifying situation beyond her comprehension. Harvey Keitel is a doggedly determined F.B.I. boss, and Philip Seymour Hoffman gives another indelible performance as the unscrupulous reporter for a sleazy tabloid who pays dearly for his scoop, glued to a flaming wheelchair minus his tongue.

Edward Norton makes a riveting centerpiece-tough and brilliant, heroic but not afraid to hide the fact that he knows the meaning of fear. This chameleon is having a banner season. In the triumphant New York stage revival of Lanford Wilson's Burn This , he's oily, arrogant and on the verge of violence with a black mustache and a slick doo-wop pompadour. In Red Dragon , he's a clean-cut preppie with a healthy tan and streaked blond hair who looks like he plunges into harm's way with ferocity to solve cases only when he's not busy modeling for Ralph Lauren's Polo collection. Ralph Fiennes is another hypnotic doppelgänger , psychologically twisted from childhood by a cruel, sexually abusive mother (the voice of Ellen Burstyn) and trembling with the need for someone to love, then shrieking naked through the darkness of a deserted nursing home to plan an apocalypse of carnage. It's a fearless performance that is scary and appealing at the same time.

That leaves Anthony Hopkins in an odd position. He's the one we return to see, time after time, yet this film is just a prelude to the slaughter that Lecter will perpetrate later. Most of the time, he's confined in chains to the subterranean caverns of the asylum where Clarice Starling will later tread. This leaves him fairly toothless, so to speak, and forces Mr. Hopkins to achieve a full characterization with narrowed lizard eyes and facial tics. But even with restraints, he commands attention. He's a monster resistant to every method in criminology, but you've got to admit he's an amusing monster. Give him sodium pentathol and he'll give you a recipe for clam dip.

Red Dragon remains my favorite of the three Thomas Harris books. It was filmed once before, in 1986, as Manhunter , a dull, second-rate, routine cops-and-killers programmer with the shocks and decadence missing. Mr. Harris once told me that he was so devastated by the dismal way his material was ruined that he vowed never to sell the rights to any of his future novels to Hollywood again. Luckily, Jonathan Demme came up with the right approach to The Silence of the Lambs and the author wisely changed his mind. Red Dragon is on the same level of achievement-beautifully acted, superbly written, imaginatively directed and photographed, and nail-gnawingly suspenseful. It didn't work in 1986, but this time they got it right. Red Dragon is so good that it might be the final word on Hannibal Lecter. If so, he can now rest in peace-but as a resident of the same building where Boris Karloff lived and died, I don't believe it. To quote my doorman, "He'll be back."

Delectable Witherspoon

Sweet Home Alabama is second-rate fluff with a first-rate star. Delectable Reese Witherspoon is New York's newest sensation, a trendy fashion designer and media darling who graces all those glossy, irrelevant publications that make methadone clinics look like moonglow. Engaged to the rich, handsome, politically ambitious son (Patrick Dempsey) of the gorgeous Mayor of the city (Candice Bergen), she's got a great career, a marriage proposal that came in the middle of Tiffany's, and a wedding at the Plaza in the works. What nobody knows is that the debutante from a white-columned Southern plantation who is taking the Apple by storm is really trailer trash from Pigeon Creek, Ala., with a redneck husband she married in high school and hasn't seen in seven years. Once she's back in the land of coon dogs, chicken-fried steak and lightning bugs-and don't forget the catfish festival-things just kind of get down in her gizzard, you know what I mean? Her folks, Earl and Pearl, have hearts of melted lard, her husband looks like a young Paul Newman, and everyone takes time for a good homily or two ("You can't ride two horses with one ass," says Earl) before the happy fade. By the time all of New York high society descends on Dogpatch, she's found out what a selfish, stuck-up "psycho Daisy Mae" she's become, and … well, you get the picture. It's as preposterous and phony as a Confederate C-note, but Reese Witherspoon has so much natural beauty, talent and charm she guarantees more fun than the day the hogs ate Willie.

Mourning In America

Moonlight Mile , a meandering soap opera written and directed by Brad Silberling, is not exactly a fiasco, but it is a disappointment, with A-list actors from whom I expected a great deal more. When his fiancée is murdered in a freak shooting in a coffee shop on the eve of their marriage, a young man named Joe Nast (Jake Gyllenhaal) stays on in the home of the girl's parents, Ben and Jojo Floss (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon), to administer damage control. While the local D.A. (Holly Hunter) tries to prosecute the killer, the parents turn their would-be son-in-law into their surrogate child. Ben makes him a new partner in his office, selling commercial real estate. Jojo elects him as her confidante, a repository for her rage and cynicism. It's up to Joe to discover that he's the crutch they both lean on, the wedge that prevents them from connecting with each other in the intimacy they dread.

Joe is the blank page everyone wants to write on. What they don't know is that the engagement was broken off three days before their daughter's death. As their mourning intensifies, Joe tries to be what everyone else wants him to be, losing himself along the way. When he falls in love with another girl, he must find a way to break away and save himself from a bogus future without breaking the hearts of the people he cares about.

When each of the parents finally cracks, it gives two fine actors a chance to show what they've got, but the rest of the movie just limps around them. In a contrived courtroom dénouement, Joe gives the town a "truth enema" at the trial, providing a resolution for everyone that is not entirely convincing. Ben changes his mind about carving up the town and redeveloping the popular hangout where his daughter died, Jojo unclogs her writer's block and miraculously hits the typewriter, and Joe hits the road.

Because Moonlight Mile deals with family, small-town paradoxes and the various ways people deal with grief in the face of unexpected tragedy, comparisons with In the Bedroom are unavoidable. But Moonlight Mile never comes close to the subtle, wrenching honesty and fresh observance of minute detail that made In the Bedroom such a shocking and exemplary American masterpiece. It means to be slow and considered, but it's never remotely as original or as emotionally involving. The title doesn't even make sense. Moonlight Mile is manipulative and brush-stroked with so much Disney gloss it looks polyurethaned. The actors work hard, to little avail. Mr. Hoffman is a coiled cylinder of tension, and Ms. Sarandon (giving the best and most original performance in the film) is a statue of resignation and pragmatism. The biggest problem is the character of Joe, who is so passive and inarticulate you just want to punch him, and Mr. Gyllenhaal plays the role the same blank-faced way he played the teenage misfits in Donnie Darko and The Good Girl , with a trademark awkwardness that is getting to be a drag. That big, droopy, wet-eyed, "Who stole my cereal bowl?" school of acting is O.K. for cocker spaniels, but somebody should tell him this performance has already been given by Tobey Maguire.