1. Forbidden Kingdom
2. Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
3. Lust, Caution

What you need to know is that Lust, Caution, the new film from Ang Lee, is a complex, oblique, subtle film set in Shanghai in the late '30s and early 1940s. It's NC-17, ostensibly for the brief but intense sex scenes, but really because, in every sense, this is a movie for grownups. It tells a story, but gives the viewer no help in deciding the rights and thw wrongs. The film opens with four women, wives of officials in the collaborationist Chinese government serving the Imperial Japanese occupiers. Gradually we focus on the youngest of the women, and first we suspect her of an illicit affair, and then we suspect her of something much more. A flashback to four years previous introduces us to the future schemer as an innocent college student, and mysteries of her later situation unfold. More than that spoils the plot, not just in the “spoiler alert” sense, but in detracting from the pleasure of watching the film unfold and guessing—because you're never told—what's in the characters' minds.

So what shall we talk about? It’s really easy to review the average Hollywood movie:

Does the third act pay off the premise of the first? Yes/no.
Calculate the ratio of Seen-It-Before to Well-That-Was-Kinda-Clever. Express as a fraction.
Does it make a halfway decent attempt at justifying its gratuitous inclusion of violence/sex/gross-out humor? Is it anything more than its shock hook? Short essay.
Are the characters consistent, cartoonish or consistently cartoonish? Circle one.
Is Nicolas Cage in the movie? Subtract 2 stars.

And so it goes.

If that were a reviewer’s full bag of tricks (extra credit for “contextualizing within the artist’s oeuvre), Lee’s compelling film would be unreviewable. Or it would be reduced by the vacuous mewlings of the criterati to Another Art Film. For instance, didja catch me using “compelling” there? That’s review-speak for “It’s good even without a car chase.”

But Lust, Caution is a great movie.

1. Miracle at St. Anna
2. The Kingdom

[rating:4]
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey,

Zack Snyder's relentlessly faithful adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's graphic novel is a powerful, though imperfect, piece of moviemaking. Its excesses should be forgiven, because they are also its strengths. Not only is the film visually like nothing out there, it is in style, passion and purity unlike most movies. Nuanced studies of the modern human condition through, say, the careful delineation of suburban social mores and the repercussion of middle-class adultery are a fine subject for film — and hey, the people at Miramax gotta eat — but every once in awhile, you need powerful dudes in big red capes to stand for justice with a simple two-dimensional purity that makes your heart pound. And since Brian Singer screwed up his chance at that last summer, we should be very grateful to Snyder for his green-screen epic.

The Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which 300 Spartan warriors led an incredibly outnumbered force in a battle to the death against the mighty army of the Persian emperor Xerxes, is both a legendary tale of sacrifice and, literally, a textbook case of war tactics. The Spartans met their foe at the mouth of a narrow canyon that forced the enemy legions to narrow down to a wedge, letting the brilliantly trained Spartans whittle down the tip of it over and over, inflicting losses much larger than their numbers should have permitted. It was enough to slow Xerxes down so that a united Greece could regroup and eventually rout his armies.

Frank Miller, creator and co-director of last year's Sin City, also adapted from his comic books, is about as subtle as a sawed-off shotgun. His tale of King Leonidas' last stand is brutal, exaggerated and exalted. His Spartans are superhuman, his Persians — and any Greeks who don't share Leonidas' noble machismo — are deformed monsters. The fate of democracy and the free world hang in the balance, though in real life Sparta itself was no model democracy, freedom extended only to men of the warrior class, and slavery was an accepted way of life. But you know what? Screw that — we are not here for the subtle, the nuanced, the ironic. We are here for the grand battle, the heroic sacrifice, and both Miller's book and Snyder's film deliver.

1. Sucker Punch
2. Watchmen
3. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer