A Checklist Of Some Recent Films Along With Audience Advisories
(with special note made of outstanding performances)

• 'In the Bedroom'
• 'Gosford Park'
• 'No Man's Land'
• 'The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring'
• 'Lantana'
• 'Iris'
• 'A Beautiful Mind'
• 'Ali'
• 'The Shipping News'
• 'Vanilla Sky'

An epic battle of good versus evil set in a prehistoric landscape; a brutal murder that prompts the victim's grief-stricken parents to consider vigilante justice for a killer who may get off with a light sentence; a struggle for dominance between two soldiers stranded in a trench between battle lines as media vultures descend: those are the themes of three of the most powerful films released for holiday consumption. Although it might appear otherwise, those films "The Lord of the Rings," "In the Bedroom" and "No Man's Land" were all completed before the events of Sept. 11. Yet all three reverberate with a prescience that their creators could not have anticipated and convey what might be called a post- traumatic resonance.

What is it about the movies that can lend them such an eerie (if vague) predictive quality? It might be that their larger-than-life images flickering in the darkness are a reflection of our collective unconscious. For of all the popular arts, the movies come the closest to approximating waking dreams. Long before the events that jolted us out of our innocence, the movies offered shadowy suggestions of what might happen. There were action films like "The Siege," set in the streets of New York during a terrorist attack. And there were movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Pearl Harbor" that perhaps expressed the longing of a nation bored with material surfeit for a return of heroism and a moral rallying point.

Of course, not all the holiday releases have this kind of resonance. Steven Soderbergh's slick, star-driven caper "Ocean's Eleven," for instance, is expert escapist fluff. Others offer escape into the past. "Gosford Park," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Kate and Leopold" conjure vintage dream worlds of 1930's England, J. D. Salinger's New York and the Victorian age of courtly love. The holiday season is also the time Hollywood trots out its artistic big guns for Academy Award consideration and tries to redeem itself from the mediocrity of the previous months. Below is a checklist of some recent films (with special note made of outstanding performances) along with audience advisories.

'In the Bedroom'

Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson play a middle-class couple in a Maine fishing town whose world comes apart when their brilliant, handsome college-age son is shot to death by his girlfriend's estranged husband. When it looks as if the killer will get off with a manslaughter conviction, they are beside themselves with frustration and turn on each other. The movie is a devastating portrait of grief and the way it threatens to rip the seams of a marriage, and of the desperate solution (vigilante justice) they contemplate to transcend their pain.

PLUSES Ms. Spacek's and Mr. Wilkinson's pitch-perfect performances take you as deep inside a marriage as Ingmar Bergman used to do. Not since Paul Schrader's "Affliction" (1998) has an American movie found such a perfect weave of acute psychological realism and geography. Todd Field (who played the musician in "Eyes Wide Shut") makes an impressive directorial debut.

MINUSES The story's very strengths its bleak eloquence, the characters' uncomfortable silences and the reflective pace will not gratify audiences seeking light entertainment.

'Gosford Park'

Robert Altman turns the cozy worlds of "Upstairs Downstairs" and Agatha Christie whodunits inside out in the sociologically acute study of an early-30's English shooting party. Under its PBS-ready gloss, this movie coolly eviscerates a world of snobs, fortune hunters and their toadying, sometimes cruelly exploited servants.

PLUSES The seamless ensemble acting by a mostly British cast includes brilliant cameos by a Who's Who of actors. Especially memorable are Michael Gambon as the rich, piggish host who is murdered; Kristin Scott Thomas as his chilly wife; Jeremy Northam as a suave matinee idol; Helen Mirren and Emily Watson as servants with secrets; and most of all Maggie Smith as a selfish, penny-pinching countess.

MINUSES The overlapping dialogue is sometimes hard to follow, and the story is so dense that two viewings may be required for total comprehension. The whodunit aspect of the movie is perfunctory.

'No Man's Land'

Danis Tanovic's directorial debut is as scalding an antiwar film as has appeared in years. A Bosnian and a Serb soldier, both wounded, find themselves stranded in a trench between enemy lines along with a third wounded soldier who cannot be moved because a mine was placed under his body. Their petty power struggles while they wait for rescue make for the blackest of comedies. When the United Nations and a global television network appear on the scene, the two organizations care more about their internal politics than about the soldiers' lives.

PLUSES The film's gallows humor is worthy of "Catch-22," and the image of a wounded soldier who can't be moved without blowing up everything in the vicinity is an absurdist metaphor worthy of Samuel Beckett.

MINUSES The media bashing is a bit too glib.

'The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring'

Peter Jackson's first installment of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantastic trilogy is almost everything a fan of the books would want it to be. The misty mountain settings (in New Zealand) are at once prehistoric and otherworldly, and the elaborate derring- do in this mythological world is grandly choreographed and rife with metaphysical significance.

PLUSES The epic splendor and special effects are dazzling. Viggo Mortensen is classic heroism incarnate, while Ian McKellen makes an archetypal wizard. Cate Blanchett materializes for one blazing, unforgettable moment.

MINUSES If the movie is a feast for Tolkien fans, those uninitiated into the world of hobbits may have difficulty grasping the language and geography. Those who don't care or who have wandering minds will squirm during its three hours.

'Lantana'

This high-toned Australian soap opera adapted from Andrew Bovell's play "Speaking in Tongues" starts out as a contemporary whodunit but turns into something deeper. The characters include a philandering, overstressed policeman (Anthony LaPaglia), a troubled therapist (Barbara Hershey) who suspects her husband (Geoffrey Rush) may be having an affair with a male patient, and other restless, worried malcontents.

PLUSES Mr. LaPaglia's portrait of a macho man risking his health by stifling his feelings until they nearly explode is a wrenching portrayal of what used to be called a Type A personality.

MINUSES It's finally just a well-written, well-acted soap opera.

'Iris'

John Bayley's memoir of his marriage to the writer Iris Murdoch while she was declining from Alzheimer's disease has been reduced to a tidy 90-minute tearjerker that flashes back and forth between the older Iris (Judi Dench) and her sexually free-spirited younger self (Kate Winslet). Anchoring the film is Jim Broadbent's awesomely self-effacing portrayal of her fussy, stammering husband, desperately reaching out to his wife as the disease erases her identity.

PLUSES Mr. Broadbent's immersion in his character is the year's most astonishing screen acting feat, and the coordination between his performance and that of Hugh Bonneville as his character's younger self is so perfect that the two actors almost blend into one. Ms. Winslet gives another brave, feisty portrait of an independent woman, and Dame Judi's Iris is calmly and magnificently self-effacing.

MINUSES The movie's back-and- forth structure quickly becomes a gimmick, and despite its wonderful performances the movie feels cramped, shallow and ultimately incomplete.

'A Beautiful Mind'

Sylvia Nasar's biography of the mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jr. has been gutted by the director Ron Howard and the screenwriter Akiva Goldman and remade as a sentimental fable of redemption and recovery. Yet the story of Mr. Nash's battle with schizophrenia still has clout. Most of it springs from Russell Crowe's astounding performance, in which this actor, who ages several decades during the film, gives a profoundly introspective performance that embodies the agonies of mental illness.

PLUSES With this picture Mr. Crowe emerges as arguably the most gifted all-around screen actor with star charisma since Robert De Niro.

MINUSES Except his mental illness, all of Mr. Nash's many kinks have been ironed out. Although the movie cleverly tricks us into sharing the character's delusions, by the end of the film its method of doing so has come to seem heavy-handed.

'Ali'

If Michael Mann's hugely ambitious biography of Muhammad Ali is beautifully shot, with some of the most powerful fight sequences ever filmed, its subject still looms too large in the public imagination to be fully captured by a movie. In his brave, expansive title performance, a bulked-up Will Smith finally sheds his cheery rapper's image.

PLUSES Jamie Foxx outdoes his stellar turn in "Any Given Sunday" with his ferocious portrayal of Drew (Bundini) Brown, Mr. Ali's dissolute sidekick. Jon Voight's sympathetic portrait of Howard Cosell transcends caricature. The movie makes memorable use of Sam Cooke's music.

MINUSES As much as the movie gives literary shape to the life of its subject, his complicated essence remains elusive. The story is simply too large for a two-and-a-half-hour movie.

'The Shipping News'

E. Annie Proulx's quirky, hard-bitten novel about a beaten-down, ugly newspaperman (Kevin Spacey) who returns to his ancestral home in Newfoundland and uncovers many family secrets, has been declawed by the director Lasse Hallstrom and turned into a mildly uplifting odyssey. What made the novel special was the author's robust, idiosyncratic language, which finds no screen correlative.

PLUSES The landscapes and cinematography are gorgeous. Judi Dench, Pete Postlethwaite and Cate Blanchett give small, well-turned performances, and Mr. Hallstrom's humanism casts a comfy glow.

MINUSES The hole at the center of the movie is a gravely miscast Mr. Spacey, who in a careful but affected performance plays his character as a mumbling lost-dog begging for sympathy.

'Vanilla Sky'

Although Cameron Crowe is credited as the director, this weird sci-fi-skewed fable about male vanity (adapted from the recent Spanish film "Open Your Eyes") is Tom Cruise's movie all the way. He plays a yuppie media mogul who emerges from a car crash disfigured and goes to fantastic extremes to restore his damaged face.

PLUSES Even if the roller-coaster plot makes little sense, it carries you along, buoyed by a wonderful pop soundtrack. Cameron Diaz, as a spurned woman who haunts the hero's dreams, is a scarily avenging fury.

MINUSES Mr. Cruise's star performance verges on the overbearing, and Penélope Cruz, who plays his dream girl, still can't speak English well enough to emote convincingly.