Written and directed by Steven Spielberg, “A.I.” is a science-fiction film that stars Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, and William Hurt. The movie takes place at some future time when global climate changes have caused the American coastline to become flooded and laws severely restrict human reproduction to conserve resources. Professor Hobby (Hurt) develops an android that looks and behaves like a child, and a married couple brings home such an android named David (Osment). At first they treat David like a son, including reading “Pinocchio” to him, but they eventually abandon him in a woods. David then seeks the Blue Fairy from the Pinocchio story in the belief that it can turn him into a real boy, and along the way he befriends a strange android named Gigolo Joe (Law), leading to many adventures. “A.I.” is complex and provocative and does not provide the comfort level of most previous Spielberg films.

This taut thriller stars Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski, and Steve Zahn. Lewis (Walker) is a college student who makes a cross-country automobile trip, picking up his brother Fuller (Zahn) and his friend Venna (Sobieski) along the way. They pull a prank on a truck driver who calls himself Rusty Nail, but things go awry and a motel occupant is severely beaten as a result. It’s not long before Lewis, Venna, and Fuller hear Rusty Nail on their CB radio and realize that he is after them. Much of the rest of the movie revolves around a series of hair-raising incidents where the psychotic trucker uses his huge tractor-trailer rig to try to run down the three young people. Although “Joy Ride” has a few funny moments, it’s basically an unusually well-crafted thriller. Fully 77 percent of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave this movie a positive review.

This drama tells the tale of a working-class Irish family living in Liverpool during the Great Depression. While the young boy Liam (Anthony Borrows) prepares for his first communion, his father (Ian Hart) loses his job and finds it difficult to get another. Liam’s loving mother (Claire Hackett) struggles to keep the family together, and his older sister Teresa (Megan Burns) takes work as a maid for a wealthy Jewish family. As Liam tries to come to terms with the Roman Catholic concept of sin, his family must pawn things with a Jewish pawnbroker to keep afloat financially. Eventually, Liam’s proud father comes to believe that Jews are at the root of his problems, and he joins a fascist organization where he can vent his anti-Semitic feelings. Most of “Liam” consists of a carefully drawn portrait of the title character and his family, but as the movie nears its end, it takes a melodramatic turn.

Ben Kingsley gives a fine performance in this crime drama. Gary “Gal” Dove (Ray Winstone) is a criminal who has happily retired to Spain’s Costa del Sol with his wife Deedee (Amanda Redman), a former porn star. But Gal’s tranquillity is shattered by the news that violent London gangster Don Logan (Kingsley) is coming to recruit him for a heist that requires his special safecracking skills. Gal eventually has little choice but to give in to Logan’s demands, and he travels to London where he participates in a robbery that involves drilling into a vault from a Turkish bath next door to a bank. “Sexy Beast” is a character-driven drama that features both humor and brutality, and a whopping 87 percent of the critics on the Rotten Tomatoes Web site liked this movie.

This politically incorrect comedy about the fashion industry stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Stiller also cowrote and directed the film, and his wife, father, mother, and sister appear in it. In the movie, Derek Zoolander (Stiller) is a veteran top male model whose career is threatened by Hansel (Wilson), a newcomer to modeling. This sends the monumentally stupid Zoolander into a funk and sets him up to be brainwashed by a nefarious group of fashion designers to kill the prime minister of Malaysia. The fashion designers want to get rid of the prime minister because his support of laws restricting child labor endangers their industry. There are some big laughs in “Zoolander” and about two-thirds of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked the movie, but many questioned the appropriateness of specifying the head of state of a real country as the target of an assassination plot.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this puzzle movie that is part science fiction, part thriller, part melodrama. Donnie Darko (Gyllenhaal) is a high school student who lives with his nice family in pleasant suburban surroundings. But Donnie is a troubled young man who is sometimes visited by a six-foot rabbit and has other experiences that may be delusions. In fact, Donnie is under a psychiatrist’s care and is on medication. Of course, Donnie is a misfit at school and has problems dealing with teachers. However, as he struggles with a number of unsettling incidents, Donnie apparently develops some ability to see into the future and perhaps even be able to travel through time. The plot of “Donnie Darko” goes through many twists and turns, and trying to figure out what it all means is supposed to be part of the fun of watching this film.

Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke give outstanding performances in this police drama. Alonzo Harris (Washington) is a veteran Los Angeles Police Department narcotics detective who is assigned the task of taking a rookie cop named Jake Hoyt (Hawke) on a training day. Harris and Hoyt soon make a drug bust, but Hoyt quickly becomes aware that his training will be highly unconventional when Harris makes him smoke the PCP-laced marijuana they confiscated. As the day progresses, the rookie sees the veteran’s renegade approach to law enforcement in situation after situation, including a lunch meeting with a whole group of dirty cops. As incident piles upon incident, Hoyt’s disgust at Harris’ way of doing police work mounts, but the rookie finds himself being pulled into the veteran’s web of corruption.

An Italian-language romantic comedy, “Bread and Tulips” features several likable characters. The story centers around a woman named Rosalba (Licia Magliettia), a forty-something homemaker who is unhappily married. On a vacation with her self-centered husband and teenage children, Rosalba gets separated from her family at a rest stop when their tour bus leaves with them on board while she is still in the bathroom. She impulsively travels to Venice, where she moves in with a melancholy waiter named Fernando (Bruno Ganz), takes a job with a florist, and makes friends with a masseuse. Meanwhile, Rosalba’s husband sends a bumbler named Costantino (Giuseppe Battiston) to Venice to find her. “Bread and Tulips” is lightweight, but it’s very successful in creating sympathetic characters for whom audiences want things to come out right.

The Cantonese-language Hong Kong martial-arts movie “Iron Monkey” played in U.S. theaters in 2001, but this was actually a cosmetic makeover of the original 1993 version of the film. Although the older version of the movie has been available on video for some time, it’s only now that the 2001 version is being released on video and DVD. Set somewhere in the Chinese countryside in the 19th century, “Iron Monkey” is about two good guys teaming up to fight against an evil governor. One of the good guys is the title character, a legendary Robin Hood-like figure. The other good guy is martial-arts expert Wong Kei-ying, who is accompanied by his 12-year-old son Wong Fei-hong (played here by a girl). But of course “Iron Monkey” isn’t about plot or characters--it’s about spectacular martial-arts action sequences.