The story is rather complicated, where beauty Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie) is the one connection with the elusive Pearce, who stole $2.3 billion dollars from Brit crime boss Reginald Shaw (Steven Berkoff) and then skipped out on a £744 million dollar back tax bill. Why he owes taxes for money he stole from a mobster isn't explained, but one presumes that he was supposed to declare it on his taxes and, uhm, forgot.

To throw off the Italian Interpol surveillance team - directed at a distance by gawky Scotland Yard Inspector Acheson (Paul Bettany) - Pearce tells Elise to board a train heading to Venice, find someone who is a similar height and weight to him and befriend the man. The surveillance team will then follow the wrong man (shades of Hitchcock's classic "the wrong man" storyline) and she'll be free to meet up with Pearce and resume their romantic relationship.

The slovenly man she picks is Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), a math teacher from Madison, Wisconsin who is traveling Italy solo. He's a bit of a mess, awkward and clearly uncomfortable in the presence of the dazzling Elise. They trade suggestive banter while on the train and go their separate ways once they arrive in Venice, but Elise pops up again while Frank is clumsily looking at a map and trying to figure out the city.

Their continued interaction doesn't go unnoticed by the surveillance team and Shaw learns about it too, sending in his own goon squad of Russian mobsters to capture Pearce and get his money back. For two billion in stolen funds, however, he seems surprisingly cool: that's a lot of money. The chase is on with both Interpol and the Russians after poor, hapless Frank, believing he's Pearce. But he's just a school teacher...

I have to admit, I found The Tourist an enjoyable escape film and while Depp was surprisingly sloppy, unattractive and unengaging in the film, Jolie was very good with her Sophia Loren-like Italian fashion wardrobe and hairstyle and her "I'm letting you in on a secret" performance. The plot had tons of holes in it, but I expected that and so wasn't too bothered. What was more disappointing was the surprising lack of chemistry between the two stars. I could believe Frank falling for Elisa - a mysterious, beautiful woman with clearly powerful and rich friends - but there was never a moment on screen that explained why she'd even give him the time of day once the initial deception was complete.

The story takes place in a near future where companies send agents to steal secrets from within people's dreams and the military are trained in artificially constructed dream worlds where they feel pain, worlds indistinguishable from reality, but from which they wake up if, in the dream, they die or are killed.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a rogue dream extractor who believes that in addition to exploring other people's dreams, it should be possible to plant ideas in their subconscious too. Called "inception", it's highly controversial, if even possible.

He's hired by Japanese industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe) and assembles a team to plant an idea in the mind of competitor and troubled conglomerate heir Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Cobb brings together an unlikely group: Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young "architect" who creates the dream worlds, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his point man and long-time collaborator, Eames (Tom Hardy), a likable, sarcastic forger and Yusuf (Dileep Rao) as a chemist.

In a world where dreams can be embedded in other dreams, nothing is ever quite what it seems, people aren't who they seem to be, and the very fabric of reality can bend and distort without warning. It makes for one heck of a movie, and is one of the first I've seen this year where I'm ready to see it a second time to ensure I understood the layers of what was happening on screen. It's that good.

Law Abiding Citizen is the latest in the bad lawyer genre, with Jamie Foxx as career focused attorney Nick Rice who accepts a plea bargain from the killer of affable inventor Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler)'s family. 

The film opens with Shelton and his daughter working together in the basement, while his wife prepares dinner. There's a knock on the door and when Shelton opens it, he's wacked with a baseball bat, tied up, and then watches as the assailant picks up the daughter and (mercifully for us viewers) murders her off-camera. Later, we learn that the wife was also murdered.

Cut to attorney Rice and his team accepting a plea bargain where the killer, Darby (Christian Stolte), has agreed to turn state's evidence against his co-assailant, Ames (Josh Stewart). That will end up putting Ames on death row, while Darby - the real killer - would only be guilty of third-degree murder and imprisoned for 3-5 years.

Shelton's not happy about this plea bargain, resulting in Rice yelling at him that "it's not what you know, it's what you can prove in court. I know you don't think it right now, but this is a victory for us."

It's not a victory, and, frankly, Law Abiding Citizen gets so muddled up with its complicated storyline and poor performances from both Butler and Foxx that it's a movie best left for a DVD rental or even skipped entirely.

You've probably already been exposed to a number of different trailers and previews from the film that feature Brad Pitt as the tough Tennessee-born redneck Lt. Aldo Raine. What you can't tell from the previews is that the film is most assuredly a revisionist history of the American (and English and French) resistance to the Germans.

Lt. Raine is the leader of a group of Jewish soldiers drafted to go deep behind enemy lines and wreak havoc, not just killing Nazis but torturing and scalping them, creating fear and great anxiety in the German high command. Raine describes the "inglourious basterds" of his unit as a bushwhacking guerilla army and assures recruits that each "owes me 100 Nazi scalps".

The film opens, however, with the antagonist, the evil and cunning SS Colonel Hans Landa (a stand-out role for Christoph Waltz), toying with French dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), who is harboring a family of hunted Jewish farmers, including daughter Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent). Within a few minutes, it's clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, a necessary element in good war films, though there is definitely some moral ambiguity as the basterds prove a rowdy, violent bunch.

I really liked Inglourious Basterds even with its few moments of extreme violence (it is, after all, a Tarantino film and that's one of his trademarks). To the woman who asked me before the film started "is this a comedy?" I now say "no, but it's a darn good movie and does have some quite amusing scenes."  If you don't like Tarantino's previous films, you might well give this one a chance, and if you're already a fan, you'll definitely enjoy his maturation as a director and storyteller.

The story has James Stewart (playing L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies) as a photo-journalist with his entire left leg in a cast, toe to hip, stuck for two months in his Greenwich Village apartment during a hot summer. Day by day he sits, bored, watching his neighbors through his window with binoculars, from the barely-clad ballet dancer Miss Torso to the sad Miss Lonelyhearts, to the songwriter and newlyweds.

More ominously, however, is Lars Thorwald (played perfectly by Raymond Burr) as the angry man across the courtyard who gets into fight after fight with his wife and then she mysteriously vanishes. Did he finally get fed up and kill her?  Did Jefferies witness a murder?

In Rear Window, Stewart plays both the armchair detective, the nosy neighbor and a surrogate for all of us sitting in the theater watching the screen and sneaking into the lives of the people up there on the big screen, the flickering shadows on the wall.

Of course, it doesn't hurt a bit that Grace Kelly (as media darling and cover girl Lisa Carol Fremont) is his fianceé and is an absolute vision of loveliness. In fact, the scene where we first see her is, in my mind, one of the most beautifully filmed moments in all of cinema. She's breathtakingly stunning, and director Alfred Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks both know it.

When we watch a film, do we see what we think we see, or do we see what we want to see?  Are films a peek behind the scenes of reality or are they their own reality?

As Jefferies' housekeeper Stella (as played by the great character actor Thelma Ritter) says early in the film: "Mr. Jefferies, we've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change."

Indeed.

Having just seen one-name director McG's Terminator Salvation, I have to say that it falls into the category of a sequel that does not do justice to the franchise storyline and characters.