A.D. Policebegan as a three-part OAV prequel to the popular Bubblegum Crisisseries; these 12 episodes constitute the entire 1999 remake for TV. In the not-too-distant future, a massive earthquake has reduced Tokyo to rubble. The metropolis has been rebuilt as Genom City, named after the gargantuan conglomerate that manufactures Voomers(VOodoo Organic Metal Extension Resource), robots that provide most of the labor in the city. When a robot turns into a violent rogue Boomer, the A.D. Police has to resolve the crisis—by shooting the Boomer in its vital core. The most effective cop on the squad is Kenji Sasaki, but he's a coolly arrogant loner who operates on his own terms, rather than a team player. When his partner is critically injured in a fight with Boomers, Kenji is paired with the mysterious Hans Kleif, and the duo slowly forges a friendship. Kenji, Hans, and the rest of the squad are pitted against Liam Fletcher, the right-hand henchman of the Genom Corporation president, in a series of violent confrontations. This incarnation of A.D. Policefeels like a standard-issue anime action-adventure series: it pits a tough, motorcycle-riding antihero against an all-powerful industrial conglomerate involved in illegal and unethical biomechanical experiments. The mecha designs are undistinguished, and nothing in the scripts, animation, or direction sets the program apart. Liam's violent attempts at hijacking a plane and a nuclear reactor may disturb some viewers. Unrated: Violence, grotesque imagery, alcohol and tobacco use. —Charles Solomon

A box-office smash in England, About a Boywent on to charm the world as another fine adaptation (following High Fidelity) of a popular Nick Hornby novel. While High Fidelitytransplanted its London charm to Chicago, this irresistible comedy was directed by Americans Chris and Paul Weitz (American Pie) with its British pedigree intact. Better yet, Hugh Grant is perfectly cast as Will, a self-absorbed trust-fund slacker who tries to improve his romantic odds by preying on desperate single mothers. His cynical strategy backfires when he recruits the misfit son (Nicholas Hoult) of a suicidal mother (Toni Collette) to pose as his own son, thus proving his parental prowess to his latest single-mom target (Rachel Weisz). The kid has a warming effect on this ultimate cad, and what could have been a sappy tearjerker turns into a subtle, frequently hilarious portrait of familial quirks and elevated self-esteem. From start to finish, it's a genuine treat. —Jeff Shannon

Meticulously crafted but also ponderous and predictable, James Cameron's 1989 deep-sea close-encounter epic reaffirms one of the oldest first principles of cinema: everything moves a lot more slowly underwater. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as formerly married petroleum engineers who still have some "issues" to work out, are drafted to assist a gung-ho Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn) with a top-secret recovery operation: a nuclear sub has been ambushed and sunk, under mysterious circumstances, in some of the deepest waters on earth, and the petro-techies have the only submersible craft capable of diving down that far. Every image and every performance is painstakingly sharp and detailed (and the computerized water creatures are lovely) but the movie's lumbering pace is ultimately lethal. It's the audience that ends up feeling waterlogged. For a guy who likes guns as much as Cameron (his next film after all, was the body-count masterpiece Terminator 2: Judgment Day), it's interesting that the moral balance here is weighted heavily in favor of the can-do engineers; the military types are end-justifies-the-means amoralists, just like the weasely government bureaucrats in Aliens. —David Chute

The character of newspaperman Chuck Taylor (Kirk Douglas) is best summed up by an astonished bystander (herself no soft touch): "I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you—you—you're 20 minutes!" Meet the "hero" of Billy Wilder's corrosive 1951 classic Ace in the Hole(a.k.a. The Big Carnival), a former big-time reporter whose reputation is so tarnished he's now at an Albuquerque rag, chasing down local-interest stuff. Until, that is, a local miner gets stuck in a cave—a situation that Taylor not only exploits but actually manipulates, the better to improve his career chances. Wilder got the idea for the movie from the real-life media circus that followed the Floyd Collins story (Collins was trapped in a cave for over a week in 1925). Needless to say, the opportunities for displaying greed and venality are fully drawn out by Wilder; indeed, the film looks unbelievably prescient from a modern perspective of media overload.

Although Wilder had scored a success with Sunset Boulevardjust a year earlier, he misread the public's ability to stare into the merciless mirror he held up to them in Ace in the Hole. The movie bombed. Paramount changed the title to The Big Carnival, thus wrecking one of Wilder's most acidic puns, but it didn't help. It also doesn't matter: Ace in the Holeis one of the truly grown-up movies of its time, and age has only improved it. Wilder's ear for cynical dialogue is honed to its sharpest point, and Kirk Douglas has one of his best parts, which he attacks with customary ferocity. Jan Sterling plays the hard-nosed wife of the trapped man, with Porter Hall as Douglas's publisher—the lone voice of decency in the film's cruel parade. Admirably, Wilder takes this all the way down the line: the ending of the movie might be the best in-your-face finish since Public Enemy. —Robert Horton

Twisty brilliance from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the team who created Being John Malkovich. Nicolas Cage returns to form with a funny, sad, and sneaky performance as Charlie Kaufman, a self-loathing screenwriter who has been hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thiefinto a screenplay. Frustrated and infatuated by Orlean's elegant but plotless book (which is largely a rumination on flowers), Kaufman begins to write a screenplay about himself trying to write a screenplay about The Orchid Thief, all the while hounded by his twin brother Donald (Cage again), who's cheerfully writing the kind of formulaic action movie that Kaufman finds repugnant. By its conclusion, Adaptationis the most artistically ambitious, most utterly cynical, and most uncategorizable movie ever to come out of Hollywood. Also starring Meryl Streep (as Susan Orlean), Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton, and Brian Cox; superb performances throughout. —Bret Fetzer