Whereas Alfred Hitchcock defined the shower as the focus of horror in the home, director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) makes the case for avoiding the bath in his suspense thriller What Lies Beneath. Taking a chilling and macabre dive into rustic Vermont, the story follows Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer), a lonely, high-strung housewife, whose struggles with inexplicable supernatural occurrences in her home eventually reveal frightening secrets both about her busy husband (Harrison Ford) and herself. In a movie with only occasional glimpses of predictability, thanks in part to Clark Greg's twisty script, Zemeckis provides well-timed shocks amid deft references to Hitchcock classics, ranging from Psycho to Vertigo to Rear Window. Ford and Pfeiffer both deliver taut and credible performances in what is a refreshing return to pure cinematic suspense, proving that the hack-and-slash excesses of horror in the '90s need not be the norm. Joe Nigro
-from Barnes & Noble website

This fascinating comedy questions what we mean when we use words like "nature" and "civilization." Lila (Patricia Arquette, Lost Highway, True Romance), a nature writer who grows hair all over her body, falls in love with Nathan (Tim Robbins, The Player, The Hudsucker Proxy), a scientist attempting to teach table manners to mice. While hiking in the woods, they discover Puff (Rhys Ifans, Notting Hill), a man raised in the wild since childhood, whom Nathan seizes as a test subject for his experiments--and soon these three, along with Nathan's French lab assistant (Miranda Otto) are embroiled in criss-crossed love affairs as they (and the audience) attempt to figure out what it means to be true to one's own nature. Though Human Nature isn't as surefooted as Being John Malkovich (which was also written by distinctive screenwriter Charlie Kaufman), it has moments of startling comic genius. --Bret Fetzer
-from Amazon.com website

This Australian comedy is wonderfully bizarre, in its story of two sisters in a tiny town who both succumb to the charms of their new neighbor: a lanky, honey-voiced disk jockey named Ken Sherry (George Shevtsov), who has escaped from the big city to spin Barry White records on the radio. As the two sisters, Miranda Otto and Rebecca Frith, embody both sisterly nosiness and solidarity, they unexpectedly find themselves competing for Ken's easily captured affections. The humor derives from the contrast between the sisters: one desperate and clinging, the other stand-offish--yet both vulnerable to Ken's strange (he has webbed toes) charms. Writer-director Shirley Barrett keeps the comedy low-key but consistent in a film in which even the owner of the local Chinese restaurant, a part-time nudist, is funny. --Marshall Fine
-from Amazon.com website

Creepiness abounds in this beautifully shot, well-acted Aussie suspense flick. The Well is especially satisfying because it takes its time, carefully setting up the characters before getting to the meat of the plot. Stiff, quiet Hester, edging into middle age, lives alone on an isolated farm with her father. When Hester brings young, pretty Katherine to the farm to help with the housework, her life begins to change, subtly revolving more and more around her young maid. To reveal any more would deprive the viewer of watching the quietly chilling plot unfold. Director Samantha Long shoots the movie skillfully and patiently. Her best device is the use of a blue-gray filter, with sudden bright flashes of red and yellow around Katherine. The cast is uniformly good, but special kudos goes to Pamela Rabe, who reveals the passion hiding just beneath Hester's surface. --Ali Davis
-from Amazon.com website