Kate Beckinsale

The petite, pale Kate Beckinsale has been giving vampires a lot of thought these days, seeing as how she's playing one in Underworld (which opened Friday) - and a vampire's victim in the soon-to-be-releasedVan Helsing. "Vampire tales have always been about sex," Beckinsale says. "And vampires are very sexy. That whole love and lust and the illicit kiss on the neck cursing you, and giving you eternal life. "You kiss somebody, OK bite somebody, and you transform them, like having sex with someone and having that transform you into a pregnant lady.

Snow Angels Starring Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell. Directed by David Gordon Green. Warner Home Video. $27.98 dvds Director David Gordon Green, whose debut feature, the profoundly humanistic George Washington, caused quite the art-house stir when it was released in 2000, came perilously close to mainstream acceptance with this look at intertwined relationships that don't do anyone any good. Struggling waitress Annie (the marvelous Kate Beckinsale) is estranged from Glenn (Sam Rockwell)

Kate Beckinsale is too good for any of the guys in Snow Angels and too good for this movie. She brings relentless energy and vitality to Annie, the estranged wife of a boozing, born-again screw-up, Glenn (Sam Rockwell), and the driven mother of their young daughter. Her inventiveness exposes just how puny this movie is. The artful writer-director, David Gordon Green, may feel he invests his characters with poignancy by depicting them as people with scant inner resources, flailing their way toward uncertain destinies.

Kate Beckinsale is too good for any of the guys in Snow Angels and too good for this movie. She brings relentless energy and vitality to Annie, the estranged wife of a boozing, born-again screw-up, Glenn (Sam Rockwell), and the driven mother of their young daughter. Her inventiveness exposes just how puny this movie is. The artful writer-director, David Gordon Green, may feel he invests his characters with poignancy by depicting them as people with scant inner resources, flailing their way toward uncertain destinies.

Click continues the fascinating process of watching Adam Sandler mature onscreen. The frat-boy humor remains, but as in 2004's 50 First Dates, it's leavened by honest heart, compelling inventiveness and the acknowledgment that not everything in life exists to be snickered at. Sandler plays Michael Newman, a successful architect whose drive and ambition leave no time for his family. They also leave him with no time to master his household's plethora of remotes, that bewildering pile of advanced technology that is the bane of family rooms everywhere.

If ever a film was insufferably quirky, it's "Shooting Fish," 93 minutes of idiosyncrasies masquerading as plot.You've got two guys, one American and one British, who live in an abandoned gas storage tank. You've got a lovely young woman who's both a would-be doctor and the most gullible human on the planet. Put them together in a story that makes little sense and uses "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" as some sort of mantra, and audiences are supposed to pay to watch?Dylan and Jez (Dan Futterman and Stuart Townsend)

Snow Angels Starring Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell. Directed by David Gordon Green. Warner Home Video. $27.98 dvds Director David Gordon Green, whose debut feature, the profoundly humanistic George Washington, caused quite the art-house stir when it was released in 2000, came perilously close to mainstream acceptance with this look at intertwined relationships that don't do anyone any good. Struggling waitress Annie (the marvelous Kate Beckinsale) is estranged from Glenn (Sam Rockwell)

What a hollow, relentless mess is Underworld. Supposedly a horror-thriller about an age-long war between vampires and werewolves, it's really about dark cinematography, cool black costumes, bad hair and guns that shoot tons of bullets but hit nothing. Underworld is all sturm und drang, relentless firepower in pursuit of nothing other than an audience that thinks to itself, "Wow, ain't that cool." A few minutes of that, of course, goes a long way; even the most shallow of audience members is soon going to start thinking, "Hey, shouldn't there be a movie here someplace?"

What's the point of establishing an intense rapport between two romantic leads in the first 20 minutes - and then spending the next hour keeping them apart? In Serendipity, it's to prove that true lovers will always find their way. Too bad comedies can't proceed with the same certainty. John Cusack exudes a sort of aging-puppyish charisma in the opening, set at Bloomingdale's during the Christmas rush. He squabbles with a pert, quick-witted stranger, Kate Beckinsale, about who was first to claim the store's last pair of black cashmere gloves.

Laurel Canyon features Frances McDormand giving her all as a Los Angeles record producer who lives and works in a contemporary post-hippie whirl of pop art, hedonism and substance abuse. She has a disc to finish so she can't stop the carnival when her Harvard M.D. son (Christian Bale) arrives at her door with his fiancee (Kate Beckinsale), who has a Harvard M.D. and (almost) Ph.D. He's come to take a pyschiatric residency at an L.A. clinic while his bride-to-be finishes her thesis on genomics.

With the two successful Underworld films under his belt, director Len Wiseman was ready to talk turkey about his next project. Sitting down with some executives from Fox, he says, he was open to all sorts of suggestions. Save one. "I couldn't see myself doing a straightforward action cop film," Wiseman, 34, says over the phone from his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. "That's not really something I'm in to." What he was in to, or at least what he was known for, were Underworld (2003)

Click continues the fascinating process of watching Adam Sandler mature onscreen. The frat-boy humor remains, but as in 2004's 50 First Dates, it's leavened by honest heart, compelling inventiveness and the acknowledgment that not everything in life exists to be snickered at. Sandler plays Michael Newman, a successful architect whose drive and ambition leave no time for his family. They also leave him with no time to master his household's plethora of remotes, that bewildering pile of advanced technology that is the bane of family rooms everywhere.

The petite, pale Kate Beckinsale has been giving vampires a lot of thought these days, seeing as how she's playing one in Underworld (which opened Friday) - and a vampire's victim in the soon-to-be-releasedVan Helsing. "Vampire tales have always been about sex," Beckinsale says. "And vampires are very sexy. That whole love and lust and the illicit kiss on the neck cursing you, and giving you eternal life. "You kiss somebody, OK bite somebody, and you transform them, like having sex with someone and having that transform you into a pregnant lady.

What a hollow, relentless mess is Underworld. Supposedly a horror-thriller about an age-long war between vampires and werewolves, it's really about dark cinematography, cool black costumes, bad hair and guns that shoot tons of bullets but hit nothing. Underworld is all sturm und drang, relentless firepower in pursuit of nothing other than an audience that thinks to itself, "Wow, ain't that cool." A few minutes of that, of course, goes a long way; even the most shallow of audience members is soon going to start thinking, "Hey, shouldn't there be a movie here someplace?"

Laurel Canyon features Frances McDormand giving her all as a Los Angeles record producer who lives and works in a contemporary post-hippie whirl of pop art, hedonism and substance abuse. She has a disc to finish so she can't stop the carnival when her Harvard M.D. son (Christian Bale) arrives at her door with his fiancee (Kate Beckinsale), who has a Harvard M.D. and (almost) Ph.D. He's come to take a pyschiatric residency at an L.A. clinic while his bride-to-be finishes her thesis on genomics.

It isn't often that you hear the term "sexually adventurous" and the name Frances McDormand in the same sentence. McDormand is out to change all that with Laurel Canyon. She plays Jane, a California record producer who works out of a studio in her Laurel Canyon home. The film shows what happens when Jane's straight-arrow son (Christian Bale) and his fiancee (Kate Beckinsale) drop in for a visit with his hipster mom. The role, says McDormand, "was a gift, a complete gift, for a 45-year-old female actor to play."

Kenneth Branagh has populated his vigorous adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" with a trans-Atlantic cast of Oscar-winners and big-screen icons: There's Emma Thompson, of course, who plays Beatrice opposite husband Branagh's Benedick; there's Denzel Washington as Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon; there's Batman, Michael Keaton, in the Monty Pythonesque role of Constable Dogberry, and there are a couple of young Americans -- Keanu Reeves as...

One of these days, the entire continent of Asia is going to sue Hollywood for defamation of character. Until that happens, we'll be forced to suffer through films like "Brokedown Palace."Like "Red Corner" and "Return to Paradise" before it, "Brokedown Palace" posits itself as a cautionary tale: Don't even think about breaking the law when playing the Ugly American tourist in Asia, for the corrupt and unenlightened legal system there will throw your fanny in jail quicker than you can say "no Bill of Rights."

What's the point of establishing an intense rapport between two romantic leads in the first 20 minutes - and then spending the next hour keeping them apart? In Serendipity, it's to prove that true lovers will always find their way. Too bad comedies can't proceed with the same certainty. John Cusack exudes a sort of aging-puppyish charisma in the opening, set at Bloomingdale's during the Christmas rush. He squabbles with a pert, quick-witted stranger, Kate Beckinsale, about who was first to claim the store's last pair of black cashmere gloves.

One of these days, the entire continent of Asia is going to sue Hollywood for defamation of character. Until that happens, we'll be forced to suffer through films like "Brokedown Palace."Like "Red Corner" and "Return to Paradise" before it, "Brokedown Palace" posits itself as a cautionary tale: Don't even think about breaking the law when playing the Ugly American tourist in Asia, for the corrupt and unenlightened legal system there will throw your fanny in jail quicker than you can say "no Bill of Rights."