Ralph Fiennes

I don't know what kind of actor I am, to be honest," Ralph Fiennes says. "Every part I approach differently, and sleep with the director if I can." There it is, that sneaky wit. The subdued Fiennes uses it sparingly at a Toronto coffee shop, but he wields it to pinprick effect. As in most interviews with the British star of Spider (tentatively scheduled for a Baltimore opening in April), Fiennes is asked to dissect his love of the tormented. A joke or two makes the heavy talk go down easier.

Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Released by the Weinstein Co. $29.95, ** 1/2 ( 2 1/2 STARS) Since Kate Winslet won her best actress Oscar for The Reader, the party line has been that it was some sort of career achievement award, given not so much for her work in this film as for all the other great films she's starred in over the years. That's nonsense. While the movie itself has some problems, none of them stems from Winslet's performance. As a sullen Berlin streetcar conductor who begins a sexual relationship with a teenager, for reasons that are both more and less than they at first seem, Winslet again demonstrates why she's earned the tag as one of her generation's greatest actresses.

What fun to find Vanity Fair refraining from its usual star worship. The gusher runs dry for Ralph Fiennes, the pale British actor who played such a convincing Nazi sadist in "Schindler's List." During his two-hour interview in the November issue, Mr. Fiennes is a model of chilly reserve: "Not that one expected a teddy bear," writes Leslie Bennetts. "Maybe an infinitesimal bit of charm, perhaps -- would that be too much to ask?" Indeed, Mr. Fiennes declines eye contact with the reporter, who is left to theorize about the murky depths lurking beneath the 32-year-old actor's "aristocratic exterior," depths that have electrified his performances -- in "Hamlet" onstage, in Robert Redford's "Quiz Show," in the futuristic "Strange Days."

[Paramount Home Video] Starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes Directed by Saul Dibb. $29.98, Blu-ray $39.99. ** dvds The Duchess, in stores Saturday, may be lovely to look at, but even Keira Knightley's best efforts can't shake up this curiously inert film, the tale of an 18th-century British lass who married into the aristocracy, only to find the marriage doomed her to a life of little more than servitude to her vain, pompous husband. Knightley, corseted and wigged beyond any reasonable measure, is Georgiana Spencer, who starts off thrilled that she is to be betrothed to the esteemed Duke of Devonshire.

Director Gillian Armstrong has waited 10 years to get her version of "Oscar & Lucinda" on the screen. It seems an odd choice, because her work, such as "Little Women," has shown a marvelous empathy for its characters.In the novel "Oscar & Lucinda," author Peter Carey takes a decided pleasure in dragging his two protagonists through a series of spiritual and physical tortures so baroque that the whole enterprise begins to take on the looniness of a Monty Python sketch.Oscar (Ralph Fiennes)

A few things you might consider doing instead of seeing "The Avengers": Walking the dog.Turning the compost.Re-grouting the bathtub.Starting your 1999 taxes.Buying a dog.Starting a compost heap.By now, the pop-culture literati (meaning people with nothing of substance or meaning to worry about) know that the entertainment media is in high feather over Warner Brothers' decision not to screen "The Avengers" for critics before it opened Friday.The studio gives us far too much credit. The American movie-going public is famously immune to the rants and raves of reviewers, making up their own minds by sallying forth intrepidly regardless of critical opprobrium.

"Onegin" is an elegantly wrought, deeply felt film based on Alexander Pushkin's 1831 novel in verse, which in turn inspired Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera. The very model of a literary adaptation to the screen, it stars a perfectly cast Ralph Fiennes and marks a remarkably assured feature directorial debut for Fiennes' sister, Martha, and also a splendid opportunity for their brother Magnus, who composed the film's spare yet evocative score. As a period piece the film is breathtaking in its beauty and authenticity, its production design a work of symbolically decayed grandeur.

[Paramount Home Video] Starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes Directed by Saul Dibb. $29.98, Blu-ray $39.99. ** dvds The Duchess, in stores Saturday, may be lovely to look at, but even Keira Knightley's best efforts can't shake up this curiously inert film, the tale of an 18th-century British lass who married into the aristocracy, only to find the marriage doomed her to a life of little more than servitude to her vain, pompous husband. Knightley, corseted and wigged beyond any reasonable measure, is Georgiana Spencer, who starts off thrilled that she is to be betrothed to the esteemed Duke of Devonshire.

Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Released by the Weinstein Co. $29.95, ** 1/2 ( 2 1/2 STARS) Since Kate Winslet won her best actress Oscar for The Reader, the party line has been that it was some sort of career achievement award, given not so much for her work in this film as for all the other great films she's starred in over the years. That's nonsense. While the movie itself has some problems, none of them stems from Winslet's performance. As a sullen Berlin streetcar conductor who begins a sexual relationship with a teenager, for reasons that are both more and less than they at first seem, Winslet again demonstrates why she's earned the tag as one of her generation's greatest actresses.

NEW YORK -- Long before she started working on an unfamiliar new computer that gave her migraine headaches and long before she learned she had cancer, Jini Fiennes conceived of her sixth and most ambitious novel, "Blood Ties," a cyclical tale of wounded generations and the redeeming power of love.Writing again after years of struggle alongside her husband to raise seven children on little money in England and Ireland, she finished the book in 1989 and then absorbed rejection after rejection from publishers.

DROPPED INTO Le Cirque to see how Sirio Maccioni and his burgeoning Italian family have survived the holidays. Before Dec. 25, the place on Manhattan's East 58th Street was jumping with Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, Nancy and Bill O'Shaunghessy, Donald Trump, Robert De Niro, Andrea Bocelli, Ron Perelman, Mary Wells Lawrence, Louise Grunwald, Barbara Walters, Neil Sedaka, Joy and Regis Philbin, and the Fox politico Dick Morris - plus a host of young beauties....

The Producers [Universal] $29.98 The movie version of Mel Brooks' hit Broadway production of The Producers did not repeat the Tony winner's phenomenal success in theaters, although the stage show based on Brooks' 1968 comedy is still ensconced at the St. James Theater on the Great White Way. Reviews for the movie were decidedly mixed when it was released last Christmas, and the film was a commercial disappointment as well -- even though several members...

The Rosetta Stone to decipher Ralph Fiennes just may be, of all things, Maid in Manhattan, the ghastly movie he made with Jennifer Lopez that came and went like a cold sore in 2002. The man can deliver a shimmering portrait of Nazi evil in Schindler's List or a brilliant Hamlet on Broadway, but what he can't uncork is a guy -- an unintrospective, untortured male of the species -- and it was a guy he had to play in the Lopez disaster. "I've always ... I've always ... I don't know ... I've never been part ... of what they call clubable," he says with a fractured elegance.

The Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles immediately won the reputation of being a director's director when his dynamo of a mosaic about the Rio de Janeiro underclass, City of God, opened two years ago. It had an astonishing impact for a movie done in Meirelles' native language, Portuguese. Its virtuosity dazzled but also distanced some critics, including me. It was Hollywood filmmakers who gave Meirelles his creative supernova status when they handed his film four Academy Award nominations, including one for best director.

I don't know what kind of actor I am, to be honest," Ralph Fiennes says. "Every part I approach differently, and sleep with the director if I can." There it is, that sneaky wit. The subdued Fiennes uses it sparingly at a Toronto coffee shop, but he wields it to pinprick effect. As in most interviews with the British star of Spider (tentatively scheduled for a Baltimore opening in April), Fiennes is asked to dissect his love of the tormented. A joke or two makes the heavy talk go down easier.

Red Dragon is to terror films what Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is to fantasy flicks. The script cleverly compresses the source book (along with a piece of The Silence of the Lambs), and the cast members look and in some cases act their parts to a T. Die-hard fans of Thomas A. Harris' original novel - the one that introduced genius serial-killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and his FBI nemesis Will Graham (Edward Norton) - will enjoy the skillful illustration of its major plots and themes.

"Sunshine," a historical epic from Hungarian director Istvan Szabo about a family - and a country - continually being ripped apart for daring to be true to itself, has too much going for it to resort to gimmickry. But it does, by offering Ralph Fiennes in a three-part role as the patriarchs of three successive generations of a Jewish family struggling to find its way through 20th-century Hungary. As good an actor as Fiennes is, such a stunt can't help but detract from the story. Audiences will be so busy being impressed with the different shadings the actor brings to his three characters that they'll inevitably be diverted from what's happening in the movie.

From a baby's harrowing ride down the River Nile to a parting of the Red Sea that would make even Cecil B. DeMille smile, DreamWorks' "The Prince of Egypt" is that rarest of film creatures: a biblical epic that does both its subject and its medium proud.That its medium is animation makes the feat even more impressive. Seven decades of talking critters and lovers who live happily ever after has made animation largely a kids' domain. True, adults helped make "Snow White" and her successors classics, but it's the non-threatening nature of animated films that has made them staples, films that generations of parents and even the youngest children could enjoy together.

"Onegin" is an elegantly wrought, deeply felt film based on Alexander Pushkin's 1831 novel in verse, which in turn inspired Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera. The very model of a literary adaptation to the screen, it stars a perfectly cast Ralph Fiennes and marks a remarkably assured feature directorial debut for Fiennes' sister, Martha, and also a splendid opportunity for their brother Magnus, who composed the film's spare yet evocative score. As a period piece the film is breathtaking in its beauty and authenticity, its production design a work of symbolically decayed grandeur.

"Sunshine," a historical epic from Hungarian director Istvan Szabo about a family - and a country - continually being ripped apart for daring to be true to itself, has too much going for it to resort to gimmickry. But it does, by offering Ralph Fiennes in a three-part role as the patriarchs of three successive generations of a Jewish family struggling to find its way through 20th-century Hungary. As good an actor as Fiennes is, such a stunt can't help but detract from the story. Audiences will be so busy being impressed with the different shadings the actor brings to his three characters that they'll inevitably be diverted from what's happening in the movie.