Sandra Bullock

My idea of a romantic gimmick is the one in Groundhog Day. Granted, that inspired piece of pop Buddhism was about a media striver reconfiguring his whole life by living the same 24 hours over and over again. But it also allowed him to fix every dunderheaded mistake he made in courting his true love - each awkward feint, every sorry piece of bravado, any misplaced emphasis and all the bone-headed declarations of his alpha-male worth. The modest gimmick behind the romance of The Lake House is a mailbox that functions as a time portal.

From reviving an exuberant 1980s film and TV franchise about singing and dancing high-school students with "Fame," to bringing an all-time children's classic to the screen with Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," nervous Hollywood studio executives are trying a little bit of everything in an effort to weather, and maybe rise a little bit above, these uncertain economic times. Among the heavy guns being called into service: new movies from directors Joel and Ethan Coen ("A Serious Man")

In 1924, two brilliant teen-agers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, planned and committed a murder as an intellectual game. Their case popularized the use of the phrase "thrill killers" and inspired several movies, most famously Compulsion (1959), starring Bradford Dillman, Dean Stockwell and Diane Varsi as a sympathetic girl. With Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt and Agnes Bruckner in parallel roles, Murder By Numbers is a new-millennial California update. The killers here are high-school students, not college grads, but like Leopold and Loeb they want to pull a perfect crime to prove they're superior to society.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince . 1/2 ( 3 1/2 STARS) $77.8 million $ 158 million 1.5 week Rated: PG Running time: 153 minutes What it's about: Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe, above) must persuade an eccentric potions professor to reveal one source of Voldemort's power. Our take: As Harry enters the thick of adolescence, the filmmakers reward him with a movie that bubbles and pops with humor and feeling. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs . ( 2 STARS)

When you've got a tidy little thriller, it helps to have a tidy little ending. Or any ending at all. Premonition has no such thing. True, it ends - as in the celluloid stops going through the projector and the theater's house lights come up. But there's no resolution to the story. Heck, there's not even the confusion that a hurried ending would bring. There's just a sort of resignation, a feeling that this was a journey made for no purpose, a despondency born of filmmakers too caught up in their cool idea to realize that a story needs closure.

Poor Gracie Hart. She's spent her life trying to be one of the boys, learning to swear, drink and fight like the brother you wish you'd had around for protection. Now, as an FBI agent, she gets to put all that training to good use. And the undercover assignment the bureau figures she's perfect for? Beauty pageant contestant. Sandra Bullock gets to try her hand at slapstick in "Miss Congeniality," a lightweight and generally amusing farce that skewers the world of both beauty shows and those who ridicule them.

The forecast for "Forces of Nature" is pleasantly bumpy.Like the crazy weather it uses as a metaphor, this film -- part road movie and part romantic comedy -- is happily full of the unexpected.Ben (Ben Affleck) and Sarah (Sandra Bullock) are the characters suffering through various disasters on planes, trains and automobiles on their way from New York to Savannah, Ga. After their plane wrecks on the runway as they try to take off, they end up stuck in a rental car with a guy named Vic, headed South.

Give Sandra Bullock credit for knowing her limitations. Having steadily built up her star clout since appearing in "Speed" about a thousand years ago, she easily could have gone the "Girl, Interrupted" route, adapting some searing first-person memoir to explore her inner demons and (God forbid) "stretch" herself as an actress. In "28 Days" she gets to explore inner demons, but not enough to cast a pall over her famously perky persona. She may be a recovering alcoholic and pill addict, but here rehab is more the comic milieu of some lovable, wacky characters than metaphor for human suffering in a world gone mad. Bullock's character goes through some changes, but she never turns into some unrecognizably serious actress.

Say hello to Hollywood's vision of a horrible, un-livable future:All guns are in a museum. Cars drive themselves. People have no-contact sex. No one's been murdered for more than a decade. Cops arrest people for using profanity.How could you possibly make this into a pyrotechnic action film?Rambo to the rescue!Oops. Actually, Sylvester Stallone is named John Spartan in his latest film. But the formula seems familiar: iconoclast hero, deranged villain, lots of gunplay, things going boom and acres and acres of well-defined musculature.

The Proposal should have been called The Formula . The Recipe would suggest too much flavor. It's been made according to the chapter in the box-office manual labeled "summer counter-programming." Take one established female star (Sandra Bullock) hungry enough for a hit to sign on to substandard material. Add a male up-and-comer (Ryan Reynolds) who still has to prove that he's a leading man. Proceed to wrap them inside a romantic comedy with several high-concept twists. Hot-weather audiences flocked to The Devil Wears Prada a few years ago. So transform Anne Hathaway's executive assistant into a man (Reynolds)

The Proposal should have been called The Formula . The Recipe would suggest too much flavor. It's been made according to the chapter in the box-office manual labeled "summer counter-programming." Take one established female star (Sandra Bullock) hungry enough for a hit to sign on to substandard material. Add a male up-and-comer (Ryan Reynolds) who still has to prove that he's a leading man. Proceed to wrap them inside a romantic comedy with several high-concept twists. Hot-weather audiences flocked to The Devil Wears Prada a few years ago. So transform Anne Hathaway's executive assistant into a man (Reynolds)

When you've got a tidy little thriller, it helps to have a tidy little ending. Or any ending at all. Premonition has no such thing. True, it ends - as in the celluloid stops going through the projector and the theater's house lights come up. But there's no resolution to the story. Heck, there's not even the confusion that a hurried ending would bring. There's just a sort of resignation, a feeling that this was a journey made for no purpose, a despondency born of filmmakers too caught up in their cool idea to realize that a story needs closure.

My idea of a romantic gimmick is the one in Groundhog Day. Granted, that inspired piece of pop Buddhism was about a media striver reconfiguring his whole life by living the same 24 hours over and over again. But it also allowed him to fix every dunderheaded mistake he made in courting his true love - each awkward feint, every sorry piece of bravado, any misplaced emphasis and all the bone-headed declarations of his alpha-male worth. The modest gimmick behind the romance of The Lake House is a mailbox that functions as a time portal.

Today, The Sun's movie critics publish their picks of the best films of 2005. Last week, we asked you to send in your choice, and to briefly tell us your reasons. Here are some of your submissions. Cinderella Man. This was a good old-fashioned movie celebrating the great American work ethic, and the rewards of hard work and good character. And any movie that can feature Russell Crowe as a likable, nay lovable, character gets my vote. Also, it was a really interesting story! ALICE ANDERSON, TOWSON The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

OBullock, where art thou? That's the question fans of this gritty and good-humored leading lady have been asking since she made three films in 2002 including Murder by Numbers, which rose above mere competence on her subtle power in the role of a sad-eyed cop. Unfortunately, it turns out she's been doing her Bullock-in-a-china-shop routine for diminishing returns in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. It's the sequel to her 2000 hit about an overgrown tomboy FBI agent, Gracie Hart, who went undercover at a beauty pageant and discovered that you could get a man with a gun as long as you also had a darn good bikini wax. The first Miss Congeniality coasted to box-office success on Bullock's gumption, Michael Caine's fey comic flair as her pageant coach, and a flowering romance with another agent, Benjamin Bratt.

"Practical Magic" sure could have used some.A hopeless mess that careens from here to there with all the finesse of a fish on dry land, "Practical Magic" wastes a good idea and two wonderful actresses (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman) on a film that has no idea where it's going. It's "The Exorcist" combined with "Mary Poppins," with a little "Thelma & Louise" thrown in just for the heck of it.Bullock and Kidman are Sally and Gillian Owens, sisters and witches growing up under an unfortunate curse: Thanks to mob hysteria back in Old Salem, all Owens women are fated to watch the men they love die.Over the years, the Owens gals have come up with several ways of dealing with their fate.

"Wall $treet Week," the weekly Maryland-produced show about money, will reach a significant milestone tonight. In other matters, cable shows review the Million Man March and the Republican presidential campaign. Also, Barbara Walters natters with celebrities.* "Disney's Aladdin on Ice" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- The week's second ice show -- and the second Friday night skating special in a row on CBS -- has the Disney touch, with Kurt Browning and Kristi Yamaguchi portraying the lead characters from the animated film.