Wes Block (Eastwood) is a detective who’s put on the case of a serial killer. His victims are young and pretty women, which he rapes and murders. The murders are getting personal when the killer chooses victims who are acquaintances of Block. Even his daughters are threatened. Written by Tony Kessen {rhkessen@cs.vu.nl}

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David Huxley is an American politician living in Hungary whom gets blackmailed by an unknown party after being videotaped having sex with his fiancée Tish and a local supermodel. Desperate to find the extortionists, David goes into the sordid Red Light district of Eastern Europe, only to end up kidnapped, leaving Tish to try to come up with a $5 million ransom on her own. Written by Anonymous

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Bridget Gregory has a lot going for her: she’s beautiful, she’s intelligent, she’s married to a doctor. But all of this isn’t enough, as her husband Clay finds out. After she persuaded him to sell medicinal cocaine to some drugdealers, she takes off with the money, almost a million dollars, and goes undercover in a mid-American smalltown. Because Clay has to pay off a loan shark who’ll otherwise damage him severely, he keeps sending detectives after her, trying to retrieve the money. When Bridget meets Mike Swale, a naive local who is blinded by her beauty and directness, she devises an elaborate, almost diabolical scheme to get rid of Clay once and for all. Written by Peter Zweers {peterz@pi.net}

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After being sent away by Judge Turpin, Sweeney Todd a.k.a Benjamin Barker returns to London with the help of a sailor, Anthony Hope. He opens a barber shop above Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pie Shop, where she sells “the worst pies in London.” With the help of Mrs. Lovett, Todd means to rid London of the corrupt aristocracy, and hopes to be reunited with his daughter, Johanna, who is now Judge Turpin’s ward. Written by Anonymous

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After another hard night at McCool’s, bartender Randy runs into Jewel. The seductive lady seems to have evaded a rape pretty closely, and when the man comes back, she puts a bullet in his head. After all these events (and others), Randy takes Jewel home, and the two become a couple. Yet Jewel begins to develop into a very demanding girlfriend and drives Randy into committing crimes for her and her elaborate lifestyle. Randy’s cousin Carl is driven crazy by Randy’s incredibly sexy girl as well as the investigating officer, Detective Dehling. Written by Julian Reischl {julianreischl@mac.com}

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Suzanne Stone (Maretto) knows exactly what she wants. She wants to be a television newscaster and she is willing to do ANYTHING to get what she wants. What she lacks in intelligence, she makes up for in cold determination and diabolical wiles. As she pursues her goal with relentless focus, she is forced to destroy anything and anyone that may stand in her way, regardless of the ultimate cost or means necessary. Written by Tad Dibbern {DIBBERN_D@a1.mscf.upenn.edu}

Unfortunately the San Diego press wasn’t offered the opportunity to view the film in the IMAX format, but I can say the 3-D digital version screened for the media in my area (and on which I’m basing my review) was beyond gorgeous. 3-D’s never been one of my personal favorite formats, but Robert Zemeckis’ spectacular achievements have turned me into a real believer in the beauty of performance capture and 3-D.

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John LeCarre’s spy thriller is brought to the big screen. A British spy (Pierce Brosnan) is banished to Panama after having an affair with an ambassador’s mistress. Once there he makes connection with a local tailor (Geoffrey Rush) with a nefarious past and connections to all of the top political and gangster figures in Panama. The tailor also has a wife (Jamie Lee Curtis), who works for the Panamanian president and a huge debt. The mission is to learn what the President intends to do with the Panama Canal. But what the two do is concoct a tremendous fictional tale about former mercenaries who are ready to topple the current government and are willing to work with Britain and the US to do so. Written by John Sacksteder {jsackste@bellsouth.net}

oseph Gordon-Levitt gives the best performance of his career and Jeff Daniels is equally outstanding in writer/director Scott Frank’s The Lookout, an immensely entertaining and mesmerizing story about a guy with brain damage who becomes involved in a bank robbery. Frank’s rookie directorial effort (he wrote the screenplays for Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and The Interpreter) is an amazingly genuine and absorbing film that pulls you in from the get-go and doesn’t let up until the ending credits scroll by.

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Even the biggest fans of Halle Berry and her beautiful body are going to be hard-pressed to find much to enjoy about Perfect Stranger, a perfectly bland thriller co-starring Bruce Willis and the go-to guy for funky/creepy characters - Giovanni Ribisi. Loaded with close-ups of Berry’s lovely face caught in a deer in the headlights stare, an overabundance of boring shots of computer screens filled with sexually teasing text, and a batch of potential murder suspects we couldn’t care less about, Perfect Stranger is a pushy film that tries to accomplish way too much and doesn’t achieve anything.

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