The Cell

Okay, The Silence of the Lambs was good a decade ago, but since then, serial-killer movies have been less about exploring the nature of evil (or psychosis) than about turning torture into entertainment, less about finding the humanity within their characters (sleuths and victims as well as murderers) than about inventing striking new displays of cruelty.

The Cell is the nadir of this trend so far, with a killer of young women named Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) who slowly drowns his victims as a prelude to even more-perverse treatment. When agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) captures him, Carl falls into a coma before he can reveal where he's trapped his last victim. Peter enlists Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist whose virtual-reality device allows her to enter the minds of comatose patients, to probe Carl's brain for the tank's location while there's still time to save the woman. Once inside his mind, Catherine finds a world of horrors from which she herself may not be able to escape. Turns out it doesn't really matter, as Novak learns all he needs to know through ordinary detective work.

First-time feature director Tarsem Singh, whose lush parade of images inspired by religious and folk art will be familiar to viewers of his commercials and music videos (including R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion"), has innovative style to spare, but what kind of achievement is it to come up with glorious lighting and arresting composition in order to photograph a naked, blood-soaked corpse? It's the feel-disgusted movie of the summer.

-- Gary Susman