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  EW review: 'War' spectacularSpielberg movie hits hard and fastBy Owen Gleiberman  Tom Cruise flees aliens in "War of the Worlds." YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- At a traffic intersection in blue-collar New Jersey, the pavement buckles and shakes, a church front shimmies away from its walls, and a dark metallic body that looks like a giant robot squid bursts, as if born, from the earth, rising up over the block with its trio of deadly tentacles, its plated pterodactyl head, its glowing spotlight eyes. Is it our imagination, or did this extraterrestrial machine-creature let out a deep, rumbling roar? Watching Steven Spielberg's spooky and playfully spectacular remake of "War of the Worlds," you may feel a surge of childlike awe, the same sort of awe inspired by the nuclear-nightmare fantasies of the '50s the moment when the giant tarantula, the Tokyo lizard king, the hell-bent flying saucer ... the thing, whatever it was, stood revealed. Yet Spielberg, an unparalleled master of the dynamics of movement and scale, scarcely gives the audience time to gape. Over and over in "War of the Worlds," he evokes the sensation, more familiar from dreams than movies, that an otherworldly entity, glimpsed from a great distance, is suddenly, violently clawing its way into your personal space. The terror is far away and close up at the same time, which may be why the movie collides so forcefully with our anxieties. "War of the Worlds" is an attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse. As the army of invaders rises up, for no given reason, to exterminate the human race, the movie never takes itself too seriously. Spielberg, though, creates a potent and almost violating sense of disruption and terror. A death ray incinerates frightened citizens as they run right at us, and those tentacles swoop onto the ground, toying with humans like morsels of food. In one sustained virtuoso sequence, a tentacle winds and folds its way through a basement with snaky cunning, its ''head'' searching out people like a roving surveillance camera. (Is this a slyly embedded political statement?) Conjuring an army of metal monsters in the sky, then bringing them right into our faces, Spielberg plays off the post-9/11 image of a potential attack that is vast and relentless, epic in its horror, yet that deep in our imaginations looms frighteningly near. Updating the paranoia of the 1953 screen version of H.G. Wells' sci-fi classic, Spielberg, working from a script by David Koepp and Josh Friedman, doesn't clutter the tension with solemn war-room scenes in which plaid-shirted civilian hackers square off against generals acting with their forehead muscles. He lets us take in the entire invasion through the scrambling, what's-happening-here desperation of Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a jockish bum of a divorced dockworker who lives in a house he apparently never cleans. Ray is spending the weekend trying to look after his two estranged children, surly teenage Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and young Rachel (Dakota Fanning), both of whom resent their mess of a father, who seems to barely know them. The situation is stock, the casting shrewder than you might expect: Cruise, just at the moment his cocky narcissism has begun to look a little frayed off screen, is now credible enough to play a borderline deadbeat dad who loves his kids but copped out on the demands of parenthood. As the three attempt to escape, zipping out of the New York area in what appears to be the only functional motor vehicle in the entire Northeast, Spielberg summons the stop-and-go rhythm of foreboding threat he used in "Jaws" and "Saving Private Ryan" -- the force of death that keeps returning, weaving in and out of the characters' fates like a dark spell, growing stronger with every appearance. We first experience the aliens as scary, ear-cracking lightning bolts, which then animate those hovering monsters that zap people at random, the monsters being warships that house something else, which leave mysterious bloody vines in their wake. The very essence of the predators' danger seems to evolve the more that we learn about it, and the hysteria of the masses, vividly dramatized wherever Ray and his kids go, becomes part of the texture of cosmic alarm. Make no mistake: What's unsettling about "War of the Worlds," in its roller-coaster nightmare way, isn't so much the aliens' methods of destruction (I found the veiny vine stuff a little ... unexplained) as it is the film's visceral vision of world annihilation as something uncanny yet imminent, happening right before your eyes -- a fiery fulfillment of our collective nervousness about the fate of the future, an anxiety that may not have been this prevalent since the height of the Cold War. Spielberg has tapped it, once again making pop poetry out of our fears. EW Grade: A- 'George A. Romero's Land of the Dead'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman The prospect of a brand-new living-dead picture written and directed by George A. Romero is more than enough to flood your zombie nostalgia receptors, and the nostalgia isn't just for the cannibalistic freakout willies that a Romero movie once provided. It's for an entire era in which gruesome B horror flicks emerged from the kicky underground -- an era when limb-tearing, face-chewing nightmares could still tickle taboos.  John Leguizamo (right) holds off a zombie in "Land of the Dead." Today, our Hollywood blockbuster culture is essentially dominated by lavishly over-expensive B movies, and so it's no longer enough for a zombie thriller like "Land of the Dead" to serve up a few shocks and gross-outs layered with a dollop of hip-absurdist videogame nihilism. You need flair and originality and pizzazz, without which the undead tend to chomp and lurch along a little too easily on their own legend. Thirty-seven years after he first brought his hungry macabre flesh-stalkers to the screen in "Night of the Living Dead," Romero may be the last person alive who still thinks they're a metaphor for something important. ''They're trying to be us,'' declares one of the still-living horde in "Land of the Dead," evoking the most famous line in "Dawn of the Dead" (''They're us''). Several of the skulking corpses now carry guns; one even screams to the heavens in what might be a fit of metaphysical rage. (Either that or that last bite of intestine didn't agree with him.) I was willing to forgive Romero for recycling his ghouls-are-us portentousness -- at least, until a character responded, with two-ton irony, ''It's like we're pretending to be alive.'' Okay! The living dead are symbols of a world that no longer values life! Our world! Now can we please get to the good parts? I'm compelled to report that in "Land of the Dead" there are virtually no good parts. The movie is listless and uninspired: bereft of scares, shot on sets that look like something out of "Escape From Pittsburgh III," full of grindingly paced scenes in which actors like John Leguizamo, as a hollow-eyed parasite of a survivor, grouse at other, far more anonymous actors, establishing that camaraderie among humans has fallen by the wayside -- and tautly understated genre heroics along with it. Dennis Hopper is on hand as the corrupt cliche who owns a posh, walled-off urban apartment complex, a structure that might have been the equivalent of the shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead" had Romero made canny logistical (or satirical) use of its physical space. I'm tempted to say that the zombie horror film should be given its last rites, except that "28 Days Later," the scandalously funny "Shaun of the Dead," and last year's blitzkrieg-of-fear remake of Romero's own "Dawn" all injected new life into the form. With "Land of the Dead," it falls back into rigor mortis. EW Grade: C- 'Undead'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman In "Undead," this tongue-through-cheek George A. Romero knockoff from Australia, there is one funky visual gag: A walking corpse gets severed and the legs keep walking, with about a third of a bloody spine sticking up. The rest of "Undead," which combines a meteor shower with a living-dead attack in ways that I never quite understood, is on the level of a no-budget student film in which the shots barely match up into sequences. It's about as much fun as watching blood dry. EW Grade: F 'Rebound'Reviewed by Scott Brown It is a far more subdued Martin Lawrence we have before us in "Rebound," mellower than the one who bounced around the "Bad Boys" movies. Here he brings a sedate (at times sedated-looking) touch to college hoops coach Roy McCormick, whose early-career wins have been obscured by bad behavior and endorsement-mongering (something the brand-dotted film itself doesn't exactly eschew). Barred indefinitely from the game, Roy opts for a high-concept redemption: In a cynical PR ploy, he finishes the season as coach of his old middle school team. Naturally, perfunctorily, he's won over by his scruffy squad of bad-news ballers. The whole thing feels like a half-day of community service, which Lawrence walks through good-naturedly. EW Grade: C+ 'Yes'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum In Sally Potter's "Yes," an American research scientist meets a Lebanese chef at a London dinner party. She's an unhappy, pale beauty and he's a soulful, swarthy hunk, and the two fall upon each other with ravenous desire. She's a scientist, lost in a sterile marriage (her husband is a cheating British diplomat), and he's a chef, lost in a country not his own (at home he was a surgeon). She is played by Joan Allen, radiantly, maturely sexy, and he is played by Armenian-Lebanese actor Simon Abkarian, ditto. The two speak in verse -- iambic pentameter, to be precise, the rhythmic beat that echoes that of hearts -- even when chopping parsley, making love, arguing about religion and culture and geopolitics. And after an East-meets-West, old-world-meets-new-imperialism quarrel (about religion, culture, geopolitics), the two cry oui, oui, oui all the way home. Or rather si, si, si: For reasons as unexplained as any in this flushed, impetuous folly, reconciliation takes place in that lovers' Eden called Cuba. Exotic, no? Potter, the writer-director of "Orlando" and "The Tango Lesson," has said she made "Yes" as an artistic response to 9/11 -- her own idiosyncratic affirmative, as it were, in the face of a cataclysmic negative. And she sets herself such a high formal level of difficulty -- and achieves images of such sensual intensity -- that there is a fascination to be had merely in swooning along with She and He. Allen actually glows with arousal; Abkarian boasts black hair so romance-novel photogenic that he's excused from wearing a hairnet in the restaurant kitchen. Parse the philosophy behind the spill of words, though, and you'll find intellectual jumble, junk. Better to nod to "Yes" as a drowsing chant than take it seriously as a statement of global concerns. EW Grade: C+ 'Tropical Malady'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum At first, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's murky art movie "Tropical Malady" is about a romance between a young Thai soldier and a country boy. Then the boy disappears -- perhaps he has been transformed into a magical beast -- and things change for the even more mythic as the soldier pushes into the heart of the jungle in pursuit. There is no loss of art-movie face to be had, I assure you, in admitting difficulty with the filmmaker's intentional tangle of genres as he stakes his story between waking life and legend: It took me two viewings to enjoy the landscape of Weerasethakul's mysterious jungle -- so very thick, steamy, and foreign -- without wishing for clearer trail markers. EW Grade: B 'The Talent Given Us'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum Andrew Wagner's casually astonishing film "The Talent Given Us" explodes the notion that there are no more permutations of reality-bending left to surprise us in storytelling. Using resources extremely close at hand, he casts his own mother, father, and two sisters as themselves, an average-but-unique family of voluble Manhattanites driving cross-country to visit the unit's reclusive, absent member, Andrew -- a filmmaker in L.A. Are they just being themselves, this clan of let-it-all-hang-out yakkers, as they squabble, eat, play, and digress? Are they acting? Wagner -- who is, of course, an invisible passenger -- lets his family take star billing in a film of uncommon originality. EW Grade: A- 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" is a small-scale milestone -- the first European remake of an American art film -- and part of what makes it a dizzy, gratifying experience is that the filmmaker, Jacques Audiard ("Read My Lips"), clearly updated James Toback's "Fingers" because he couldn't get it out of his head. In the 1978 original, Harvey Keitel, bopping through the New York streets in a fringed white scarf, was a Mob collector who was also a classical pianist -- a violent stud-dandy torn between the gutter and the angels. The film was enraptured pulp, held together by Toback's obsession with the thin line between seduction and force. In "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," the hero now works the sleazier side of Paris real estate, but the real change is one of tone. Where Keitel's short-fused jukebox art punk lived in thrall to his divided nature, Thomas (Romain Duris), with his reflective handsomeness, is a man out to rescue himself from the sewer he's tumbled into. "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of "Fingers," yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there. EW Grade: B+ Click Here 
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