Movie Guide

New in Theaters

Director: Neil Jordan. With Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea. (135 min.)

Neil Jordan's "The Crying Game" combined the Irish/English struggles and issues of sexual identity and somehow it all came out right. In his new film, "Breakfast on Pluto," he's trying for a much more elaborate version of the same thing. Cillian Murphy plays a hyper-feminine transvestite who spends much of the movie traipsing about an increasingly violent landscape in search of his long lost mother. His whirligig encounters, political and sexual, rarely soar. Grade: B

Director: Claude Sautet. With Lino Ventura, Sandra Milo, Jean-Pierre Zola. (110 min.)

The late Claude Sautet was one of the best, and perhaps the most underappreciated, of the great French directors who came to prominence in the '50s and '60s. Best known in this country for "Vincent, François, Paul and the Others" and "César and Rosalie," his films were remarkably graceful studies in bourgeois angst. Now we finally have a chance to see "Classe tous Risques," a first-rate crime thriller from 1960 that will be playing the art-house circuit (currently at New York's Film Forum). It stars Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo, just before he made "Breathless." Grade: A

Directors: Scott McGehee, David Siegel. With Richard Gere, Flora Cross. (104 min.)

Eliza (Cross) is an 11-year-old spelling prodigy. Her father, Saul (Gere), believes she communicates with God according to the precepts of Kabbalah, which hold that the alphabet contains the secrets of the universe. As Eliza advances to the National Spelling Bee championship, her mother becomes unhinged and her brother rebels by joining the Hare Krishnas. Saul is stocked with inner demons but, as is often the case with Gere, he seems to draw all his energies from the surface. "Bee Season," at its core, is about the ways in which family members wreak destruction on each other with the best of intentions. Grade:B

Director: Joe Wright. With Keira Knightley, Judi Dench, Matthew Macfadyen. (135 min.)

One of the great romances in the canon, Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" has been adapted for TV five times but only once before as a movie. If young audiences respond to director Wright's version, set in the late 18th century, it will be because he has brought out the vigor in Austen's romance in a way that the other adaptations never quite accomplished. Keira Knightley triumphantly comes into her own as Elizabeth, the heroine. Grade: A