Sequel to the popular Pitch Black, the film that really launched Vin Diesel on an unsuspecting audience. He plays the titular role, Riddick, a mad, bad anti-hero - out for himself, but tough as nails in an unforgiving futurescape.

Fast action thriller that revolves around the investigation of the murder of an upcoming rapper Benjamin. As the investigation team is led by his childhood friend Rad, he is determined to get the killer.

Great period pictures make you feel as if you've stepped into another era, heard its language, breathed its spirit, and come away with a fresh perspective on that time as well as your own. Ride with the Devil is one of those special films--why wasn't it more widely embraced by reviewers and filmgoers? Did it rely too much on our patience for slow accumulation of unforced rhythms and meanings (as opposed to The Patriot, which "moved" audiences with cattle-prod simplicity and manipulation)? Ride with the Devil--smart, handsome, tenderly awed by how individual lives get ambushed by history--is ripe for rediscovery.

The Civil War of battlefields and plantation houses is nowhere to be seen here. Instead we see the war as an improvised and largely blundering but very bloody feud among neighbours in the border state of Missouri. In this bucolic war zone--more than a little reminiscent of the Balkans in the late 1990s--the Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee (The Ice Storm) traces the destinies of several young Southern bushwhackers (guerrilla fighters) as they experience violence, the seasons, and different kinds of love. Skeet Ulrich draws the aristocratic glamour role (and top billing), but he's overshadowed by Tobey Maguire as a first-generation American, the magnificent Jeffrey Wright (a shameful oversight at Oscar time) as a freed slave fighting beside his former master, and singer Jewel in a very natural acting debut as the young widow who graces all their lives. The title The Birth of a Nation was already taken, but by the end of this movie you feel it would have applied here. --Richard T. Jameson, Amazon.com