The Danvers State Mental Hospital closed down fifteen years ago. Now there's five strangers from the Elimination Company to clean it up. The hospital holds many secrets from its evil past...

Even when it misses a dramatic opportunity in favour of generic action, Set It Off benefits from a sharp understanding of its well-drawn central characters. They are a quartet of young African American women in Los Angeles (Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise), all struggling against a system that seems designed to prevent them from realising their dreams. The movie establishes their plight with credible attention to emotional detail, making their decision to rob banks believable enough to give the ensuing plot its inevitably tragic momentum. Co-written by the screenwriter of What's Love Got to Do With It?, the film conveys genuine compassion for its characters, and the ensemble cast is uniformly strong--especially Queen Latifah as a brash lesbian whose fate is as certain as her forceful attitude.

Set It Off expresses a real sense that these women have been close friends for years, and that gives the film additional impact, even when their transition to crime and violence feels somewhat forced and superficial. A romantic subplot involving Pinkett and a social-climbing banker (Blair Underwood) is too contrived to be convincing, and director F. Gary Gray (Friday) tries too hard to combine hard-hitting action with social relevance (a weakness shared by Gray's following film, The Negotiator). Still, Set It Off effectively avoids passing judgement; its emotional complexity transcends simple notions of right and wrong, injecting vitality--and a kind of renegade integrity--into the traditions of a familiar plot. --Jeff Shannon

The most viscerally frightening and disturbing homicidal maniac picture since The Silence of the Lambs, Seven is based on an idea that's both gruesome and ingenious. A serial killer forces each of his victims to die by acting out one of the seven deadly sins. The murder scene is then artfully arranged into a grotesque tableau, a graphic illustration of each mortal vice. From the jittery opening credits to the horrifying (and seemingly inescapable) concluding twist, director David Fincher immerses us in a murky urban twilight where everything seems to be rotting, rusting, or moulding; the air is cold and heavy with dread. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are the detectives who skillfully track down the killer--all the while unaware that he has been closing in on them, as well. Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey are also featured, but it is director Fincher and the ominous, overwhelmingly oppressive atmosphere of doom that he creates that are the real stars of the film. It's a terrific date movie--for vampires. --Jim Emerson