John Travolta is starring in another action flick that, judging from its trailer, involves a lot of explosions. The romantic-sounding title "From Paris With Love" deals with terrorists, bullets, and physical combats.

Co-starring with "The Tudors" star Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Travolta plays an American spy looking to stop a terrorist attack in Paris. Meyer, a low-ranking intelligence operative working in the office of the U.S. Ambassador in France, partners with Travolta to take on the mission.

"District 13" director Pierre Morel helmed the script written by "Transporter 3" writer Luc Besson and Adi Hasak.

Also starring are Kasia Smutniak, Amber Rose Revah, Melissa Mars, Richard Durden, Farid Elouard, and Chems Dahmani.

"From Paris With Love" will be released on February 5 in the U.S.

United States (CNS) - 131 minutes

In theaters January 15, 2009

Rating: PG-13, Drama

It's sad and it's poignant and it's, yes, lovely too.

It's The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson's filmization of the popular 2002 Alice Sebold novel the striking central conceit of which is that its narrator is a 14-year-old girl who's been murdered and is telling her story from beyond the grave. She's in "the in-between" that bridges life on earth and death in heaven, which she will reach once she's able to let go of her mortal life.

At least part of the reason that Jackson -- director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as Heavenly Creatures and King Kong -- was attracted to this daunting adaptation was the chance to create a stylized supernatural afterworld, a predilection suggested by the effects-heavy epics on his resume.

Susie Salmon, played by Atonement's remarkable Saoirse Ronan, is a teenager from suburban Pennsylvania who is brutally murdered on her way home from school in 1973 by a serial-killer neighbor (Stanley Tucci) early on in the film. She finds herself in an ethereal location in the afterlife, where she gets to observe the devastating grief endured by her father (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), grandmother (Susan Sarandon), and younger siblings (Rose McIver and Christian Thomas Ashdale), and tries to come to grips with her own death even as her loved ones do.

The ghost-like Susie, whose body has never been found, doesn't haunt her family, but watches over them -- and observes the behavior of her unrepentant killer, who has also never been found, as well as the police detective (Michael Imperioli) assigned to the case.

The script by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and producer-director Jackson makes this dreamy, otherworldly meditation on life and death, love and loss, revenge and redemption, and hurting and healing, curiously optimistic, even uplifting, despite its singularly downbeat premise.

Both youngster Ronan and veteran Tucci are first-rate -- she's winningly luminous, he's disturbingly creepy -- and Wahlberg holds his own, while Weisz and Sarandon struggle with underwritten roles.

Perhaps the most gripping and indelible sequence, one involving Susie's sister sneaking into the villain's house, offers exquisite, nail-biting, Hitchcockian suspense.

Some viewers will undoubtedly balk at the film's shifting tones, with the stark contrast between the horrifying, emotional domestic tragedy and the abstractly flamboyant, visually imaginative, decidedly sentimental GGI renderings of Jackson's "in-between."

Readers who swear by Sebold's novel and others as well may find the film coy in the way it denies us the details of the horrendous crime described in the book and keeps its commission tastefully implicit. However, suggesting rather than depicting the horror seems an altogether artistically justifiable approach, given the film's focus and intended audience.

Viewers not bothered by the seeming inconsistencies should find the film inordinately moving in its celebration of the love of one's children, even if the screenplay focuses less on the dynamics of the family than the novel did.

For those who buy the changes in the translation from page to screen, Peter Jackson's movie version of The Lovely Bones will register as heavenly.

United States (CNS) - 118 minutes

In theaters January 15, 2009

Rating: R, Drama

Denzel Washington takes to the road during a year well past 2012 as The Road and 2012 are joined in their genre by the latest end-of-the-world drama, The Book of Eli.

This futuristic, post-apocalyptic neo-western is about a reluctant but fierce warrior who fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind.

Denzel Washington, one of TBOE's many producers, stars as the solitary, larger-than-life, laconic title character, who wanders -- on foot: he's a walker extraordinaire -- westward across the civilization-free wasteland thirty years after a nuclear holocaust (as the protagonist puts it, "thirty winters after the flash") on desolate roads patrolled by brutal, murderous gangs.

That he carries with him a hope for the future is obvious. But it's just as evident that he and his concealed weapons can take care of himself, administering swift and deadly punishment to however many thugs get in his face: he immediately outnumbers them.

Gary Oldman plays dictatorial warlord Carnegie, the self-appointed leader of a makeshift frontier town of renegades, and the one other person who knows the value of what Eli has and wants it for himself.

Mila Kunis -- looking overdressed and out of place, but hanging in there -- is Solara, the daughter of Carnegie's blind "wife," played by Jennifer Beals. Solara is drawn to Eli and, despite Carnegie's demand and threatened reprisals against her mother that she seduce Eli and and find out where he keeps the precious tome, sees him as a possible way out of the oppressed life she lives in the domain of her tyrannical "stepfather."

Directors Albert and Allen Hughes (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents, From Hell) work from a screenplay by Gary Whitta that is somewhat coincidence-laden and depends on the tired convention of a resourceful hero coming up against an endless parade of bad guys who are not only inept fighters but have shockingly woeful aim.

Does the screenplay take itself too seriously? Perhaps. Is the religious overtone a bit much to swallow? Maybe. But after starting off as it's to be a one-dimensionally superficial action piece, the film evolves beyond that in the late going and delivers a decent payoff as well as a mild narrative surprise or two, at least one of which, however, many will find head-scratchingly improbable.

In retrospect, the plot seems to collapse like a house of cards, with the plot holes outnumbering the potholes. But it holds up sufficiently while you're watching.

All told, the film is best served viewed as a "What's really going on here puzzle?" that doesn't reveal its central secret until very late in the game.

For most of the way, Washington isn't asked to do much in the way of demanding acting, but his star turn represents exactly what the film needs: his considerable and unassailable screen presence.

And Oldman is as ever reliably effective as a crazed, obsessive, ruthless villain.

With its post-apocalyptic premise, stark landscapes, anarchic action, and monochromatic palette, TBOE certainly resembles the recent The Road, but it's much more audience-friendly than that respectable but trying film.

The Book of Eli is a gritty sci-fi drama with a spiritual spine that's downright religious about its violent action.