10 Movies To Rent Now

This twisty caper about corporate espionage, starring the dream team of Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, is a little like Mr. and Mrs. Smith minus the gunplay and the tabloid headlines. Writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) keeps you guessing about who’s double-crossing whom as the stars bed down, team up and engineer an elaborate plan to steal a mysterious and invaluable new product. Game on!

Kristin Scott Thomas (near left) conveys more with silence than most actors can in a three-page monologue. She plays Juliette, who reunites with her younger sister (Elsa Zylberstein) after spending 15 years in prison, for reasons that are slowly revealed. A subtle, searing performance, in French no less.

The honey-making Boatwright sisters (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keyes and Sophie Okonedo) exert a powerful spell in this film of Sue Monk Kidd’s best-seller. Dakota Fanning (left, with Latifah), Jennifer Hudson and Paul Bettany round out a fine cast.

How great is it to see Debra Winger (left) on the screen again? She has a small role in this tale of a family wedding, but it’s a doozy. Other pleasures include Anne Hathaway playing a troubled daughter; Rosemarie DeWitt as the bride; and a strikingly naturalistic direction by Jonathan Demme.

Penélope Cruz is wonderfully wild and crazy in Woody Allen’s latest meditation on love. Patricia Clarkson, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall and Javier Bardem aren’t too shabby either.

Two women in desperate straits smuggle illegal immigrants into the U.S. from Canada, in a tense and intimate drama that provides no easy answers for thorny issues. Expect 21 Grams’ Melissa Leo (near left) to figure in next year’s Oscar race.

The great British comic Ricky Gervais (left, with Téa Leoni) makes a hilariously unlikely leading man in this supernatural romance. He stars as a dentist so misanthropic he can barely deal with the living, much less the dead people he starts seeing after he nearly dies himself. Only a woman as warm and lovely as the widowed archaeologist played by Leoni can make a dent in his curmudgeonly heart. But then there’s the matter of her expired husband, an amusing Greg Kinnear.

In this beautifully observed drama adapted from Monica Ali’s acclaimed novel, a Bangledeshi woman, living in London and unhappy in her arranged marriage, has an affair that jolts her into taking control of her life.

A fierce, compelling performance by Julianne Moore (left) galvanizes this dark drama, which is based on the life and violent death in 1972 of Barbara Baekeland, social-climbing wife of the Bakelite plastics heir. Let’s just say that “inappropriate” barely begins to describe the way she mothered her son.

Clive Owen and Naomi Watts star in a stylish thriller (directed by Run Lola Run‘s Tom Tykwer) about a multi-national bank involved in arms deals, assassinations and third-world coups. The nefarious details are a little fuzzy, but the actors make a fabulous team, and there’s a shootout at the Guggenheim Museum that’s among the most exciting sequences ever filmed.