Stars: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Unger, Rosanna Arquette, Elias Koteas, Peter MacNeill

Director: David Cronenberg

Summary: In a bleak and passionless world of multi-lane freeways, advertising executive James Ballard, and his wife Catherine, lead hollow but complex sex lives. Following a near fatal car crash, James is drawn into a life where sex and danger are interlinked and he meets a scientist who seeks to release his sexual tensions by crashing into cars on the freeway...

After surviving a head-on car collision that triggers a raw sexual awakening, a bored, nihilistic television producer assembles a following of other bored, death-obsessed nihilists who seek kinky thrills by investigating the ostensible erotic basis of the twisted metal, skid marks, and adrenaline rushes of auto smash-ups. Based on the eponymous novel by J. G. Ballard. The film's controversial thesis won accolades from some (a Cannes Special Prize) and censure from others. Available in rated and unrated versions.

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Movie studios, by and large, avoid controversial subjects like race the way you might avoid a hive of angry bees. So it's remarkable that Crasheven got made; that it's a rich, intelligent, and moving exploration of the interlocking lives of a dozen Los Angeles residents--black, white, latino, Asian, and Persian--is downright amazing.

A politically nervous district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his high-strung wife (Sandra Bullock, biting into a welcome change of pace from Miss Congeniality) get car-jacked by an oddly sociological pair of young black men (Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges); a rich black T.V. director (Terrence Howard) and his wife (Thandie Newton) get pulled over by a white racist cop (Matt Dillon) and his reluctant partner (Ryan Phillipe); a detective (Don Cheadle) and his Latina partner and lover (Jennifer Esposito) investigate a white cop who shot a black cop--these are only three of the interlocking stories that reach up and down class lines.

Writer/director Paul Haggis (who wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby) spins every character in unpredictable directions, refusing to let anyone sink into a stereotype. The cast--ranging from the famous names above to lesser-known but just as capable actors like Michael Pena (Buffalo Soldiers) and Loretta Devine (Woman Thou Art Loosed)--meets the strong script head-on, delivering galvanizing performances in short vignettes, brief glimpses that build with gut-wrenching force. This sort of multi-character mosaic is hard to pull off; Crash rivals such classics as Nashvilleand Short Cuts. A knockout. --Bret Fetzer