Typically I hate action movies, but there is a particular category of action movies that I love: action movies starring Angelina Jolie.  As lovely as it is to be engrossed by the throes of a psychological mind-f*ck or a deeply moving drama, sometimes it’s nice to sit back, kick up your feet, open a huge bag of popcorn, and watch the bullets fly and the get lost in the smouldering gaze of the eyes of a woman who, despite her controversial choices, possesses such intensity and beauty that when her face flashes on the screen, it is nearly impossible to look away.  SALT is not a movie that will likely win any Academy awards or change history, but it does feature many big guns, a fictitious American president who looks like a combination of George Bush and Bill Clinton, Russian gangsters, and an epic chase scene which includes Angelina jumping from the tops of moving cars, dodging bullets and pulling some serious ass-kicking ninja moves.

Like I said, I do not normally like this kind of movie.  The type of film I usually go for is much more dark, sombre, dramatic, and intellectual.  Atom Egoyan‘s latest offering, Chloe, fits the bill to a T.  Without giving away too much of the plot, it goes a little like this: Catherine is a doctor who suspects her husband of cheating.  She meets Chloe one day in a restaurant bathroom and, by chance, they have a conversation which leads Catherine to hire Chloe–who happens to be a call girl–to seduce her husband.  A rather twisted unravelling of facts and fictions ensues.  True to form, Egoyan conjures mesmerizing performances from Julianne Moore, who plays Catherine, as well as from the dangerously alluring Chloe, played by Amanda Seyfried.  Labelled by critics as an ‘erotic thriller’, I would peg the film more as a dark drama.  Aesthetically pleasing, erotic, and emotionally disturbing, Chloe is, in my opinion, the best film Canadian director Egoyan has churned out since Exotica, although some may be inclined to disagree, arguing that they prefer The Sweet Hereafter’s subtle twists and turns to the mind-bending pleasure trip that is Exotica.