Thomas Anderson (Reeves) is by day a corporate drone-one of the millions of programmers who populate the software companies of the world. But by night he is Neo, a computer hacker. His dual existence starts to come crashing down when he receives a mysterious message over his computer, and is lead to a meeting with Trinity (Moss), another hacker. She promises him the answer to the question that has been plaguing him for years: 'What is the Matrix?'. The answer to the question will change the way he sees the world.

The Matrix was a box office smash when it first came out, and with good reason. The Wachowski brothers have crafted an incredible world, with dazzling special effects. A lot of innovative effects appear in the movie, although I can guarantee that they'll all appear in the next crop of action flicks. But for now, sit back and enjoy them. The plot has been criticised by some for being too complicated and opaque and for others for being transparent and simplistic. Personally, I found that things were kept moving at a fast enough pace for an action film, with just enough intelligence behind it to make me want to come back and see the movie again.

Six characters find themselves mysteriously imprisoned in a psychedelic maze of interconnected chambers, some with lethal booby traps. Their task is to escape without getting killed in one or other of several gruesome ways or dying of thirst or starvation.

Cube is a bizarre low-budget sci-fi horror film from Canada, and isn't much more than a flashy exercise in high-tech atmospherics and macabre effects. After a while, it all gets a bit tedious. Cube's set is the best thing in the film-it is brilliantly evocative-a series of interlocking translucent panels, linked by heavy sliding doors. Each room in the maze leads to other rooms of identical appearance, and Vincenzo Natali kicks off with a convincing pre-credit demonstration of the sort of fate that awaits unwary intruders when the first victim is 'cubed' by a razor-like mesh of blades. Graphically violent and atmospherically engaging is what sums up this film. The plot is a little weak (lots of unanswered questions) but it's a sci-fi horror film so action, blood and guts and some character interaction is what you should expect. Over all not a bad sci-fi horror film, at least its idea is original.