Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett) is a young widowed mother of three with unusual psychic powers, which she uses to try and help her troubled neighbours in a small Georgian town. One of her regulars is a car mechanic Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi), a disturbed young man teetering on the verge of a breakdown. Another is Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank), the unfortunate wife of Donnie (Keanu Reeves) a wife beater who thinks Annie is a bad influence on his wife - and a witch. At a local dance, she chats to the Principal at her eldest son's school, Wayne (Greg Kinnear) and his bride to be, Jessica (Katie Holmes), who she spies having an affair with another man. When Jessica is murdered, local police are baffled and clueless, and (skeptically) call on Annie to help. Annie has a dream that leads the law to Donnie Barksdale's pond, where the dead body is found, and Donnie looks like the obvious killer. But Annie's visions don't stop, and we are left (1) with the possibility that the murder may have been committed by several other excellent candidates, and (2) with suspicion falling on the psychic herself.
Moody and often chilling, The Gift is a visually striking, intriguing thriller with supernatural elements and a superlative star turn from Cate Blanchett. In fact it's a hand picked cast, and Giovanni Ribisi, Hilary Swank, Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes and Keanu Reeves are all superb. Katie Holmes has actually managed to move away from playing another Joey Potter ("Dawson's Creek" has a lot to answer for), while Keanu Reeves seems to excel at playing a nasty character. The end. Sorry I didn't know how to finish it off.

An aging Mexican antiques dealer, Jesus (Federico Luppi) has the gift, or perhaps curse, of immortality trust upon him when he uncovers a weird little device inside a piece of furniture which latches on to him and pumps him full of immortality juice of some kind. Of course such a device, once discovered, is likely to attract a little attention, and this comes in the form of a dying industrialist (Claudio Brook) and his nephew/goon (Ron Perlman), who come across the journal of the alchemist responsible for making the little gold bug thing.
Cronos is generally entertaining, occasionally horrifying, sometimes intriguing, often kind of sad and would you believe even quite funny in parts (five adverbs, one sentence, new record). It is however always unique in it's intentions and devices. In addition, unlike most films of this genre, it does deal reasonably sensibly (and ultimately kind of disturbingly I think) with the concepts it raises, such as the aforementioned supposed 'gift' of immortality, and the characters of those who would seek it above all things.