Who is Scarlett Johansson

Robert and Alfred are rival magicians. When Alfred performs the ultimate magic trick, Robert tries desperately to find out the secret to the trick.

In the end of the Nineteenth Century, in London, Robert Angier, his beloved wife Julia McCullough and Alfred Borden are friends and assistants of a magician. When Julia accidentally dies during a performance, Robert blames Alfred for her death and they become enemies. Both become famous and rival magicians, sabotaging the performance of the other on the stage. When Alfred performs a successful trick, Robert becomes obsessed trying to disclose the secret of his competitor with tragic consequences.

The Black Dahlia drips with film noir atmospherics as it unspools a lurid and complicated story taken from James Ellroy's true-crime-inspired novel of the same name. Two boxers-turned-cops--Lee "Mr. Fire" Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, Thank You For Smoking) and Bucky "Mr. Ice" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett, Black Hawk Down)--are morally tested as they pursue the killer of a young would-be actress, grappling with corruption, narcissism, stag films, and family madness along the way. L.A. Confidential turned Ellroy's heated prose into a taut, compelling movie, but The Black Dahlia collapses like a soggy meringue. Director Brian De Palma (who once made such vibrant, entertaining movies as Carrie and The Untouchables) can't muster the energy to craft one of his trademark bravura action sequences and seems outright bored by the more mundane tasks of shaping performances and establishing mood.

The actors flounder; Eckhart seems to be emoting for two, perhaps to compensate for Hartnett's bland lack of affect; even actresses as dependable as Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation) and Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) give clumsy, unconvincing performances.

The one exception is an unsettling performance by Mia Kirshner (Exotica) as the doomed actress, seen only in perverse screen tests and stag films. The story is incomprehensible (and when you can follow it, it's silly); the dialogue is atrocious; the characters make hardly any sense from scene to scene. The movie is, however, good for many moments of absurd camp, such as when Bucky enters the most lavish, palatial lesbian bar you'll ever see, featuring a Busby-Berkeley-style stairway of smooching babes and a crooning k.d. lang. -- Bret Fetzer

Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman star in this hilariously twisted tale of murder and mystery.

When an inquisitive college journalist (Johansson) stumbles upon new clues to a string of murders, her investigation leads directly to a handsome businessman (Jackman), who draws her in with his mysterious charm. Could a whirlwind romance with the subject of her search also become the most dangerous scoop of a lifetime? Experience the laughs in this witty new comedy that will have you guessing until the very end.

While retaining her secret identity, the illustrious Mrs. Erlynne (Helen Hunt) saves Lady Windemere (Scarlet Johansson) from making a grand social faux-pas with the scoundrelly Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore).

In 1930, Mrs. Erlynne, who describes herself as poor and infamous, driven from New York society by jealous wives, sees a news photo of wealthy Lord Windermere and his young wife: she heads for the Amalfi Coast to be among the rich and famous for 'the season' and to snare Lord Windermere. Gossips twitter as he spends his afternoons with her, his wife blissfully innocent as she blushingly fends off attentions from a young English nobleman, an international playboy who thinks he's in love. Mrs. Erlynne is also pursued by a worldly-wise older English nobleman. Lady Windermere's 20th birthday party approaches, where all plays out amid numerous amoral Wildean aphorisms.

Scarlett Johannson and Helen Hunt give Oscar Wilde's popular play Lady Windermere's Fan a lavish jazz-age treatment in A Good Woman. An adventuress (Hunt, As Good as It Gets) flees scandal in New York and lands in Italy, where she crosses paths with a young businessman (David Hasselhoff look-alike Mark Umbers) and his very upright young wife (Johansson, Lost in Translation). Before long, tongues are wagging about the adventuress and the businessman, possibly driving the wife to a rash act. A Good Woman retains Wilde's plot--though its 19th century moral concerns don't have the same punch in 1930s Italy--and tosses aside most of his impeccable dialogue, sprinkling his clever epigrams here and there in the otherwise undistinguished dialogue. Johansson, perhaps the most physically sensual actress since Brigitte Bardot, is miscast as the moral prig; Hunt, looking pinched and austere, is miscast as the jaded courtesan. The movie's great saving grace is Tom Wilkinson as a rich man who hopes Hunt will warm his older years. Wilkinson brings a worldly benevolence to every moment he's on screen, making the lines that weren't written by Wilde sound as crisp and wise as if they were. -- Bret Fetzer