Being touted as the film where you’ll see Angelina Jolie bare all (leading one critic to wonder how she’ll manage to cover all those “Billy Bob” tattoos), this erotic thriller aspires to Hitchcockian heights, but settles for soft-core erotica. The film is based on the novel Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich, the respected author and screenwriter behind films like Rear Window, but adapted for the screen by the same screenwriter who brought us Bonfire of the Vanities. Antonio Banderas plays a wealthy Cuban in the 1880s who, after discovering (much to his chagrin) that his young mail-order bride (Angelina Jolie) is not quite what he expected, is tossed into a maelstrom of deceit. Compare to Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid, a previous adaptation of the same Woolrich novel. See “Opening Friday” for theaters.
