CAST AWAY

In Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis’ most fully satisfying work in ages, Tom Hanks stars as Chuck Noland, a FedEx engineer for whom the world can’t move fast enough; he’s obsessed with time-saving, whether it be with associates in Moscow or friends at home. Before boarding a plane for a business conference, he even goes so far as to give his girlfriend (Helen Hunt) a wrapped engagement ring, instructing her to open it when he returns. (He saves lead-in time on its actual presentation.) But somewhere over the Pacific, the plane crashes (in one of cinema’s most terrifying airplane disasters), and Chuck is washed up on a deserted island with little hope of escape or rescue; suddenly, he has all the time in the world, and the film, which had previously been lightning quick, slows down to a crawl.

THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE

Despite being saddled with a crummy title, Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove turns out to be the studio’s most sheerly pleasurable animated feature in ages. It appears to have been made not only for those of us who were sick to death of the tired old Disney formula, but by people who were sick to death of the tired old Disney formula; it attacks the studio’s shopworn clichés with a vengeance that is both hilarious and utterly deserved.

PROOF OF LIFE

Proof of Life, the kidnapping drama by director Taylor Hackford, stars David Morse as Peter Bowman, an American engineer living near the Andes who gets abducted by a group of Latin American revolutionaries convinced that Bowman’s dam-building project is an insidious political maneuver.