Tomorrow Never Dies (Special Edition)

With stylish director Roger Spottiswode (Under Fire) at the helm, this James Bond thriller is one of the sleekest ever. It doesn't feel weighed down by its mammoth special effects, like most other recent installments. It's consistently graceful and light on its feet, especially when high-kicking Hong Kong martial-arts star Michelle Yeoh leaps into action as Bond's Chinese counterpart. And a sequence depicting a high-altitude parachute jump ranks with the coolest set pieces of the entire series. There's even an attempt in this outing to modernize the stiff-jointed Cold War assumptions of the secret-agent genre, by making the bad guy (played with greedy relish by Jonathan Pryce) an international media mogul, a megalomaniacal blend of Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner. As a ploy to boost the ratings of his cable-news hookup, Pryce's Jeremy Carver employs a globe-spanning satellite system to nudge the armed forces of China and Great Britain into a confrontation--quoting William Randolph Hearst (and Charles Foster Kane) along the way: "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." Bond number six, Pierce Brosnan, seems to be settling into a no-nonsense interpretation of 007 as "a professional doing a job," a craftsman who seems to be exhilarated by his own competence. Michelle Yeoh's best Hong Kong efforts include Yes, Madam, Heroic Trio, and Supercop, in which she costarred with Jackie Chan--and matched him kick for kick. --David Chute