Playing it to the hilt

It's been an impressively strange movie year thus far -- a mixture of the banal and the baroque. On one hand, documentaries bristling with realistic grit have had more people talking than ever. Conversely, the far-out filmic worlds of Pixar and the Wachowski Brothers have conquered the box office.

The fall usually ushers in Hollywood's serious season, but this year, towering above the Oscar hopefuls ("Mystic River," "Mona Lisa Smile") and adaptations of Great Novels (Philip Roth's "The Human Stain," Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain"), are a handful of big-budget cinematic epics of a sort that once seemed out of fashion. Call them the love-children of J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson: It's hard to imagine an 18th-century seagoing saga or a Japanese period action film (even one that stars Tom Cruise) getting major marquee prominence before "The Fellowship of the Ring" made multiplexes safe for ambitious world-building in 2001.

Yet there's "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" starring Russell Crowe as cult author Patrick O'Brian's beloved Captain Jack Aubrey. And here's Cruise in "The Last Samurai." There's Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett and Jason Patric as Jim Bowie in a $95 million recreation of "The Alamo." With the understanding that the kids need a little adventure, too, there's also Mike Myers as "The Cat in the Hat." Then there's Jackson himself with the final installment in his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, a series that's proven to be a hard Hobbit to break. And there's much more stuff between the epics and the Oscar bait. Read on.