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Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer) are Americans who've gone to China with Roy's church to work with underprivileged children. A train buff, Roy books them passage on the Transsiberian Express from Beijing to Moscow, before flying back to the States. On the journey, they meet Carlos (Eduardo Noriega), a sexy, well-travelled Spaniard who seems to knows a lot about Customs, and Abby (Kate Mara), a young woman who has run away from Seattle.

Meanwhile, Grinko, a Russian narcotics detective (Ben Kinglsey) is tracking down whoever killed a drug dealer in Vladivostok and vanished with both the drugs and the money.

Jessie, who had a fairly wild past before marrying Roy and trying to settle down, feels sympathetic towards the seemingly lost Abby. And she feels something more unsettling for Carlos, who gives off an aura of raw sexuality and physical danger. When the train stops at a snowy village somewhere in Siberia, Roy goes looking at old coal locomotives with Carlos. When the train starts up again, Roy is no longer aboard.

Hoping that Roy has simply missed the train, Jessie gets off at the next village to make inquiries. Carlos and Abby decide they will stay with her until she finds her husband. They're concerned about her safety. In this isolated, wintry and foreign environment, the sexual tension between Carlos and Jessie begins to heat up, culminating in an abandoned Orthodox church off in the woods near the village.

The pacing of Transsiberian reflects that of the train itself. It starts off slowly -- introducing these people, telling their back stories and actually developing characters and relationships -- and then picks up more and more speed as the film chugs along. The subtle tension in one scene links to another, which links to another, until the total becomes almost unbearable. It's closer to Hitchcock than a contemporary thriller that substitutes action and quick edits for genuine suspense.

Director and co-writer Brad Anderson (The Machinist) offers some good twists and turns on the trip, which keeps the film moving along in surprising ways. The story of Jessie and Carlos doesn't end in the Orthodox church in Siberia, it only marks the beginning of a new stage in the journey.

Despite excellent acting all around, the film really belongs to Emily Mortimer. Transsiberian is Jessie's story in the end, and Mortimer does a great job of portraying the internal struggle between her restless nature, with its wild past, and her desire to live a positive life and love Roy, who saved her both physically and emotionally after she slammed head-on into his car while she was drunk. Jessie makes some really poor decisions on this journey. But Mortimer gives her the dignity of a human being really wrestling with good and bad aspects of herself, and the fact that they may be more intertwined than we normally care to admit. As she says to her husband at one point, quoting Tennessee Williams, "Kill off all my demons, Roy, and my angels might die, too."(So that's where Tom Waits got the line.) But this isn't just a metaphorical journey. It is a physical one as well, through contemporary Russia, and Anderson does a great job capturing the ambiance of traveling through a strange land, both in the small details and in the starkly beautiful shots of the train passing through the Siberian wilderness. While the landscape and people can seem exotic to the Americans, there's also a sense of the chaos, hardship and danger in the post-Soviet Union era. This becomes more evident as the film progresses. As one character says, "In Russia, we have expression. 'With lies, you may go ahead in the world, but you may never go back.' Do you understand this, Jessie?" Where is that line? At what point can you no longer turn back? Brad Anderson has fashioned a fine suspense film that touches on these darker questions as it speeds on its way to a dramatic climax, with action sequences that seem to organically rise out of the need of the moment rather than being a constructed set-piece to show off CGI. The writing and directing are excellent. The acting is consistently great, with special kudos to Woody Harrelson, who has the thankless task of playing a fairly simple guy who's positive by nature, but who imbues Roy with real humanity. The cinematography by Xavi Giménez is top notch. There's a lot going on in this film. It lingers well and leaves you slightly unsettled. And it's the best movie that takes place on a train in a long, long time.

Ernst Lubitsch directs Heaven Can Wait with his usual taste and flair, but the film is surprisingly dull and sentimental compared to his best work. It lacks the irony and sophistication of Trouble in Paradise, the comic energy of To Be or Not To Be, or the humanity of The Shop Around the Corner. Much of the problem seems to lie in an unusually flat script from the great Samson Raphaelson. The story of recently deceased Henry Van Cleve recounting his lecherous escapades to "His Excellency" down below in order to gain entrance to Hell seems ripe for a Lubitsch film, and the opening sequence in the amazing art deco lobby of the Inferno shows great promise, but the story has a maudlin quality that it never really escapes.

We're never shown any of Henry's love affairs, which, in hindsight, the film could have probably used. Don Ameche is at his best in Heaven Can Wait when he gets to turn on the charm. Instead, we're only told about the episodes indirectly via conversations between Henry and his long-suffering wife, Martha. The story also seems conflicted in its purposes. On one hand, Raphaelson and Lubitsch try tugging at our heart-strings by having us feel sympathy for Martha as she struggles with Henry's indiscretions, and on the other, we're supposed to laugh with Henry precisely BECAUSE he's constantly cheating on his wife. That's just the way he is, we're instructed, and isn't he still wonderful? Even the Devil finds Henry charming and his infidelity a mere trifle. We all know that lovable Henry really belongs in Heaven with the wife he cheated on for several decades. It's a fairly sexist film in that regard. Somehow, the charming scoundrel element doesn't work in Heaven Can Wait as it does in so many other Hollywood films. Perhaps Don Ameche doesn't have the Cary Grant panache to carry it off. He does make a rather listless Lothario in this one. Gone is that dynamic energy he had in a film like Midnight, which is a superior work based on somewhat similar themes. In that case, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett out-Lubitsched the director they admired so much. But I'm not sure Grant or any other scoundrel could have done much with Raphaelson's script. Ameche does what he can.

The rest of the cast is quite good, with Charles Coburn at his mischievous best, and several fine secondary actors. Gene Tierney does well in a difficult role, though her hairstyle when Martha gets older has not lasted well through the ages. Somehow this very beautiful actress winds up looking a bit like the Bride of Frankenstein. Overall, Heaven Can Wait is a solid film, with some good moments strewn about here and there. But it's not Lubitsch at his best.

Red Garters receives deserved attention for its interesting visuals. The spare, stagy sets mostly feature two-dimensional building fronts placed against a brilliant red backdrop, with a few artificial trees and shining yellow dirt thrown in for good measure. The film has a stripped-down, cartoon-like quality that's enhanced by the camera-work, editing, and a general acting style that tends towards caricature. Frank Tashlin, who went from directing Porky Pig shorts to Jerry Lewis movies, worked on an earlier version of the project for a year qand half, and Red Garters shows his influence. As a visual experiment, it's fairly fascinating.

Unfortunately, as a musical, it's not that great. In fact, Red Garters is a downright preachy and annoying film by the end. Rosemary Clooney gets to use her wonderful voice on several songs, and for that we can all be thankful. Her singing is the best part of the film. But as much as I like Rosemary as a vocalist, she wasn't the most vibrant on-screen personality and can't really carry an entire movie. She was probably better suited for the kind of supporting role she had in White Christmas. Worst of all, her character is the one who preaches the most, and any film that can turn Rosemary Clooney into a grating presence is not a film for me.

In terms of song and dance, Red Garters doesn't offer much that hasn't been done better, or much better, somewhere else. The Evans and Livingston songs are pleasant enough, but you probably won't remember any of them the next day. At least Rosemary sings them, along with Guy Mitchell, who had a good voice. Nick Castle's choreography pales in comparison to Michael Kidd's work on another "Western" musical from 1954, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. And it's hard not to compare them. The best dancing in the film may be Buddy Ebsen's meager 20 seconds, which is a shame because he's one few people in the film with any zing. Though the actors are all okay, there's little chemistry between them, and little pizazz to this movie.

There are some funny moments here and there, but I found myself laughing less and less as the film progressively hammered away at its "message." Edith Head does fairly well with the women's costumes, thankfully, since there's not much else to look at in this film. I'm still not sure what she was trying to do towards the end with Joanne Gilbert's black dress and calico apron thing, but at least it diverted my attention somewhat from the moralizing finale.

For those offended by Hollywood racist portrayals, the token "Injun" in this film – Minnie Redwing – will probably be unbearable.

Finally, the vaunted visuals of the film only hold for so long. The sparse sets are, well, sparse, and they gradually become boring and a bit claustrophobic. I never thought I would miss Brigadoon or Yolanda and the Thief, but, Lord, if I didn't find myself yearning for the Baroque details of other soundstage worlds.