Leonardo DiCaprio fights terrorists for the CIA in this rapid-fire thriller from director Ridley Scott (GLADIATOR, BLACK HAWK DOWN). While Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) gets his hands dirty on the teeming Arab streets, his handler Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) watches from Washington via spy satellite, cheerfully giving bull-in-a-china-shop style orders while picking up his kids from school.LIES is decked out from front to back with fascinating bits of Arabic and espionage minutiae as it races along its wild mission to track down an elusive terrorist sect leader. Crowe has fun in his portly Southern-accented INSIDER mode, while DiCaprio does his usual anguished moral suffering over the fate of individuals (To Crowe's Hoffman, it's all just part of war and nobody's innocent). As the suave head of Jordanian intelligence, Mark Strong gives a scene-stealing, cobra-like performance that clashes beautifully with Crowe's "ugly American" bullying. The beautiful Golshifteh Farahani plays the obligatory love interest, the nurse who treats Ferris's regularly occurring battle and torture wounds. When most action heroes are completely healed within minutes of every fight, it's refreshing--in a grisly sort of way--to see how Ferris's wounds bruises pile up. The solid script is by William Monahan from the David Ignatius novel.

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Oscar Isaac, Simon McBurney
Director: Ridley Scott
Producer: Donald DeLine, Ridley Scott
Composer: Marc Streitenfeld