Mimic
An ultracreepy blend of horror and fantasy (think of it asBeauty and the Bugs) from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro (Cronos) about giant cockroaches in the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. Like its DNA-altered spawn (the title refers to the way some insects evolve to resemble their predators),Mimicis not your everyday bug picture, but a more poetic (though quite gruesome) sort of film, literally crawling with bizarre, striking images. In this case, the mutant bugs are not the result of evil atomic experiments (as inThem!), but are the unexpected side effect of work done by an entomologist (Mira Sorvino) and her Center for Disease Control officer husband (Jeremy Northam), who, in a last-ditch effort to control a roach-carried disease epidemic that was killing children, released a genetically altered form of sterile cockroaches beneath the city. They stopped the virus, but... Also starring Charles Dutton, Giancarlo Giannini, F. Murray Abraham, and Josh Brolin.--Jim Emerson