Cameron Crowe follows up his most "personal" work, the semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, with the umpteenth Hollywood remake of an art-house import, Alejandro Amenábar's science-fiction brain-twister, Open Your Eyes. The most personal ingredient here, aside from the selection of oldies on the soundtrack, appears to be the latex mask worn by the intermittently disfigured Tom Cruise, looking in it uncannily like the horse-faced writer-director: a rather literal enactment of a storyteller's desire to live vicariously through his glamorous, gorgeous, girl-getting hero. (The star and director had worked together before on Jerry Maguire.) Still and always a crowd-pleaser above all, Crowe is at some pains to elucidate the obscurities: the commentative and mood-setting pop songs; illustrative cutaways to help explain and emphasize; continual repetition to allow slowpokes to keep pace; much overacting. (How does Penelope Cruz, reprising her role from the Spanish original, feel about her first kiss from Tom? Perhaps there's a clue in her bouncing up and down on the couch after his departure, her squealing like a teenager at a Beatles concert, her running-in-place at sprint speed.) At bottom -- and at the root of Hollywood's ongoing plunder of European cinema -- this is for people who need Tom Cruise and no subtitles in order to sit through a foreign film. Cameron Diaz, Jason Lee, Kurt Russell. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd