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Grade: B+

Verdict: Spielberg and Cruise are back to top form.

Details: Starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Rated PG-13 for violence and one brief sex scene. Two hours, 15 minutes

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Review: The future according to Steven Spielberg is something to behold. Not since Ridley Scott gave us the dark and drizzly “Blade Runner” in 1982 has a director created what-if?, just-around-the-corner future that seems so, well, probable.

In preparing for “Minority Report,” his daring adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story, Spielberg gathered 23 futurists for a three-day retreat/think tank at a glamorous resort. Pooling their best ideas, he's given us a brave new world fifty years hence, full of all sorts of wonders.

Everywhere you look in “Minority Report,” there's something to see — magnetic cars that can move vertically and horizontally; shopping malls where the video billboards call you by name; and magazines with moving covers. (One sign that the shape of things to come may not be entirely positive: the surviving newspaper is USA Today.) What makes the movie more than a cold exercise in sci-fi showing off, however, is you also look at the characters — especially Tom Cruise, who gives this futuristic film noir-ish spin on “The Fugitive” the sort of star kick that Robert Mitchum brought to the shadowy urban thrillers of the late '40s.

In the year 2050, all crime has been eliminated from Washington, D.C., thanks to Pre-Crime, a high-tech law enforcement system that detects murders before they're committed. Pre-Crime gets its glimpses into the future through Pre-Cogs (as in precognitive), a trio of psychics who spend lives floating in a pool in a kind of perpetual dream state. They're still human, however; they've even got names — the twins, Arthur and Dashiell, and Agatha (Samantha Morton), whose powers are the strongest.

Their visions are then passed to a special police unit, headed by John Anderton (Cruise), who have some brief amount of time in which to stop the crime.

In six years, the Pre-Cogs have never been wrong. So imagine Anderton's horror when a vision reveals that, in 36 hours, he will kill a total stranger. He doesn't know if what he has seen is real or if it's a set-up orchestrated by Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) an FBI agent sent to check out Pre-Crime before it goes national. He's barely arrived before he starts playing turf-battle games with Anderton, which makes the cop suspicious.

Now, Anderton knows he would never murder anyone. He also knows the Pre-Cogs are infallible. So he goes on the lam, pursued by his former colleagues with their super-cool hover packs and their eerie-cool cyberspiders, spindly little techno-creatures that identity-check retinas. (Fingerprints are so passé.)

Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have shot most of the film in a disorienting style that uses everything from desaturated color to fragmented images to digital set extensions. Yet Spielberg doesn't allow the visuals to overwhelm the plot. The Pre-Cogs' visions are turned into movable data that is manipulated on a large clear screen by someone wearing light-tipped gloves that act as a kind of very evolved mouse. The concept alone is nifty, yet Spielberg also uses it to reveal character. When Anderton is working, he's passionate and grandiose, manipulating the images like a symphony conductor. By contrast, Witwer is precise and constricted, more like a blackjack dealer.

And in the midst of all the eye candy, he stays true to the movie's themes. The picture posits a clear moral predicament. Is it right to manipulate the future? Is it right to punish someone for something that hasn't yet happened? And what does that mean about predetermination vs. free will? The film's biggest flaw its that it loses some of that resonance in the final scenes, reverting to undiluted, traditional heroism.

“Minority Report” also reminds us of the kinetic bravado Spielberg has brought to movies like “Jaws” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” An edge-of-your-seat chase through a factory's automated assembly line (producing the 2055 Lexus?) is as gripping and expertly staged as Indiana Jones' one-man assault on the Nazi convoy in “Raiders.” There are also those trademark Spielberg throwaways that make a scene richer and often funnier. When a hover jet goes out of control, its flames singe the hamburgers a family is grilling for dinner. When the cyberspiders go rampaging through a tenement, they interrupt a couple making love as well as an old guy on the toilet. And he's not shy about grossing us out. There's a don't-look scene with a seedy doctor (Peter Stormare) who illegally swaps out eyes. The bit does for optometry what “Marathon Man” did for orthodontics.

Cruise is the film's anchor. He insists we stay connected to him, pulling us through the plot's more melodramatic points by sheer force of personality and movie-star talent. But then, the film is peppered with fine performances: Farrell, who gives the kind of attention-grabbing portrayal that Guy Pearce delivered in “L.A. Confidential;” Max von Sydow as Cruise's avuncular boss; and Lois Smith as one of Pre-Crime's inventors, who dispenses knowledge with self-pleased high spirits.

Most of all, there's Morton, who got her first Oscar nomination for playing a mute in Woody Allen's jazz homage, “Sweet and Lowdown.” History could repeat itself; she has very little dialogue here, yet she imbues her character with a dream-child fluidity and a Cassandra-like intensity. She's a water-baby who dreams of murders. In one of the movie's best scenes, she pleads — demands — that Cruise stay put when they're being chased through a mall. The look on her face is part total fear, part total authority.

Questions of what we know, what we don't know and what we only think we know permeate “Minority Report.” Over and over, Agatha desperately asks Anderton, “Can you see?” Spielberg asks us the same thing and, thanks to his wizardry, we truly can.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)