Scarecrow suggests 'Trade' and 'Taken,' both about kidnappings

In 2007's "Trade," a Texas insurance-fraud investigator and a Mexican teenager form a determined alliance to take down a sex-trafficking ring. Jorge (Cesar Ramos) gives his younger sister Adriana a bicycle for her 13th birthday. While navigating it around the streets of Mexico City, she's captured and stuffed into the back of a truck with several other victims. Jorge witnesses the abduction and manages to follow the group for a while. Along the way he learns the kidnappers are bound for the U.S., where they have buyers waiting via an Internet auction. Jorge loses their trail just short of the border, where he meets Ray (Kevin Kline), who has also been investigating the group while looking for his long-lost daughter. The two track the group to New Jersey, where their findings bring them face to face with the horrors of the sex-slave trade.

"Taken" is another recent movie with sex traffickers as the villains. While traveling in Europe, a girl is kidnapped. Lucky for her (and not the sex traffickers), her dad (Liam Neeson) is an ex-special-ops agent, security expert and talented butt kicker. He does a little investigation and mystery solving, and a lot of roughing people up.

"Thriller: A Cruel Picture," aka "They Call Her One Eye," is an older Swedish film about an abused girl fighting back against those who exploit women. Christina Lindberg plays a young woman who is drugged, forced into prostitution and mutilated; she later returns for violent revenge. This weird combination of arty experimental film and total exploitation (warning: The uncut version includes hard-core porn scenes) is a favorite of Quentin Tarantino, who paid homage by giving Daryl Hannah's character an eye patch in "Kill Bill."

While it has nowhere near the emotional heft of the films mentioned above, we've got a '90 nostalgia soft spot in our hearts for 1995s "Hackers," a slick, techno-fueled story of rebellious high-school computer geniuses. Jonny Lee Miller, who would become more recognizable the next year as Sick Boy from "Trainspotting," plays Dade Murphy, a computer-hacking protégée known in cyber circles as "Zero Cool." He arrives at his new school in New York and meets up with a crowd of similarly techie friends, including Jesse Bradford ("Bring It On"), Matthew Lillard ("Scream") and the future Mrs. Miller, a then 20-year-old Angelina Jolie, who plays a sassy gamer who goes by "Acid Burn."

These clever kids flex their computer muscle and try to impress each other with hacking stunts. On one such job breaking into a corporate supercomputer, the group discovers a scheme to steal millions and unleash a computer virus that could wreak havoc on the world's computers. They trace the plot back to an ex-hacker known as "The Plague" (Fisher Stevens), and from there the two factions engage in an escalating virtual tug of war that ends with a Scooby-Doo-like, "And I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't of been for you meddling kids!"

Contributed by Scarecrow Video, 5030 Roosevelt Way N.E., Seattle; 206-524-8554 or www.scarecrow.com.