They were agents who had skillfully plotted two audacious murders, and who had gained access to the secret passages within the palace - passages that not even the Shogun's bodyguards appeared to know about!

The characters may be cardboard-thin in this film, a skillfully plotted update of Frederick Knott's play (and Alfred Hitchcock's film) "Dial M for Murder," but the nasty cat-and-mouse games they play are icily amusing.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Marois, "Live Virgin" may not be a great comedy, but it is skillfully plotted and outrageous enough to keep the laughs coming right up until a sappy ending that is the only cop-out in an otherwise nervy movie.

The skillfully plotted movie parallels Rita's having to choose between Erik and Steff with Bob's having had to decide between his wife and his Rita Hayworth lookalike decades ago.

Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine -along with Jacques Monod and Andre Lwoff, his collaborators in research on gene regulation - Mr. Jacob has written an autobiography that is not only literate but positively literary, shot through with reminiscences of classical French authors, skillfully plotted and elegantly written.

Three Stages of Amazement was called "furiously compelling" by Janet Maslin at the New York Times, "superbly crafted, skillfully plotted" by The Washington Post, and "generous and graceful and true" by O Magazine.

The film received mixed reviews from critics: Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it a "skillfully plotted update of Frederick Knott's play".

And it is her presence that unifies this skillfully plotted novel, with its rich variety of characters and voices.

"Ma Petite Entreprise" ("My Little Business"), which opens the 10-day festival today, is a skillfully plotted caper about a law-abiding woodworker forced to concoct an elaborate insurance scam after his workshop is destroyed by fire.

For the disaffected protagonist of this skillfully plotted and engagingly written novel, the search for the secret of invisibility leads to painful but ultimately liberating self-knowledge.