In theaters

MONSTER, written and directed by Patty Jenkins, 109 minutes, rated R.

You know the old adage – Hollywood loves a pretty face. But lately when it comes to winning the Academy Award for best actress, those faces – some among the most celebrated in the world – have been transformed into something less photogenic than we’ve come to expect.

Take for instance three of the last four winners for best actress. Last year, Nicole Kidman blunted her profile with a prosthetic nose to become Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.” A year earlier, Halle Berry nixed any trace of makeup to bare her soul in “Monster’s Ball.” Two years before that, Hilary Swank sported a bowl cut to convincingly pass herself off as a young man in “Boys Don’t Cry.”

Without the trappings of beauty to hold them back, all of these actresses found the freedom to create something startling and real. As such, they did some of the best work of their careers and took home the Academy Award.

If the trend continues, Charlize Theron, the South African bombshell who heretofore hasn’t successfully carried a movie on her own but who has smashingly succeeded in doing just that in Patty Jenkins’ “Monster,” is a lock on this year’s award. The actress has found herself the role of a lifetime.

In the movie, Theron plays real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who killed seven men before being captured, convicted and sent to death row in 1992. She was electrocuted 10 years later.

At first a romance, the movie dissolves into a horror show as Jenkins chronicles Wuornos’ chaotic, dysfunctional relationship with Selby Wall (Christina Ricci) – a fictionalized version of Wuornos’ real-life 18-year-old lover Tyria Moore.

“Monster” isn’t an apologia for Wuornos’ crimes, but Jenkins does attempt to understand them with a measure of empathy, particularly since they stem from an act of self-defense when Wuornos was raped by one of her tricks. The movie is an uneasy road map of her violent undoing, a portrait of a woman with no moral center who chose murder as a way to steal money and thus, in her mind, stay in love.

Theron’s beauty has been used by Hollywood far more often than her talent, but here she has fully and defiantly transformed herself, greasing back her hair, dying it dishwater blond, shaving off her eyebrows, yellowing her teeth, pitting her skin and gaining 30 pounds. In the process, she delivers the best performance of 2003.

As Wuornos, she is as remarkable as she is unrecognizable, but it would be a mistake to assume that her performance – like Kidman, Berry and Swank’s – is only the result of physical transformation. It’s performance as art – so powerful, calibrated and raw that it’s difficult to shake the pain, vulnerability and ultimately the rage Theron expresses onscreen.

She’s fantastic here, never better, and her performance – wild, loose and unexpected, with the screen barely able to contain her – is something to behold.

“Monster” isn’t yet in the Bangor market, but Hoyts, Spotlight or Movie City 8 would have a gem on their hands if they changed that.

Grade: A

On video and DVD

FREDDY VS. JASON, directed by Ronny Yu, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, 115 minutes, rated R.

In “Freddy vs. Jason” the promise exists for a hilarious good time, but the venture is such a sloppy, uninvolving drag that it rarely offers audiences the hair-raising spectacle they expect.

As directed by Ronny Yu from a script by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, the film takes two exhausted pop-culture icons – Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) of the long-running “Nightmare on Elm Street” series and Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirziner) of the longer-running “Friday the 13th” franchise – and brings them back for yet another chance at life.

Fittingly, the story begins in Hell with Freddy worming his way into Jason’s dreams. Since Jason is dead and can no longer dream, the movie already is on shaky ground. But logic doesn’t matter here. In these movies, logic was dismembered long ago. What does matter is that Freddy’s meddling jolts Jason back from the dead and inspires him to go on the senseless slaughtering of several unlikable, barely clothed coeds and shrill teenage boys.

When the film’s core group of teens (Monica Keena, Jason Ritter, Kelly Rowland) hear that it might be Freddy doing the killing, they become terrified, which is exactly what Freddy wants because it launches him back into their nightmares. There, he wreaks all sorts of havoc before his ego leads him to a rote showdown with the machete-wielding Jason.

Few expect flashes of genius from any of this, but nobody likes laziness regardless of the genre or dumb writing, which this flick has in spades in spite of being in the works for the past 11 years.

All Yu had to do to succeed was to offer some fresh, reasonably inventive ways to get sliced and diced, a measure of wit, some characters that we could invest ourselves and a few memorable jolts along the way. He falls well short of that, saddling audiences with a buckets-of-blood mentality that deadens the spirit and drowns this film.

Grade: D-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.