Jolie's real influences don't appear to be other actresses, past or current, but, as Kael hinted, the great male screen rebels like Brando and Nicholson. Her performances in "Girl, Interrupted" and especially in "Gia" might be the most powerful American acting of the last 20 or so years. It's impossible to imagine any other American actress in those roles; at her best, Jolie makes nearly every other actress of her generation look timid. (One felt afraid briefly for Gwyneth Paltrow -- by no means a lightweight herself -- when Jolie's leather-clad, eye-patched fighter pilot in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" zeroed in on her. "What," she asks Jude Law, her voice dripping with contempt, "is that?")

Angelina Jolie is the most popular movie star in the world in every conceivable way but one: She isn't popular. At least not in terms of selling movie tickets. Tabloids, sure. Magazines, from Marie Claire to Vanity Fair to Reader's Digest, yes. She's the empress of Web sites (the best one I've found is Souliejolie.com, but you may have trouble getting on it, as I often have, because of the heavy traffic). But she's not popular in movies. Jolie created the first truly kick-ass female action hero in films, Lara Croft -- Croft's closest living relative would be Diana Rigg's Emma Peel on the old "Avengers" television series -- yet she isn't a substantial box office draw. The overstuffed "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," thanks in large part to all the silly postproduction gossip, may change her box office status, if temporarily, but to what avail if she has to appear in the same kind of movies to sustain it? (It does have one unforgettable sequence with Jolie, dressed in a black plastic dominatrix outfit, breaking a man's neck, then slipping on a raincoat, walking off a 40-story building and sliding down a cable to the sidewalk and into a cab. Director Doug Liman is a hack, but we thank him at least for that scene.)

On the whole, what David Thomson wrote in Salon regarding her performance in the 2001 Nicolas Cage vehicle "Gone in Sixty Seconds" remains true in 2005: "Angelina Jolie is ... the kind of treasure that no one has the least idea how to handle." Most of her recent screen appearances have amounted to co-starring roles in big productions where she enters from a side door and then takes over the film -- in "Shark Tale" as a pillow-lipped fish, the kind of femme fatale part she has never played on-screen; as the snake-wearing mother of Colin Farrell in "Alexander," in which the tedious Accent Police got on her for delivering her lines in a Slavic intonation that was actually the high energy mark of the film; and in "Sky Captain," where she's hustled in and out of the story by filmmakers so astonishingly obtuse as to not realize that it's Angelina we're interested in and not some insipid romance between Jude Law and Gywneth Paltrow. Match Angelina with either one of them or get all three involved, and you've got a movie.

Some critics are quick to suggest that Jolie's dark and intense sexuality is part of the reason for her lack of box office success. There might be something to that. Jolie is less classically feminine than any A-list actress. Ultra-female she is, but not feminine. (Her one attempt at playing a standard woman's role, the blond newscaster in "Life or Something Like It," doesn't get off the ground until a scene where she goes punk and leads a group of striking bus workers in singing "Satisfaction.") I don't think her inability to play conventional women's roles limits her appeal to straight men -- who, judging from the number of magazines calling her "the sexiest woman alive," are intrigued by her. If the number of female celebrities (Kate Beckinsale, most recently) who have gushed over her is any indication, she touches a chord in a lot of women. What Jolie's razor-edged sexuality does do, however, is limit the kind of roles that she can be cast in.

Film critics have always been fond of saying about a talented new actress that "you want to cast her in everything," but what's remarkable about Jolie is how many roles you don't want to see her in. She can play Lara Croft  she might be the only actress who can play Lara Croft -- but she's unthinkable as a Charlie's Angel (which she turned down) or in almost any part played in recent years by Cameron Diaz, Halle Berry or Meg Ryan. She's too strong, too much of a presence -- as her director in "Girl, Interrupted," James Mangold, put it, "She plays every role like it's her movie." You can't picture her in a James Bond movie because she'd take the movie away from whoever was playing Bond. (She might, however, as she herself suggested, be perfect as a Bond villain.) In fact, in virtually none of her films has she ever played a character defined by male concepts of traditional female sexuality. You wouldn't want to see her as a hooker with a heart of gold, a frustrated suburban housewife or the loyal wife who roots her husband on to victory -- in other words, about half the roles available to top Hollywood actresses.

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