Unity, CryEngine, Unreal Engine, etc. all have cinematic tools, but of course you’ll pay money for them. Have a look at Muvizu (http://www.muvizu.com). It’s built on the Unreal Engine, but it’s free and I believe it lets you import things (not sure about custom characters, though). There’s also iClone, which is really a neat and full-featured program and I just got version 4 pro for free from a 3D Artist magazine DVD.
Ive seen the source film maker, was temped to download it and give it a try,
what they claim is that you can play a popular valve based games and act out the scene in the game (say like team fortress 2) and then it will save the gameplay, then after that you can go into it with the source film maker and change the animations and make adjustments, not sure if you’ve ever seen the tf2 animations like “Meet the Pyro” but they where all done in the source film maker, If that helps