Featurettes/Behind-The-Scenes/Documentaries

Akira Kurosawa's rousing Seven Samurai was a natural for an American remake--after all, the codes and conventions of ancient Japan and the Wild West (at least the mythical movie West) are not so very far apart. Thus The Magnificent Seven effortlessly turns samurai into cowboys (the same trick worked more than once: Kurosawa's Yojimbo became Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars). The beleaguered denizens of a Mexican village, weary of attacks by banditos, hire seven gunslingers to repel the invaders once and for all.

On a remote stretch of deserted highway, a band of violent bikers has taken over, attacking anyone unlucky enough to cross their savage path. Racing up and down the seemingly endless miles of asphalt, the crazed outlaws blaze through small towns, plowing into vehicles and pedestrians alike with reckless abandon. Bringing a sense of law to this lawlessness are the mobile police force, led by Max and Goose, who are as fast and mean as their adversaries and are willing to do whatever it takes to cut the enemy down.

This terrific Walter Hill Western follows the careers of the James and Younger brothers--and uses the nifty idea of casting actual clans of acting siblings in the roles. Thus, the James brothers are played by James and Stacy Keach; the Youngers by David, Keith, and Robert Carradine; the Millers by Randy and Dennis Quaid; and the Fords by Christopher and Nicholas Guest. Hill, working with an evocative Ry Cooder score, creates a film that is at once breathtakingly exciting and elegiac in its treatment of these post-Civil War outlaws.

With Steven Pressfield's inspirational novel to guide them, director Robert Redford and screenwriter Jeremy Leven have tilled fertile soil with a graceful touch. Redford does for golf what A River Runs Through It did for fly-fishing: the sport is a conduit for a philosophy of living, and Redford achieves the small miracle of making golf a central metaphor that's visually compelling.

What do you do if you're the new manager of the minor-league team called the Buzz? Pray for rain! Instead, Gus Cantrell (Scott Bakula) turns his team from a laughingstock to the equivalent of blue-chip stocks in this third Major League comedy reuniting five series stalwarts, including wisecracking play-by-play man Bob Uecker. Cantrell has his work cut out. The catcher is living proof why the chest protector and other protective gear are called "the tools of ignorance." The ace pitcher should earn frequent-flyer miles for the fastballs opposing batters sock into orbit.

Pure dynamite! The Lethal Weapon team has done it again, putting the match to the fuse and putting the WOW! back on screen for Lethal Weapon 4. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover return as buddy cops Riggs and Murtaugh, with Joe Pesci riding comedy shotgun as chatterbox Leo. Murtaugh is still the family man. Riggs is still the gonzo loose cannon - what's this? - family man. His will he/won't he marriage to Cole (Russo) is one of the new wrinkles in this powerhouse crowd-pleaser that also stars comedy favorite Chris Rock and international action star Jet Li.

A baseball comedy and slob comedy rolled into one, this one actually works as entertainment, if not as a piece of cinematic mastery. James Gammon is the has-been manager hired to lead the last-place Cleveland Indians whose owner wants them to lose so she can sell them. But the team of has-beens and never-wases that he assembles (including Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen, and Wesley Snipes) develops a sense of pride and turns the team around. There's plenty of rowdy humor about sex, race, and whatever else they can make fun of.

A lusty and rousing adventure, this calls to mind those glorious costume dramas produced so capably by the old Hollywood studio system--hardly surprising, in that its title character, a de facto Robin Hood in Old California, provided starring vehicles for Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power, the '50s TV hit, and dozens of serials and features. Zorro, a pop-fiction creation invented by Johnston McCulley in 1918, is given new blood in this fast-moving and engaging version, which actually works as a sequel to the story line in the Fairbanks-Power saga, The Mark of Zorro.

James Bond (Roger Moore) may have met his match in Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), a world-renowned assassin whose weapon of choice is a distinctive gold pistol. When Scaramanga seizes the priceless Solex Agitator energy converter, Agent 007 must recover the device and confront the trained killer in a heart-stopping duel to the death!

A perfume magnate (Barbra Streisand), with plenty of chutzpah, falls victim to an embezzling employee who takes her for everything she owns. Well, almost everything.... There is one $60,000 investment that still belongs to her -- a washed up prizefighter (Ryan O'Neal) with a sore paw, whose talents had been purchased as a tax write-off. Seeing him as her only chance to recoup some of her former wealth, she decides to manage the mild-mannered boxer's career herself. Can she stimulate a return to championship form?