Four ordinary men in two canoes navigate a river they only know as a line on a map, taking on a wilderness they only think they understand. Deliverance, based on James Dickey's novel, surges with the urgency of masterful storytelling, like Georgia's Chattooga River along which it was shot. Equally masterful is the portrayal of each man's change of character under stress, harrowingly enacted by award winners Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox.
The bright, glossy world of Doris Day and Rock Hudson sex comedies gets a self-aware brush-up in Down with Love. Pillow-lipped Rene Zellweger (Chicago) plays Barbara Novak, the author of a bestselling book called Down with Love that advises women to focus on their careers and have sex a la carte--just like a man would. Determined to prove that Novak is just as vulnerable to love as any woman, dashingly chauvinist magazine writer Catcher Block (ever-charming Ewan McGregor, Moulin Rouge) pretends to be a courtly astronaut who wouldn't dream of putting his hand on a woman's knee.
This lavish, suspense-filled film was made from Peter Benchley's best-selling novel. Gail Berke (Bisset) and David Sanders (Nolte) are on a romantic holiday in Bermuda when they come upon a sunken wreck of a WWII freighter. Near it, they find an ampule of morphine, one of tens of thousands still aboard the wrecked ship. Their discovery leads them to a Haitian drug dealer, Cloche (Gossett), and an old treasure hunter, Romer Treece (Shaw). With Cloche in pursuit, Gail, David and Treece try to recover the sunken treasure.
David Spade embodies Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star with the snide, glib, and bored attitude for which he is loved by his fans. Dickie, whose mother abandoned him in his youth when his TV show was canceled, yearns to regain the spotlight. But he can't get a promising role because the director believes that Dickie isn't a real person; so, to find his real self, Dickie hires a family to give him the childhood he never had.
Britain's Hammer Studios had been making films for decades before they suddenly redefined themselves with this lurid remake of the Universal Studios horror classic. Prohibited by Universal from copying their blocky makeup (and their script, for that matter), Hammer returned to Mary Shelley's novel for inspiration, and then went in its own direction. Peter Cushing plays Dr. Frankenstein as the rational scientist turned cold-blooded criminal in his campaign to discover the secret of life, committing murder to further his ends, or to remove an inconvenient mistress.
In the film that launced the James Bond saga, Agent 007 (Sean Connery) battles the mysterious Dr. No, a scientific genius bent on destroying the U.S. space program. As the countdown to disaster begins, Bond must travel to Jamaica where he encounters the beautiful Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) and confronts the megalomaniacal villain in his massive island headquarters!
A connoisseur of conning, Lawrence Jamison is running the ultimate royal scam on the Riviera--he's posing as a deposed prince raising funds for the freedom fighters of his stricken homeland. But his "hustling highness" gets royally flushed when a pretender to his throne turns up. He's Freddy Benson, a small-time scam artist who has enough on Jamison to make a mess of the monarchy. So the rivals make a wager--the first to extract $50,000 from the next woman they see, wins. And the loser goes into exile.
The plot for "Die Hard 2," which is more unsettling today than it was at the time, has a group of terrorists taking control of Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C in order to secure the release of a South American drug lord (Franco Nero) on his way to the United States for trial. If their demands are not met, they are going to start crashing the circling airplanes. Once again, John McClane (Willis) is in the wrong place at the wrong time, at the airport to pick up his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who is on one of those circling airliners.
When his top-secret mission is sabotaged, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) finds himself captured by the enemy, abandoned by MI6 and stripped of his 00-license. Determined to get revenge, Bond goes head-to-head with a sultry spy (Oscar winner Halle Berry), a frosty agent (Rosamund Pike) and a shadowy billionaire (Toby Stephens) whose business is diamonds... but whose secret is a diabolical weapon that could bring the world to its knees!
Sean Connery retired from the 007 franchise after You Only Live Twice (replaced by George Lazenby in the underrated and underperforming On Her Majesty's Secret Service) but was lured back for one last official appearance as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever.
