Philip Kaufman's intimate epic about the Mercury astronauts (based on Tom Wolfe's book) was one of the most ambitious and spectacularly exciting movies of the 1980s. It surprised almost everybody by not becoming a smash hit. By all rights, the film should have been every bit the success that Apollo 13 would later become; The Right Stuff is not only just as thrilling, but it is also a bigger and better movie.
The world's most hilariously disaster-prone detective is back on the case as Peter Sellers stars in this merry masterpiece of sheer slapstick sleuthing fun! When the priceless Pink Panther diamond is stolen yet again, the inimitable Inspector Jacques Clouseau is saved from an unwilling early retirement and sent off to the country of Lugash to investigate. Certain that the heist is the work of a suave jewel thief known as The Phantom, Clouseau unleashes his formidable array of outlandish disguises and preposterous deductive powers in madcap pursuit of his would-be quarry.
An underrated little picture, Real Genius offers a rare college comedy that doesn't rely on gross-out humor--and a look at Val Kilmer before he turned into a star. A high school whiz kid (Gabriel Jarret) arrives at a brainy college, where the cr?me de la cr?me of the science students are marshaled under an ambitious professor (expert villain William Atherton). Unbeknownst to them, the kids are working on a weapons system that the prof plans on selling to the government.
Modeled after 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Jerry Zucker's Rat Race lacks the irreverence of Zucker's 1980 hit Airplane! but has enough chuckles to make it an agreeable time-killer. Like Mad, Mad, Mad..., it employs a huge ensemble of comedy stalwarts, assembled by an eccentric hotelier (pearly-toothed John Cleese) to race from Las Vegas to New Mexico for a $2 million jackpot.
He's back! Superstar Sylvester Stallone is John Rambo, the ultimate action hero, in this explosive Oscar-nominated sequel to First Blood that boasts a riveting screenplay by Stallone and James Cameron (Titanic). Although the Vietnam War is officially over, Rambo remains the perfect fighting machine. But his survival skills are tested with a vengeance on a top-secret mission that takes him back to the jungles of Vietnam in search of American POW's.
The battle rages on as superstar Sylvester Stallone detonates the third and most explosive in the action-packed Rambo trilogy. Combat has taken its toll on John Rambo (Stallone), but he has finally begun to find inner peace inside a monastery - until his friend and mentor Col. Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna) shows up to ask for his help on a top-secret mission to Afghanistan. A war-weary Rambo declines, but when Trautman is captured, Rambo erupts into a one-man firestorm to rescue his former commanding officer and decimate the enemy.
Rain Man is the kind of touching drama that Oscars are made for--and, sure enough, the film took Academy honors for best picture, director, screenplay, and actor (Dustin Hoffman) in 1988. Hoffman plays Raymond, an autistic savant whose late father has left him $3 million in a trust. This gets the attention of his materialistic younger brother, a hot-shot LA car dealer named Charlie (Tom Cruise) who wasn't even aware of Raymond's existence until he read his estranged father's will.
When '90s teens David and Jennifer (Maguire and Witherspoon) get zapped into the perfect suburbia of the black & white '50s sitcom, Pleasantville, what results is a "visionary adventure" (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone) that Siskel and Ebert give "Two big thumbs up!" Pleasantville's perfect people includes a mild-mannered soda jerk (Daniels), a socially repressed mom (Allen) and a father who always knows best (Macy). But, when '90s pop culture clashes with '50s family values, chaos ensues, turning the town of Pleasantville upside down and black and white into color.
Clint Eastwood (making his very assured directorial debut) is a poetry-spouting stud-muffin DJ stalked by a maniacally amorous fan after a misguided one-night stand in this enjoyably schlocky, undeniably effective film about good intentions gone murderously wacky.
Platoon put writer-turned-director Oliver Stone on the Hollywood map; it is still his most acclaimed and effective film, probably because it is based on Stone's firsthand experience as an American soldier in Vietnam. Chris (Charlie Sheen) is an infantryman whose loyalty is tested by two superior officers: Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), a former hippie humanist who really cares about his men (this was a few years before he played Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ), and Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), a moody, macho soldier who may have gone over to the dark side.
