Mary Steenburgen

This vivid, high-energy human tableau interweaves the lives and passions of a middle class, small town family against the scandals and events of a transitional America in 1906. Director Milos Forman and producer Dino De Laurentiis have assembled an all-star cast - including legendary James Cagney - that brings the best-selling E.L. Doctorow novel to life in unforgettable fashion, with memorable music by composer/conductor Randy Newman. Ragtime is both a compelling story of human emotions and a reflection of the innocence, excitement and drama of that important time in America's history.

London 1893 is home to a killer with a macabre nickname... and also to a visionary genius who would write The Time Machine. But what if H.G. Wells' invention wasn't fiction? And what if Jack the Ripper escaped capture fleeing his own time to take refuge in ours - with Wells himself in pursuit? From writer/director Nicholas Meyer, Time After Time is a marvelous entertainment of shivery suspense and sly social comment. In modern-day San Francisco, the Ripper (David Warner) finds our violent age to his liking.

Rom-com favorite Sandra Bullock and the affably charming Ryan Reynolds’s superb chemistry turn The Proposal from otherwise standard romantic-comedy fare to one that is entertaining and sure to garner laughs. Margaret (Sandra Bullock) is a workaholic, tyrannical book editor (reminiscent of The Devil Wears Prada) who suddenly finds her career in jeopardy as she faces deportation back to Canada. Her solution is to simply fake an engagement to her unsuspecting assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), who in turn blackmails her for a promotion.

Neil Jordan's somber The Brave One is a lot of things. A reflective movie about a crime victim's sense of dislocation and isolation from her own life following a harrowing trauma, the film will strike a chord with a lot of people who have known violence. The Brave One is also a provocative drama about the nature of justice, a theme explored endlessly in American movies that typically find law enforcement wanting. In Jordan's film, however, the conflict between instinctive vigilantism and legal protocols is approached with more deliberateness and complexity than usual.

Philadelphia wasn't the first movie about AIDS (it followed such worthy independent films as Parting Glances and Longtime Companion), but it was the first Hollywood studio picture to take AIDS as its primary subject. In that sense, Philadelphia is a historically important film. As such, it's worth remembering that director Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, The Silence of the Lambs) wasn't interested in preaching to the converted; he set out to make a film that would connect with a mainstream audience. And he succeeded.

In A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Woody Allen mixes Shakespeare, Ingmar Bergman, and the music and art of the turn of the century. Allen plays Andrew, an inventor, whose listless marriage to Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) has lost all erotic zip. He welcomes two pairs of friends to his country home: college professor Leopold (Jose Ferrer) and his fiance Ariel (Mia Farrow), and dentist Maxwell (Tony Roberts) and his suffragette nurse Dulcy (Julie Hagerty). Before long, everyone's lusting after everyone else's partner, and the plot twists and turns to a happy and magical conclusion.

Elf is genuinely good. Not just Saturday Night Live-movie good, when the movie has some funny bits but is basically an insult to humanity; Elf is a smartly written, skillfully directed, and deftly acted story of a human being adopted by Christmas elves who returns to the human world to find his father. And because the writing, directing, and acting are all genuinely good, Elf is also genuinely funny. Will Ferrell, as Buddy the adopted elf, is hysterically sincere. James Caan, as his rediscovered father, executes his surly dumbfoundedness with perfect aplomb.

Fulfilling a long-time fantasy, Doc Brown has decided to live in the Old West of the 1880s. But when he's in danger of meeting an untimely end, Marty travels back into the past to rescue him. There just one problem: Doc is so smitten by schoolteacher Clara Clayton (Mary Steenbergen) that he's become a little distracted. Now it's up to Marty to keep Doc out of trouble, get the DeLorean running, and put the past, present and future on track so they can all get back to where and when they belong.