Like moths to a flame, great actors gravitate to the singular genius of playwright-screenwriter David Mamet, who updated his Pulitzer Prize-winning play for this all-star screen adaptation. The material is not inherently cinematic, so the movie's greatest asset is Mamet's peerless dialogue and the assembly of a once-in-a-lifetime cast led by Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, and Alec Baldwin (the last in a role Mamet created especially for the film).
A big-budget summer epic with money to burn and a scale worthy of its golden Hollywood predecessors, Ridley Scott's Gladiator is a rousing, grisly, action-packed epic that takes moviemaking back to the Roman Empire via computer-generated visual effects. While not as fluid as the computer work done for, say, Titanic, it's an impressive achievement that will leave you marveling at the glory that was Rome, when you're not marveling at the glory that is Russell Crowe.
The Gambler is one of the edgier and more interesting, if forgotten, films of the mid-1970s, the kind of studio film that rarely gets made anymore. Based on a screenplay by James Toback (Two Girls and a Guy) and directed by Karel Reisz, the film stars James Caan as a brilliant college literature professor with the same weakness as one of Dostoevsky's characters: He can't resist a wager. Indeed, he's in so deep that even his seemingly good-hearted bookie (Paul Sorvino) is trying to kill him.
Tom Hanks gives an astonishing performance as Forrest Gump in this acclaimed film from director Robert Zemeckis that rocketed to box-office history and touched the hearts of filmgoers like no other movie. Through three turbulent decades, Forrest rides a tide of events that whisks him from physical disability to football stardom, from Vietnam hero to shrimp tycoon, from White House honors to the arms of his one true love. Forrest is the embodiment of an era, an innocent at large in an America that is losing its innocence. His heart knows what his limited IQ cannot.
Director Herbert Ross (The Turning Point) pulled a winning movie out of this almost self-consciously archetypal tale of teenage rock rebellion. Kevin Bacon stars as a hip city kid who ends up in a Bible-belt town after his parents divorce. An ill fit for a conservative community where rock is frowned upon and dancing is forbidden, Bacon's character rallies the kids and takes on the establishment.
Sigourney Weaver more than earned her Oscar nomination for Best Actress in Gorillas in the Mist, dominating every frame of Michael Apted's biopic about primatologist Dian Fossey. Tenderly mothering an orphaned gorilla infant or terrorizing an African poacher with a staged lynching, the statuesque star is never less than fiercely focused, a glamorous warrior for animal rights.
Jennifer Aniston gives a career-changing performance in The Good Girl, a movie that questions whether goodness is a virtue or a trap. Justine (Aniston), weary of her dead-end retail job and her childless marriage to Phil (John C. Reilly), diverts herself with a new coworker named Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), who feels as ill-treated by his life as Justine does with hers. The empathy between them leads, all too quickly, to an affair--which just as quickly turns into an obsession that threatens to destroy Justine's marriage.
Alfred Hitchcock's final film is understated comic fun that mixes suspense with deft humor, thanks to a solid cast. The plot centers on the kidnapping of an heir and a diamond theft by a pair of bad guys led by Karen Black and William Devane. The cops seem befuddled, but that doesn't stop a questionable psychic (Barbara Harris) and her not overly bright boyfriend (Bruce Dern, in a rare good-guy role) from picking up the trail and actually solving the crime. Did she do it with actual psychic powers? That's part of the fun of Harris's enjoyably ditsy performance.
Freeways are clogged. Terror stalks our cities. At shops and restaurants, the customer is seldom right. The pressure of big-city life can anger anyone. But Bill Foster is more than angry. He's out to get even. "I'm going home," Foster says as he abandons his gridlocked car on the hottest day of the year. Instead, he walks straight into an urban nightmare by turns absurdly funny and shatteringly violent. Academy Award winner Michael Douglas is Foster, an ordinary guy at war with the frustrations of daily living.
One of Clint Eastwood's two most important filmmaking mentors was Don Siegel (the other was Sergio Leone), who directed Eastwood in Dirty Harry, Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and this enigmatic, 1979 drama based on a true story about an escape from the island prison of Alcatraz. Eastwood plays a new convict who enters into a kind of mind game with the chilly warden (Patrick McGoohan) and organizes a break leading into the treacherous waters off San Francisco.
