The characters, action and comedy are back - plus something new. Riggs meets someone he never expected to find: his female alter ego, Lorna Cole (Rene Russo). With this director's cut of Lethal Weapon 3, something newer is added: three minutes of never-before-seen footage! Remember the marina slugfest between Riggs and Murtaugh (Danny Glover)? New scenes between Riggs and Murtaugh's daughter Dianne (Traci Wolfe) add subtext to his fighting-mad protectiveness.
With over seven minutes of previously unavailable scenes, the director's cut of Lethal Weapon is a long overdue present for fans. Riggs' solitary homelife and the tragic loss spurring him to a reckless disregard for his own safety now come into greater focus. We see that recklessness in new scenes underlining the differences between the two cops. Murtaugh, just 50, needs reassurance about his skills at a firing range. Riggs, not caring if he sees another birthday, coolly walks into a schoolyard sniper's field of fire.
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.
In the capable hands of director Peter Weir, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a seafaring adventure like no other, impeccably authentic, dynamically cast, and thrilling enough to give any classic swashbuckler a run for its money. In adapting two of Patrick O'Brian's enormously popular novels about British naval hero Capt.
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.
Wallace Ritchie, an American vacationer in London, doesn't know that the bullets are real and the truth serum true. He thinks the intrigue erupting around him is part of an audience-participation theater event. Yet the world's fate depends on this gullible goofus who can't even spell CIA. Bill Murray is Ritchie, the naive spy who comes in very bold in The Man Who Knew Too Little. He can't believe how believable the make-believe is.
The Majestic is an old-fashioned throwback replete with a 1950s B-script and halcyon values like patriotism, true love, and clean fun. Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) is a Hollywood scriptwriter with a sexy gal, a screenplay under his belt, and his big break on the horizon. But when his name is mistakenly given to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Appleton's dreams of success in the biz quickly unravel.
When a mysterious wave of killings sweeps the Mafia underworld, it's Inspector "Dirty Harry" Callahan who answers with Magnum Force. In this sequel to "Dirty Harry," a San Francisco homicide detective investigating a rash of gangster murders discovers they are the work of a rookie police assassination squad. Despite a demotion by Lt. Neil Briggs for his questionable methods, Harry will stop at nothing to find the killers.
Two men enter. One man leaves. That's the law in Bartertown's Thunderdome arena. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome stars Mel Gibson for his third go-round as the title hero who takes on the barbarians of the post-nuclear future - and this time becomes the savior of a tribe of lost children. Music superstar Tina Turner steals what's left of the screen as Aunty Entity, a power-mad dominatrix determined to use Max to tighten her stranglehold on Bartertown.
With no fewer than eight couples vying for our attention, Love Actually is like the Boston Marathon of romantic comedies, and everybody wins. Having mastered the genre as the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary, it appears that first-time director Richard Curtis is just like his screenplays: He just wants to be loved, and he'll go to absurdly appealing lengths to win our affection.
