A slew of queasy 1960s anxieties get refracted through the camp superspy persona of oversexed karate-chopping polymath Derek Flint (James Coburn, fantastically deadpan). Our Man Flint sees him tackle a trio of, gasp, pinko scientists who can control the planet's weather, while In Like Flint pits him against a devious group of demented feminists. Funny, knowing, and yet unsettling at the same time.
Colin (son of Tom) Hanks proves his worth as a responsible wannabe writer constantly thwarted by his manic stoner brother (Jack Black), drunken mum (Catherine O'Hara) and surfer dude buddies. Many most excellent jokes and comic cameos from John Lithgow and Jane Adams make this a fine Friday-nighter.
Not even the presence of Peter Lorre can save Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea from being shoddy, badly written B-movie dreck. Fantastic Voyage may be creaky, but it's still great fun. Gasp as doctors (including Raquel Welch) get miniaturised and injected into the bloodstream of a comatose scientist to operate on his brain. Worth it for the impressively psychedelic SFX alone.
Remember the '80s, when Dan Aykroyd comedies were event movies? This 1988 stinker brings back plenty of bad memories, with Aykroyd playing a mental patient masquerading as a radio talk-show shrink. Not even co-stars Walter Matthau and Charles Grodin can wring a laugh from this wretched relic.
A pair of '70s cops, undercover, become miserably hooked on smack in this impressively unflinching '92 drama. Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh star, both grittily serving notice that they're prepared to sweat, shiver and sacrifice goody-goody mainstream careers. The despair's draining, but its influence was to prove widespread.
Stylish but disturbing French art thriller starring Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle as victims of a drug experiment that's turned them into...uh, sex-crazed cannibals. Dalle turns up the volume on her usual sexy-but-bonkers routine, Gallo is just bonkers and the whole thing is like an extra-gory werewolf movie without the fur. Not one for the squeamish.
Dennis Hopper-directed noir-by-numbers from 1990. Don Johnson's ambiguous stranger drifts into a sultry small town to run a con, and gets caught between lust for married Virginia Madsen and troubled teen Jennifer Connelly. Routine; but cherish this movie for the once-in-a-lifetime soundtrack Hopper persuaded Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Taj Mahal to jam.
Bob Fosse surprised everyone in '74, showing there was more to his dark vision than nimble dance steps. He riffs permissively on Lenny Bruce's stand-up routines (which were never routine), and Dustin Hoffman's rarely been bolder. Somehow nominated for loads of Oscars while railing against the establishment's buffoonery.
The definitive example of High Godard (that brief period after his spectacular debut, À Bout De Souffle, and before the left-wing quasi-revolutionary abstractions of British Sounds and Passion), Bande À Part is a veritable checklist of stylish and insouciant Nouvelle Vague chic. There's the casually one-dimensional protagonists, in this case pseudo-gangsters Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and their new playmate Odile (Anna Karina).
Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder sleepwalk their way through Arthur Hiller's one-joke 1989 comedy as the accidental owners of a missing microchip who are pursued by an assortment of shady villains. Pryor's blind and Wilder's deaf, but Hiller's pedestrian direction settles for routine caper thriller moves rather than fully exploring the comic potential of this offbeat premise.
