Nick Broomfield's documentaries are as much farcical as investigative, with the director affecting the role of bumbling, plummy-voiced faux-naif, Kurt & Courtney (1998) was no exception. He looks hilariously out of place trailing around grungey Seattle, politely interrogating a series of eccentrics, conspiracy theorists and whacked-out dopers. He examines the possibility that Courtney murdered her husband, but witnesses prove so unreliable he drops the charge.
Psychiatric patient Prot (Kevin Spacey) seems remarkably sane, except for his assertion that he's really an alien visitor from a distant planet named K-Pax. It's Starman meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (in a nicely ironic piece of casting, Jeff Bridges plays the psychiatrist determined to discover Prot's real identity), and works nicely even if it does err on the side of sentimentality.
Steve Buscemi's 1996 writing/directing debut, by turns subtly hilarious and desperately sad, is a scruffy, rambling tour of barfly life, wherein his shiftless mechanic becomes an ice cream salesman and romances a much-too-young-for-him Chloe Sevigny. The tagline—"One man's search for... who knows what"—perfectly captures its loaded small-town shrug. Bruisingly good.
Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie makes his directorial debut with this hip crime caper, with Ryan Phillippe and Benicio Del Toro as two petty criminals who kidnap Juliette Lewis, a pregnant surrogate mother, unaware that the baby she's carrying belongs to mob boss Scott Wilson. Needless to say, the bullets barely stop flying in this slick, violent thriller.
Tim Robbins is Jacob, a Vietnam Vet trying to adjust to civilian life in New York but suffering from horrific, nightmarish visions. The after-effects of a military drug experiment, or something more sinister and supernatural? Even if Adrian Lyne's film makes a lot of confused choices, it's still an interesting—and genuinely scary—ride.
Enduringly popular epic, directed with vigorous panache by Richard Fleischer. Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis are terrific as the feuding half-brothers, sons of hugely-bearded Viking warlord Ernest Borgnine, and there's an admirable amount of rowdy quaffing, hearty pillaging and general mayhem.
The sequel to Robert Rodriguez's maniacally good Spy Kids, with budding-Bonds Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara up against a rival team of adolescent agents and the monsters of mad scientist Steve Buscemi's fantasy island. Suggesting a Ray Harryhausen movie invaded by the screwball surrealism of a Looney Tunes cartoon, it ups the first film's formula of candy-coloured cool stuff for kids and in-jokes for grown-ups. Quite fantastic.
Set at the death of the samurai age, Japanese master Nagisa Oshima's first feature in 13 years charts the disruption of a militia barracks by the arrival of Ryuhei Matsuda's androgynously beautiful young swordsman. A partial return to the erotic obsession of In The Realm Of The Senses, it's a bleak but mesmerically beautiful movie where realism balances with dreamy stylisation.
The clinically style-obsessed Tony Scott might not have been everybody's choice to helm a Tarantino script just as St Quentin was white-hot (seems a while ago now, huh?), but he made a splendid 1993 pulpy pot-boiler which, in sum, outshines its pithy but disjointed parts. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are the doomed Detroit lovers-on-the-run with a suitcase of coke, negotiating baroque badlands after Slater kills sleazoid pimp Gary Oldman and his comedy dreadlocks. Everyone who's anyone turns up to harass the couple and their sad dad Dennis Hopper.
