Dennis Hopper got an Oscar for his supporting role to Gene Hackman's high-school basketball coach in David Anspaugh's heart-tugging 1986 tale of sport-equals-life heroics. This was based on a real basketball comeback fight in '50s Indiana and released as Hoosiers in the US. Aptly enough, Hopper was fresh back from his own decade-long trip through chemical hell at the time. Sentimental slush, but redeemed by a knockout cast of veteran heavyweights.
Sandwiched, chronologically, in between Jules Et Jim (1962) and Fahrenheit 451 (1964), La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin) is an intriguing anomaly in the François Truffaut canon. A neo-Hitchcockian tale of infidelity, it methodically observes the extra-marital deceptions of apathetic intellectual Pierre (Jean Desailly) before rashly culminating in a bizarre shotgun shootout courtesy of Pierre's hysterical wife. For Truffaut completists.
With director Eastwood Oscar-hot from Unforgiven and star Costner hit-hot from The Bodyguard and JFK, 1993's A Perfect World should've been a smash. Yet there's a darkness to the story of possibly psychotic boy-befriending recidivist Costner that simply killed the movie at the box office. On re-examination, it's a fascinating film, a blatant conflict of arch American sentimentality and subversive menace. And Costner's great in it, too.
Nanni Moretti's Cannes-winner is restrained and moving, with the Italian writer/director forsaking his comic urges to examine how a teenage son's death affects a family. Moretti plays the father, a psychoanalyst who, grieving, loses interest in his patients. Awkward emotions are deftly handled: Hollywood should watch this and learn.
A stand-out hit among the current new wave of globally fê ted Latin American features, Fabián Bielinsky's fine caper thriller fucks with audience perception like a pumped-up David Mamet puzzler. A motley team of conmen and crooked cops progress from petty shop swindles to plan a rare stamp heist, but as the stakes escalate and the cast of characters broadens, nagging questions about who's hoodwinking who throw up dazzling wheels within wheels.
Brazenly preposterous Manhattan thriller follows clinical psychologist Michael Douglas as he tries desperately to extract the location of a stolen jewel from the mind of trauma patient Brittany Murphy to satisfy the demands of crazed kidnapper Sean Bean. Eminently ludicrous stuff, but wonderfully anchored by Douglas' trademark beleaguered male schtick.
Lovingly restored version of Fritz Lang's silent sci-fi classic with another 20 minutes' worth of footage, plus the original music score, so even if you know the movie well you're in for treats and surprises. If you don't, you'll discover incredible visuals, the sexiest robot ever made and a core message—capitalism without compassion sucks—that's as fresh now as in 1926.
Passable psychodrama as up-tight corporate suit Julia (Stockard Channing) and haughty PA Paula (Julia Stiles) play out malicious power games in a hotel suite. This often lacks the wit and IQ required for a nerve-jangling thriller, but the assured leads provide seductive intrigue.
