An enthralling examination of the loaded cultural issues of sex, class and race as seen through the subculture of black and hispanic transvestites.

Where "Brockback" leaves its lovers where gay love stories have left them for centuries - isolated, ostracized and miserable - this small comedy finds a far more liberated alternative for everyone involved. In its own modest way, it's the far more radical film.

The series' breakout star remains Scrat (Chris Wedge), a scrawny, speechless rat-squirrel thing trapped in a Sisyphean quest for acorns, and while kids' movies generally could do with fewer scatological gags (the target audience for poo and pee humor needs no encouragement), writers Peter Gaulke and Jim Hecht managed to come up with a (relatively) sophisticated one.

The critique of masculinity is far more thoughtful and compelling than the vague ruminations about war. Nonetheless Cruise's impassioned performance as Kovic is an impressive accomplishment.

Even though Kinnear is meant to be obvious love interest, it's the relationship between Kate and Angie that becomes the film's central story, making this comedy sweeter -- and more honest in its depiction of class difference -- than one might otherwise expect.

For once in a kids' sports picture, the child actors don't grate or get sticky, and the adults aren't crotch-grabbing, swaggering, overgrown delinquents. More important, Little Big League makes some very nice emotional points along the way to a satisfying end, suggesting that America's rocky romance with baseball is alive and well.

Vic Morrow is excellent as the leader of a gang of thugs, as is Poitier in a star-making performance, though at age 31 he unfortunately doesn't convince as a high school student.

The action sequences are well staged and the twists and turns of the convoluted plot will keep viewers guessing. A competent and unpretentious entertainment.

An extremely funny movie that presents a torrent of insightful gags at breakneck pace, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka features many of the stars of the old "blaxploitation" movies, adding weight and authenticity to Wayan's film. In offering up this affectionate parody of the old movies, Wayans also turns a satiric eye on black culture in general--but in an inoffensive, lighthearted manner.

Routine military melodrama leads to a satisfactorily explosive climax. But what makes Birds truly riveting entertainment is not the conflict between good and bad guys, but the clash between the film's apparent intent and the loony subversiveness of its performances.

Among those who are on hand to offer their own feelings about the man known as Peter Berlin and his art are fellow porn legend Jack Wrangler, groundbreaking gay writer Armistead Maupin, pornographer Wakefield Poole and director John Waters, who remembers Peter from his days in San Francisco, and still doesn't quite get what he's all about.

It will certainly appeal to its target audience, and Bynes is charming enough to carry the whole film on her shoulders, which is a good thing considering that she's in just about every scene and leading man Tatum is a stiff.

This hysterically funny parody of Cold War tensions sees a Russian submarine get stuck in a sandbar off the coast of New England after its commander, Bikel, ventures too close to shore in order to get a good look at America.

Jeremy Gosch's documentary about the origins of professional surfing shines a light on four wave riders – three Australians and a South African – who helped transform a counter-culture life style into a billion-dollar industry.

A sweet, unassuming surprise.

Driver and Renner deliver haunting performances in this story of crime and punishment.

Many have called this film a brilliant mood piece of a dying Old West; that doesn't make it a masterpiece, but the ghosts of its cast do still haunt one's viewing experience.

Conventional to the core but gets a blast of pure, hard-driving energy from Joaquin Phoenix's and Reese Witherspoon's vividly realized performances.

Ambling but never less than endearing.

Sebastien Pentecouteau's startlingly beautiful cinematography lends the film a dreamlike quality and perfectly suits Kounen's mystical subject matter.

To a post-Vietnam War generation put off by militarism, David Puttnam's inspiring account of the final and most-harrowing WWII mission of the B-17 bomber The Memphis Belle may seem hopelessly dated, but older viewers are likely to find much to enjoy in the film.

Fortunately, no amount of optical wizardry and quick-change trickery can disguise the fundamental power of Harper's performance, a revelatory turn that's truly transformative in every sense of the term.

Raw, uncompromising and surprisingly explicit.

Seltzer's characters are real; and Haim, Green, and Sheen play them wonderfully. As a result LUCAS is not just a film for teenagers but for anyone who has ever been a teenager.

Feature debuts don't come much better than director Robert Harmon and screenwriter Eric Red's sleek, dream-like thriller about a naïve college boy who crosses paths with devil in the flesh after taking a wrong turn on some lost highway.

Conrad's script surprises at nearly every turn.

An engrossing study of imagery and one's perception of the image.

The Wind And The Lion is certainly jingoistic to a fault, and its portrayal of the various factions is little above the cartoon level, but thanks to marvelous performances by Keith and Connery, the film works as a maker of myths.

An exuberant and supremely unselfconscious first film about five Melbourne college students and the various crises that befall them during one momentous day. The movie is in the best sense of the word artless (there's not an hommage insight), and its occasional missteps -- like a ham-fisted parody of partisan film students -- do little to undermine its charms.

Special kudos to Adams, who nails the distinctive body language of Disney's spunky good girls and manages to make Giselle's relentless optimism seem charming rather than a sign of mental deficiency.

Happily, many of the figures spoken about throughout the film are still with us -- Neville is even able to reproduce Patricia Foure's famous group photo with most of its original subjects.

A solid, surprisingly modest spy thriller, enlivened by Sean Connery's screen charisma and occasional hints of the extravagance to come.

Francis Ford Coppola's first mainstream feature (after a few unremarkable skin flicks) is a little gem of gothic horror, stylishly helmed on a shoestring budget.

It's a deeply provocative piece of filmmaking.

Wilby's father and the neighbor's dog get all the credit, but younger viewers will delight at knowing who really performed the heroics.

With 20/20 9/11 hindsight, it's clear that covertly arming the Mujahedeen wasn’t such a good idea after all, but neither Nichols nor Sorkin wants to spoil the fun.

A very good musical that should have been a great musical. Bob Fosse, making his film directorial debut, couldn't convey the verve he injected into the play to the movie version.

INTERVISTA play as an enjoyable, lightweight entertainment, filled with the usual Felliniesque characters, faces, and situations.

Richard Pryor's assured tragicomic performance is so engaging that this otherwise forgettable film is not only worth watching, but often compelling.

Despite some minor flaws, The Fortune Cookie is a very satisfying film.

But transforming full, live-action performances into quavering cartoons isn't inherently lyrical, and here it produces the jittery sense of a world dissolving into flat forms and buzzing prattle.

The film is both fun and frightening, and can also be viewed (however modest its intentions) as a commercialized techno-version of Franz Kafka's allegory Metamorphosis.

Only Rejtman's sharp eye for absurd detail and the bleakly subtle joke separates comedy from tragedy in this story of listless Bonaerenses chasing their own tails through successive drab rings of urban hell.

De Sica handles his fantastic material subtly and with simplicity, yielding an original mix of sharp satire and poetic fable that extended the limits of the neo-realist style.

A tense and chilling espionage picture, Sabotage contains one sequence that many consider among the director's most excruciatingly suspenseful.

Doesn't always work, nor does it measure up to their hilarious AIRPLANE!. It is, nevertheless, very funny as it lampoons two genres: the spy movie and the teenage musical.

Throughout, Holstein makes no bones about the fact that Father Mychal was hardly perfect -- he was a recovering alcoholic who found salvation in Alcoholics Anonymous -- nor does he attempt to disguise Father Mychal's homosexuality, something he never made public but which no doubt grounded his gutsy work with gay Catholics and people with AIDS.

Fisher's dialogue draws heavily on the original film's intertitles and script directions and the addition of sound is a plus for moviegoers uncomfortable with the artificial embarrassment of silence.

If you can get past the lips, Ryan gives a touching performance as a woman determined to battle her cancer while knowing life offers no guarantees except death -- an understanding no doubt sharpened by Kasdan's own experience battling Hodgkin's disease as a teenager.

The film's highlights are far and away the musical performances.

Urzua's unsentimental story of shattered idealism is specific to Cuba, but anyone whose path to adulthood was paved with disillusionment, -- whether they were betrayed by faith, family or institutions – will understand her melancholy nostalgia.

Shot on location in the Bahamas, Austria, and on Salisbury Plain, HELP!, the second Beatles film, is nonsensical fun.

Director Roger Spottiswoode, who edited a number of Sam Peckinpah movies, succeeds brilliantly in creating the chaotic last days of Somoza's government while at the same time incisively evaluating the moral dilemma faced by war correspondents.

Hilarious pseudo-documentary spoof of a British rock group that was so on-target in its satire, many viewers took it for the real thing.

The film is visually stunning, and Peckinpah makes great use of his Durango, Mexico, locations.

Without their efforts, ordinary moviegoers would never know that air-guitar competitors must craft a series of one-minute routines, some to songs they've only just heard, or that their efforts are judged on the 4.0 to 6.0 scale used to rank competitive figure skaters. Important to know? No. Fascinating? Absolutely.

Gripping adventure tale.

Disney does it again in this delightful comedy.

An uneven, but generally well done and entertaining, potpourri of 10 cartoons set to disparate musical styles, ranging from jazz to classical, and performed by such artists as Benny Goodman, The Andrews Sisters, Dinah Shore, and Nelson Eddy.

The film is dazzling in its use of color and odd shapes and is enhanced by the distinctive voices of Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter, Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat, Jerry Colonna as the March Hare, and Verna Felton as the Queen of Hearts.

Returning director Richard Donner seems to have smoothed over the few stylistic rough edges remaining from the earlier film to deliver here two hours of pure, breathless, high-impact entertainment.

While many of the jokes don't pay off, it's still funny enough to merit your attention. Mancini's score adds pace and flow. This spectacle is almost totally uncontrolled, and therein lies much of its charm.

A hard-hitting action thriller.

In addition to its views on the glamorization of serial murder, MAN BITES DOG offers a wicked send up of notoriously talky French filmmaking--the most unbelievable thing about the movie's narrative conceit isn't that the crew is calmly shooting a vicious serial murderer as he goes about his business, but that they've chosen to follow the unbearable Ben. His loathsome, self-absorbed monologues are torment worthy of the ninth circle of Hell, but with a cup of black coffee and a supply of smelly cigarettes he could pass at any cafe for a run-of-the-mill French intellectual.

While this is a wonderful showcase for some fine acting--notably by Fonda--it is not great filmmaking, and one may be left wishing for the biting, off-the-wall satire of Dr. Strangelove.

The overall effect of watching his film is a bit like a nerve-racking game of Russian roulette: You just know a gun is going to go off, but you don't know which of this multitude of characters it's going to hit.

Horse lovers and racing enthusiasts are this likable film's obvious audience, but you don't have to care about the Derby to get caught up in the stories of the people and the horses behind the two minutes of glory.

A charming surprise.

The final scenes pack a surprising melodramatic punch.

It presents an image of today's Israeli army, composed of teenagers who are by now several generations removed from the founders' original vision and have begun to question whether tactics designed to keep the country safe will only lead to increased levels of fear, humiliation and deadly violence.

Director James Foley and cinematographer Mark Plummer deftly conjure the sense of stifling containment that drives these characters to drink or sin, but Robert Redlin's screenplay fails to fully animate their personalities. Patric gives a tremendous, smoldering performance, but Ward fails to convey the mysterious radiance of a convincing femme fatale. Dern rounds out the unappetizing triangle with an unpleasant performance, proving himself a worthy contender in the Dennis Hopper/Harry Dean Stanton creepstakes.

Hollywood's attempt to capitalize on student rebellion looked trivial in comparison to real events (the shootings at Kent State occured in the same year), but Getting Straight, buoyed by Gould's eccentric screen presence and Kovacs' stylish camerawork, holds up surprisingly well.

First and foremost a celebration of Cuban dance and music.

Under veteran helmer Roy Ward Baker's solid direction, Kruger makes a surprisingly sympathetic "enemy" protagonist, and one can't help but root for the brave and determined young German in his escape attempt.

This is a landmark western, redefining what the genre was capable of doing, and is one of Daves's best works.

A vibrant, cinematically radical, and extremely accomplished work which went on to become one of the most celebrated movies ever made.

Even though the screen is often divided into a Mondrian-like grid, each individual box containing its own discreet moving image, McDonald's film is surprisingly fluid and easy to follow.

The execution is masterful and even as you see the building blocks of the climax being put into place, it's a delight to watch them fit JUST SO.

Lundgren, an inexpressive actor, is perfect as a graphic cipher: his face was made to be drawn in ink and filled in with broad washes of color. Carefully tended facial stubble trimmed to give him a skull-like appearance, Lundgren is truly impressive as a character defined by emotional emptiness.

Shot in neorealist black-and-white, it opens like a gritty slice of social drama, then takes a sharp turn into bleak, existential horror.

A minor classic of the genre, this is a memorable addition to the vampire tradition in the horror film.

Likably low-key, character-driven dramatic comedy.

Harsh, funny, grim, and, like all Bob Fosse's films, primarily concerned with the intersection of life and showbiz.

Fans of Lehane's Kenzie-Gennaro books will lament the fact that starting with the fourth book means losing the couple's extensive backstory, but the essence of their fragile, damaged bond comes through even if you don't know what shaped it.

Doesn’t break any new documentary ground, but it does exactly what it sets out to do: Preserve a live event and make it available to a broader audience.

Claustrophobic and nightmarishly atmospheric, ISLE OF THE DEAD is kept moving along by director Mark Robson at a deliberate pace which becomes more and more creepy until the moment of the premature burial.

An intriguing Hitchcock thriller which probes the dark recesses of a man's mind through psychoanalytic treatment and the love of a woman.

One of the most intelligent and terrifying horror films of the 1980s.

The film is by turns strident, obvious, righteously angry and inspired.

With both Lorre and Price having a grand time poking fun at the material and themselves. The final story has several memorable moments.

The funniest of all the Cheech and Chong movies, UP IN SMOKE provides a feast of gags for the sympathetically minded.

A dry, thoroughly modern reminder that while mores change, human nature doesn't.

The story gets silly from time to time, stretching credibility to the breaking point, but the final result is an old-fashioned love triangle made new by the third party's being electronic.

A sentimental film that works because of its unsentimental moments--in particular, its sometimes embarassingly honest portrayal of what interests boys and how they talk about it. Reiner elicits some excellent performances from his young cast (River Phoenix is a standout) and Kiefer Sutherland is memorable as a menacing teen hood.

Based on the comic strip created by Charles Schulz, this is the fourth and the best of the animated films devoted to the charming antics of the "Peanuts" gang.

Goldbacher's film is lovely to look at, but the blurry heart of the film only suffers by the comparison.

It's a spectacular adventure story with romance, because while they fight with wild animals and cannibals, they fall in love.

An early cinema staple, the chase film, is resurrected, pure and simple, by star-producer-director Cornel Wilde.