When his top-secret mission is sabotaged, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) finds himself captured by the enemy, abandoned by MI6 and stripped of his 00-license. Determined to get revenge, Bond goes head-to-head with a sultry spy (Oscar winner Halle Berry), a frosty agent (Rosamund Pike) and a shadowy billionaire (Toby Stephens) whose business is diamonds... but whose secret is a diabolical weapon that could bring the world to its knees!
Sean Connery retired from the 007 franchise after You Only Live Twice (replaced by George Lazenby in the underrated and underperforming On Her Majesty's Secret Service) but was lured back for one last official appearance as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever.
If you know what to look for, you can find almost anything in the personal ads - including the love of your life! Bored New Jersey housewife, Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), fills her days by reading the personal ads and following an ongoing romance between Jim (Robert Joy) and Susan (Madonna), a mysterious drifter who appears to lead the kind of free-spirited life about which Roberta can only dream.
It's Sergio Leone meets Sam Peckinpah meets Quentin Tarantino in this ultraviolent, mythological shoot-'em-up by auteur Robert Rodriguez. In Desperado, Rodriguez creates larger-than-life, genre-tweaking stock characters and puts them through their paces. As they stride bravely through an Old West lightly dusted with camp humor, they're periodically called upon to nimbly dodge bullets and fireballs through outrageously choreographed displays of Hollywood pyrotechnics.
Four ordinary men in two canoes navigate a river they only know as a line on a map, taking on a wilderness they only think they understand. Deliverance, based on James Dickey's novel, surges with the urgency of masterful storytelling, like Georgia's Chattooga River along which it was shot. Equally masterful is the portrayal of each man's change of character under stress, harrowingly enacted by award winners Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox.
With a voracious trio of mako sharks wreaking havoc, Deep Blue Sea dares to up the ante on Jaws, but director Renny Harlin trades the nuanced suspense of Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster for the trickery of the digital age. In other words, why build genuine terror when you can show ill-fated humans getting torn into bloody chunks?
After Sudden Impact, no one could have expected the Dirty Harry sequel to follow. But The Dead Pool is fairly inspired, even playful--check out a "chase" scene between Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan character and a remote-controlled toy car wielding a bomb--and it ended the long-running series on an unexpectedly positive note. This time, Callahan investigates a series of murders that appears to be on a "death list," while becoming romantically involved with a television reporter (Patricia Clarkson).
For Daredevil, justice is blind, and for the guilty, there's hell to pay! Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner ignite dangerous sparks and nonstop thrills in this action-adventure about the newest breed of superhero. By day, blind attorney Matt Murdock (Affleck) toils for justice in Hell's Kitchen. By night, he's Daredevil, The Man Without Fear - a powerful, masked vigilante stalking the dark streets with an uncanny "radar sense" that allows hime to "see" with superhuman capabilities.
A sumptuously mounted and photographed celebration of artful wickedness, betrayal, and sexual intrigue among depraved 18th-century French aristocrats, Dangerous Liaisons (based on Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is seductively decadent fun. The villainous heroes are the Marquise De Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte De Valmont (John Malkovich), who have cultivated their mutual cynicism into a highly developed and exquisitely mannered form of (in-)human expression.
Kevin Costner's 1990 epic won a bundle of Oscars for a moving, engrossing story of a white soldier (Costner) who singlehandedly mans a post in the 1870 Dakotas, and becomes a part of the Lakota Sioux community who live nearby. The film may not be a masterpiece, but it is far more than the sum of good intentions. The characters are strong, the development of relationships is both ambitious and careful, the love story between Costner and Mary McDonnell's character is captivating.
