Featurettes/Behind-The-Scenes/Documentaries

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is a big, fun, bubble-brained mess of a movie, and that's exactly as it should be. Its popular 2000 predecessor got the formula right: gorgeous babes, throwaway plots, and as many current pop-cultural trends as you could stuff into a candy-coated dollop of Hollywood mayhem. This sequel goes one "better": The plot's even more disposable (if that's possible), the babes, cars, and fashions even more outlandish, and the stuntwork (heavily digital, heavily absurd) reaches astonishing heights of cartoon silliness.

Charlie's Angels

For every TV-into-movie success like The Fugitive, there are dozens of uninspired films like The Mod Squad. Happily--and surprisingly--this breezy update of the seminal '70s jiggle show falls into the first category, with Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore (who also produced), and Lucy Liu starring as the hair-tossing, fashion-setting, kung fu-fighting trio employed by the mysterious Charlie (voiced by the original Charlie, John Forsythe). When a high-tech programmer (Sam Rockwell) is kidnapped, the angels seek out the suspects, with the daffy Bosley (Bill Murray in a casting coup) in tow.

Chaplin

Directed by Sir Richard Attenborough and starring Robert Downey Jr. and an extraordinary cast, Chaplin is a loving, grand-scale portrait of the Little Tramp's amazing life and times. His poverty-stricken childhood in England comes to life, along with his friendships with Mack Sennett (Dan Aykroyd) and Douglas Fairbanks (Kevin Kline), his many wives and scandalous affairs, and his relentless pursuit by J. Edgar Hoover. Chaplin is the larger-than-life story of the actor behind the icon and a stunning depiction of a bygone era when Hollywood was at its most glamorous.

Cats & Dogs

How can you hate a movie that features ninja Siamese cats wreaking havoc with their kung fu prowess? That's one of the highlights in Cats & Dogs, an effects-laden family film that mystifies cat fanciers by casting dogs as the undisputed heroes in all-out warfare with nefarious felines. Hidden headquarters and high-tech gadgets are featured on both sides of this age-old battle. On the feline side, the longhaired Persian Mr. Tinkles (voice of Sean Hayes) plots to sabotage the efforts of Professor Brody (Jeff Goldblum) to discover a cure for human allergies to dogs.

Casino Royale

John Huston was only one of five directors on this expensive, all-star 1967 spoof of Ian Fleming's 007 lore. David Niven is the aging Sir James Bond, called out of retirement to take on the organized threat of SMERSH and pass on the secret-agent mantle to his idiot son (Woody Allen). An amazing cast (Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Deborah Kerr, etc.) is wonderful to look at, but the romping starts to look mannered after awhile. The musical score by Burt Bacharach, however, is a keeper.

Casino

Director Martin Scorsese reunites with members of his GoodFellas gang (writer Nicholas Pileggi; actors Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Frank Vincent) for a three-hour epic about the rise and fall of mobster Sam "Ace" Rothstein (De Niro), a character based on real-life gangster Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal. (It's modeled after on Wiseguy and GoodFellas and Pileggi's true crime book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas.) Through Rothstein, the picture tells the story of how the Mafia seized, and finally lost control of, Las Vegas gambling.

Casablanca

A truly perfect movie, the 1942 Casablanca still wows viewers today, and for good reason. Its unique story of a love triangle set against terribly high stakes in the war against a monster is sophisticated instead of outlandish, intriguing instead of garish. Humphrey Bogart plays the allegedly apolitical club owner in unoccupied French territory that is nevertheless crawling with Nazis; Ingrid Bergman is the lover who mysteriously deserted him in Paris; and Paul Heinreid is her heroic, slightly bewildered husband.

Carrie

This terrifying adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel was directed by shock maestro Brian De Palma for maximum, no-holds-barred effect. Sissy Spacek stars as Carrie White, the beleaguered daughter of a religious kook (Piper Laurie) and a social outcast tormented by her cruel, insensitive classmates. When her rage turns into telekinetic powers, however, school's out in every sense of the word. De Palma's horrific climax in a school gym lingers forever in the memory, though the film is also built upon Spacek's remarkable performance and Piper Laurie's outlandishly creepy one.

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

One of the most popular screen Westerns ever made, this Academy Award-winning classic blends adventure, romance and comedy to tell the true story of the West's most likeable outlaws. No one is quicker than Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) when it comes to get-rich-quick schemes, and his sidekick Sundance (Robert Redford) is a wizard with a gun. When these two bungling train robbers tire of running from the law, they set out for Bolivia with Sundance's girlfriend (Katharine Ross).

The Commitments

They had Absolutely Nothing. But They Were Willing To Risk It All. Jimmy Rabbitte, just a tick out of school, gets a brilliant idea: to put a soul band together in Barrytown, his slum home in north Dublin. First he needs musicians and singers: things slowly start to click when he finds three fine-voiced females virtually in his back yard, a lead singer (Deco) at a wedding, and, responding to his ad, an aging trumpet player, Joey "The Lips" Fagan. Song by song, gig by gig, the Commitments start their climb to the top: Dublin gets soul.

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