Angelina Jolie proves her box-office versatility in Life or Something Like It, a romantic comedy (Jolie's first) that succeeds on the strength of Jolie's appealing performance. As Seattle TV news reporter Lanie Kerrigan, Jolie craves celebrity (i.e., she's insecure and seeks approval), but her disapproving cameraman (Edward Burns) detects an admirable woman beneath Lanie's bleached-blond coif and pancake makeup.
Nowadays it's rare to find a movie that pays attention to human weakness as well as strength, and that sees a whole person as having both. When a sports magazine gets bought by a media conglomerate, an ad sales executive named Dave Foreman (Dennis Quaid, The Rookie) finds himself playing second-in-command to Carter Duryea, a hotshot barely half his age (Topher Grace, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!) whose marriage has just fallen apart.
Comedy superstar Dan Aykroyd stars as a mild-mannered professor of chivalry and infamous underworld pimp in the hilarious comic romp Doctor Detroit. When Professor Clifford Skridlow (Aykroyd) accidentally gets conned into taking on the persona of "Doctor Detroit," he soon finds himself up to his neck in luscious ladies, the Chicago Mob, and a notorious crime czar called "Mom" (Kate Murtagh). It's comedic chaos all the way as Aykroyd attempts to juggle two very different career paths without losing his life or his mind.
It's fast, funny, outrageously illegal - and the granddaddy of the cross-country speed spectacles that have raced across movie screens in the past two generations. Put your pedal to the metal for The Gumball Rally. New York City is the starting point and this supersonic contest ends 2,900 miles later in Los Angeles. In between, director Chuck Bail (coordinator of many classic movie stunt sequences) and a crew of actors and stuntpersons treat you to a truly breakneck road comedy. Gary Busey plays a daredevil in a 600-horsepower Camaro.
If you don't mind a heavy dose of schmaltz and sentiment, this romantic comedy has a gentle way of seducing you with its charms. While You Were Sleeping was the first starring role for Sandra Bullock after her blockbuster success in Speed. In a role that nicely emphasizes her easygoing appeal, Bullock is the reason the movie works at all. She plays Lucy Eleanor Moderatz, a Chicago Transit tollbooth clerk who's hopelessly smitten with a daily commuter, Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher).
Will Smith's easygoing charm makes Hitch the kind of pleasant, uplifting romantic comedy that you could recommend to almost anyone--especially if there's romance in the air. As suave Manhattan dating consultant Alex Hitch Hitchens, Smith plays up the smoother, sophisticated side of his established screen persona as he mentors a pudgy accountant (Kevin James) on the lessons of love.
This remake of Preston Sturges's 1948 comedy follows the same plot and has its amusing moments. Dudley Moore is a famous orchestra conductor who is convinced that his wife (Nastassja Kinski) is having an affair with his best friend, a flamboyant violinist (Armand Assante). So he plots an elaborate scheme by which he will kill them both and get away with murder. That fantasy, which he has while conducting an orchestra, rapidly falls apart once he actually tries to put it into motion. Moore and Assante compete for overacting awards, while Kinski was never much of an actress to begin with.
Goldie Hawn and George Segal star in this rough and tumble comedy that bounces from San Francisco's Barbary Coast to the wilderness of Utah. The Dirtwater Fox (Segal) is a slick gambler who wants to hold on to the $40,000 he's stolen from a gang of outlaws. The Duchess (Hawn) is a scheming saloon singer who wants to become a "real lady." But once they team up, they begin to realize that what they really want is each other. Mixing clever dialogue with plenty of action, this sassy spoof of the Old West is made all the more fun by it's two very talented stars.
An all-star cast steals the laughs in this criminally entertaining film that crosses Get Shorty with The Usual Suspects and comes up with the "year's most original comedy!" (Miami Herald). Who is Cletis Tout? takes classic elements from crime movies -- a jewel heist, a prison break, a fugitive, a beautiful girl -- turns them inside out, upside down, and shakes them into a hilarious new comedy caper! Christian Slater plays Finch, a forger who's having an identity crisis.
Inspired casting puts sparks in this comedy of counterculture clash between an aging 1960s radical and a buttoned-down FBI agent. Dennis Hopper plays an Abbie Hoffman-esque sixties activist and prankster who lands in the custody of a conservative young agent (a suitably uptight Kiefer Sutherland) and proceeds to literally unravel the agent's carefully constructed front through a series of slippery mind games. Hopper has a blast as the unreformed sixties relic, and Carol Kane is delightful as a hippie holdout who puts both men back in touch with their identities.
