Drama

The rough-edged vitality of contemporary Irish filmmaking is readily apparent in Intermission, a deliriously ambitious black comedy in which 54 characters and 11 plotlines compete for consistently impressive screen-time.

Newman is electrifying as Fast Eddie Felson, an arrogant, amoral hustler who haunts backstreet pool rooms fleecing anyone who'll pick up a cue. Determined to be acclaimed as the best, Eddie seeks out the legendary Minnesota Fats, who's backed by Bert Gordon, a predatory gambler. Eddie can beat the champ, but virtually defeats himself with his low self-image. The love of a lonely woman could turn Eddie's life around, but he won't rest until he beats Minnesota Fats, no matter what price he must pay.

Gary Oldman, Jeroen Krabbe, Isabella Rossellini and Valeria Golino star in Immortal Beloved, a mesmerizing mystery based on the tumultuous real life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Oldman gives a tour de force performance as the passionate, volatile genius who inspired love and hatred in equal measure. Whether seducing regal followers or criticizing the ruling class, Beethoven made many enemies. But he also had one true love -- the unnamed Immortal Beloved mentioned in an enigmatic letter discovered upon his death.

David Mamet's Heist is--not unlike many of his previous films--amusing, manicured, and fraught with an awkward tension. If you've seen The Spanish Prisoner or House of Games, you're by now familiar with the plot-subverting gambit of the double-cross turned triple- and then quadruple-cross. Heist sticks to the formula.

Jennifer Connelly followed up her Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind with this dark but moving story of small mistakes that escalate, with tragic necessity, to disaster. In House of Sand and Fog, Kathy (Connelly) gets evicted from her house for failing to pay a tax she never should have been charged in the first place. The house is swiftly put up for auction and bought by a former military officer from Iran named Behrani (Ben Kingsley, Sexy Beast).

One of the most rousingly enjoyable sports movies ever made, this small-town drama tells the story of the Hickory Huskers, an underdog basketball team from a tiny Indiana high school that makes it all the way to the state championship tournament. It's a familiar story, but sensitive direction and a splendid screenplay helped make this one of the best films of 1986, highlighted by the superb performances of Gene Hackman as the Huskers' coach, and Oscar nominee Dennis Hopper as the alcoholic father of one of the team's key players.

A titanic performance by Jack Nicholson powers this fact-and-fiction biography of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. From the opening moment--Hoffa sitting alone in the back of a car--Nicholson's performance is one of his best, and a rare role as a historical person. The sweeping all-American story of a common worker who reaches the highest pinnacle in the world's most powerful union is sweepingly told with wondrous detail, in wardrobe, sets, and trucks.

Helped along by an unprecedented access to John Lennon's boyhood homes, schools, and sundry haunts, In His Life: The John Lennon Story has a ghostly appeal that makes one feel a bit like a voyeur on pop history. Focusing on eight years of Lennon's youth, from ages 16 to 24, In His Life stars Irish actor Philip McQuillan in the lead and dramatizes much of the familiar lore: John's abandonment by his father; the double loss of his mother, Julia (Blair Brown), first to another family and then to a random accident; his historic introduction to Paul McCartney (Daniel McGowan) at St.

After the release of Withnail & I, British writer-director Bruce Robinson continued his satirical assault on British culture with this fiendishly funny rant, the title of which can be taken figuratively and literally as an object lesson in the art of consumer manipulation. Nobody dupes consumers better than Dennis Bagley (Richard E. Grant); his genius in crafting seductive ad campaigns has earned him a country estate, countless awards, an admiring boss, a loving wife (Rachel Ward), and, well, a gigantic boil on his shoulder that's like a throbbing zit from hell.

When Havana was released in 1990, a lot of reviewers unfavorably compared it to Casablanca, and those comparisons (in addition to audience indifference) turned the film into a box-office disaster. It deserved a better fate, because, while this is certainly no masterpiece, it's an intelligent and lavishly produced film about a chapter of history--the final days of Cuba under the collapsing Batista regime--that remains largely unfamiliar to the American mainstream.