In the vastly overrated 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, author Peter Biskind puts the blame for Hollywood's blockbuster mentality at least partially on Steven Spielberg's box-office success with this adaptation of Peter Benchley's bestselling novel. But you can't blame Spielberg for making a terrific film, which Jaws definitely is. The story of a Long Island town whose summer tourist business is suddenly threatened by great white shark attacks on humans bypasses the potboiler trappings of Benchley's book and goes straight for the jugular with beautifully crafted, crowd-pleasing sequences of action and suspense. This is supported by a trio of terrific performances by Roy Scheider (as the local sheriff), Richard Dreyfuss (as a shark specialist), and particularly Robert Shaw (as the old fisherman who offers to hunt the shark down). The sequences on Shaw's boat-as the three of them realise that in fact the shark is hunting them-are what entertaining moviemaking is all about. -Marshall Fine -This text refers to another version of this video. Jaws revolutionised Hollywood, single-handedly invented the summer blockbuster, spawned three increasingly poor sequels, and became the first film to gross more than 100 million dollars. Unlike many recent blockbusters, however, in Jaws the audience really cares about the fate of the men engaged in their duel with the monster. Granted the shark looks fake, but we willingly suspend our disbelief as storytelling and character development count for far more than mere special effects, adding enormously to the movie's suspense, excitement and sheer terror. The cast and screenplay are exemplary, but it was Steven Spielberg who emerged as the film's true star, while John Williams' unforgettable Oscar-winning score made him almost as much of as household name as the young director. [+]

Xena-you gotta love her: after all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from producer Sam Raimi's head in March 1995 to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules, a high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages. Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurks doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty-and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on a journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled by the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant friend. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits, as the duo confront gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires, at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. In the second series (first aired US 1996-97) Xena and Gabrielle (plus goofy side-sidekick the Joxer) meet the Fates, the (surprisingly Gothic) Bacchae, Ulysses, Cupid, Goliath, Santa Claus and (perhaps) the baby Jesus, as well as full-on Xena foe Julius Caesar and her former healer-mentor M'Lila. While filming this series, Xena actress Lucy Lawless was thrown by a horse on Tonight with Jay Leno, and injured: hence a sudden slew of swapped-body stories (Callisto, Autolycus and Gabrielle each have to mimic Xena for an episode), while domestic comedy and/or parody stories contribute to the medically advisable action-lite plotlines. Meanwhile, Callisto murders Gabrielle's hubby-to-be, and the narrative tension deepens. -Honey Glass.

Xena-you gotta love her: after all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from Sam Raimi's head in March 1995, to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules, a high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages. Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurks doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty-and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on a journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled by the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant friend. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits, as the duo confronts gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. In the first series (first aired US 1995-96), Xena and Gabrielle encounter Centaurs, Amazons, Titans, Gods, Helen of Troy, Hercules, King of Thieves (and Zappa-lookalike) Autolycus and-most important and exciting-Xena's ex-victim-turned-nemesis Callisto, an evil skinny-blonde avenging angel. -Honey Glass.

Unanimously hailed as one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of the motion picture, Seven Samurai has inspired countless films modelled after its basic premise. But Akira Kurosawa's classic 1954 action drama has never been surpassed in terms of sheer power of emotion, kinetic energy, and dynamic character development. The story is set in the 1600s, when the residents of a small Japanese village are seeking protection against repeated attacks by a band of marauding thieves. Offering mere handfuls of rice as payment, they hire seven unemployed "ronin" (masterless samurai), including a boastful swordsman (Toshiro Mifune) who is actually a farmer's son desperately seeking glory and acceptance. The samurai get acquainted with but remain distant from the villagers, knowing that their assignment may prove to be fatal. The climactic battle with the raiding thieves remains one of the most breathtaking sequences ever filmed. It's poetry in hyperactive motion and one of Kurosawa's crowning cinematic achievements. This is not a film that can be well served by any synopsis; it must be seen to be appreciated and belongs on the short list of any definitive home-video library. -Jeff Shannon.

The best of the James Bond adventures starring Roger Moore as tuxedoed Agent 007, this globe-trotting thriller introduced the steel-toothed Jaws (played by seven-foot-two-inch-tall actor Richard Kiel) as one of the most memorable and indestructible Bond villains. Jaws is so tenacious, in fact, that Moore looks genuinely frightened, and that adds to the abundant fun. This time Bond teams up with yet another lovely Russian agent (Barbara Bach) to track a pair of nuclear submarines that the nefarious Stromberg (Curt Jürgens) plans to use in his plot to start World War III. Featuring lavish sets designed by the great Ken Adam (Dr. Strangelove), The Spy Who Loved Me is a galaxy away from the suave Sean Connery exploits of the 1960s, but the film works perfectly as grandiose entertainment. From cavernous undersea lairs to the vast horizons of Egypt, this Bond thriller keeps its tongue firmly in cheek with a plot tailor-made for daredevil escapism. -Jeff Shannon On the DVD: The main extra feature here is another in the excellent series of new "making of" documentaries that adorn these Bond DVDs. Here, everything from the painful and protracted gestation of the movie to the building of the massive 007 Stage at Pinewood is chronicled. Also included is an appreciation of and interview with gifted production designer Ken Adam, the man responsible for the extravagantly grand look of all the Bond movies. The commentary track features Adam alongside director Lewis Gilbert and co-producer Michael Wilson, who is instrumental in encouraging Gilbert and Adam to explain and reminisce as the movie unfolds. [+]

Xena-you gotta love her: after all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from Sam Raimi's head in March 1995, to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules, a high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages. Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurks doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty-and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on a journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled by the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant friend. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits, as the duo confronts gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. In the first series (first aired US 1995-96), Xena and Gabrielle encounter Centaurs, Amazons, Titans, Gods, Helen of Troy, Hercules, King of Thieves (and Zappa-lookalike) Autolycus and-most important and exciting-Xena's ex-victim-turned-nemesis Callisto, an evil skinny-blonde avenging angel. -Honey Glass.

Get mindless for awhile with this 1997 disaster flick, starring the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles as a funky place for lava to spew, plus Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche as the brave souls who know how to shut off the spout. Director Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard) wastes no time getting to the good stuff-it's happening in Volcano even before opening credits are over-and neither should anyone in the mood for technical efficiency without the burden of art. -Tom Keogh.

A mismatched group of people (the singer, the movie star and her boyfriend, the man in the iron lung and his nurse, a refugee, etc) are passengers on a plane which makes an emergency landing on a glacier. Miles from anywhere and with the radio out, theirs is a bitter tale of survival which does not necessarily end happily ever after.

Xena-you gotta love her: after all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from Sam Raimi's head in March 1995, to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules, a high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages. Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurks doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty-and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on a journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled by the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant friend. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits, as the duo confronts gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. In the first series (first aired US 1995-96), Xena and Gabrielle encounter Centaurs, Amazons, Titans, Gods, Helen of Troy, Hercules, King of Thieves (and Zappa-lookalike) Autolycus and-most important and exciting-Xena's ex-victim-turned-nemesis Callisto, an evil skinny-blonde avenging angel. -Honey Glass.

In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it was his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz(Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving war-time action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning. " Like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. -Jeff Shannon In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story Heart of Darkness onto the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. [+]

Akira Kurosawa's rousing Seven Samurai was a natural for an American remake-after all, the codes and conventions of ancient Japan and the Wild West (at least the mythical movie West) are not so very far apart. Thus The Magnificent Seven effortlessly turns samurai into cowboys (the same trick worked more than once: Kurosawa's Yojimbo became Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars). The beleaguered denizens of a Mexican village, weary of attacks by banditos, hire seven gunslingers to repel the invaders once and for all. The gunmen are cool and capable, with most of the actors playing them just on the cusp of '60s stardom: Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn. The man who brings these warriors together is Yul Brynner, the baddest bald man in the West. There's nothing especially stylish about the approach of veteran director John Sturges (The Great Escape), but the storytelling is clear and strong, and the charisma of the young guns fairly flies off the screen. If that isn't enough to awaken the 12-year-old kid inside anyone, the unforgettable Elmer Bernstein music will do it: bum-bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum-ba-bum. Followed by three inferior sequels, Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven, and The Magnificent Seven Ride! -Robert Horton.