Thelma & Louise is a feminist manifesto writ large on the big screen, a smart and funny gender reversal of the standard Hollywood buddy formula, a road movie extraordinaire, with characters who became instant cultural icons. No matter how you define it, Ridley Scott's 1991 box-office hit pinched a nerve and made the cover of national news magazines for tweaking gender politics like no movie before or since. Callie Khouri's screenplay overhauls the buddy formula with its story about two best friends (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis) who embark on a liberating adventure that turns into an interstate police chase after a traumatic incident makes both women into fugitives; they are en route to a destiny they could never have imagined. The perfect casting of Sarandon and Davis makes Thelma & Louise a movie for the ages and Brad Pitt became an overnight star after his appearance as the con-artist cowboy who gives Davis a memorable (but costly) night in a roadside motel. -Jeff Shannon.

The burning intensity of Russell Crowe (L. A. Confidential) first lit up screens as a hate-filled, Mein Kampf-spouting skinhead in this brutal Australian drama. Crowe glowers from under his deep-set eyes as Hando, the creepy but charismatic leader of a racist gang who declares war on the Asian immigrants pouring into Melbourne. His rage erupts in violent attacks on the local Vietnamese community, but when his victims fight back his gang breaks up, and Hando flees the city with his best buddy Davey (Daniel Pollock) and redheaded hellion Gabe (Jacqueline McKenzie), a rich-girl runaway who turns the dynamic duo into a splintered love triangle. Writer-director Geoffrey Wright's matter-of-fact treatment of this subculture eschews social commentary for visceral immediacy. His portrait of white supremacist punks living like squatters on the fringes of Australian society is powered by coiled anger and simmering frustration, which finds its outlet in brutal fights and murderous rampages. The lack of moral position may bother some people, especially in light of Wright's sympathetic treatment of particular members of Hando's racist army, and the cold, hate-driven violence is sometimes hard to watch, but his vivid characters and richly drawn world create a compelling drama for adventurous filmgoers. -Sean Axmaker The burning intensity of Russell Crowe (LA Confidential) first lit up screens as a hate-filled, Mein Kampf-spouting skinhead in this brutal Australian drama. Crowe glowers from under his deep-set eyes as Hando, the creepy but charismatic leader of a racist gang who declares war on the Asian immigrants pouring into Melbourne. [+]

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas' 1981 resurrection of the Saturday-matinee adventure genre was deservedly popular, and kicked off a successful trilogy. Set in 1936, this first feature introduces Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, an archaeologist and adventurer whose quests for rare antiquities frequently find him running from one menace or another. Raiders finds Dr Jones in the middle of a Nazi plot to use the mysterious powers of the Ark of the Covenant to win the war. Karen Allen plays the love interest with an old-fashioned "man's woman" appeal (she can drink anybody under the table and is free with her fists). The constant, cliff-hanger appeal of the movie is great fun-one is always wondering how Indy will get out of one scrape after another-and Ford's career got a big boost with his self-effacing but masculine portrayal of the hero. -Tom Keogh.

In his 19th screen outing The World is Not Enough, Ian Fleming's super-spy is once again caught in the crosshairs of a self-created dilemma: as the longest-running feature-film franchise, James Bond is an annuity his producers want to protect, yet the series' consciously formulaic approach frustrates any real element of surprise beyond the rote application of plot twists or jump cuts to shake up the audience. This time out, credit 007's caretakers for making some visible attempts to invest their principal characters with darker motives-and blame them for squandering The World is Not Enough's initial promise by the final reel. By now, Bond pictures are as elegantly formal as a Bach chorale, and this one opens on an unusually powerful note. A stunning pre-title sequence reaches beyond mere pyrotechnics to introduce key plot elements as the action leaps from Bilbao to London. Pierce Brosnan undercuts his usually suave persona with a darker, more brutal edge largely absent since Sean Connery departed. Equally tantalising are our initial glimpses of Bond's nemesis du jour, Renard (Robert Carlyle), and imminent love interest, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), both atypically complex characters cast with seemingly shrewd choices and directed by the capable Michael Apted. The story's focus on post-Soviet geopolitics likewise starts off on a savvy note, before being overtaken by increasingly Byzantine plot twists, hidden motives and reversals of loyalty superheated by relentless (if intermittently perfunctory) action sequences. Bond's grimmer demeanour, while preferable to the smirk that eventually swallowed Roger Moore whole, proves wearying, unrelieved by any true wit. The underlying psychoses that propel Renard and Elektra eventually unravel into unconvincing melodrama, while Bond is supplied with a secondary love object, Denise Richards, who is even more improbable as a nuclear physicist. Ultimately, this world is not enough despite its better intentions. [+]

The joined-at-the-hip team of director Richard Donner and star Mel Gibson (all the Lethal Weapon movies and Conspiracy Theory) had obvious fun resurrecting the Wild Western comedy television series about a roguish rambler-gambler. In Maverick, Gibson assumes the role of cardsharp Bret Maverick, equally quick with a pair of aces and a pair of guns. Good sport James Garner (who played Maverick on TV) takes another role, as a lawman who travels alongside the hero to a big-money poker game on a riverboat. The real peach in this fruit salad of satire and broad jokes, however, is Jodie Foster, who plays a crafty Southern belle quite adept at poker herself. Sexy, funny, and (from the onscreen evidence) a great kisser, Foster has never been more of a delight. Written by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). -Tom Keogh.

The last and least memorable of John Ford's famous cavalry trilogy, Rio Grande nonetheless has an interesting continuity about the gentlemanly rules of military conduct. Here the focus is on the family. While creating a heated controversy over his handling of the Apache war, John Wayne must also contend with disgruntled wife Maureen O'Hara and estranged son Claude Jarman Jr, a new recruit trying to earn his father's love and respect. Ford seems to suggest that there are two conflicting codes of honour in every cavalry officer's life, the personal as well as the professional, and that it takes an act of heroism to maintain both. It's fascinating to observe Wayne's progression throughout the trilogy, as his personal stakes intensify. Also, this is the first of five onscreen appearances between the Duke and O'Hara, each filled with a competitive spirit and stormy sexuality. -Bill Desowitz, Amazon. com.

A gloriously over-the-top treat, Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers takes the militaristic moralising of Robert Heinlein's pulp classic and sets about undermining it mercilessly. Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) desperately wants to join the Mobile Infantry and kill some Earth-threatening alien bugs. He also desperately wants Carmen (Denise Richards), but only gets to fulfil one ambition in the second of Verhoeven's futuristic satires (also cowritten with his RoboCop scriptwriter Ed Neumeier). Set in a fascistic future where kids must do military service to qualify as citizens, own property or even have babies, the film's dark Vietnam and Nazi-era parallels are all the more disturbing given its deceptively sunny Beverly Hills 90210 teenage cast (though scenery-chewing veteran Michael Ironside steals the movie as tough-talking Lt Rasczak). The CGI arachnids are among the most convincing and dangerous-looking creatures ever seen on screen, and with the movie clocking up the highest number of blanks ever fired on a film set, it's also pretty loud! Verhoeven went on to be Executive Producer of the Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles animated TV series a couple of years later. On the DVD: Starship Troopers in this DVD incarnation can now be played continuously on one side of the disc (the original Region 2 release version was that crime against the DVD format, a "flipper"). You'll also feel really spoiled by the extras here: five deleted scenes (approximately six minutes) pad out Carmen's love triangle problems. There are impressive screen tests for Denise Richards and Casper Van Dien (three-and-a-half minutes). An eight-minute featurette zips by with key interviews and fact flinging. And a real treat is three scene developments with layers of FX work explained by Verhoeven. [+]

Still one of American cinema's most powerful, daring film-making debuts, Terrence Malick's Badlands is a quirky, visionary psychological and social enigma masquerading as a simple lovers-on-the-run flick. Inspired by the 1958 murders in the cold, stark badlands of South Dakota by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the film's plot, on the surface, is similar to that of other killing-couple films, like Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy. Martin Sheen, in an understated, sophisticated performance, plays the strange James Dean-like social outcast who falls in love with the naïve Sissy Spacek-and then kills her father when he comes between them. The two flee like animals to the wilderness, until the police arrive and the killing spree begins. What sets the film apart from others of its genre is Malick's complicated approach. Gorgeous, impenetrable images contrast sharply with Spacek's nostalgically artless narration, serving as ironic counterpoints, blurring concrete meaning and stressing that nothing this horrific is simple. Malick observes, rather than analyses, the couple in a manner as detached and apathetic as the couple's shocking actions. No judgment or definitive motivations are offered, though Malick's empathy often leans toward his senseless protagonists, rather than the star-struck society that makes killers famous. Compared with the interchangeable uniform cops who hunt them and the film's other nameless characters stuck in suburban banality, the couple are presented like tarnished, warped andfrustrated results of squelched individuality. Badlands, on one level, views America's suffocating homogeneity and, conversely, its continued obsession with celebrities (individuals considered different but adored) as hypocritical. [+]

In Arthur Penn's adaptation of Thomas Berger's novel Little Big Man, Dustin Hoffman stars as Jack Crabb, the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn. Giving a bravura performance, Hoffman plays Jack from teen years into old age in this picaresque fable of the Old West. Jack's story is a fantastic one: captured by Indians as a boy, reared as an Indian, shuttling back and forth between the white and Indian worlds. In the process, he befriends everyone from Wild Bill Hickock to George Armstrong Custer and is a gunslinger, a snake-oil salesman and an Army scout. This is a solid blend of comedy and tragedy, making a strong statement about America's treatment of Native Americans without sermonising. A terrific cast includes Faye Dunaway, Martin Balsam and Richard Mulligan, but this show is all Hoffman's. -Marshall Fine.