Caustic wit gets a full-body workout in this 1994 comedy (known as The Ref in the US), in which a cat burglar (Denis Leary) gets trapped in an affluent Connecticut neighbourhood and is forced to hold a bickering couple hostage on Christmas Eve, only to discover that their Yuletide spirit is anything but cheerful. Caroline (Judy Davis) and her husband, Lloyd (Kevin Spacey), have been at each other's throats for so long that they've developed domestic arguments into an art form, and the would-be kidnapper turns into a reluctant mediator, even after he's got the battling couple wound up in bungee cords. The situation grows even more complicated when the couple's smart-aleck son comes home from military school, but it's not the plot here that's a top priority. Instead it's the sheer pleasure of witnessing a three-way verbal jousting match, written with razor-sharp skill and delivered by actors who are perfect for their roles. The movie's got a dark edge, but it never gets too dark-you know that it's not going to slide into more seriously damaging territory, so you can sit back and enjoy the volleys of scathing insults and sarcasm the way you would a Bill Hicks performance. If that sounds like your idea of entertainment, Hostile Hostages will serve it up with style. -Jeff Shannon.

Sophisticated to a point, this well-executed wolf-man tale works due to its clever setting and enormous star power. We all know Jack Nicholson can go nuts but the script makes his character aware of his changes, sometimes for the better, early on. The setting, a publishing house in the middle of a takeover, gives the characters dramatic life before the horror elements kicks in. A senior editor about to get the boot, Nicholson's character becomes a new man after being bitten by a wolf. He takes on challenges at work, lives a more robust life and attracts a new love. But will his new-found energy consume him? Director Mike Nicholson keeps the action alive in the first half but the film peters out at the end with cheap theatrics and the overuse of slow motion. Michelle Pfeiffer has little to do as simply the love interest with a grittier than average personality. Better is James Spader as a smarmy colleague. Nicholson is in fine form, relying on his keen gift to spark interest (a twitch of the head, a look in the eyes), instead of heavy doses of movie make-up. Giuseppe Rotunno's sweeping camerawork sets the mood quite well. [+]

The Southern Star is a very big diamond. Someone steals it. George Segal and Ursula Andress, pursued by Ian Hendry, all hampered by the dipsomaniac homosexual ex-Major Orson Welles, attempt to retrieve it, and have encounters with wildlife, humour and danger along the way.

Robert Towne is one of Hollywood's most celebrated screenwriters, but because his directorial efforts have been few and far between, anticipation was high when this star-powered crime story was released in 1988. Critical reaction was decidedly mixed, but there's plenty to admire in this silky, visually seductive film about a drug dealer (Mel Gibson) whose best friend from high-school (Kurt Russell) is now working for the Los Angeles sheriff's drug detail. Their personal and professional conflicts are intensified by their love for the same woman, a waitress (Michelle Pfeiffer) at the Italian restaurant they both frequent. There's a big deal going down with a drug lord (the late Raul Julia), but as it twists and turns, Towne's story is really more about personal loyalties and individual honour. And even if it doesn't quite hold together, the movie's got a fantastic look to it (courtesy of the great cinematographer Conrad Hall), and the three stars bring depth and dimension to their well-written roles. -Jeff Shannon.

Arriving from the provinces to embark on his studies, naïve, plodding country cousin Charles (Gérard Blain) finds himself way out of his depth as he struggles to negotiate the niceties and posturing of Parisian student life in the fast lane at the end of the '50s. Try as he might, his stay at the home of his sophisticated, cynical, hard-living cousin Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy) turns into a harsh lesson in modern urban living. In almost every respect, Les Cousins is the mirror image of Chabrol's depiction of rural France in his earlier film Le Beau Serge. Brialy and Blain essentially reprise their roles in an urban context, and-despite some exemplary New Wave glimpses of Paris from speeding cars-Le Beau Serge's extended flirtation with the documentary form is here ousted by crisp expressionistic cinematography and taut editing. Les Cousins presents a fable about moral confusion as traditional French values come under threat from burgeoning post-war consumerism. Chabrol repeatedly foregrounds the superficiality of Paul's circle of friends, with their tastes for fast cars, expensive apartments, and militaristic ritual and guns. Meanwhile the lucid exploration of the overlap between hedonism and fascism in 1950s Paris serves as a sharp reminder of the deep roots of neo-fascist politics in contemporary France. -Michael Witt.

In this classic 1963 adaptation of William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, a planeload of schoolboys are stranded on a tropical island. They've got food and water; all that's left is to govern themselves peacefully until they are rescued. "After all", says choir leader Jack, "We're English. We're the best in the world at everything!" Unfortunately, living peacefully is not as easy as it seems. Though Ralph is named chief, Jack and the choristers quickly form a clique of their own, using the ever-effective political promise of fun rather than responsibility to draw converts. Director Peter Brook draws some excellent performances out of his young cast: the moment when Ralph realises that even if he blows the conch for a meeting people might not come is an excruciating one. Well acted and faithfully executed, Lord of the Flies is as compelling today as when first released. -Ali Davis.

"Style is the answer to everything," intones skid row poet Charles Serking, played by the suitably grizzled and worn Ben Gazarra, to his somnambulistic audience. Serking is, of course, a not-at-all veiled stand-in for beat legend Charles Bukowksi, whose autobiographical short stories were the basis for Tales of Ordinary Madness. But Serking, in many ways, comes off more like a gin-soaked fantasy of a skid row Hemingway whose sports of choice are alcohol, women, and sex. Behind the salt-and-pepper beard and rummy eyes lies an actor too poised to allow himself to fully sink into the alcoholic sloppiness that Mickey Rourke so easily brought to the screen in the less pretentious and more concise Barfly, which Bukowski himself scripted. But if Italian-born director Marco Ferreri stumbles over the self-conscious dialogue, he's right at home capturing the seedy atmosphere of dim, run-down apartments and underlit bars in the real Hollywood Serking calls home. When Serking's fling with the stunning, self-mutilating Italian hooker Cass (Ornella Muti, who puts her oversized safety pin to some rather startling uses) becomes too emotional, he takes the anonymous safety of the streets-crashing in a flophouse, passing around a bottle with a listless knot of derelicts. Serking melds right in with the littered streets and lost souls, a real man of the people. Suddenly you see it: he's got style. -Sean Axmaker.

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 5' 10" 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 lurk 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 journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled via the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard Gabrielle, her constant companion. 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 cross-roads where touchy-feelly Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. -Honey GlassIn the third series (first aired US 1997-98), Xena, Gabrielle and the Joxer meet Boadicea, the Furies, Cleopatra and, in a flashback to China, Lao Tzu (as well as influential Xena-ex Lao Ma, Tzu's wife), slog through their very own very funny version of Groundhog Day, and fall out extremely badly. Xena reveals she has a son, Solan; Gabrielle betrays Xena (by mistake) in China; Gabrielle is raped; her daughter, a child of evil called Hope, is menaced by Xena, so Gabrielle takes up with Callisto (herself now a Goddess with divided loyalties) and kills Solan. Despite the usual forays into body mix-up plot lines and knockabout romantic silliness, as well as an all-musical dream episode ("The Bitter Suite") where this multiple pile-up of anger and betrayal seems to have been resolved, in reality the various revenge killings and attempts make matters worse. When Hope is reborn, hatching from a cocoon as an adult Gabrielle-lookalike, the mutual revenge reaches a murderous, sacrificial climax-until just one embittered &Uml;berbabe is left standing. [+]

Setting out for the one last catch that will make up for a lacklustre fishing season, Captain Billy Tyne (George Clooney) pushes his boat the Andrea Gail out to the waters of the Flemish Cap off Nova Scotia for what will be a huge swordfish haul. While his crew is gathering fish, three storm fronts (including a hurricane) collide to create a "perfect storm" of colossal force, and Billy's path back to Gloucester, Massachusetts, takes them right smack into the middle of it. Wolfgang Petersen's adaptation of Sebastian Junger's seafaring best-seller is a faithful if by-the-numbers true-story account of a monster storm that rocked New England in 1991, specifically Tyne's commercial fishing boat and its crew. Junger's tale fashioned a compelling if staid narrative out of seemingly disparate events, but this film adaptation tends to flatten out the story into a conventional if absorbing story of man vs nature, as the crew fights for survival against the awesome waves the storm kicks up. The central part of the film, which cuts between the Andrea Gail's fight to stay afloat and the attempts of the coastguard to rescue a yacht in peril, is suspenseful action of the first degree, aided by some awesome computer-generated waves. Still, it's a long way to that action, with an extended first act that consists mainly of stoic men, crying women and a fair amount of "don't go out into the sea" dialogue-in other words, a compelling story has been shoehorned into standard summer movie fare. It's too bad, as Peterson assembled an excellent cast-including Mark Wahlberg, Diane Lane, John C. Reilly and William Fichtner among them-but seems to opt for only a surface exploration of these characters, though Clooney seems to have a touch of Captain Ahab in him. You may still be won over by the movie, but for a more in-depth portrait, go to Junger's book for the missing details. -Mark Englehart.