Although it eventually runs out of smart ideas and resorts to a typically explosive finale, this above-average thriller rises above its formulaic limitations on the strength of powerful performances by Samuel L Jackson and Kevin Spacey. Both play Chicago police negotiators with hotshot reputations, but when Jackson's character finds himself falsely accused of embezzling funds from a police pension fund, he's so thoroughly framed that he must take extreme measures to prove his innocence. He takes hostages in police headquarters to buy time and plan his strategy, demanding that Spacey be brought in to mediate with him as an army of cops threatens to attack, and a media circus ensues. Both negotiators know how to get into the other man's thoughts, and this intellectual showdown allows both Spacey and Jackson to ignite the screen with a burst of volatile intensity. Director F Gary Gray is disadvantaged by an otherwise predictable screenplay, but he has a knack for building suspense and is generous to a fine supporting cast, including Paul Giamatti as one of Jackson's high-strung hostages, and the late JT Walsh in what would sadly be his final big-screen role. The Negotiator should have trusted its compelling characters a little more, probing their psyches more intensely to give the suspense a deeper dramatic foundation, but it's good enough to give two great actors a chance to strut their stuff. -Jeff Shannon.

In 1987, some 20 years after the original series had ended, Star Trek: The Next Generation was launched into a decade renowned for its materialistic greed, but also for its hesitant steps towards a more unified world order. Creator Gene Roddenberry revised his vision of humanity's future accordingly, shifting the Trek timeline 80 years on and reinventing the new Starship Enterprise as an Ark-like exploration vessel full of families, schools, soothing recreational facilities and a maternally pacifying computer voice (Roddenberry's wife, Majel Barrett). The Next Generation crew were not soldiers, but scientists and diplomats. Unlike the fiercely individualistic Captain Kirk, Patrick Stewart's patrician Captain Jean-Luc Picard was a model team leader: no matter how desperate the crisis, he ensured that everyone got to sit round the Conference Room table and talk it over. And in a true late-1980s touch, a key member of the Bridge crew was psychoanalyst Counsellor Troi, always on hand to discuss everyone's feelings. Season Two saw the welcome introduction of the cybernetic horror that was the Borg. Originally a powerful symbol of technological misuse in an otherwise technologically utopian universe, ultimately their hive-like existence served to reinforce the message that everyone would be much happier as a team player. Even renegade super-entity Q (John De Lancie) relied on Picard as much as his fellow god-like playmates; Data followed Pinocchio and Spock in a quest to discard what made him an individual; and there was even an episode that rationalised why all aliens basically looked alike (we're all one big family). Even the slogan change to "Where no one has gone before" acknowledges that there's no "one" in a team. But for all its earnest political correctness and an over-reliance on "technobabble", good stories played by an appealing ensemble cast were at the heart of the show's success. [+]

In Blue Streak, Martin Lawrence plays a jewel thief who plants a stolen diamond in the ventilation duct of a building under construction. When he's released from prison a few years later, he discovers that the building is now a Los Angeles police station. His solution: he impersonates a detective. It's a standard fish-out-of-water set-up and the plot doesn't take any chances with the formula, but Lawrence wears his role like a loose suit and does a little low-key boogie whenever he can, drawing you into the absurdity with a cock of his head and a roll of his eyes. -Bret Fetzer, Amazon. com Bad Boys is slick to a fault. This glossy action flick takes place in sunny Florida, where Martin Lawrence and Will Smith play two cops-one married with kids, the other a swinging bachelor. The last film was produced by the hit-making team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer before Simpson's untimely death and marked the directorial debut of Michael Bay who followed up with The Rock. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Rancid Aluminium's unlikely hero, leery Liam Gallagher-look-a-like Pete (Rhys Ifans), is wholly unprepared for promotion to head of the family business after his father dies unexpectedly. To make matters worse, no matter how hard he tries he can't impregnate his wife Sarah (Sadie Frost), and believes he's shooting blanks. Unable to handle responsibility, Pete turns to scheming Irish accountant Deeny (Joseph Fiennes) for help, who recommends that the company seek foreign investment to pay off its debts. What Pete doesn't know is that Deeny is trying to do him out of the business and has arranged a "loan" from a Russian Mafia warlord, Mr Kant (Steven Berkoff), whose raven-haired daughter Masha (Tara Fitzgerald) is set on seducing Pete. Given its all-star British cast (which also includes Dani Behr, Keith Allen and Nick Moran) and bestseller source material, Rancid Aluminium must have looked like a sure-fire comedy hit. But first-time director Ed Thomas (better known as a playwright and theatre director) can't seem to keep a handle on the convoluted plot and the laughs are entirely incidental. Ifans's irritating mockney voiceover doesn't help, nor the fact that Tara Fitzgerald's accent keeps slipping between Stalingrad and Sloane Square. Fans of the James Hawes original may get a thrill from seeing his characters come to life, but it's unlikely anyone else will. -Chris Campion.

Shades of Rollerball! Director Ernest Dickerson and executive producer Wesley Snipes ponder the sport of the future and come up with. "Futuresport", a combination of handball, ice hockey, and skateboard hot-dogging begun as an inner-city alternative to gang warfare and transformed into a glitzy media sensation. Dean Cain stars as the reigning Futuresport hero, a cocky glory hound who counts his cash and "popularity index" ratings with a smug grin until his narcissism costs him the championship game. As a ruthless terrorist group pushes the world to the brink of war, the suddenly altruistic Cain hatches a plan to bring Futuresport back to its roots. With the help of reporter (and former flame) Vanessa Williams and the game's creator (a rastah-inflected Snipes, who gives himself the film's best role), Cain proposes a winner-take-all game to settle the territorial dispute. Beefy former TV "Superman" Cain makes a better reformed hero than a snotty superstar and looks great in the game scenes, but Snipes steals the film with his funky turn as the inner-city guru with more on his mind than the game. Dickerson gives this TV film a handsome look and even injects a little grit into the otherwise bland screenplay, but apart from the zippy game scenes (which Dickerson films with an electrified energy), it's a familiar and rather flat bit of science fiction hokum. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. [+]

Reuniting the "dream team" of director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter (and esteemed director in his own right) Paul Schrader-the men who brought you Taxi Driver and Raging Bull-Bringing Out the Dead provoked outrageously high expectations on its theatrical release. But when this brown-paper parcel of a film was unwrapped by critics and film-goers, the collective Christmas-morning sigh of disappointment was all but audible. Sure, there is a lot of blood but where are all the guns, the wise guys cracking wise, the filmic fireworks most people expect from a Scorsese movie? But shake the wrapping a bit and out rolls a tiny, perfect parable about New York City ambulance driver Frank (Nicolas Cage) who finds grace just when he seems to have hit rock bottom. Deprived of sleep, wired on speed of kinds, haunted by visions of a homeless girl he couldn't save, like Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, Frank roams the neon-spackled streets despairing at the decay around him. He's as war-torn by the ravages of the 1980s (the film is set in the early 1990s, before Mayor Giuliani got tough on crime) as Travis was by Vietnam's after effects. But Frank's problem is too much empathy, not alienation, and at least he is not as crazy as his co-drivers-one addicted to food (John Goodman), one to religion (Ving Rhames) and one to drugs and violence (Tom Sizemore)-each colleague more hilarious and frightening than the last. This is a story of a man who thought he could not take it anymore, one wracked by guilt and regret, who ends up being redeemed by-it's a movie cliché, and yet it just about works here-the love of a good woman (Patricia Arquette). Bringing Out the Dead may lack the glamorous, adolescent angst of Taxi Driver and eschew the rigorous dissection of masculinity that distinguished Raging Bull but it has its own quieter virtues and just as much visual bravura. Watching it on the small screen gives you more time to absorb its moral subtleties, its spectacular time-lapse photography and, like all great Scorsese movies, its hysterical stretches of black humour (Rhames' character's attempt to raise a seemingly dead clubber is a particular highlight). It may not be one of the director's, or even the screenwriter's, best films, but it still towers above most of the dross churned out by Hollywood every year and remains indispensable viewing for anyone serious about cinema. [+]

When his absent-minded father gives young Billy Pelzer (Zach Galligan) a new pet, he warns him to abide by three rules. The rules get broken, of course, and the pet-a cute Mogwai named Gizmo-unwittingly gives birth to the vicious Gremlins who proceed to terrorise the town. Although the long shadow of Producer Steven Spielberg hangs over Joe Dante's 1984 comedy Gremlins almost as much as it did over Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982), Dante doesn't allow it to overwhelm his own quirky style too much. Glimpses of Robbie the Robot and The Time Machine (which promptly disappears) at an inventors' convention reveal his passion for old-movie references (which culminated with Matinee, 1993). Aided and abetted by Spielberg's guidance and a script by Chris Columbus (who would go on to direct and produce the Home Alone franchise) and a music score by Jerry Goldsmith, Dante had all the help he needed to make the biggest hit of his career. Much of the humour derives from Dante's playful handling of the setting in Smallsville, USA, whose inhabitants are as much the target of his satire as they are of the Gremlins' unwanted solicitations. The xenophobic neighbour who warns prophetically of "gremlins" in foreign cars and machinery provides a subtext for the attack on homely American values, as does showing Invasion of the Body Snatchers on TV while the wicked Gremlins hatch. The sight of the little tykes cavorting in a bar, getting drunk and even dancing in pink leggings looks suspiciously like a satirical dig at the whole 1980's culture of selfishness: with their destructive impulses and overindulgences the Gremlins are the ultimate egotistical yuppies. As with many Spielberg projects, the bland hero saves the day for nostalgic, old-fashioned values, but there are plenty of laughs along the way-for example in the now-classic scene when the hero's mother fights off Gremlins in the kitchen by stuffing them in the blender and microwave. Dante's 1990 sequel is even more satirically pointed, and he effectively remade the original with Small Soldiers (1998), replacing Gremlins with toys. [+]

Two icons of 1960s cinema, Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda, go head-to-head in Steven Soderbergh's stylish reworking of the lone avenger theme. Stamp plays Wilson, an ageing Cockney villain newly out of jail, who arrives in Los Angeles to ask some awkward questions. His beloved daughter, mistress of powerful rock promoter Terry Valentine (Fonda), has died in a car crash; but Wilson is far from convinced it was an accident. With his gaunt, grim features and sparse white hair, Stamp is a dead ringer for the angel of death. Or maybe, as Soderbergh hints with some intricate flashback and flash-forward cutting, the whole story is a dying man's dream of vengeance. Echoes of Get Carter and Point Blank aren't far to seek. Though it is tense, gripping and often funny-Wilson's rhyming-slang dialogue bemuses every American he meets-The Limey is shot through with an aching sense of loss and wasted years. The final showdown between Wilson and Valentine feels like the epitaph of an era once rich in dreams. Some of the film's most poignant moments are its "flashbacks" to Wilson's younger days, which are actually clips from Ken Loach's 1967 movie Poor Cow, featuring the 20-something Stamp, insolently and heart-breakingly beautiful. -Philip Kemp.

John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) directed this gripping, entertaining 1977 thriller that centres on graduate student Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Tootsie). Hoffman plays a sullen and cowardly loner haunted by the suicide of his father, a suspected communist. He is drawn into a murky web of international intrigue when his brother, CIA agent Doc Levy, played by Roy Scheider (Jaws, The French Connection), is murdered by a former Nazi (Laurence Olivier) who has come to the United States to reclaim a valuable stash of diamonds. Babe (Hoffman) must confront his fears of the past as he runs for his life and tries to avenge his brother's death at the same time. Featuring a classic torture sequence and a terrific cast that includes William Devane and Marthe Keller, Marathon Man written by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men) stands as a great entertainment and as one of the seminal films of the 1970s. -Robert Lane.