Based on the riveting bestseller by Richard Price, this 1995 crime drama was directed by Spike Lee with such authority and authenticity that it has the hyper-real quality of a stylised documentary. Fully capturing the thoroughly researched detail of Price's novel, the film focuses on Strike (Mekhi Phifer), a young, ambitious "clocker"-or drug dealer-who works the streets of his New York housing project, selling drugs for a local supplier named Rodney (played with ferocious charisma by Delroy Lindo). Just as Strike is struggling to get away from his dead-end life of crime, another dealer is murdered in a fast-food restaurant and local detectives (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro) consider Strike the primary suspect. In cowriting the script with novelist Price, Lee uses this murder mystery to explore the plague of guns and black-on-black crime in America's inner cities, in which drugs and death are familiar routines of daily life. The film doesn't pretend to offer solutions, nor does it dwell on the problem with numbing insistence. Rather, this taut, well-acted film takes the viewer into a world often hidden in plain sight-a world where options seem nonexistent for youth conditioned to have little or no expectation beyond a probable early death. Lee and Price are deadly serious in handling this volatile subject (which incorporates racism, powerless law enforcement, and political indifference), but Clockers is also blessed with humor, insight, and humanity. It's one of Lee's most confidently directed films, signaling a creative maturity that Lee continued to develop throughout the 1990s. -Jeff Shannon.

At his best, director John Woo turns action movies into ballets of blood and bullets grounded in character drama. Face/Off marks Woo's first American film to reach the pitched level of his best Hong Kong work (Hard-Boiled). He takes a patently absurd premise-hero and villain exchange identities by literally swapping faces in science-fiction plastic surgery-and creates a double-barrelled revenge film driven by the split psyches of its newly redefined characters. FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) must play the villain to move through the underworld while psychotic terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) becomes a perversely paternal family man, while using every tool at his disposal to destroy his nemesis. Travolta vamps Cage's tics and flamboyant excess with the grace of a dancer after his transformation from cop to criminal, while Cage plays the sullen, bottled-up agent excruciatingly trapped behind the face of the man who killed his son. His attempts to live up to the terrorist's reputation become cathartic explosions of violence that both thrill and terrify him. This is merely icing on the cake for action fans, the dramatic backbone for some of the most visceral action thrills ever. Woo fills the screen with one show-stopping set-piece after another, bringing a poetic grace to the action freakout with sweeping camerawork and sophisticated editing. This marriage of melodrama and mayhem ups the ante from cops-and-robbers clichés to a conflict of near-mythic levels. -Sean Axmaker.

This handsome box set collects together all three of the films based on Tom Clancy's hugely popular Jack Ryan books. In the first adaptation, The Hunt for Red October, Alec Baldwin offers an interesting Ryan in this gripping submarine-set thriller directed by action auteur John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard and Die Hard With a Vengeance). Red October also sports Sean Connery as the Russian nuclear submarine captain, his Scottish accent only cursorily disguised as per usual, attempting to defect to the West on his ship. Ryan must figure out his true motives for approaching the US. It all makes for an exceptionally handsome movie with action sequences that really take one's breath away. The second Clancy adaptation, Patriot Games, is the first to star Harrison Ford in the Ryan role. Recently voted the sexiest man alive in a popular poll, Ford's strong, silent shaggy presence brings more warmth to the CIA analyst part. Directed by Phillip Noyce (Dead Calm), this film has Ryan and his family on vacation when Ryan is called upon to save a member of the British royal family from attack by Irish terrorists, giving a new twist on the phrase "adventure holiday". Before you know it, the Ryan clan is being targeted by the same terrorists, who invade his Maryland home. Sean Bean as head baddie wreaks havoc on property and rivals Brad Pitt in the dodgy "Oirish" accent stakes, but no one is better than Ford at square-jawed righteous heroism. [+]

Previous UK releases of Catchfire have listed the pseudonymous Allan Smithee as director, but this version proudly opens with "a Dennis Hopper film". Also known as Backtrack, it offers a plot that advances by illogical leaps and bounds while whole scenes seem to go astray. With prominently billed actors getting almost nothing to do while major players go un-credited, a bland music score that might have been laid in from another film entirely and an ending that makes a lot of noise without actually resolving much, the film certainly has its bad points. However, it's also one of Hopper's more eccentric films, and more fun than Colors or The Hot Spot (which he had no trouble owning up to), partly because the director also takes a quirky lead role and his own personal interests are stirred by the modern art frills of the chase plot. The film opens with LA-based conceptual artist Jodie Foster, looking chunkily terrific just before her adult career took off, suffering a minor breakdown on the freeway and happening on a gangland execution. Pint-sized mob boss Joe Pesci sets his killers on her but the crooks ineptly murder Foster's boyfriend (Charlie Sheen, taking a very early bath). Pesci calls in Hopper, a professional hitman who immerses himself in Foster's life and art in order to track her down only to develop an obsessive crush on the woman. When he finds her, he gives her the choice between getting rubbed out or becoming his property. Hopper retains the knack for finding odd-looking byways of rural America, but is uncomfortable with helicopter chases and shoot-outs. The leads, despite great chunks of missing story, are both interesting-Foster sexily vulnerable and Hopper doing a wry New York drawl as the sax-playing hit man. [+]

Too old for Hamlet and too young for Lear-what's an ambitious actor to do? Play the Devil, of course. Jack Nicholson did it in The Witches of Eastwick; Robert De Niro did it in Angel Heart (as Louis Cyphre-get it?). In The Devil's Advocate Al Pacino takes his turn as the great Satan, and clearly relishes his chance to raise hell. He's a New York lawyer, of course, by the name of John Milton, who recruits a hotshot young Florida attorney (Keanu Reeves) to his firm and seduces him with tempting offers of power, sex and money. Think of the story as a twist on John Grisham's The Firm, with the corporate evil made even more explicit. Reeves is wooden, and therefore doesn't seem to have much of a soul to lose, but he's really just our excuse to meet the devil. Pacino's the main attraction, gleefully showing off his-and the Antichrist's-chops at perpetrating menace and mayhem. -Jim Emerson.