Rat Race ought to be far less enjoyable than, in the end, it is. Studded with C-list stars, it has a heartless and derivative premise: a group of no-hopers racing across country for a stash of money for the amusement of a casino owner (John Cleese) and a group of high rollers who will bet on anything. Yet their adventures along the way are inventive: for example, lost in the desert Cuba ...
Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra star in this visually stunning metaphysical tale of life after death. Neurologist Chris and artist Annie had the perfect life until they lost their children in an auto accident; they're just starting to recover when Chris meets an untimely death himself. He's met by a messenger named Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and taken to his own personal afterlife--a freshly ...
John Singleton, at the age of 23, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his debut film, Boyz n the Hood. The film stars Laurence Fishburne, Angela Basset, Ice Cube, and Academy Award-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr. in his first starring role in a feature film. Gooding plays Tre Styles, a teenager growing up in South Central Los Angeles. His father, Furious ...
Eddie Murphy stars and stars in this very broad and raucous comedy that finds the Oscar-nominated Dreamgirls actor revisiting the multiple-character shtick that worked so well for him in Coming to America and The Nutty Professor. The latter's makeup-effects artist, Rick Baker, once again transforms Murphy into a variety of grotesques and caricatures, including the hugely fat, ...
Originally, Men of Honour was simply called Navy Diver and no doubt all involved held high hopes that it would be an award-winning biopic. Unfortunately, Carl Brashear's life as the first African-American Master Diver went through that vaguely distasteful contemporary Hollywood Marketing makeover and the result is not quite so worthy of its subject and intentions. The film's ...
When Warner Brothers was unable to secure the rights to Richard Preston's terrifying non-fiction book The Hot Zone (purchased by a rival studio), they took the basic idea of a fatal virus on the loose in the US, added Dustin Hoffman and director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot) and produced an unusual thriller--a surprise hit--called Outbreak. The other picture, slated to star ...
Jerry Maguire, the film that launched the careers of writer-director Cameron Crowe and actress Renée Zellwenger, is accurately regarded as one of the best romantic comedies of the 1990s. It's an unconventional tale about the paradoxical nature of success in which a top sports agent (Tom Cruise) is forced to reassess his life when he is unceremoniously dumped by his employer. After falling ...