Winning a raft of awards, not least of which four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, Oliver Stone's Platoon was a box-office smash heralding Hollywood's second wave of Vietnam war films. Where predecessors The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were elaborate epics, Platoon simply showed the daily reality of the war from the point of view of ...
Thanks to generous funding from media mogul Ted Turner, first-time director Ronald F Maxwell was able to make an almost word-for-word adaptation of Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Killer Angels. Running over four hours, Gettysburg (1993) splits into two convenient parts for TV viewing (although a 70mm print was given limited theatrical release). This story of three ...
A powerhouse performance by Denzel Washington fuels Training Day, a brutal urban police drama in which a rookie narcotics cop learns the hard way that even good cops can go very, very bad. Washington plays veteran detective Alonzo Harris, a self-proclaimed "wolf among wolves", eager to teach his rookie partner Jake (Ethan Hawke) that normal rules don't apply on the mean streets of Los ...
Despite an irritating, tacked-on voice-over narration that somebody must have thought necessary to make sense of the story (it isn't), Last of the Dogmen is actually a very moving and magical film. Tom Berenger plays a Montana bounty hunter who helps an anthropologist (Barbara Hershey) search for the descendants of a Cheyenne tribe who disappeared in the 1870s. What the two find in a remote ...
This seminal film about the reunion of thirtysomething friends works even better than when first released in 1983. The fine performances of the ensemble cast and a rockin' soundtrack always made this eminently enjoyable. However, the characters' often pompous blather occasionally stalled the action. Baby Boomer introspection has become so common that such navel gazing seems less problematic than ...
A guilty pleasure but nothing more, Sliver is a tame thriller, made at the height of Sharon Stone's fame as she rode high off the back of Basic Instinct. Where Sliver goes wrong though is in effectively trying to transpose the elements that made Stone's name into the film (right down to getting Basic Instinct scribe Joe Ezterhas to pen the script) It doesn't work, but ...