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Bad Boys (Special Edition)

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 two are forced to trade places to foil criminal mastermind Fouchet (Tchéky Karyo) who has stolen $100 million worth of heroin from a police lockup. Violent, illogical, and filled with wall-to-wall profanity, Bad Boys was the last film 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. Bad Boys will be of interest to action buffs and fans of Téa Leoni, who makes one of her early screen appearances in the central supporting role. --Jeff Shannon

The Cowboy Way

Somebody in Hollywood thought there was some fish-out-of-water potential in this teaming of wild man Woody Harrelson and slow-burning Kiefer Sutherland as a pair of New Mexico cowboys who go to New York to tame the wild, wild, uh ... East. Well, they were mistaken, because this 1994 action-comedy is little more than a tiresome reworking of Crocodile Dundee. Woody and Kiefer head for the Big Apple to rescue the illegal-immigrant daughter of one of their rodeo buddies (who has mysteriously disappeared), and what they discover is a sweatshop operation run by a hot-tempered thug (Dylan McDermott, before his role on TV's The Practice). That's when the boys start using their ropin' and shootin' skills to foil the bad guys. One measure of this film's credibility is the inevitable scene of the boys riding on horseback through the gridlocked streets of Manhattan. Uh huh. You know how it goes... you just have to go with it or marvel at the sheer stupidity of it all. Of course, forget all the sniping if you're a fan of Harrelson or Sutherland--they're both doing their best under the burden of disadvantage. --Jeff Shannon

Bad Boys / Bad Boys II

Bad Boys
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 two are forced to trade places to foil criminal mastermind Fouchet (Tchéky Karyo) who has stolen $100 million worth of heroin from a police lockup. Violent, illogical, and filled with wall-to-wall profanity, Bad Boys was the last film 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. Bad Boys will be of interest to action buffs and fans of Téa Leoni, who makes one of her early screen appearances in the central supporting role. --Jeff Shannon

Bad Boys II
No one goes to a movie directed by Michael Bay for delicacy and grace; you go because Michael Bay (Armageddon, The Rock) knows how to make your bones rattle during a high-speed chase when a car flips over, spins through the air, and smacks another car with a visceral crunch. Bad Boys II fulfills this expectation and then some. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence may be mere puppets amid all this burning rubber and shrieking metal, but they actually provide a human core to the endless cascade of car wrecks and gunfights. Their easy rapport makes their personal problems--a running joke is Lawrence's attempts at anger management--as engaging as the sheer visual hullabaloo of bullets and explosions. The plot is recycled nonsense about drug lords and dead bodies being used to smuggle drugs, but orchestration of violence is symphonic. If that's your thing, then this is for you. --Bret Fetzer

Killing Zoe

From the Creators of RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION. An American safecracker named Zed (Eric Stoltz) is summoned to Paris by his childhood buddy, Eric (Jean-Hugues Anglade), to help pull a Bastille Day bank heist. Dreams of easy money quickly evaporate when the heist goes sour and Eric transforms into a psychotic, drug-crazed sociopath. This highly controversial first film by Academy Award(r) -winning filmmaker Roger Avary* was an instant cult classic and fast became the barometer by which Generation X gauged its own nihilism. Killing Zoe is a "must own" dark vision that drags exploitation, kicking and screaming, into the realm of art house cinema - neither will ever be the same. *1995, Best Original Screenplay, PULP FICTION

The Emperor and the Assassin

The Doom Generation

In this way-over-the-top homage to blood-spattering road movies a trio of aimless world-weary teenagers get their thrills torturing and killing a trail of cashiers and clerks before engaging in kinetic menages-a-trois. Available in rated and unrated versions.System Requirements:Running Time: 83 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: R UPC: 031398216872 Manufacturer No: 21687

Superior to both Kids and Natural Born Killers, Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation is a snarling satire that has the emotional range to prompt rage, fear, laughter, and grief in a viewer. Three L.A.-based, almost-twentysomethings--an incredibly foul-mouthed Valley Girl (Rose McGowan), her puppyish boyfriend (James Duval), and a sexy bad boy (Johnathon Schaech)--take to the road after a series of comic collisions with skinheads and gun-toting convenience-store clerks. While secret lawmen and voyeuristic TV cameras follow their movements, the fugitives gradually warm up to a three-way sexual relationship that wraps them in a profound, renewing innocence--an innocence then stolen by a wrathful America. Araki skewers the usual villains: the media, homophobes, gun nuts, Gen-X stereotypes. But there is so much more at stake here than meets the eye, an extraordinary anger and fear about predatory intolerance and purposelessness about the young. The DVD release includes the original theatrical trailer and production notes. --Tom Keogh

Fathers and Sons

A heart warming saga filled with tender and poignant observations on the paternal-filial relationship. Fathers and Sons take a closer look into the lives of three suburban families who share the same street. Through stories that span time and multiple generations, the fathers and sons living on Caleb's Path Road struggle to cross the chasm of alienation and past hurts to finally understand one another. With its honest and unflinching portrait of family life, Fathers and Sons will leave you uplifted about the potential of humanity and the promise of new beginnings.

Happy Times

A beautifully heart-wrenching movie. Zhao, a middle-aged laid-off factory worker, longs for a wife; in the hopes of marrying a pushy divorcée, he agrees to pay for an expensive wedding. To raise money, he turns a derelict bus into a place for couples to rendezvous, and brags to his fiancee about how he manages the Happy Times Hotel. When the divorcée insists that Zhao give Ying, her blind stepdaughter, a job at the hotel as a masseuse, he convinces his friends to help him concoct a fake massage parlor where the girl can work. Happy Times begins as a delightful light comedy, but as the relationship between Zhao and Ying grows, this deceptively simple movie flows effortlessly back and forth from sweetness to sorrow, culminating in a devastatingly moving ending. --Bret Fetzer

The Doom Generation

Made for a fraction of the cost of Oliver Stone's similarly themed Natural Born Killers, Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation is more persuasively outragous in its cultural satire, scarier in its violence, and more profound in its vision of a hate-fueled, media-drunk America seemingly determined to eat its young and dwell stupidly on their vengeance. Rose McGowan (Scream), James Duval (Nowhere), and Johnathon Schaech (That Thing You Do!) star as a trio of friends (Schaech's character actually being a complete stranger who steps into their car and into their lives one club-hopping night) who end up on a sex-and-crime spree that draws the fixed stare of television coverage. Araki makes a case for their continuing innocence in a society whose anti-outsider malevolence is barely disguised in the media but is quite naked out in the heartland, where a punishing level of bigotry is not unknown. Araki's jokes and techniques are crude yet forceful, and his anger is absolutely clear where Stone's was obscured and overreaching. The climax is among the most shattering and enraged scenes of '90s cinema. The DVD includes cast information, a theatrical trailer, and French and Spanish subtitles. --Tom Keogh

The Blue Kite