Hollywood visionary Tim Burton pays homage to another Hollywood visionary, albeit a less successful one, in this unusual fictionalized biography. The film follows Wood (Johnny Depp) in his quest for film greatness as he writes and directs turkey after turkey, cross-dresses, and surrounds himself with a motley crew of Hollywood misfits, outcasts, has-beens, and never-weres. The real story, however, is his friendship with aging, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), whom he tries to help stage a comeback. Landau’s unforgettable Oscar-winning performance must be seen to be believed, as must Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning makeup. While it would have been easy to make a film simply ridiculing the bumbling director, Burton instead focuses on his driving passion for filmmaking and his unwavering persistence in the face of ridicule and failure. Possibly the most surprising aspect of the film is the genuine sentiment with which Burton treats the relationship between Wood and Lugosi; his devotion to Lugosi is touching, as is Lugosi’s final soliloquy — an inane bit of dialogue from the hilariously bad Bride of the Monster that grows into a poignant metaphor for the actor’s life and ultimate triumph of his spirit. Even the look of the film is right; it manages to preserve the air of one of Wood’s own films while retaining a sense of artistry in much of the composition on screen (note the scene at the drug rehab where Lugosi endures a horrifying night of detox). In all, Ed Wood is a unique film — at times side-splittingly funny; at others, tragic or even frightening — and a heartfelt tribute to the love of movies, good and bad alike.

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A mix of political satire and a modern take on 1930’s-style screwball comedy, this romance from director Ron Underwood was assumed by many to be based on the real-life relationship between liberal political consultant James Carville and conservative commentator Mary Matalin. Michael Keaton stars as Kevin, an insomniac who meets Julia (Geena Davis) in a store late one night as they haggle over the last bottle of sleeping pills. After spending a romantic evening together, Kevin and Julia each discover to their chagrin that the other is a rival speechwriter in a nasty New Mexico senatorial campaign. As the senate race heats up, the bickering pair tries to keep the relationship alive, but then Julia’s ex-fiance Baghdad Bob Freed (Christopher Reeve), a network news foreign correspondent, shows up with the intention of renewing their relationship.

Twenty-seven years after turning one of Rudyard Kipling’s best known works into a successful animated musical, Disney returned to the same source material for this live-action adventure, which hews slightly closer to the original source material. Mowgli (Sean Naeleli) is the five-year-old son of a wilderness guide who accompanies his father on a hunting expedition in the jungles of their native India. Mowgli becomes close friends with a British girl named Kitty (Joanna Wolff), whose parents commissioned the hunt, but when a tiger attacks their camp and kills Mowgli’s father, the boy is lost in the confusion, and he’s left to fend for himself. Mowgli is befriended by the animals of the jungle — Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, and Grey Brother the wolf — and they develop an unspoken sense of communication as the growing boy learns to live in the wilds. Years later, after growing to adulthood, Mowgli (now played by Jason Scott Lee) once again encounters Kitty (now played by Lena Headey), who is visiting India with her father, Col. Brydon (Sam Neill), a British officer stationed nearby, and her stuffy fiancée Capt. William Boone (Cary Elwes). Kitty and Mowgli recognize each other, and while his powers of speech are rusty, with the help of Dr. Plumford (John Cleese), Kitty and her father are able to return Mowgli to civilization. However, after spending most of his life in the jungle, Mowgli does not feel at home among other people, and while he deeply loves Kitty, he concedes to his rival for her affections. However, Boone and several of his men kidnap Mowgli when they learn that he has discovered a vast treasure in the jungle, and they try to force him to reveal its secrets while fending off the dangers of the jungle which Mowgli understands, but Boone and his men do not.

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppet Masters comes to the screen 43 years later. Sharp-eyed viewers will recognize similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but Heinlein’s book came first. Parasitic space aliens invade the Midwest, taking over the bodies of humans and manipulating these unfortunates to do their bidding. US security agent Donald Sutherland and his team of troubleshooters attempt to squash the extraterrestrial scheme before everyone in the world is turned into Howdy Doody. Adding an extra layer to this familiar scenario is the fact that Sutherland doesn’t get along with everyone on his side-in particular, he has a lot of trouble relating with his son Eric Thal. Stuart Ormes’ perfunctory direction is not up to the standard set by the actors and special effects.

Twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (from the popular television series Full House) are back with another TV-movie for the kids. This time around the twins go West to help save their grandmother’s endangered dude ranch from their greedy uncle who wants to take it over. Western cliches abound, but kids should find the duo heroines entertaining in this safe family choice.

Legendary scientist Albert Einstein (played here by Walter Matthau) takes a break from theoretical physics to try to set up his intellectual niece with a handsome auto mechanic in this romantic comedy. The movie’s central conceit is that Einstein’s brilliance extends to matters of the heart, allowing him to immediately sense that Ed Walters (Tim Robbins), a bright, lower-class mechanic obsessed with Popular Science Magazine, would be perfect for his niece Catherine (Meg Ryan). Unfortunately, Catherine is already engaged to a stiff Princeton man. In order to defeat Catherine’s resistance, Uncle Albert decides to help Ed pretend to be a revolutionary scientist, a charade that inevitably leads to much farcical confusion. Einstein’s scientist pals are portrayed as a Greek chorus of Catskills-style kibitzers, featuring such notable perfomers as Lou Jacobi as Kurt Godel and director Gene Saks as Boris Podolsky.

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Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly nearly set the screen on fire in this clever, female-powered twist on the standard Mob caper film. Gershon is Corky, an ex-con renovating the apartment next door to where Tilly’s Violet lives. Violet is the moll of psychotic gangster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), who uses the apartment as an occasional location for meetings and beatings, and also uses Violet as an occasional plaything for his Mob cronies. Violet is attracted to the super-sexy Corky, and the two begin an intense affair. Corky hatches a plot to escape with $2 million that Caesar is planning to give to a Mob boss, and the mayhem escalates from there.

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Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) is the perfect suburban housewife and mother. She likes to cook, her home is immaculately clean, she’s always well-groomed and cheerful, and she loves her husband Eugene (Sam Waterston) and her two children, Misty (Ricki Lake) and Chip (Matthew Lillard). There’s just one problem with Beverly — if you do anything to make someone in her family feel bad, you’re dead meat on a stick. While she does a great job of hiding it, Beverly has a vicious and vengeful streak, and when she’s not making obscene prank calls to the neighbors or bribing her garbagemen to save embarrassing items from her neighbors’ trash, she’s mowing down whoever would be so rude as to make her husband go into his office on a Saturday, break up with her daughter, or suggest that her son watches too many horror movies. Taking John Waters back to R-rated territory after the relatively sedate Hairspray and Cry Baby, Serial Mom captures a comfortable middle ground between Hollywood professionalism and Waters’ subversive sense of humor, and Kathleen Turner has a field day as the sweet-on-the-outside, evil-on-the-inside Beverly. The supporting cast includes such Waters favorites as Patty Hearst, Traci Lords, Mink Stole, and Susan Lowe; Joan Rivers and Suzanne Somers appear as themselves, and all-female grunge-metal band L7 plays the all-female grunge-metal band Camel Toe.

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A man from the future fights to survive in a society thrown back to the dark ages in this sci-fi adventure set in 2022. Capt. Robbins (Ray Liotta) is a military man who, after he’s convicted of the murder of his superior officer, is sentenced to a high-tech prison ruled by the Warden (Michael Lerner), a cruel taskmaster who enjoys torturing his inmates. After a scuffle with the Warden, Robbins is transferred to a primitive island penal colony known as Absalom, where the civilization is dominated by two groups, the Insiders, a peaceful tribe led by the Father (Lance Henriksen), and the Outsiders, a pack of violent misfits led by Marek (Stuart Wilson). Robbins runs afoul of the Outsiders and is injured in a skirmish; he escapes to the Insiders’ camp, where he plots his revenge. No Escape was based on the novel The Penal Colony by Richard Herley.

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Director John Dahl’s The Last Seduction is an updated film noir centering around a seductive, cheerfully lethal femme fatale. Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) talks her gullible, easily manipulated, doctor-husband Clay (Bill Pullman) into pulling off a $700,000 drug deal to pay off his gambling debts. But while Clay is in the shower, Bridget quietly leaves with the money. She ends up in a bar in a small town where she meets Mike (Peter Berg) and uses him to further her scheme to keep the money and get rid of her inconvenient husband. Linda Fiorentino was championed by many critics for a Best Actress Academy Award nomination, but neither she nor the movie could be nominated since the film had made its debut on cable television.

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