Raynor Scheine

The first film by Duncan Tucker, Transamerica stars Felicity Huffman as a pre-operative transsexual named Bree (whose given name was Stanley). One week before going under the knife, Bree learns that she fathered a boy who is now 17 and is in trouble with the law. Bree would like to ignore this information, but is forced to meet the young man, Toby (played by Kevin Zegers), by her analyst Margaret (Elizabeth Peña), who will not allow the surgery to happen unless Bree meets him and confronts this aspect of her past. Upon meeting, the son believes that Bree is simply a do-gooder. She buys a car and the two road-trip back to her home in Los Angeles, Bree all the while attempting to keep from Toby the truth of the situation. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

The traditions of the western and the gangster film meet head-on in this dark crime drama. Jericho is a small town in Texas that in the 1920s looks much like it did in the 1860s, except that two violent gangs of rival bootleggers have driven away nearly all of the citizens not involved in the booze racket. Strozzi (Ned Eisenberg) leads a gang of Italian rum-runners with the help of his right-hand-man Giorgio (Michael Imperioli), while Doyle (David Patrick Kelly) is the head of an Irish mob, with Hickey (Christopher Walken) serving as his enforcer; the town's sheriff, Ed Galt (Bruce Dern) is powerless to stop the crime in Jericho, and he mainly tries to stay out of the way and keep an uneasy peace between Strozzi and Doyle. John Smith (Bruce Willis) is a ruthless and amoral gunman on the run from the law who passes through Jericho on his way to Mexico. Sizing up the situation, Smith quickly hatches a scheme by which he'll sell his services first to one of the gangs, and then the other, eventually turning the two sides against each other while he stays in the middle and takes the profits generated by both sides. Writer and director Walter Hill based his screenplay on Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai picture Yojimbo, which also inspired Sergio Leone's ground-breaking spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

When your dog, bird, or water-dwelling mammal disappears, who do you call? Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey) is a low-rent private eye who specializes in recovering lost animals, so when Snowflake, the Miami Dolphins' aquatic mascot, is kidnapped, team representative Melissa Robinson (Courtney Cox) puts Ace on the case. However, Snowflake isn't the only Miami Dolphin who has gone missing; several key members of the team also disappear, including quarterback Dan Marino (who plays himself), who is spirited away while filming a TV commercial. With the Super Bowl only two weeks away, will Ace be able to find Snowflake and the missing athletes in time to salvage the big game? Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was a surprise box office smash and catapulted manic comedian Jim Carrey to stardom. The supporting cast includes Sean Young as ill-tempered Lois Einhorn, Udo Kier as the sinister Ronald Camp, and rapper Tone Loc as Ace's detective pal Emilio (Loc also wrote and performed a song for the closing credits). ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Jon Avnet's The War is set in the rural south and brimming with lessons on social consciousness, much like his previous effort, Fried Green Tomatoes (1991). During the summer of 1970 in backwoods Mississippi, Stephen Simmons (Kevin Costner) is struggling to be a breadwinner for his family while still suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in the Vietnam War. His wife Lois (Mare Winningham) provides most of the family income. Stephen gets a job in a mine and saves a friend who has been injured, helping him erase his guilt over abandoning another friend during a firefight in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Simmons children, Stu (Elijah Wood) and Lidia (Lexi Randall) are feuding with an even poorer family of neighbors, the Lipnickis, over access to a tree fort that Stu and Lidia built. Mr. Lipnicki (Raynor Scheine) is drunken and abusive and helps escalate the disagreement into a major battle for the fort. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

When sweet Northern college kid Bill (Ralph Macchio) and his buddy Stan (Mitchell Whitfield) are picked up and thrown into the slammer in a hick Southern town, at first it looks like no big deal. Then they are informed that they are accused of murder. Penniless and without a single friend in the area, Bill decides to call his goofy cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci), who has somehow recently become a lawyer. Full of family feeling and bravado, Vinny, who has never tried a criminal case in his short life as a lawyer, rides south to defend his trusting relative. He's an expert motormouth and street-level logician from the wilder reaches of metropolitan New York, complete with a thick accent and the attitude to go with it. Otherwise, he's much less well qualified than your average public defender. When he arrives on the scene with his equally brassy girlfriend Lisa (Marisa Tomei), Bill is fairly sure he's going to be sentenced to death. His buddy Stan is even less confident of his legal representative, if that's possible, and the first thing Vinny has to do is to regain the consent of his clients to represent them. The local judge doesn't seem any too sympathetic to Vinny's verbal shenanigans either, and even the most optimistic supporter of the boys would begin to have doubts at this point -- and Vinny's no exception. With the insistent moral encouragement of his girlfriend, Vinny somehow accomplishes the impossible and wins grudging (if very irritated) respect from all concerned, for once studying as if his life depended on it. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

A woman learns the value of friendship as she hears the story of two women and how their friendship shaped their lives in this warm comedy-drama. Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) is an emotionally repressed housewife with a habit of drowning her sorrows in candy bars. Her husband Ed (Gailard Sartain) barely acknowledges her existence, and while he visits his aunt at a nursing home every week, Evelyn is not permitted to come into the room because the old women doesn't like her. One week, while waiting out Ed's visit, Evelyn meets Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), a frail but feisty old woman who lives at the same nursing home and loves to tell stories. Over the span of several weeks, she spins a whopper about one of her relatives, Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson). Back in the 1920s, Idgie was a sweet but fiercely independent woman with her own way of doing things who ran the town diner in Whistle Stop, Alabama. Idgie was very close to her brother Buddy (Chris O'Donnell), and when he died, she wouldn't talk to anyone except Buddy's girl, Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker). Idgie gave Ruth a job at the cafe after she left her abusive husband, Frank Bennett (Nick Searcy). Between her habit of standing up for herself, standing up to Frank, and serving food to Black people out the back of the diner, Idgie raised the ire of the less tolerant citizens of Whistle Stop, and when Frank mysteriously disappeared, many locals suspected that Idgie, Ruth, and their friends may have been responsible. Evelyn finds herself looking forward to her weekly visits with Ninny, and is inspired by her story to take a new pride in herself and assert her independence from Ed. Fried Green Tomatoes was based on the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by actress-turned-author Fannie Flagg, who makes a cameo appearance as the leader of a self-help group. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Small-time crook Mickey Rourke is mockingly named Johnny Handsome because of his grotesquely deformed face. While in stir on a robbery rap, Rourke is knifed by convicts in the employ of his former partner--and now bitter enemy--Lance Henriksen. While in the prison hospital, Rourke is cared for by a kindly doctor (Forrest Whitaker), who believes that the key to Rourke's rehabilitation might be a literal change of face. Undergoing plastic surgery, Rourke emerges as virtually unrecognizable to everyone but the audience. Paroled, Rourke seems to be willing to follow a straight and narrow path. Seems to be. Only Morgan Freeman, playing a hard-bitten law officer, sees through Rourke's "new leaf." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Though a fine cast was assembled for this comedy, none can save this embarrassingly humorless satire. Henderson Dores (Daniel-Day Lewis) is a very proper British art expert sent to rural Georgia by his boss to purchase a painting by Renoir. The present owner, hillbilly Loomis Gage (Harry Dean Stanton), claims he bought the painting for $500 in France in 1946. Dores offers $10 million, but Gage's scheming son Freeborn (Maury Chaykin) has made a deal with a rival art dealer for $15 million. Steven Wright plays Dores' business rival Pruitt with his typical deadpan charm, and Joan Cusack and Laurie Metcalf provide romantic interest. Tea and crumpets collide with moonshine and cornbread in this feature, but the results are unpalatable. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

High-powered gangsters move this crime drama along at a fast pace. When two cops, Eddie Jillette (Richard Gere) and Joe Collins (Gary Basaraba), hear about a contract out on local crime boss Losado (Jeroen Krabbe), they go undercover posing as hitmen, and the result is murder. Collins and the man who hired them, Paul Deveneux (Terry Kinney) are killed, and Jillette goes looking for the assassin. He ends up in New Orleans where he locates Michel Duval (Kim Basinger), the girlfriend of Deveneux now virtually held a prisoner by Losado. Jillette has his work cut out for him. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Using four famous but unnamed individuals to symbolize a notorious era in American politics, as well as to explore the nature of despair, director Nicolas Roeg has created an intriguing drama. Based on a play by Terry Johnson, the story begins with the blond Theresa Russell as a sex-goddess actress working on a scene over a subway grate, with her skirts billowing out in the updraft. A famous Professor from Princeton with white hair opens his door to the actress, who takes out a few props and goes through her rendition of the theory of relativity. Between her theatrical mode of speech and his world of mathematics, there is a certain entente. Enter the ballplayer who is her husband (Gary Busey), in love but without a clue as to the actress' inner sadness. Throw in the senator from Wisconsin (Tony Curtis) before whose sub-committee on Unamerican Activities the Professor has to appear, and the undercurrent of a societal witch-hunt that ruined many careers in Hollywood, in academics, in sports, and in politics is churned into the story. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide