Natural Born Killers (1994)

Just what Oliver Stone intended with this wafer-thin heavy metal video clip - all symbolism, zero realism, and seemingly a grand thesis of one simplistic note - I don't know but it is loud, long and monotonous: a two-hour fight scene that plays out as though everyone is making it up as they go along, with one-dimensional characters screaming their way through one long unlikely situation, with the chaos of mass murderers Mickey and Mallory's "deep love" affair (read occasional "dry humping" and tongue kisses) and violent crime spree spliced meaninglessly with cartoon clips, black and white photography and - in a last-ditch attempt at relevance - media clips of actual celebrated tv crime reports. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Candleshoe (1977)

There's some dated gender stereotyping and at least one cringeworthy allusion to race, but Disney's Candleshoe is a classic family adventure in which a young Jodie Foster, a year on from her standout Taxi Driver performance, stars as a streetwise kid who inveigles her way into a family mansion by pretending to be a long-lost heir because she wants to get her hands on a hidden treasure.

★★★☆☆

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Basic Instinct (1992)

If you can get past the fact the sweaty suited detectives are all males indistinguishable from each other and the women are all deviants whose perverse sexual desires the men must sigh and resignedly sate, then this is for most of its runtime a solid thriller with Michael Douglas doing a good job playing Michael Douglas playing a detective, and Sharon Stone channelling Vertigo's Kim Novak to play the cop's prime murder suspect-with-benefits, a mystery novelist whose bed-partners end up dead by ice-pick.

★★★☆☆

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