As Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) arrives in the Amazon jungle, she is met by a number of natives, and the focus of her trip – Dr. Robert Campbell (Sean Connery).

It seems that Dr. Campbell has for some time been operating on his own, without following typical company procedure, such as filing progress reports, and now that his contact has retired, the duty of figuring out just what he is up to down here has fallen to her. She isn’t exactly pleased. But then, neither is he.

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During the daily grind, it seems as if we may never get out. For the Harvey family, that all changed one day when family leader Martin Harvey (Martin Short) gets a message that they have been left a sailboat once owned by Clark Gable. All they have to do is pick it up from Saint Pomme de Terre (loosely translated as ‘Saint Potato’).

This sounds like the perfect opportunity for a family vacation, especially since this boat may be worth a quarter of a million dollars. After contacting a yacht broker in Miami, they get a captain who will meet them there and help them sail the boat back to the US. Unfortunately, once they see the boat, they determine that it’s not quite what they expected. It’s seen better days.

Calling the broker, they inquire about what it might be worth in less-than-perfect condition. Sensing that the boat is a pile of junk, the broker sends a local captain instead – Captain Ron (Kurt Russell).

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What starts off as a Christmas movie rapidly turns into something drastically different. A young boy and his father pull into a parking space outside a store, and the boy’s father tells him to stay in the car while he goes inside. Not long after, shots ring out and the father comes out, clutching cash in his hand, and then the boy sees his father killed when he is shot by the dying store owner. Then the boy vows to never do drugs or get involved in that kind of life.

Fast-forward twenty years to interviews in a police station, and we meet Russell Stevens, Jr. (Laurence Fishburne), all grown up and turned into a policeman, fighting the kind of thing that killed his father. Now he’s being given a deep cover job to live the kind of life that killed his old man. To do so, he’ll change his name to John Hull move to Los Angeles, get a shabby apartment and become a drug dealer to try and take down some of the most important pieces of an International operation. Getting involved isn’t difficult. Staying separate is.

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The average person watches 7 hours of television per day. Roy Knable (the late John Ritter) must watch enough for two other people who don’t watch at all, at least according to his son, who narrates this for us to open the movie.

Roy’s wife Helen (Pam Dawber) would probably agree. She feels like she doesn’t even see Roy any more. So one night while she’s trying to talk to him, she throws something into the TV. This doesn’t even deter Roy – he just puts another one (albeit a smaller one) on top. Then the real trouble starts.

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This is the telling of the Charles Dickens classic The Christmas Carol. The only difference is that it is told by The Muppets (with a few humans thrown in for good measure, notably Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge).

On Christmas Eve, he is as crotchety as ever, and his employees – rats mostly, led by Kermit the Frog as Bob Kratchit – ask for the next day off, and reluctantly, Scrooge agrees. That night, however, he is visited by five ghosts. This differs slightly from the Dickens telling, because The Muppets needed to fit in Statler and Waldorf (Jacob and Robert Marley, respectively – only Jacob was in the original). Marley and Marley come to tell Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts this night. They also deliver one of the best songs in the show.

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Baird Academy is a prep school for forming young men, and though they claim to be forming the future leaders of the country, it appears to be populated almost entirely by those who you would never want to be in such a position. The one possible exception is Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell), who hails not from the old money of the Northeast, but from a tiny burg in Oregon and is attending Baird on a scholarship. He doesn’t fit into the “in” crowd, and perhaps he shouldn’t want to.

Yet Charlie is intimidated by them and their money nonetheless, so when he sees several of the boys setting up for a gag that sprays paint on the headmaster’s car, he naturally assumes that he shouldn’t be a snitch and tell what he knows, even though the headmaster offers to get him a free ride into Harvard. It’s even less tempting when one of the other boys who was with him (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) approaches him as a “friend” and says that they don’t do that.

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Everyone knows that they need someone, and this is a film that attempts to chronicle the process of finding someone for several twenty-somethings in Seattle during the nineties.

Janet (Bridget Fonda) just wants someone to say gesundheit when she sneezes, but on-and-off-again boyfriend Cliff (Matt Dillon) is more concerned about his band than Janet (Cliff also serves as something of a narrator).

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Back when Drew Barrymore was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, she made this movie about being a bad girl – only she wasn’t that bad. She did it mostly with mental games, and though there is a certain sexual overtone to the movie, there’s actually very little sex in it. Perhaps that means she was over her bad girl phase, since she hit at such a young age.

Or perhaps she was just in need of a paycheck, so she took the opportunity to jump at whatever came along. After all, this was probably the best of all the Poison Ivy movies that were made, so it’s certainly good that she picked the first, rather than one of the others, but you can’t really give her credit for thinking ahead, when there was no guarantee that they would have ever made another one, so who knows?

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Kevin Spacey is just a really good psychopath. I think it’s because he doesn’t have to be all in-your-face about it. He can quietly go about his business and when you turn around, you realize how twisted he is. If you’re lucky. This movie, while perhaps not the best, is a pretty good example of that.

Here, Spacey plays Eddy Otis, a seemingly successful guy in the suburbs who is always ready to share everything he has – even, it seems, his wife. Initially, neighbor Richard Parker (Kevin Kline) thinks Otis is a little wacko, but over time, he slowly becomes curious, until one day he gives in entirely.

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As the poem goes, the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. Rebecca De Mornay stars as the widow of a doctor who takes his own life after being accused of inappropriately touching his female clients, and she decides that her hand should be the one to rock the cradle of the one who caused her so much pain.

After waiting a few months for things to settle down, she insinuates herself as a nanny to the one who started the whole mess, and at first things go swimmingly. But slowly they start to fall apart. Mentally disabled helper Solomon (played excellently by Ernie Hudson) sees her breast feeding the baby that she is supposed to be watching, and she makes short work of him by planting some evidence to get him kicked out.

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