Year: 1998

Words like ‘bad’ don’t even do The Avengers justice. It’s time to haul out the big guns, like ‘appalling.’ The Avengers is jaw-droppingly appalling. This is quite possibly the worst movie Hollywood has ever produced — worse than Batman and Robin, which ascended to a pinnacle of awfulness I wouldn’t have thought could be surpassed.

Ever After is a frothy delight — it’s a little bit RenFest, a little bit Monty Python, and a whole lotta fun. A feminist updating of the Cinderella fairy tale, it never hits you over the head with its attitude and never takes itself too seriously.

I worship at the feet of Kevin Spacey, god of acting, now more than ever after sitting through The Negotiator. Directed by F. Gary Gray — who, not surprisingly, is a veteran director of music videos — The Negotiator is a frenetic, incohesive, pumped-up amalgam of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and The Fugitive, without the charm or suspense of any of them. Spacey is the only thing that holds it all together.

Boy, you can really tell the difference between one artist’s vision and a movie made by committee. Cop Land, written and directed by James Mangold, carves its own little self-contained niche in a genre that sometimes seems overdone: stories about dirty cops doing dirty deeds.

Saving Private Ryan is every bit as brutal as you’ve heard, and probably more intense than you can imagine (unless you’ve actually been in combat). Director Steven Spielberg has achieved a level of reality here that I’ve never seen before in a film.

Nicely directed by Gus Van Sant (probably the most mainstream movie from the man who made To Die For and My Own Private Idaho), Good Will Hunting is mostly notable for the maturity and insight of a script written by a couple of twentysomethings.

The Mask of Zorro is a movie to remind you what Hollywood used to be: a dream factory whose uncynical and unhyperbolic entertainments could sweep you up into the screen and make you forget yourself and the real world for two hours. The last movie to be this viscerally exciting and satisfying is probably Raiders of the Lost Ark — and the last movie this charming and delightful must be The Princess Bride.

There’s a good movie buried somewhere in The Postman — no, really. Costner could have trimmed a good hour from this three-hours-plus monster and had a much more robust story. But Dances with Wolves — a brilliant film — went to Costner’s head, and now he’s afraid to tell any tale that isn’t an epic.