Clues left behind by the murderers of his boss lead Detroit cop Eddie Murphy back to Los Angeles to investigate potential corruption at an amusement park. This part of the Beverly Hills Cop series misses any of the appeal of even the second installment . The plot is dumb, the dialogue is stilted, and Murphy’s character is too serious leaving a huge chasm where humor would have previously been. The only plus in the entire film is the location, which is used to at least decent effect.   

Eleven days before Christmas, Earth’s orbit passes through the tail of a comet. The next day, two sisters Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney discover they are two of only a few people who survived the event unscathed. A really fun low-end 80s film, it has everything that makes the decade great. There’s plenty of neon, fashion, big hair, montages and shopping malls accompanied by a pretty great soundtrack. It’s really surprising this hasn’t become a well-known classic of the era. 

In the shadow of the 2008 Presidential election and the Great Recession, Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn are hired to rob a mob poker game in imitation of another robbery perpetrated by Ray Liotta, who runs the game, years earlier. Hitman Brad Pitt is called in who in turn calls in James Gandolfini to perform the parts he feels he’s too close to. A violent, cynical, and probably all too accurate portrayal of the United States and its values that spends a bit too much time emphasizing that point, I was mostly surprised to see Pitt and Gandolfini working together two films in a row when I had no idea they shared the screen so often.  

Christian Slater falls in love with Patricia Arquette, the prostitute his boss hired for his birthday, so he goes to pimp Gary Oldman and tries to get her released from his control. This simple act results in the vast violence and destruction that propels the rest of the film. I had always assumed this was another 1990s ultra-violent Bonnie and Clyde on the road clone, similar to Natural Born Killers, and while this film does share many of the same attributes, the majority of the action stays in Los Angeles and the Slater-Arquette coupling are less the perpetrators of the violence and rather just the impetus. It surprisingly has quite a varied cast with Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and even Bronson Pinchot in a relatively meaty role all making appearances. 

Because of her unique British-French heritage, Violette Szabo, portrayed by Virginia McKenna, was recruited by the Special Operations Executive as an agent after her French husband died during World War II. An undoubtedly brave and heroic woman, this film importantly preserves a small bit of war history that is easily forgotten. McKenna gives a strong performance embodying the many facets of Szabo and her double life as a spy, but the narrative spends a too much time on her romances, both real and imaginary, to give full credit to the incredible acts she performed.