Con Air 

Actors ‏ : ‎ Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, Steve Eastin

Con Air is proof that the slick, absurdly overblown action formula of Hollywood mega-producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Days of Thunder, The Rock, Crimson Tide) lives on, even after Simpson's druggy death. (Read Charles Fleming's exposé, High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, for more about that.) Nicolas Cage, sporting a disconcerting mane of hair, is a wrongly convicted prisoner on a transport plane with a bunch of infamously psychopathic criminals, including head creep Cyrus the Virus (John Malkovich), black militant Diamond Dog (Ving Rhames), and serial killer Garland Greene (Steve Buscemi, making the most of his pallid, rodent-like qualities). Naturally, the convicts take over the plane; meanwhile, on the ground, a U.S. marshal (John Cusack) and a DEA agent (Colm Meaney) try to figure out what to do. As is the postmodern way, the movie displays a self-consciously ironic awareness that its story and characters are really just excuses for a high-tech cinematic thrill ride. Best idea: the filmmakers persuaded the owners of the legendary Sands Hotel in Las Vegas to let them help out with the structure's demolition by crashing their plane into it. --Jim Emerson

 

8MM

Actors ‏ : ‎ Nicolas Cage, Chris Bauer, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Anthony Heald

Academy Award(r) winner Nicolas Cage stars with Joaquin Phoenix and Catherine Keener in an electrifying thriller from the writer of Seven. Directed by Joel Schumacher (The Client, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill), this dramatic story follows one man's obsessive search for the truth about a six-year-old crime and his ultimate discovery of the truth about himself. 

Kiss of Death 1995

 

Kiss of Death

Actors : David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt, Kathryn Erbe

A New York hoodlum leads the district attorney to a grinning, giggling gangster. Directed by Henry Hathaway.

Leaving Las Vegas 1995

 

Leaving Las Vegas

Actors : Nicolas Cage, Elisabeth Shue, Shashi Bhatia, Kim Adams, Valeria Golino

One of the most critically acclaimed films of 1995, this wrenchingly sad but extraordinarily moving drama provides an authentic, superbly acted portrait of two people whose lives intersect just as they've reached their lowest depths of despair. Ben (Nicolas Cage, in an Oscar-winning performance) is a former movie executive who's lost his wife and family in a sea of alcoholic self-destruction. He's come to Las Vegas literally to drink himself to death, and that's when he meets Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute who falls in love with him--and he with her--despite their mutual dead-end existence. They accept each other as they are, with no attempts by one to change the other, and this unconditional love turns Leaving Las Vegas into a somber yet quietly beautiful love story. Earning Oscar nominations for Best Director (Mike Figgis), Best Adapted Screenplay (Figgis, from John O'Brien's novel) and Best Actress (Shue), the film may strike some as relentlessly bleak and glacially paced, but attentive viewers will readily discover the richness of these tragic characters and the exceptional performances that bring them to life. (In a sad echo of his own fiction, novelist John O'Brien committed suicide while this film was in production.) The DVD features uncut, unrated footage that was not included in the film's theatrical release. --Jeff Shannon  

 

The Rock

Actors : Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, Michael Biehn, William Forsythe

The safety of San Francisco hangs in the balance when General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) and his renegade squad of US Marines take over the abandoned Alcatraz prison and threaten to launch a poison gas attack on the city if their demands are not met. The FBI's response is to call in Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), a nerdy weapons expert, and John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery), a former SAS man who has been in prison for the last 30 years, and send them together into the prison complex. Can this unlikely pairing prevent mass murder? The free world holds its breath.

Between his high-octane debut, Bad Boys, and 1998's wannabe blockbuster Armageddon, hotshot director Michael Bay forged his dubious reputation with this crowd-pleasing action extravaganza. In Rock, a psychotically disgruntled war hero (Ed Harris) seizes the island prison of Alcatraz and threatens to wage chemical warfare against nearby San Francisco unless the government publicly recognises the men who were killed under Harris's top-secret command. Nicolas Cage plays the biochemist who teams up with the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz (Sean Connery) in an attempt to foil Harris's terrorist scheme. As one might expect, what follows is an action-packed barrage of bullets, bodies, and climactic confrontations, replete with enough plot contrivances to give even the most jaded action fan cause for alarm. It's a load of hooey, but the cast is obviously having a grand old time, and there's enough wit to make the recycled action sequences tolerable. --Jeff Shannon