Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) is the quintessential Wall Street shark, scoring killer deals by day and shallow escort sex by night. His round-the-clock routine of empty luxuries is disturbed one lonely Christmas Eve when a gun-packing punk (Don Cheadle)–perhaps an angel of mercy–responds to an altruistic gesture from Jack by giving him “a glimpse” of the life he could have had. Could have, that is, if he had married the girlfriend (Téa Leoni) he’d abandoned 13 years earlier, raised two adorable children, worked in his father-in-law’s retail tire outlet, and lived happily ever after in suburban New Jersey. Thrust into this “glimpse” of the path not taken, Jack’s a single-malt man in a lite-brew world, wondering if he’ll ever return to his “better” life of callous wealth and solitude–or if he even wants to.
Carp all you want about this derivative premise, with its marginal stereotypes and biased embrace of domestic bliss and dirty diapers. The simple fact is, The Family Man works like a charm. Under the assured direction of Brett Ratner (Rush Hour), this holiday crowd-pleaser offers comedy and chemistry in equal measure, making the hilarity of Jack’s predicament a smooth catalyst for that rarest of movie romances: the marital love story. Leoni is Cage’s perfect match as Jack’s idealized but imperfect wife, and the movie’s appeal largely derives from its awareness that any life has its pleasures and pains. While it only flirts with the dark desperation that makes It’s a Wonderful Life a classic predecessor, The Family Man is an irresistible what-if fantasy, and even its debatable ending rides on a wave of genuine warmth and sentiment. –Jeff Shannon
Kip Raines (Giovanni Ribisi) is a cocky young car thief working with a crew to steal 50 cars for a very bad man whose nickname is “The Carpenter.” Being young and cocky, Kip messes up, so it’s up to his big brother, Randall “Memphis” Raines (Nicolas Cage), to come out of car thief retirement and save him. With a cast that includes Robert Duvall, Angelina Jolie, Delroy Lindo, Cage, and Ribisi, it would be easy to say this story wastes all their talents–which it does, but that’s not the point. This is a Jerry Bruckheimer film. A good story and complex characters would only get in the way of the action scenes and slow the movie down. No, Gone in 60 Seconds (based on the cult 1974 film of the same name) is not about the stars as much as it’s about cars. Fast cars. Rare cars. Wrecked cars. All cars. Too bad director Dominic Sena (Kalifornia) doesn’t come across as more of a gearhead; he seems less interested in fast cars than fast cuts. But is this movie fun? Absolutely, and it’s fun because it’s so stupid. With pointless car chases and hackneyed dialogue in one of the most predictable plots of the year, Gone in 60 Seconds is a comic film that’s not quite a parody of itself, but darn close. –Andy Spletzer
Martin Scorsese comes home to the mean streets of New York with Bringing Out the Dead, the hyperkinetic tale of an ambulance driver (Nicolas Cage) on three sleep-deprived, adrenaline-fueled nights amongst the dead and dying of the city. Less a coherent narrative than a mood piece, the film is a welcome return to form for Scorsese, who takes Joe Connelly’s memoir and spins it into a slightly surreal, darkly comic tale of one man’s redemption. Frank Pierce (Cage) is a man who feels impotent in his job as an EMT–less a lifesaver, he’s more of a grief mop as he sardonically puts it, bearing witness to the pain and suffering of others. Haunted by the specter of a young homeless girl, something stirs in Frank when he meets Mary (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of a heart attack victim Frank attends to. In a world where human interaction usually means putting someone on a stretcher, or bantering frenetically with his coworkers, Frank seems headed for certain physical and nervous collapse.
This thoroughly unpleasant thriller from the hands of Joel Schumacher (Batman and Robin) offers very little in its lurid tour of snuff films and the seedy pornographic underworld. A wooden Nicolas Cage stars as a private detective hired by a tycoon’s widow, who discovers in her dead husband’s safe some 8mm footage of a young girl being sexually abused and slaughtered. Cage’s job is to determine the veracity of the film and to find out the girl’s identity, whether she be alive or dead. What could have been a taut, nerve-jangling thriller is instead a lumbering, overwrought but underwritten tale of vigilante justice. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker also penned the imaginative and compelling Seven, but you wouldn’t know it from this tired and monotonous script. Schumacher tries for echoes of both The Silence of the Lambs and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (which stars George C. Scott as a father trying to find his daughter in the seedy porn industry), but despite some slick camerawork, the film fails to draw the audience into either the mystery of the missing girl or Cage’s supposed internal conflicts. It’s not so much the unsavory subject matter as it is the sloppy and unimaginative filmmaking that makes the movie unbearable. Of the entire cast only Joaquin Phoenix, as a charismatic goth boy who works at an adult book store, comes away with a memorable performance. –Mark Englehart
Brian De Palma’s 1998 thriller is largely an exercise in airing out his orchestral, oversized visual style (think of his Blowout, Body Double, or Raising Cain) for the heck of it. The far-fetched story features Nicolas Cage as a crooked police detective attending a championship boxing match at which the Secretary of Defense is assassinated. The unfortunate Secretary’s right-hand man (Gary Sinise) happens to be Cage’s old friend, a fact that complicates the cop’s efforts to reconstruct the crime from conflicting accounts–a directorial strategy bearing similarities to Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The outrageousness of the scenario essentially gives De Palma permission to construct a baroque cathedral of spectacular camera stunts, which (he well knows) are inevitably more interesting than the hoary conspiracy plot. (The opening scene alone, which runs on for a number of minutes and consists of one, unbroken shot that moves in from the street, following Cage up and down stairs, and in and out of rooms until finally ending ringside at the match, is breathtaking.) The shifting points of view–based on the contradictory statements of witnesses–also give De Palma license to get creative with camera angles and scene rearrangements. The script bogs down in the third act, but De Palma is just revving up for a big, operatic finish that is absolutely gratuitous but undeniably impressive. Yes, it’s style over substance in Snake Eyes, but what style we’re talking about.–Tom Keogh 
Some critics complained that City of Angels could never compare to Wim Wenders’s exquisite German film Wings of Desire, which served as the later film’s primary inspiration. The better argument to make is that any such comparisons are beside the point, because Wings of Desire was a much more deeply poetic, artfully contemplative film, whereas City of Angels is an enchanting product of mainstream Hollywood. Meg Ryan stars as Dr. Maggie Rice, a heart surgeon who is grieving over a lost patient when an angel named Seth (Nicolas Cage) appears to comfort her. She can see him despite the “rule” that angels are invisible, and Seth’s love for Maggie forces him to choose between angelic immortality and a normal human existence on earth with her. Featuring heavenly roles for TV veterans Andre Braugher and Dennis Franz, the film liberally borrows imagery from Wings of Desire, but it also creates its own charming identity. Cage and Ryan give fine performances as lovers convinced they are soul mates, and although the plot relies on a last-minute twist that doesn’t quite work, this earnest love story struck a chord with audiences and proved to be one of the surprise hits of 1998. –Jeff Shannon
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
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 it 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 recognizes 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. If you’re ordering this movie on DVD, be careful with the volume knobs on your home-theater sound systems, because The Rock could cause partial hearing loss and structural damage to your home. –Jeff Shannon
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
This remake of a 1947 film noir casts David Caruso (freshly escaped from TV’s NYPD Blue) in the role originally played by Victor Mature. He plays Jimmy Kilmartin, a reformed criminal struggling to keep straight and keep his wife (Helen Hunt) from going back to the bottle. But a favor for his cousin lands him back in the clink, and when his wife dies, he comes out ready to make a deal with the D.A. He becomes an informant, joining the crew of Little Junior Brown (Nicolas Cage), a pumped-up, asthmatic psycho who weightlifts strippers for amusement. Eventually, Jimmy finds himself forced to keep his radar up for treachery from both the criminals he’s finking on and the cops he’s working for. This film, directed by Barbet Schroeder, didn’t do much business, despite a powerful but controlled performance by Caruso and a scarily splashy one by Cage. –Marshall Fine