Space Cowboys is a slice of cornball Americana that's so much fun you'll be tempted to stand up and salute. Director and co-star Clint Eastwood manages to turn what might have been ludicrous into a jubilant tribute to age and experience, and Space Cowboys succeeds as two movies in one-a comedy about retired pilots given one last shot at glory and an Apollo 13-like thriller with all the requisite heroics. With a dream cast of Hollywood vets playing old farts described in tabloids as "The Ripe Stuff", the movie jumps from a 1958 prologue (establishing their lost bid for space travel) to 40-plus years later, when the retired Air Force aces (Eastwood, James Garner, Donald Sutherland, Tommy Lee Jones) volunteer to rescue a falling Russian satellite that only Eastwood's character can repair. It turns out that Russkie bird is a Cold War leftover equipped with live nuclear warheads, and the movie revs up to a rousing climax in which our heroes prove their mettle. But first the comedy: watching these codgers struggle to pass NASA's physical tests is a total hoot, with running gags about wrinkles, dentures, and oysters for sagging libidos. (Sutherland is the scene-stealer, but they're all having a blast. ) Once in space, the movie gets down to business, and the visual-effects wizards at Industrial Light and Magic provide stunning vistas from Earth's orbit; a shot looking down at the boot of Italy is particularly beautiful. A sub-plot involving a weasely NASA administrator (James Cromwell) is rather perfunctory, but it hardly matters. Space Cowboys earns its wings, once again demonstrating Eastwood's comfort with any genre he chooses. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. [+]

Johnny English Johnny English, a spy spoof that skewers the genre with Rowan Atkinson's trademark brand of veddy-British slapstick. It's a bit half-baked as a wannabe franchise, but Atkinson's creation of a new screen persona is just promising enough to warrant a sequel, despite critics' complaints that Austin Powers had already exhausted the spy-spoof's potential. Poppycock! Atkinson's gift for physical and, in this case, even verbal humor will surely please his devoted fans, even when a rather tepidly comedic screenplay prevents the British funnyman from reaching new heights of absurdity. As bumbling superspy Johnny English, who gains top-level MI-7 clearance after inadvertently causing a colleague's demise, Atkinson breathes life into gags that are too familiar to earn such an amusing revival. With John Malkovich as a smarmy Frenchman determined to overthrow the British monarchy, and Natalie Imbruglia as Johnny's comely comrade-in-arms, this slight but enjoyable comedy gives Atkinson plenty of opportunity to mug it up as only he can. -Jeff Shannon Thunderbirds The deep love that young boys feel for planes, cars, and gadgets is the driving energy of Thunderbirds, a live-action movie based on the British puppet TV show of the 1960s. Bill Paxton (Near Dark, One False Move) plays Jeff Tracy, billionaire ex-astronaut, who's turned his family of heroic sons into a crack rescue squad, zooming to danger and saving people using super-sophisticated vehicles. The youngest boy (Brady Corbet) hasn't yet joined the team and resents every moment he's not in uniform-but he gets his chance when a malevolent villain called the Hood (Ben Kingsley, slumming a bit from Gandhi and Sexy Beast) traps the rest of the family on a crippled space station and turns the Thunderbird vehicles to his evil purposes. Expect bright colors, clumsy dialogue, and a less-than-thrilling plot, but many kids will enjoy the fantasy of a secret island, rocket ships, and flying cars. -Bret Fetzer.

The second sequel to the mould-making action film Die Hard brings Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) to New York City to face a better villain than in Die Hard 2. Played by Jeremy Irons, he's the brother of the Germanic terrorist-thief Alan Rickman played in the original film. But this bad guy has his sights set higher: on the Federal Reserve's cache of gold. As a distraction, he sets McClane running fool's errands all over New York-and eventually, McClane attracts an unintentional partner, a Harlem dry cleaner (Samuel L Jackson) with a chip on his shoulder. Some great action sequences, though they can't obscure the rather large plot holes in the film's final 45 minutes. -Marshall Fine.

Only Joel and Ethan Coen, masters of quirky and ultra-stylish genre subversion, would dare nick the plotline of Homer's Odyssey for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their comic picaresque saga about three cons on the run in 1930s Mississippi. Our wandering hero in this case is one Ulysses Everett McGill, a slick-tongued wise guy with a thing for hair pomade (George Clooney, blithely sending up his own dapper image) who talks his chain-gang buddies (Coen-movie regular John Turturro and newcomer Tim Blake Nelson) to light out after some buried loot he claims to know of. En route they come up against a prophetic blind man on a railroad truck, a burly one-eyed baddie (the ever-magnificent John Goodman), a trio of sexy singing ladies, a blues guitarist who's sold his soul to the devil, a brace of crooked politicos on the stump, a manic-depressive bank robber, and-well, you get the idea. Into this, their most relaxed film yet, the Coens have tossed a beguiling ragbag of inconsequential situations, a wealth of looping, left-field dialogue and a whole stash of gags both verbal and visual. O Brother (the title's lifted from Preston Sturges' classic 1941 comedy Sullivan's Travels) is furthermore graced with glowing, burnished photography from Roger Deakins and a masterly soundtrack from T-Bone Burnett that pays loving homage to American 30s folk-styles: blues, gospel, bluegrass, jazz and more. And just to prove that the brothers haven't lost their knack for bad-taste humour, we get a Ku Klux Klan rally choreographed like something between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley musical. -Philip KempOn the DVD: This two-disc set duplicates the original single-disc release of the film which included a handful of cast and crew interviews, and adds an additional disc with more interviews, two brief behind-the-scenes featurettes about the production design and the post-production digital colouring of the film, a couple of storyboard-to-scene comparisons and a music video of "Man of Constant Sorrow". There's also a 16-minute documentary to promote the companion Down from the Mountain concert. Frankly there's not a lot here to justify spreading it across two discs: a more pleasing not to say generous offering would have been to cram all these extras onto Disc 1 and give us Down from the Mountain as the second disc. -Mark Walker.

After building up the duo's popularity through popular recordings and several performances on Saturday Night Live, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd-as "legendary" Chicago blues brothers Jake and Elwood Blues-took their act to the big screen in this action-packed hit from 1980. As Jake and Elwood struggle to reunite their old band and save the Chicago orphanage where they were raised, they wreak enough good-natured havoc to attract the entire Cook County police force. The result is a big-budget stunt-fest on a scale rarely attempted before or since, including extended car chases that result in the wanton destruction of shopping malls and more police cars than you can count. Along the way there's plenty of music to punctuate the action, including performances by Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway and James Brown that are guaranteed to knock you out. As played with deadpan wit by Belushi and Aykroyd, the Blues Brothers are "on a mission from God", and that gives them a kind of reckless glee that keeps the movie from losing its comedic appeal. Otherwise, this might have been just a bloated marathon of mayhem that quickly wears out its welcome (which is how some critics described this film and its 1998 sequel). Keep an eye out for Steven Spielberg as the city clerk who stamps some crucial paperwork near the end of the film. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

There actually is no naked killer in Naked Killer but that's about all this mad, adults-only comic book action rollercoaster is missing. Flirty, feral Chingmy Yau gives an abusive jerk an impromptu vasectomy in front of cop Simon Yam, an impotent detective who vomits whenever he draws his gun. He's tracking a series of sex murders where all the male victims are missing their private organs when he falls in love with chief suspect Chingmy. She's subsequently recruited by the real killer, a hit-woman who targets rapists at large and practises on drooling sex-mad psychos chained up in the attic. When they finally head out for the real thing, they take out victims in a display of mid-air somersaults, cracking whips, flying ropes and flashing guns. This kind of foreplay attracts the lustful attentions of rival assassin Carrie Ng, a lesbian killer ready to abandon her purring sex kitten for the savage Chingmy. This is one of the most energetically gonzo Hong Kong logic-bombs ever made, a crazy melodrama that revels in absurd extravagance, sick humour (you may never eat link sausage again) and pure adrenaline driven displays of gymnastic action and orgiastic gunplay. Incoherence is a small price to pay for such guilty delights. -Sean Axmaker.