The Full Monty; Chariots of Fire; The Crying Game; Four Weddings and a Funeral (1981)

The Crying Game (1992, LIVE, R, $14.98), by contrast, already feels like a quintessentially early-'90s period piece. Still, it proved that if it's possible to manufacture a little British hit via marketing and a major gimmick (if you don't know by now, I'm not going to spoil it for you), the movie had better be good. Written and directed by Neil Jordan (who won an Oscar for his script), Crying is remarkably hard to pin down: It's an IRA war film; no, wait, it's a mystery; oops, it's a star-crossed love story; hold on, it's a thriller. Keeping the film on track is the troubled honesty of the central figure — Stephen Rea as an IRA gunman who finds himself emotionally in over his head with the girlfriend (Jaye Davidson) of a former hostage — even as the latter's performance looks increasingly like the rare instance of lightning captured in a bottle.

Two years later, Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, PolyGram, R, $14.95) didn't need a promo blitz to win over American audiences; besides being smartly acted and well written, this was a feel-good romance with big laughs (Rowan Atkinson as a vow-flubbing priest), big tears (John Hannah reading Auden's ''Funeral Blues'' over Simon Callow's casket), and a cute leading man (Hugh Grant, before Divine intervention). In fact, the film's weak link was its one concession to U.S. audiences — Andie MacDowell as Grant's love interest — while the closeness of its characters struck sparks of recognition in anyone who's had a circle of friends.

The Full Monty plays its cards with much less finesse: It's a blue-collar comedy with a big heart, as opposed to a yuppie comedy with good lines. But if Robert Carlyle sticks in your craw as a lovable Sheffield lug tryin' to ''dew raht'' by his young son (especially if you're still having nightmares about the actor's psychotic Begbie in Trainspotting), it's hard to dislike a movie about six average blokes working up the nerve to strip to Gary Glitter's ''Rock and Roll Part 2.'' Whenever Monty's calculation peers through — except for the beefcake and the black guy, all of the characters must overcome a Personal Travail before they can take their misbegotten Chippendales act to the stage — the day is saved by Mark Addy's corpulent and tartly realistic Dave. ''Antiwrinkle cream there may be,'' Dave says at one point, ''but anti-fat bastard cream there is not.'' Alone among the 1997 Best Picture nominees, Monty stakes its claim for fat bastards everywhere: Its triumph is that there's nothing Titanic about it at all. Monty: B Chariots: B+ Crying Game: A- Four Weddings: A