9 The Brady Bunch Movie No one could be less enthused than I at the prospect of seeing the cheeseball sitcoms of the '60s and '70s turned into feature films. But The Brady Bunch Movie is a wonderful surprise. Exuberantly witty, it re-creates the show's polyester suburban utopia down to the last inch of shag carpeting--and then puts the slyest of quote marks around the Bradys themselves, so that the audience's affectionate mockery of the family's too-good-to-be-true wholesomeness becomes a joke the movie is deviously in on. (Gary Cole doesn't just play Mike Brady--he deconstructs him.) As a satire of American teenagers raised on the casual surrealism of consumerist daydreams, The Brady Bunch Movie is hipper than Clueless and three times as funny.
10 Safe Todd Haynes, the most truly independent filmmaker in America, is in top form in this acerbic nightmare about a middle-American ditz (Julianne Moore) who finds that she's allergic to the pollution and plastic of modern life. That sounds like a dated theme, but the heart of the movie comes later, when Moore joins a self-help cult run by a "compassionate" guru (Peter Friedman) who's the most insidiously evil character I saw in 1995. The theme of Safe is that the cures we take are even worse than the diseases, an eerily ambiguous message that Haynes molds into a work of creepy beauty--a horror film of the spirit.
THE WORST
1 The Perez Family Members of the Cuban community protested the casting of Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, and Anjelica Huston as Cuban refugees. Actually, it's the Screen Actors Guild that should have protested. As Dottie, a.k.a. the earthy, noble spirit of the working class, Tomei shimmies and hootchie-coos and spills out of her dress like a peasant Charo. She steamrolls everyone in her path, including the audience, who, in Mira Nair's fiasco, are put through two hours of embarrassingly "colorful" ethnic drama.
2 Hackers Least riveting trend of the year: watching characters sit in front of computer terminals, typing. In this drab cyberfable, the tedium is compounded by the people doing the typing, a bunch of "hip" geeks who christen themselves with names like Cereal Killer. But have no fear--these hackers are saving the world! In their dreams.
3 Home for the Holidays Jodie Foster's second outing as a director suggests that she's better off staying in front of the camera. Home for the Holidays is about a family coming apart at Thanksgiving, but it's the movie that comes apart. Foster piles on one fractious, overstaged scene after another, and her supposed sensitivity to actors boils down to letting them do any damn thing they please (it's scary to watch Robert Downey Jr. without his leash).
4 Dangerous Minds Why did so many young viewers ßock to this sham classroom drama? Maybe because the "Gangsta's Paradise" video made it look like a movie costarring Michelle Pfeiffer and Coolio. Pfeiffer plays a novice teacher who brings the ennobling spirit of poetry to the inner city--i.e., she tosses candy bars at her delinquent students as if they were dolphins and informs them that Bob Dylan wrote a song about a drug dealer. The real dangerous minds are the ones that think up movies like this.
