On the big screen in India after a four-year tryst with the censor board is Quentin Tarantino's ultraviolent cult classic, Pulp Fiction.

Tarantino has turned movie making on its head. Devoid of the conventional beginning and end, the film instead has about five loosely related stories occurring in the seamier side of Los Angeles at around the same time. The characters are an assortment of mobsters, hitmen, hoodlums and drug peddlers, who cross over from one story to the other.

John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson are absolutely brilliant as two underworld hitmen who work for mob boss Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames).

Travolta climbed Hollywood hustings with his role as the cool and coked-out hitman while Jackson is his Bible-spouting partner in crime who wants out.

In a parallel story, Bruce Willis plays a boxer on the run from Rhames after he wins a fight he's paid to lose. Meanwhile, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer play a Bonnie and Clyde couple who hold up a restaurant, whereTravolta and Jackson are diners. Uma Thurman is a mob moll while Tarantino, Harvey Kietel and Christopher Walken pop in for cameos in this fabulous film.

The censors seemed to have spared the film's disturbing Tarantino-esque sequences which are in direct proportion to the pungent language. Blood and brains splatter, people are shot at the slightest pretext, there's a homosexual rape and graphic scenes of drug abuse.
Playing at Sterling

Wag the Dog

`A comedy about truth, justice and other special effects.' The catchline says it all. In a film that has the most uncanny parallels with reality, Wag the Dog hit US screens months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal airbursted over the White House.

A teenager claims that the president groped her in the Oval Office. Before this can do real damage, the White House hires ace spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) for firefighting operations.

In an attempt to run the teenager off the front pages, DeNiro enlists crooked Hollywood directorStanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) and his entourage to create a diversion.

In the best traditions of the 1970s Capricorn One where a Mars landing is faked in a studio, Hoffman shoots a war outdoors. But instead of lobbing cruise missiles at rogue terrorists, Hoffman's plot has US forces being sent into tiny Albania which possesses a nuclear device. The newspapers, mass media and American public are in a feeding frenzy. There's an added Saving Private Ryan angle to it when a lone US soldier supposedly left behind becomes a cult hero. An enjoyable commentary by director Barry Levinson on the blurred lines between media, politics and showbiz.
Playing at Sterling

The Avengers

A cocktail of the Batman and James Bond genres, The Avengers is part of Hollywood's spree of recycling 1960s TV classics. (Remember Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible?)

The film is set in 1999, where bowler hat and brolly wielding British secret agent Jonathan Steed, stiffer-lipped than Bond, is pitted against the actorwho first played Her Majesty's Secret Agent.

Sean Connery is Sir August De Wynter, a megalomanical scientist straight out of a Bond caper, who has perfected a weather controlling weapon. Predictably like zillions of super villains before him (the latest being Arnold Schwarznegger as Mr Freeze in the forgettable Batman and Robin), Connery threatens to freeze London if he's not paid a ransom. So Ralph Fiennes teams up with scientist Emma Peel (Uma Thurman) to foil Wynter.

The usual special effects, car chases, jet powered bumble bees and landmark destruction spree: Big Ben blown up and Lord Nelson toppled off his perch in Trafalgar square. Ditto for this star-studded movie which collapses even before it starts. The otherwise brilliant Fiennes (pronounced Rafe Fines) is a cardboard cutout in the film obviously aimed at the box-office than at the Oscars. Connery in his maiden ouvere as villain is unable to sustain this insipid fare. The stunning Uma Thurman, one of the saving graces of Batman and Robin, iswasted even in a double role.

Jibes at the English gentleman, tea and weather jokes are flogged to death. Amazingly, in all the glimpses of streets, buildings and countryside, people are totally absent.
Playing at The Regal