Guarding Tess

Nicolas Cage stars in this drama-comedy about a Secret Service agent unable to get out of his assignment watching over an exasperating former first lady (Shirley MacLaine). The two get along like oil and water, but when MacLaine's bored widow ends up kidnapped, Cage's agent becomes a determined avenger. While the pairing of these two actors in a movie isn't something most audiences would ever have considered, that's what makes it so much fun. Cage and MacLaine are brilliantly focused in their respective parts, and filmmaker Hugh Wilson brings an unusually solid and urgent feeling to a story that might have become a dismissible light comedy in another director's hands. --Tom Keogh