Black Rain

A guilty pleasure if ever there was one, Black Rain is a ridiculously entertaining thriller by Ridley Scott (Alien), starring Michael Douglas as a tough New York cop who--along with his partner (Andy Garcia)--goes to Japan to deliver a local mobster. When the latter escapes, Douglas's brand of gonzo crime fighting rubs his Japanese hosts the wrong way. Slick, mechanistic, and absurd, the film is all surface action and attitude (not to mention Scott's incredibly busy, trademark art direction); and one can get lost in the sheer indulgence of it. However, if you can buy Douglas as an iconoclastic lawman, you can buy anything else here, including the notion of Kate Capshaw as a blonde escort highly desired by Japanese businessmen. --Tom Keogh

Cultures clash (and so, occasionally, do clichés) in this 1989 stylefest from director Ridley Scott. Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are New York cops who grab a Japanese mobster and take him back to Osaka--only to lose him there. When they're forced to track him down, Douglas's knuckles-and-know-how approach to crime-fighting puts him at odds with his Japanese handlers. Beside eschewing police brutality, their code of honor also induces guilt because Douglas has succumbed to the occasional shifty tendency in the past. Despite some strong action sequences and Scott's trademark look of neon reflected on wet streets, it begins to drag and ends up exactly where you expect it to--with Douglas chin-to-chin with chief bad guy Yusaku Matsuda. No one plays a flawed hero better than Douglas but this one tends to be by the numbers. --Marshall Fine