Event Horizon (1997)

Starring:

• Laurence Fishburne
• Sam Neill
• Kathleen Quinlan

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Paul W.S. Anderson will never win an Academy Award. Still, he's got a knack for mindless, lightweight horror and action with mainstream blockbuster-y tendancies. Event Horizon is easily his most uncompromising Hollywood film, a dark, unsettling work with some fairly graphic imagery (including a topless Sam Neill). It came out the year before the similarly plotted Sphere, but takes a much more horror-inclined approach (both seemingly influenced by the 1972 sci-fi drama Solaris). The title refers to the name of a space ship that jumps into another dimension and brings back something...evil. No, not Jesse Helms; something worse...barely. While Sam Neill starts out as the central figure in the story, it's Laurence Fishburne who ends up as the main "hero" we're rooting for. He's a typical no-nonsense ship captain, playing it straight and low-key, making his delivery of the best line of the film all the more hilarious: after watching a gore-laden video of what heppened to the ship's previous crew, he mutters, "We're leaving." Richard T. Jones plays crew member Cooper, who despite the racial odds, survives.

Soul Food (1997)

Starring:

• Vanessa Williams
• Vivica A. Fox
• Nia Long
• Michael Beach
• Mekhi Phifer
• Brandon Hammond
• Jeffrey D. Sams
• Gina Ravera
• Irma P. Hall
• Carl Wright
• Mel Jackso

Storyline

When Ahmad Simmons' (Brandon Hammond) diabetic grandmother, Josephine "Big Mama" Joseph (Irma P. Hall), falls into a coma during an operation to amputate her leg, it throws the Joseph family into chaos. Ahmad watches as his mother, Maxine (Vivica A. Fox), and aunts Teri (Vanessa L. Williams) and Tracy (Nia Long) struggle to adjust to the family matriarch's sudden absence, fall into old rivalries, share memories, and work to maintain the long-standing tradition of Sunday family dinners.