Sam Raimi clamps down his comic-book graphic style — Wellesian deep focus, tilted cameras, magnifying-glass closeups — on the Western genre. For him, a new frontier. Essentially he has worked out an exhaustive series of variations on the Main Street showdown: the two opponents lined up on a parallel visual plane at opposite sides of the screen; the opponents angled into screen space along lines of diminishing perspective; the progressively closer and closer shots of the gunmen in mounting anticipation of the signal to slap leather; the victor deceptively dropping to the street first and the vanquished waiting a couple of seconds before beginning to wobble; the discreet cut-away prior to the sound of the shots; etc. While all this is technically quite ingenious, not to mention industrious and exuberant and more, it is narratively quite monotonous. Not to mention preposterous to begin with. It's the bad idea of AGunfight (Kirk Douglas vs. Johnny Cash, for the price of admission) amplified to the proportions of the NFL playoffs: a single-elimination quick-draw tournament, with one literal survivor. The participation of Sharon Stone in such a contest needs, or at any rate gets, no more justification than the affirmative-action policy that also makes room for an Indian, a black, a foreigner, a pedophile, and a juvenile (Leonardo DiCaprio, enjoying himself immensely and contagiously). With Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd