Oliver Stone's blitz of professional football. Long (almost three hours long, almost JFK and Nixon long), loud, hyperbolic, frenetic, chaotic, trite, cynical, sentimental, sanctimonious. And ill-informed. Stone seems to believe that a touchdown counts seven points; that playoff stats are added on to regular-season totals; that both sides in a game may wear dark jerseys as long as one is black and the other blue; that football can be played in the dark. (Unless they do business differently in the fictitious AFFA.) Perhaps Stone can be exempted from the charge of triteness in the single instance of the third-string quarterback's weekly ritual of puking on the playing field. (Supply your own alternative charge.) Al Pacino's locker-room pep talk before the big playoff game might have been worth hearing if it were not so annoyingly shot and edited (Pacino's voice mismatched with his unmoving mouth, etc.) and if it were not two and a half hours into the film. Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, Cameron Diaz, LL Cool J, Jim Brown, Lawrence Taylor, James Woods. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd