Oliver Stone's ballad of the alliterative Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis), who crisscross the American Southwest on a Charles Starkweather-ish murder spree, but multiplied many times for purposes of "satire." Also part of the picture, also part of the "satire," is a tabloid TV show called American Maniacs, hosted by an Aussie-accented Steve Dunleavy soundalike (Robert Downey, Jr.), who helps to promote the pair into cult figures of indeterminate magnitude. The chief feature of the movie is nothing it has to say about American society and the proclivity therein for violence, but is rather the stylistic smoke screen that clouds the nothing it has to say. (Partly clouds, let's clarify. Patchily clouds. Unconcealingly clouds.) Stone throws in everything and the kitchen sink: willy-nilly alternations between color and black-and-white (grainy overexposed black-and-white as well as romantically backlit black-and-white); collage-like combinations of the two; color tints; fuzzy video (for family-life flashbacks presented in a television-sitcom format, complete with laugh track); animation; archival footage; nonsequential editing; tilted cameras (to the left, to the right, ticktock, ticktock); and much, much more. And over and over. Mix and match. Or mix and mismatch. No turn left un-Stoned. The effect of this cinematic cocktail shaker is like an extended music video or blue-jeans ad, and is even more like torture. Just the movie, in fact, to show to Malcolm McDowell with his eyelids pinned open during the deprogramming episode of A Clockwork Orange. With Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd