A baseball comedy and slob comedy rolled into one, this one actually works as entertainment, if not as a piece of cinematic mastery. James Gammon is the has-been manager hired to lead the last-place Cleveland Indians whose owner wants them to lose so she can sell them. But the team of has-beens and never-wases that he assembles (including Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen, and Wesley Snipes) develops a sense of pride and turns the team around. There's plenty of rowdy humor about sex, race, and whatever else they can make fun of. Look for Rene Russo (in her first film role) as Berenger's romantic interest; Snipes also had his first showy role as Willie Mays Hayes, the team's base-stealing ace. --Marshall Fine

Red Dawn opens with one of the most shocking scenes ever filmed; on a peaceful morning, through the windows of a high school classroom, students see paratroopers land on the varsity football field: the invasion of the United States has begun! As their town is overrun by foreign nationals, eight teenagers escape to the mountains. Taking the name of their high school football team, the Wolverines, they wage unremitting guerrilla warfare in defense of their parents, their friends and their country. Powerful, chilling and absolutely gripping, this outstanding film features some of today's most popular stars, including Patrick Swayze (Ghost), Charlie Sheen (Platoon), C. Thomas Howell (The Hitcher), Lea Thompson ("Caroline in the City"), Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing) and veteran actor Harry Dean Stanton (Alien). When it comes to thrilling entertainment, Red Dawn wins the war with a vengeance!

Platoon put writer-turned-director Oliver Stone on the Hollywood map; it is still his most acclaimed and effective film, probably because it is based on Stone's firsthand experience as an American soldier in Vietnam. Chris (Charlie Sheen) is an infantryman whose loyalty is tested by two superior officers: Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), a former hippie humanist who really cares about his men (this was a few years before he played Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ), and Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), a moody, macho soldier who may have gone over to the dark side. The personalities of the two sergeants correspond to their combat drugs of choice--pot for Elias and booze for Barnes. Stone has become known for his sledgehammer visual style, but in this film it seems perfectly appropriate. His violent and disorienting images have a terrifying immediacy, a you-are-there quality that gives you a sense of how things may have felt to an infantryman in the jungles of Vietnam. Platoon won Oscars for best picture and director. --Jim Emerson

Michael Douglas won an Oscar for perfectly embodying the Reagan-era credo that "greed is good." As a Donald Trump-like Wall Street raider aptly named Gordon Gecko (for his reptilian ability to attack corporate targets and swallow them whole), Douglas found a role tailor-made to his skill in portraying heartless men who've sacrificed humanity to power. He's a slick, seductive role model for the young ambitious Wall Street broker played by Charlie Sheen, who falls into Gecko's sphere of influence and instantly succumbs to the allure of risky deals and generous payoffs. With such perks as a high-rise apartment and women who love men for their money, Charlie's like a worm on Gecko's hook, blind to the corporate maneuvering that puts him at odds with his own father (played by Sheen's offscreen father, Martin). With his usual lack of subtlety, writer-director Oliver Stone drew from the brokering experience of his own father to tell this Faustian tale for the "me" decade, but the movie's sledgehammer style is undeniably effective. A cautionary warning that Stone delivers on highly entertaining terms, Wall Street grabs your attention while questioning the corrupted values of a system that worships profit at the cost of one's soul. --Jeff Shannon

John Cusack (Con Air) and Charlie Sheen (Major League) lead a "superb ensemble of actors" (Newsweek) delivering "striking performances" (The New York Times) in this "mesmerizing story" (Los Angeles Times) about the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal, certainly one of the saddest chapters in the annals of professional sports. Buck Weaver (Cusack) and Hap Felsch (Sheen) are young idealistic players with the Chicago White Sox, a pennant-winning team owned by Charles Comiskey – a penny-pinching, hands-on manager who underpays his players and treats them with disdain. And when gamblers and hustlers discover that Comiskey's demoralized players are ripe for a money-making scheme, one by one the team members agree to throw the World Series. But when the White Sox are defeated, a couple of sports writers smell a fix and a national scandal explodes, ripping the cover off America's favorite pastime.

Part of what was touted as a late-1980s revival of Westerns (and you can see how long that lasted), this good-looking, empty-brained film was like a spurs-and-chaps version of a Joel Schumacher movie, filled with pretty faces, prettier imagery, and absolutely no new ideas. The idiotically grinning Emilio Estevez is cast as Billy the Kid, who slowly accumulates a gang of Brat Pack buddies (Lou Diamond Phillips, Kiefer Sutherland, Dermot Mulroney) and fashions them into a group of male models with six-guns. The action is confused and the script is trite, though Terence Stamp is intriguing as the old reprobate who helps the gang get its act together. Followed by an even worse sequel. --Marshall Fine

Navy SEALs are a top antiterrorist unit that goes anywhere (SEa, Air, or Land) to fight for and protect the American Way of Life. When a SEAL team rescues American hostages in the Middle East, they discover the terrorists have a warehouse of deadly Stinger missles. Rather than risking his entire team, Lt. Curran (Michael Biehn) orders his men to leave without destroying the Stingers. But when civilian aircraft start getting shot down--and when one of Curran's men is killed by terrorists--the SEALs make it their personal business to track down and destroy the deadly missles--and the fanatics who want to use them. Made in the Top Gun mold, Navy SEALS features stock characters (including Charlie Sheen's loose cannon) and at times seems like a recruiting film for the SEAL program. But the action sequences are well done (especially the final battle in war-torn Beirut) and the special effects and cinematography are first-rate. There's also a certain gung-ho, testosterone-driven, adrenaline-junky sensibility that seems appropriate to the sort of impossible missions SEALs are asked to do. It's a good time, as long as you don't take it too seriously. --Geof Miller

Proving that a little success can be a dangerous thing, Emilio Estevez parlayed his early-'80s "brat-pack" fame into a dubious directorial career, beginning with 1986's Wisdom (in which Estevez costarred with then-fiancée Demi Moore), and resuming with this sophomore-effort 1990 comedy that benefits most from Emilio's teaming with brother Charlie Sheen. (Close your eyes and listen: their voices sound like their dad Martin Sheen after inhaling helium.) The brothers play a pair of garbage collectors who discover a body on their daily rounds, and the corpse draws them into a scheme involving corrupt politics, illegal hazardous-waste dumping, and a lovely neighbor (Leslie Hope) with connections to the dead guy. Add a wacko Vietnam vet (Keith David), an unsuspecting pizza deliverer (Dean Cameron), and a pair of overzealous cops, and you've got a comedy that lazily rambles from one lightweight scene to another. It's way too loose to have any noteworthy quality, but that's also part of the movie's low-brow appeal: Estevez and Sheen play well together, and this is just their way of goofing off with Hollywood money. With a sharper script and an experienced director, Men at Work could have paid off handsomely. As it is, these sibling antics are amiable enough, and the early-'90s fashion crimes (like Charlie's "dork knob" ponytail) offer an amusing diversion from the lamest gags. --Jeff Shannon

Hang on tight for non-stop action in this high-speed romantic action comedy starring Charlie Sheen and Kristy Swanson. When a falsely accused bank robber (Sheen) decides to escape, he grabs the nearest hostage- a billionaire's daughter (Swanson) with an ideal getaway car. Pursued by a multitude of police cars and an equal amount of outrageous media coverage, the unlikely twosome races toward the Mexican border and into unexpected romance.

Calling this 1996 science fiction thriller "a glorified B movie," isn't a criticism. Writer-director David Twohy managed to get interesting material on the screen despite a limited budget, and the film is just believable enough to be satisfying as a tale of paranoid conspiracy. If you can ignore the hokey parts and accept Charlie Sheen as noted radio astronomer Zane Ziminski, you'll get thoroughly involved when the reception of an alien radio signal leads him to Mexico and to a huge underground power plant operated by aliens bent on the eventual takeover of Earth. Ron Silver is suitably chilling as the astronomer's boss, whose real identity is more horrifying than Ziminski ever imagined. The underground alien lair is memorably creepy, and Twohy's film is just smart enough to qualify as more than a guilty pleasure. --Jeff Shannon