That's the difference between "Butterfly Kiss" and an unregenerate piece of cheese like "Natural Born Killers" or a gender-politics bombthrower like "Thelma and Louise." It has no social agenda, which gives it its own bleak integrity. Like its heroines -- and lovers and madfolk the world over -- it's wholly occupied with chasing private demons and angels.
There are too many strong players in this film. Two legends M.Brando and Jack Nicholson are in, but there is also very interesting player in the same film. Let's have a look at him by three films. HARRY DEAN STANTON. The first one by Arthur Penn, 1976.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being focuses on Tomas (Daniel-Day Lewis), a Don Juanist terrified of commitment and a surgeon at a Prague hospital. He is trapped between his platonic and semi-erotic love of Teresa (Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche), a photographer and his wife and a erotic and semi-platonic love of Sabina (Lena Olin), a painter and his mistress.
Teresa is haunted by terrible nightmares and suicidal urges brought on by a love of Tomas clashing with a hatred of his "lightness" or the ability to view sex as entertainment and not commitment. Sabina, on the other hand, is having to deal with her very first tinges of jealousy as the only man she may have ever truly loved is now obviously in love with another woman.
As a necessary subtext, this occurs at the same time as the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union.
After The Last of the Mohicans, Mann returned to the crime genre with the masterful and mesmeric Heat. This is a moody, sonorous and elegiac saga, famous for the first screen pairing of Robert De Niro, as master thief Neil McCauley, and Al Pacino, as LA cop Vincent Hanna. It is a film laden with death and a sense of sad inevitability as the characters wander around as phantasmal presences, finding each other only to lose each other again. As a remake of his TV pilot L.A. Takedown, Heat is a mercurial exercise in cinematic form, shifting between the poles of elaborately choreographed action set-pieces to the long-lensed, tightly focused, intimate exchanges between couples. Personal dramas are played out in glass-walled houses, overlooking the sea or against the abstracted backdrops of flickering lights in cityscapes. Three action sequences structure the film - an ambush, a street battle and a spectacular fight-to-the-death in the film's climactic moments on an airplane runway. These experiments with the formal possibilities of the crime genre make Heat a high point in the cinema of Michael Mann.