Men in Black Review

Barry Sonnenfeld moved the story from the scattered locations of early drafts to New York, reasoning that New Yorkers would shrug at a neighbor who behaves oddly, and called his take on Lowell Cunningham's comic The French Connection with aliens. Bo Welch built the agency's headquarters as a 1960s airport terminal, and Rick Baker's creatures, from coffee-drinking worms to a tiny pilot inside a human head, won the Oscar for makeup.

The pairing makes it. Tommy Lee Jones plays K with a bone-dry calm, as if first contact were paperwork, and Will Smith plays J as the wisecracking audience surrogate whose jokes bounce off Jones's stone face. Vincent D'Onofrio contorts his whole body to suggest a bug stuffed into a farmer's skin, and Danny Elfman's score keeps things jaunty.

The story is the weak spot. After a terrific first half of recruitment and orientation, the hunt for the galaxy is thin; the finale was rethought five months into the shoot and the plot simplified late in post, and it plays that way. At 98 minutes it never outstays its welcome. It was the third-highest-grossing film of 1997 and spawned three sequels.