The Last of the Mohicans

This exciting mix of high adventure, romance and history lesson is wonderfully presented in a colossal, glossy package. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Hawkeye, the frontiersman raised by Mohicans who gets caught between two cultures when he falls for Cora (Madeleine Stowe), a British army officer's daughter. In the ensuing and, it must be said, often confusing bloody battles involving the French, the British and the Native Americans (the scalpings, by the way, are very realistic), he refuses to give up his adopted tribe's cause, or his love. Directed by Michael Mann, this is one of the few war movies that has proved more popular with women than men. It's an admirable effort, but Mann should also have paid more attention to his dialogue, which often sounds too contemporary for the 1750s. However, the well-staged action sequences and his grandiose sense of scale combine to produce an epic that harks back to the good old-fashioned adventure films of Hollywood's heyday.