Salvador may be Oliver_Stone's best film, even if it is one of his least known and commercially disappointing. Released in the same year as Stone's more acclaimed Platoon, Salvador takes a rare, politically volatile subject -- the U.S.-backed war in El Salvador -- and gives audiences a thrill-a-minute ride through the eyes of its unlikely protagonist, photographer Richard_Boyle (James_Woods). The reliable Woods is terrific, given room to roam by Stone in a complex and unforgiving role, and James_Belushi as his friend is a dramatic surprise. The film is compelling both as a semi-autobiographical account of a risk-taking, globe-trotting photojournalist (Stone wrote the screenplay with Boyle) and as a mesmerizing political horror story. It's comparable in some ways to Missing, as one of a few mainstream American films to examine the United States's Latin American foreign policy and its impact on peoples' lives. Salvador marked Stone as a political maverick with a dazzling directorial style, as kinetic and frenetic as it would be in his later work. Michael Betzold, Rovi

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