Breakfast of Champions

(Miramax)

Alan Rudolph turned Kurt Vonnegut's clunky, preachy novel into a big, black comic strip of a movie that trains its heavy artillery at the assumptions of ordinary movies and at the comic-strip way most of us live our lives. Perhaps that's why it bombed in the theaters: it hit too close to home. Whatever, the outstanding cast -- Bruce Willis, Barbara Hershey, Lukas Haas, Nick Nolte, Glenne Headly, Omar Epps, and Albert Finney -- give their cardboard characters depth and ambiguity; and just the sight of Nolte running down the street in red lingerie is worth the price of a rental.