One Night Stand MPAA Rating: R Entertainment: +1 1/2 Content: -3 1/2

Max Carlyle (Wesley Snipes) is a successful Hollywood director with a beautiful wife and two wonderful children. He travels to New York to visit an estranged homosexual friend (Robert Downey, Jr.) who has just been diagnosed with AIDS. During his stay in New York, he meets a woman (Nastassja Kinski) who relates to him on an artistic level, something his wife no longer does. After saving her from muggers, she invites him to her hotel room and they commit adultery. One year later, Max returns to New York to comfort his friend who is now dying. After the funeral, Max and his wife attend a party at which Max's one-time lover and her husband are also attending. During the course of the party, Max and his lover re-unite, and even stranger, Max's wife and the lover's husband have sex. Relationships rekindle and dissolve in this love-torn drama, and the end result is interesting and somewhat unexpected. ONE NIGHT STAND will draw moderate crowds at the box-office as Snipe's starpower and Downey's powerful performance keep this dud from being a bomb.

This film fails to demonstrate any redeeming qualities. At the heart of the movie is the idea that adultery is the most appropriate expression of love for someone, even if they're not your spouse. Simply put, infidelity is the sign of a dead marriage, and like all dead things, must be buried so that new life can begin -- with another, more appropriate person. In addition to this corrupt message, the movie contains five crude words and 27 obscenities. The Lord's name is taken in vain ten times, and one moderately violent scene features a knife mugging. The sex scenes are explicit with one becoming particularly severe as the woman coaches her partner to do certain things and responds with exclamations. Female breast nudity occurs several times, and sexually suggestive dialogue is also common. A gay man dying of AIDS is asked if he would like a priest, and he angrily replies, "I've seen a lot of people lose courage at the last moment. I'm not sorry; I'm just frightened." This movie is a one-nighter moviegoers will want to miss.

Preview Reviewer: Jason Shepherd
Distributor: Warner Bros., 4000 Warner Blvd., Burbank, CA 91522