Robert Altman's "The Player" is one of the greatest movies ever made about movies, and it has one killer scene that just about sums up Hollywood in the 1990s: A script condemning capital punishment goes from an earnest indie project with no big names involved to a major starring vehicle for Julia Roberts, whose character is saved from the gas chamber at the very last moment by a figured played by Bruce Willis. Released in 1992, you'd think that mainstream studios would dispense with such cornball endings after that skewering, but they kept on using the death penalty as a dramatic hook right up to the end of the decade, from tear-jerkers like "Dead Man Walking" and "The Green Mile" to glossy legal thrillers such as "Primal Fear" and the Samuel L. Jackson-starring would-be Oscar contender "

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