Scott Rabinowitz Movies

The sixth-season opener of Law & Order finds detective Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) teamed with a new partner, Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt). For their first assignment together, Briscoe and Curtis try to piece together the last hours in the life of a murdered girl, using an ATM machine film to determine what happened to the victim between her classroom and her music lesson. The results of the investigation lead to a revenge killing -- which many observers regard as "justice." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Two lonely adults in New York City engage in an unusual mating dance in the atmospheric comedy/drama Sometime in August. Marcia (Sylva Kelegian) has often been disappointed in love and has just gone through yet another painful breakup, while a ghost of her older self (Terry Keane) often visits to remind her of her failings. In hopes of making her life more interesting, she hires a man named Igor (Michael Medeiros) who poses as a private investigator. Marcia assumes another personality, which she wants Igor to follow. Soon Igor, pretending to be a detective, is trailing Marcia, who is pretending to be another woman. An attraction develops between the two, but will they ever be able to share their real selves with each other? Sometime in August had its premier at the 1999 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Don Cheadle makes his first series appearance as Paul Nathan, an overaged med student who chose to enter school only after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. During his first shift, Nathan plunges in to help the other staffers treat the victims of a Halloween party fire -- whereupon his colleagues notice that he doesn't react all that well to intense pressure. In other developments, Corday (Alex Kingston) and Romano (Paul McCrane) battle over a patient who may be facing an amputation; despite her recent erratic behavior, Weaver (Laura Innes) tries to save a baby who was all but killed in a home birth gone awry; and the romance between Chuny (Laura Ceron) and Kovac (Goran Visnjic) is sabotaged by his insatiable addiction to sex. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi