Barbara Bain Movies

Nick Turturro, Dennis Christopher, and Alexandra Paul star in director Rex Piano's tightly-wound thriller concerning a group of group of kidnappers who take over an abandoned hotel while forcing the daughter of a well-known software engineer to access crucial government data. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

James Coburn stars in this disappointing drama about a man who tracks the gun he believes killed his daughter. Living out his twilight years in a dreary, snowbound Vermont town, tragedy strikes when his beloved daughter (Virginia Madsen) returns home for the holidays. While out doing some last minute shopping, she is shot and killed, seemingly by a nameless local thug. Crushed by her tragic and sudden death Coburn's hard-working everyman falls to pieces and decides to set out on in search of the weapon that laid the final blow. Also in search of his estranged granddaughter, Coburn crisscrosses the country as he comes into contact with the various owners of the titular weapon, hearing each of their diverse stories. ~ Rachel Deahl, All Movie Guide

A middle-aged man finds love in the last place he was looking -- his psychiatrist's waiting room -- in this dark comedy drama. Alex (William H. Macy) is a man in his mid-forties who is having something of a midlife crisis; he's unhappy with his life; his marriage to Martha (Tracey Ullman) is going through a rough patch; he's worried about his six-year-old son, on whom he dotes; and he wishes he hadn't bucked under to the wishes of his domineering father Michael (Donald Sutherland) and started working in the family business. Making things even more problematic is the family's line of work -- Alex is a killer-for-hire. Alex feels as if he's about to unravel from stress when he begins seeing Josh (John Ritter), a psychiatrist. One day, while waiting for his session with Josh, Alex meets Sarah (Neve Campbell), a sweet, pretty, but severely neurotic young woman with an omnivorous sexual appetite. Alex and Sarah take an immediate liking to one another, and Alex begins to pursue a romance with her, though he knows an affair could create more problems than it solves, especially after Michael informs Alex that Josh is his next target. Panic marked the feature debut for writer/director Henry Bromell, who previously distinguished himself as a novelist and a television producer. The supporting cast includes Barbara Bain as Alex's mother, who helped get her husband started in the business. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Michael Di Jiacomo made his directorial debut with this allegory that opens with a 12-minute black-and-white prologue about three French filmmakers who encounter the tuba-playing Tollkeeper (Mickey Rooney) on a silent stretch between two ghost towns in the Utah desert. In NYC, an armed thief (John Turturro) holds up despairing cabdriver Henry (Tim Roth), who tells him to go ahead and pull the trigger. With the thief gone, Henry's next passengers are the three Frenchmen seen earlier, and he takes them into New England where he's so spellbound by the beautiful Fatima (Mili Avital) that he takes a job with her irritating mother in order to maintain his pursuit of Fatima. Shown at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

Making great fun of the '70s, this lively sci-fi comedy centers on a trio of time travellers who go into the past in hopes of retrieving the Constitution to celebrate America's 300th birthday. Unfortunately, the travelers end up in 1976 not 1776. The trouble is, they don't realize it. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this exploitation film, a group of violent neo-Nazis invade a small town, causing murder and destruction wherever they go. However, when the skinheads make the mistake of murdering a tough man's girlfriend, he sets out to avenge her death ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

Fed up with David's childish behavior, Maddie (Cybill Shepherd) bets him that he can't act in a mature manner throughout their next case. David (Bruce Willis) does his best, even though the case at hand--delivering the ransom money for a kidnapped concert pianist--offers ample temptation for him to cut up. By the time the situation is resolved, however, Maddie kind of misses the "old" David and would like to have him back. This is the episode with the infamous (and much-copied) "office limbo" scene. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Alien Attack is a jerry-built feature film comprised of two episodes from the TV sci-fi series Space: 1999. Martin Landau stars as John Koenig, commander of Moonbase Alpha, a futuristic research colony. Landau's then-wife Barbara Bain co-stars as the base's chief medical officer Dr. Helena Russell, while Barry Morse is on hand as Prof. Victor Bergman. The first half of Alien Attack consists of the inaugural Space 1999 episode "Breakaway," wherein a huge atomic-waste explosion hurls the moon-and of course Moonbase Alpha-out of the Earth's orbit (thereby establishing the series' premise). This episode is arbitrarily coupled with #22 in the series, "War Games"; in this one, Koenig and Russell plead with warmongering aliens Anthony Valentine and Isla Blair to spare Alpha from destruction. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Cosmic Princess is comprised of scenes from the syndicated TV series Space 1999. Most of this "TV movie" consists of the series' second-season opener, which introduced Maya (Catherine Schell), an extraterrestrial endowed with the ability to transform herself into any life form. Maya is the daughter of Mentor, an evil alien who tries to drain the minds of the Moonbase Alpha crew. Befriending the Earthlings (among them series regulars Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and Barry Morse), Maya helps them escape Mentor's clutches. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Space: 1999 was one of the more visible sci-fi disasters of early-'70s television, although it started out with some promising credentials. It was produced by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson, who had been responsible for several fondly remembered series such as Supercar, Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet & the Mysterons, and Thunderbirds, all built around marionettes and utilizing superb special effects and model work. The Andersons had also produced one intermittently engaging live-action series, UFO, and a fine feature film, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. The series starred Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, who were the closest thing to a power-couple among television actors in those days (from their work together on Mission: Impossible) and Barry Morse, an excellent Canadian actor. Moreover, the producers started with what, in those days, was an admirable and challenging goal -- to create a television series that tried to follow in the footsteps of 2001: A Space Odyssey (then less than a decade old), mixing lunar settings, interstellar adventure, and a profound sense of cosmic wonder. The story of Moonbase Alpha and its crew, blasted into deep space when the nuclear waste deposited on the moon propelled the satellite out of orbit, was a silly, but intriguing, one once the audience got past the notion of the moon moving fast enough to reach interstellar space. The series never found a balance between its cosmic consciousness and the need for a steady dose of action each week, and once it underwent a major retooling of its cast for the second season, the smell of broadcast death hung over Space: 1999 for the remainder of its run. The presence of the first episode, alas, shows the shortcomings of even the superior first season that followed: After a good thriller plot for the opener, comprised of straightforward action and presenting well-delineated characters, the show came to rely heavily on plots involving lots of pseudo-science, symbolic illusions, and alien machinations, and never properly interwove its action with its philosophical ponderings. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide