Benjamin Mouton Movies

A touching and unusual love story, The Whole Wide World was based on a memoir by Novalyne Price Ellis, in which she recalled her brief romance with Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian and one of the finest and most prolific pulp writers of his day. In 1933, Novalyne Price (Renee Zellweger) is a pretty but shy Texas schoolteacher who would like to be a writer some day. A friend offers to introduce her to Howard (Vincent D'Onofrio), who writes broad, bold yarns about superhuman heroes and damsels in distress and has little patience for writers of more pretentious fiction. Novalyne likes Howard and he seems to like her, but she finds him a hard man to deal with. He lives in the world of his stories, and he devotes as much time as possible to his bedridden mother, which leaves him little time to pursue a romance. But when Howard discovers that another man has been courting Novalyne, he's heartbroken -- even if they didn't have a conventional romance, he felt there was a special emotional bond between them, and he hates to see it thrown away. Renee Zellweger and Vincent D'Onofrio both deliver fine performances and are a believable (if unconventional) romantic couple; D'Onofrio also co-produced. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Produced by the same team that bankrolled the hit The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, this violent domestic thriller is often compared to that mega-hit. Screenwriter Wesley Strick made his directorial debut with this script by Michael Auerbach. Vincent Spano and Moira Kelly are Russell and Dana Clifton, a successful but childless yuppie couple who adopt a mesmerizing young girl named Janie (Julia Devin). Janie has suicidal tendencies, however -- she walks out into crowded streets, keeps a butcher knife under her bed, and sometimes cuts herself. She also has psychotic white-trash parents, John and Leann Netherwood (Keith Carradine and Daryl Hannah). The Netherwoods are crooks forced to give up their daughter, but once released from jail, they are intent on getting her back. They kill an adoption agency worker and a police officer as part of their vendetta, terrorizing the suburban town as they target the Cliftons in their all-out war for the return of Janie. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi

A flustered Ross (George Clooney) covers for Greene (Anthony Edwards), who has called in sick so that he can spend some time with his wife, Jenn (Christine Harnos). Carol (Julianna Margulies) finds a kindred spirit in her newest patient, Jamie (Brigid Walsh), a suicidal rape victim. Benton (Eriq La Salle) reacts strangely when his mother (Beah Richards) is brought into the ER after injuring her ankle. And Carter (Noah Wyle) develops a crush on Lewis (Sherry Stringfield). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This cold, stylish erotic-thriller grossed over $100 million at the box-office despite vigorous protests at its depiction of gays and women. The shocking opening sequence features a graphic sexual encounter involving a rock-star bound with a white Hermes scarf by an unidentified blond woman. Despite the fact that the scene ends with a bloody icepick murder (horrifyingly realized by makeup artist Rob Bottin), Hermes scarves quickly sold out at stores nationwide. This seeming paradox is at the heart of the film's appeal, as it mixes perverse sexuality and erotic bloodshed in a manner common to European thrillers (director Paul Verhoeven had done it himself in 1979's marvelous De Vierde Man) but mostly taboo in America. The plot concerns Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), a successful bisexual mystery writer who may also be a ruthless murderer. Everyone close to Catherine dies, and troubled policeman Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) must find out why. In the process, Nick becomes sexually involved with both Catherine and police psychiatrist Beth Gardner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), while the bodies begin piling up and Catherine turns the cat-and-mouse game around on Nick. Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas -- who was paid $3 million for the script -- keep the tension ratcheted up throughout, even during the frequent sex scenes, which carry a violent edge reminiscent of the Italian thrillers of Dario Argento. The film's most notorious scene, a police interrogation in which Catherine makes drooling idiots out of her captors by revealing that she is not wearing underwear, became a cultural touchstone and was widely imitated and parodied. Sharon Stone, meanwhile, was embarrassed to the point that she claimed Verhoeven had aimed lights on strategic locations without her knowledge. George Dzundza and Dorothy Malone co-star. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Despite its occasional lapses into silly self-consciousness, Flatliners is one of the most intriguing and well-constructed supernatural thrillers of the 1990s. A group of brilliant medical students decide to literally play with life and death. They put themselves in suspended animation, electronically inducing a near-deathlike state and then pulling out of it at the last possible moment. Things get hairy when one of the students (Kiefer Sutherland) becomes obsessed with the notion of really dying, the better to experience the Afterlife before being revived--if he can be revived. In her first dramatic starring role (playing a sensitive young lady on a misguided guilt trip), Julia Roberts is very, very good--completely bereft of movie-star mannerisms. Audiences flocked to see Flatliners back in 1990 due to the highly publicized off-screen romance between Roberts and Sutherland. Oh, yes: Kevin Bacon and William Baldwin are in the picture, too. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this thriller, sisters Charlotte (Judith Ivey) and Lucy Bonnard (Jennifer Jason Leigh) reside in the Louisiana home left to them by their parents. As Charlotte cares for her troubled younger sister, the two make a living by renting out rooms in the huge, gloomy mansion. However, when Matt Rutledge (Eric Stoltz) comes to stay, he stumbles across a number of the Bonnards' dark secrets that were best left hidden. ~ Iotis Erlewine, Rovi