Christine Lahti Movies

A doctor finds out the hard way that there's more to medicine than skill in the operating theater in this emotional drama. Jack McKee (William Hurt) is a gifted but arrogant surgeon who cares little about the emotional welfare of his patients and is little more than a benign stranger to his wife Anne (Christine Lahti) and his son Nicky (Charlie Korsmo). Jack has been suffering from a nagging cough for some time, and when he begins coughing up blood one morning, he finally allows another doctor to take a look at him. The doctor discovers that Jack has a malignant tumor in his throat that could rob him of the ability to speak, or even kill him. Suddenly, Jack is a patient instead of a doctor, and he learns first hand about the long stretches in the waiting room, the indignity of filling out pointless forms, and the callous attitude of the professional medical community. Jack also gets to know June (Elizabeth Perkins), a terminal cancer patient whose joyous embrace of life as her time draws to a close is an inspiration to him. Restored to health, Jack is determined to be a more caring healer and strives to be a better husband and father, but his new lease on life also earns him an enemy in fellow surgeon Murray (Mandy Patinkin), who wants Jack to lie under oath for him in a major malpractice case; and a new respect for Eli (Alan Arkin), an ear-nose-throat man he used to ridicule for his empathetic treatment of his patients. The Doctor was based on the memoir of real-life surgeon Ed Rosenbaum, entitled "A Taste of My Own Medicine." ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Written with heartbreaking attention to detail by Ara Watson and Sam Blackwell, No Place Like Home was one of the first TV movies to direct itself to the plight of the homeless. Jeff Daniels plays a Pittsburgh apartment superintendent and aspiring electrician who loses his job--and his home--when the apartment building burns to the ground. Daniels, his wife Christine Lahti, and his two children (Lantz Landry and Kyndra Joy Casper) move in with Daniels' brother Scott Marlowe, but the resultant family hostilities render the situation impossible. As the family takes the downward journey from welfare hotel to homeless shelter, Daniels searches in vain for an electrician's job, Lahti takes a few stints as a waitress, and son Lantz Landry gets involved with a drug dealer. The film offers little hope or comfort, nor any pat solutions to the ever-growing homeless dilemma. The final shot in No Place Like Home is a stunner, grimly evocative of King Vidor's more upbeat finale in 1928's The Crowd. Lee Grant, director of this numbingly realistic TV movie, had earlier directed a documentary on the same subject, Down and Out in America. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this family drama from director Sidney Lumet, Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play Arthur and Annie Pope, a pair of '60s radicals who have eluded the FBI for 16 years after bombing a napalm laboratory as a Vietnam War protest. This lifestyle involves continually moving their base of operations and establishing new identities, which is especially hard on their children, 18-year-old Danny (River Phoenix) and 10-year-old Harry (Jonas Abry), who can never amass a group of friends or an academic record. This last problem comes to the fore when they arrive in a New Jersey town where the high school music teacher (Ed Crowley) takes an interest in Danny's piano playing, encouraging him to apply early admission to Juilliard. Danny yearns to follow this dream, but knows that separating from his parents would be a permanent break -- the aging hippies rarely even see their own parents, and can never inform anyone where they've moved. Arthur can't stand the idea of breaking up the family unit, which has provided the support that's allowed him to tolerate life on the move, but Annie sees her own sacrificed dreams in her son's prodigious musical talents, and begins pressuring Arthur to grant the boy his independence. Complicating factors, Danny has fallen in love with the daughter of his music teacher (Martha Plimpton), but can't allow himself to get too close to her, because he may have to leave again at any moment. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide

As the brainchild of writer-director-producer Donald Wrye, the 14 1/2 hour ABC movie event Amerika marked one of the most expensive and controversial miniseries in the history of prime time television when it bowed over the course of seven nights in February of 1987. Regarded as something of a conservative counterpoint to Nicholas Meyer's The Day After (which screened on ABC, four years prior and allegedly demonstrated leftwing bias - prompting very outspoken criticisms from Republican pundit Ben Stein), this $40 million production imagines a dystopian future set in the late 1990s. When the drama opens in May of 1997, the Russians have effectively won the Cold War by wresting control over the United States, with the backing of a U.N. Peacekeeping Force. Although the initial takeover was not annihilative or even apparently violent, the consequences are overwhelming; a puppet leader holds court in the Oval Office, the American economy has fallen to pieces with Midwesterners lining up for vegetables, and gulag prisons are scattered across the land; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of refugees have hit the countryside and wander aimlessly. The majority of the action unfurls in a rural Nebraska community, where onetime antiwar protester and presidential candidate Devin Milford (Kris Kristofferson) has just been released from a gulag, and now discovers his family farm being whittled away by the Russians. Meanwhile, his childhood friend Peter Bradford has somehow landed a position in the government hierarchy and finds himself being drawn in more deeply. Across the land, Russian stormtroopers engage in acts of violent intimidation, such as burning farmhouses and brainwashing abductees, while the Russian occupiers systematically maneuver on the political front to bring the once-powerful republic tumbling down. The supporting cast includes Christine Lahti, Wendy Hughes, Sam Neill, Armin Mueller-Stahl and many others; the title, of course, was intended to reflect "America" as modified to a slightly more Russian spelling. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

A timid aerobics instructor learns that her new best friend is also her husband's mistress in this domestic drama starring Mary Tyler Moore. Suffering from a bit of empty-nest syndrome as her children pass through adolescence, indecisive homemaker Holly Davis (Moore) reluctantly accepts a part-time gig teaching exercise classes for frazzled gym owner Helga (Salome Jens). There, she meets struggling, independent-minded broadcast journalist Sandy Dunlap (Christine Lahti) and they quickly become thick as thieves. As it turns out, though, Sandy is actually an adulteress -- she's engaged in a clandestine affair with Chip (Ted Danson), Holly's seismologist husband. Chip loves both women and wants to continue seeing Sandy, but she breaks things off with him now that she knows his wife. When Chip dies suddenly, Sandy helps Holly cope and finances Phase Two of her life as the new owner of Helga's aerobics center. Unfortunately, though, evidence of Chip's infidelity lies around just waiting to be discovered. In the end, it's up to Chip's friend Harry Crandall (Sam Waterson) -- who's been nursing a crush on Holly for years -- to help a pregnant Sandy and a heartbroken Holly come to terms with their complicated friendship. Just Between Friends marked the directorial debut of screenwriter Allan Burns. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

In this made-for-TV movie, a group of lonely, unattached people meet up in a local bar in search of love and friendship. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

Tommy Lee Jones won an Emmy for his searing performance as wanton killer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song. The film covers the last nine months of Gilmore's life, beginning with his release from prison in 1976. Linking up with teen-age divorcee Nicole Baker (Rosanna Arquette), Gilmore makes a half-hearted effort to go straight, but ends up embarking on a robbery spree that culminates in two cold-blooded murders. Arrested and sentenced to be executed, Gilmore insists upon being put to death (Utah law required a firing squad for this); he spends his final days as a poster boy for anti-death penalty activists and as a "client" for an entrepreneur (Steven Keats) who wants to make a film of Gilmore's life. Adapted by Norman Mailer from his own book, The Executioner's Song originally aired in two parts on November 28 and 29, 1982. It has since been boiled down to a 97-minute theatrical film for European consumption, with additional scenes of violence and nudity. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The made-for-television movie The Henderson Monster is about a genetic scientist who experiments with the creation of new life in a small university town. After he is discovered by the community, the town is gripped by an ethical debate. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide

Dr. Scorpion (Roscoe Lee Browne) is a megalomaniac genius, who plans to rule the world with or without the world's cooperation. His chief nemesis is marine biologist Jonathan Shackleford (Nick Mancuso), an ex-spy better known as "Shack". Shack was also the title of the TV series for which the filmed-in-Hawaii Dr. Scorpion was the pilot. Producer Stephen Cannell lost interest in the project almost from the beginning, thanks to the network-imposed casting of the Nick Mancuso in the leading role (Mancuso agreed that he was wrong for the part, but a buck's a buck). Still, the notion of a Hawaii-based spy appealed to Cannell, so much so that he later revitalized the notion as the moderately successful TV series Stingray. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Lee Strasberg stars in this made-for-TV movie as a widowed senior citizen who suffers a stroke. Recovering in the hospital, Strasberg wants to return to his home, but refuses to have a housekeeper out of fear of being considered helpless. The notion of moving in with his grown children is also vetoed--by the children themselves, who chafed under Strasberg's arrogance and philandering when they were growing up and now prefer that he'd live elsewhere. The only alternative left is a nursing home, and Strasberg would rather die than resort to that. The Last Tenant was written by ABC Theatre Award-winner George Rubino. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide