Angela Alvarado Movies

An aspiring writer faces up to the responsibilities of marriage and family in this romantic comedy from writer, director, and producer John Hughes. Despite the misgivings he pours out to best friend Davis McDonald (Alec Baldwin), Jake Briggs (Kevin Bacon) marries high-school sweetheart Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern). After an abortive attempt at graduate school in New Mexico, the couple settle in suburban Chicago. Jake fakes his way into a job as an advertising copywriter, while Kristy settles into her own corporate job. The couple face the typical ups and downs of any new marriage, especially after Davis visits with a bimbo on his arm, regaling his pal Jake with tales of the good life. A few years later, Kristy decides to stop taking her birth-control pills -- and tells Jake about it three months later. Plagued by doubts, unfulfilled ambitions, and images of a fantasy girl (Isabel Lorca) he once spotted in a club, Jake resists the idea of fatherhood. Then he finds out he has low sperm count and, his manhood thus challenged, lines up for fertility clinic-assisted stud duty. The birth doesn't go as smoothly as Jake expected, however, setting the stage for climactic realizations. Edie McClurg, who played the nosy school secretary in Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off, makes a cameo appearance as an officious neighbor. In addition, a who's who of other Hughes alums and Hollywood stars lend their faces and voices to a series of closing-credits shots in which each suggests a name for the titular baby. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

In this comedy/drama, teen-aged Tony (Bentley C. Mitchum) has never known who is father is. Together with his best buddies Peter and Susan, he tracks down the clues he has as well as he can. Meanwhile, the twin brother of a Spanish priest has set out from where he lives in order to find his son, whom he has never met. (The priest and his twin are played by Christopher Mitchum.) The two search parties meet in the village where the priest lives, giving rise to all sorts of misunderstandings - for instance, that the priest was the father, and not his twin brother, whose existence no one else knows about. This leads to all sorts of trouble for the priest from his diocesesan bishop (Ernest Borgnine) and other priests. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In Judgment Night, an action-packed thriller directed by Stephen Hopkins, a group of young middle-class men Emilio Estevez Cuba Gooding Jr. Jeremy Piven and Stephen Dorff on a night out with the boys take a disastrous wrong turn that leads to a run-in with a vicious street gang led by Fallon (Denis Leary). A cold, vicious and frightening criminal, Fallon and his band of thugs threaten to permanently silence the foursome after they witness a murder. ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide

James L. Brooks' showbiz comedy I'll Do Anything is "The Musical That Almost Was" (after test screenings Brooks removed all the musical numbers in the film, turning the film into a songless romantic comedy). Matt Hobbs (Nick Nolte) is a hardly working actor who finds himself raising his 6-year-old daughter Jeannie (Whittni Wright) after her mother Beth (Tracey Ullman) is sent away to prison. Since Matt now has to support a daughter, he has to develop more regular work habits. As a result, he takes a job as a chauffeur for a William Castle-inspired schlockmeister named Burke Adler (Albert Brooks). As Adler develops a relationship with divorced test-marketing researcher Nan Mulhanney (Julie Kavner), Matt becomes romantically attached to beautiful development executive Cathy Breslow (Joely Richardson). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Assigned the thankless task of teaching freshman English at a gang-infested Long Beach, CA high school, a 23-year-old teacher resorts to unconventional means of breaking through to her hardened students in director Richard LaGravenese's adaptation of Erin Gruwell's best-seller The Freedom Writer's Diaries: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. Her students had been written off, and her chances of succeeding scoffed at, but Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) wasn't about to go down without a fight. Long Beach is a place where a new war is waged with each passing day, and when the hardened students who walk those dangerous hallways sense an outsider attempting to understand their plight, their cynical resentment threatens to keep a deadly cycle in motion. Despite the initially hostile reaction she receives in the classroom, Gruwell uses the writings of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo to teach her students not only the basis of the English language, but compassion and tolerance as well. Later, when the time comes to tell their own tales in a project specially designed to explore the daily violence that the majority of students have grown numb to, the barriers that had once stood so strong gradually begin to crumble. When the only chance for survival is to befriend the person who was once your mortal enemy, the world is opened to a whole new realm of possibilities. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide