Dennis Christopher 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

Although Six Feet Under often dwells on death -- such as this week's depiction of a scenic designer named Kevin Lamb (Dennis Christopher) who stages his lover's funeral as a miniature opera -- "Nobody Sleeps" also revolves around the birthday of the Fisher matriarch. Electrified by her daring, naughty new friend Bettina (Kathy Bates), Ruth (Frances Conroy) loosens up a little and actually has some fun on her special day. Part of that is thanks to Lisa (Lili Taylor), who, despite the objections of husband Nate (Peter Krause), manages to throw a lovely and somewhat rowdy party for her mother-in-law. Even David (Michael C. Hall) has fun, despite his continuing troubles with Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), which have been thrown into sharp relief by Kevin's elaborate tribute to his late partner. The only person to miss the festivities is Claire (Lauren Ambrose). She's busy having the night of her life getting drunk and talking trash with her pal Russell (Ben Foster), her art teacher Olivier (Peter MacDissi) and one of Olivier's big-wig artist friends. A drunken Nate, also enjoys some rambling conversation -- with the taunting specter of his stultified father (Richard Jenkins), whom Nate fears he's becoming. Originally broadcast March 23, 2003, on HBO, "Nobody Sleeps" marked season three, episode four of the made-for-cable drama. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Russian Francesca Zaborszin (Natalya Andreichenko) is convinced that the United States is responsible for her father's death. Crazed for revenge, she has devised a system that scrambles the navigational controls of commercial airliners, causing them to crash without warning. After two major air disasters in as many days, Capt. Gordon Pruett (Bruce Payne), a United States Air Force fighter pilot, is called into action. It is discovered that Francesca's secret control system is based in a Middle Eastern terrorist complex; Pruett is ordered to bomb the facilities before more airliners can crash (and more innocent lives are lost), but he finds himself unable to carry out his orders when he discovers another American pilot is being held hostage at the base. The supporting cast includes Corbin Bernsen and Dennis Christopher. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This science fiction adventure, set in the future, depicts an Earth so polluted that people must live underground to avoid the deadly air. It is the sequel to 1989's Circuitry Man. In this new world, people who once would have plugged into drugs for illicit fun, now turn on with computer chips. The evil Plughead, a biosynthetic man, has a revolutionary chip that allows humans to live a decade beyond normal life expectancy but to manufacture it they must torture innocent people until they die. Plughead has no problem with that; in fact, he rather enjoys it. Plughead's nemesis, Danner is also a biosynthetic man, but he is a good guy. FBI agent Kyle is using Danner to help her find Plughead. Together they travel to a barren desert in search of their foe. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Originally titled Stephen King's It, this two-part TV movie first aired on November 18 and 20, 1990. The story starts in Maine, where a small child is lured into the hands of what audiences everywhere can be assured is one mean clown. The 30-year struggle against an evil supernatural force that masquerades as a circus clown named Pennywise (Tim Curry) begins in 1960 and spans until 1990. Featured are a group of six young men and one young woman who call themselves "the lucky seven" and are the unfortunate targets of Pennywise from pre-adolescence into their mid-forties. The lucky seven emerge physically intact but emotionally scathed after their first battle with Pennywise -- who is a self-labeled "eater of worlds...and children." When Pennywise returns 30 years later, the seven are forced to remember their terrifying past and faced with the prospect of destroying him once and for all. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

A BBC production, Christabel was one of several British TV iniseries seen during the 1988-89 season of the PBS anthology series Masterpiece Theatre. Dennis Potter adapted the teleplay from Christabel Bielenberg's autobiography The Past is Myself. Elizabeth Hurley plays Christabel, a British woman married to a German lawyer. Part One of this four-part drama begins with the wedding in 1934; the couple settles in Berlin and raises a family. Four years later, the husband (Stephen Dillon), concerned over the day-to-day outrages committed by the Nazis, plans to move out of Germany, while Christabel, utterly disinterested in politics, wavers in her commitment to her husband's plans. In part two, Christabel, living in Europe at the outbreak of the war, worries about her parents in England, while her husband joins a pro-British organization and is eventually arrested for treason. Christabel was adapted for television by Dennis Potter, better known for his surrealistic British TV serials Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This Spanish horror movie steals ideas from at least three different major films including Alien, Predator, and The Andromeda Strain as it tells the story of three American teens on vacation in Spain who drive their RV into a tiny Spanish town where a large piece of Skylab has fallen and infected the town with a parasitic alien microbe that drives human beings insane and turns them into horrible mutants. At the same time, a scientist from NASA arrives to his agency's secret location beneath an ancient Spanish castle to meet with the member of the original team who survived the microbe. He shows the new scientist the ruined body of one of the men. During the examination, some of the dead man's blood gets on the survivor and suddenly he is infected. The scientist wants to use him to create a serum, but the victim panics and kills himself. The scientist finds the tourists, and then to test out his vaccine infects himself with the virus. He promptly orders the American military to fire-bomb the town so that none of the residents will escape and spread the horrible microbe. He then injects the youths with his serum and dies. Just before the military drops the deadly napalm, the youths in their RV manage to crash the blockades in the town. They make it to a gas station and there find themselves assaulted by a terrifying alien being who bursts from the chest of a dead attendant. The creature tries to scale the RV's windshield. Fortunately, the clever driver simply turns on his windshield wipers, knocks it to the ground and then runs it over several times. The survivors begin to celebrate, until they realize that their driver has a nose bleed. This means that he too has been infected and all is lost. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

A woman wearing a heavy veil shows up at the offices of the Blue Moon Detective Agency and hires David (Bruce Willis) and Maddie (Cybill Shepherd) to locate a recently paroled convict named Frank Harbert (Joel Polis). It seems that, years ago, Frank had horribly disfigured the veiled woman's face, and now she wants to find him--and marry him! Inevitably, Frank turns up dead, prompting the detectives to launch a second search for the killer. The episode climaxes with a profusion of people wearing black veils, in a chaotic mistaken-identity sequence reminiscent of The Pink Panther--or at the very least, the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

An impressive cast drives this early episode of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre. Dennis Christopher -- best known from the 1979 sleeper hit Breaking Away -- is Jack, a boy who acquires a handful of magic beans in exchange for his poor family's cow. His mother, Soap's Katherine Helmond, is furious and throws the beans into garden beside the house. However, the beans grow overnight into a magnificent beanstalk that reaches into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk only to find that it leads directly to the castle of a fierce yet wealthy giant. Elliot Gould and Jean Stapleton star as the giant and his equally gigantic wife. ~ Carrie Downes, All Movie Guide

This film, aired on television as 24 Hours of the Rebel, delves into the hero-worship aura that surrounded James Dean following his tragic death. This stars The Waltons' Richard Thomas (getting a break from his usual "goody-goody" roles), who, as character "Jimmy J," is stunned by Dean's death and gathers his friends in a drinking foray where the stupor comes more from their turbulent emotions than from the suds. Quite respected for its real-life glimpses, this film is the debut of Dennis Quaid. ~ All Movie Guide