Michelle Clunie Movies

Don't you just hate days that start like this? While working on a patient with a grotesquely swollen tongue (and, as we will soon learn, several other nauseating symptoms), House (Hugh Laurie) is confronted by Jack Moriarty (Elias Koteas), the husband of one of his previous patients. Before anyone quite knows what's happening, Moriarty pulls out a gun and shoots House--and the motivation for this horrifying act turns out to be almost as perplexing as the act itself! Despite the blood and the pain, House insists upon continuing the job at hand, while his behavior takes a more bizarre turn than ever before. Before long, House finds it impossible to separate reality from fantasy...and that's the state of affairs as this final episode of House's second season reaches its cliffhanger climax. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Damaged Care is fact-based drama about the managed care industry. It originally aired on Showtime. Laura Dern co-produced and stars in the film as Dr. Linda Peeno, who gives up her career after earning a medical degree, so that she can take care of her family. Her husband, Doug (James LeGros), is a successful OB/GYN. In 1987, when their children (from previous marriages) have gotten a little older, Linda decides to return to work, and gets a job as a medical reviewer at Humana Health Care. Patient claims that aren't approved by the UR (utilization review) nurses are forwarded to the doctors on the medical review team, who, Linda learns, are expected to rubber-stamp the UR nurses' decisions. Every decision Linda makes to cover a patient's care is questioned, sometimes angrily. The head of the UR department, Cheryl Griffith (Regina King) befriends Linda, and shares her unhappiness with the system. Linda has a crisis of conscience when she gets a call about an emergency heart transplant that needs immediate approval. Pressured by the company, she finds an out in the employer's healthcare booklet, and denies the claim. The patient dies. Eventually, Linda quits Humana (angering Doug), and Cheryl gets her a job at a smaller, non-profit company, Brothers Managed Care. The system is pretty much the same, though, and Linda comes into conflict with the cost-conscious head of the UR nurses, Gemma Coombs (Michelle Clunie). When a nurse (Suki Kaiser) is stricken with a series of crippling strokes, Linda takes a stand against the company to get her the treatment she needs. Eventually, Dr. Linda Peeno gets out of the system, and becomes an outspoken critic of the abuses of the health care industry. Dern's mother, Diane Ladd, and Adam Arkin also appear in the film. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

To prove to Mr. Feeny (William Daniels) that he has good business sense, Cory (Ben Savage) takes advantage of Feeny's absence to transform his teacher's home into a Bed & Breakfast. As for Feeny, he and Eric (Will Friedle) unexpectedly become close friends while vacationing at a hotel; in fact, there's a fascinating role reversal when Eric provides comfort and advice to an unlucky-in-love Feeny! And incidentally, where did Shawn (Rider Strong) learn how to speak Dutch? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Near the end of The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey, in his Oscar-winning performance as crippled con man Roger "Verbal" Kint, says, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." This may be the key line in this story; the farther along the movie goes, the more one realizes that not everything is quite what it seems, and what began as a conventional whodunit turns into something quite different. A massive explosion rips through a ship in a San Pedro, CA, harbor, leaving 27 men dead, the lone survivor horribly burned, and 91 million dollars' worth of cocaine, believed to be on board, mysteriously missing. Police detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) soon brings in the only witness and key suspect, "Verbal" Kint. Kint's nickname stems from his inability to keep his mouth shut, and he recounts the events that led to the disaster. Five days earlier, a truckload of gun parts was hijacked in Queens, NY, and five men were brought in as suspects: Kint, hot-headed hipster thief McManus (Stephen Baldwin), ill-tempered thug Hockney (Kevin Pollak), flashy wise guy Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), and Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a cop gone bad now trying to go straight in the restaurant business. While in stir, someone suggests that they should pull a job together, and Kint hatches a plan for a simple and lucrative jewel heist. Despite Keaton's misgivings, the five men pull off the robbery without a hitch and fly to Los Angeles to fence the loot. Their customer asks if they'd be interested in pulling a quick job while out West; the men agree, but the robbery goes horribly wrong and they soon find themselves visited by Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), who represents a criminal mastermind named Keyser Soze. Soze's violent reputation is so infamous that he's said to have responded to a threat to murder his family by killing them himself, just to prove that he feared no one. When Kobayashi passes along a heist proposed by Soze that sounds like suicide, the men feel that they have little choice but to agree. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Chapter nine in the Friday the 13th series finds supernatural psycho Jason Voorhees returning from the dead to possess the body of a medical coroner. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide