Nancy Schreiber Movies

When high-powered attorney Louise (Meg Ryan) learns that her husband, Ian (Timothy Hutton), plans to leave her after 13 years of marriage to run off with his twentysomething girlfriend, Sara (Kristen Bell), she impulsively decides to take drastic action. She ties up Ian in their country house, and refuses to let him go until they talk things through. Naturally, he resists, and things take an even worse turn for the couple when a young hooligan (Justin Long) hears Ian's cries for help, and decides to rob the couple blind instead of helping the hapless husband. Serious Moonlight was scripted by the late Adrienne Shelly. Shelly's husband, Andy Ostrow, who produced the film and has a small role in it, decided to go forward with the project, for which Shelly had been seeking a producer, after the actor-director's tragic death. Serious Moonlight marks the feature directorial debut of actor Cheryl Hines, who co-starred in Shelly's last directorial effort, Waitress. Several key crew members for Serious Moonlight -- including composer Andrew Hollander, casting directors Sunday Boling and Meg Morman, costume designer Ariyela Wald-Cohain, and line producer Brigitte Mueller previously -- worked with Shelly on Waitress. Serious Moonlight had its world premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, where it was shown in the Encounters section. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Another of the many "tough but troubled heroine" cable-TV dramatic series of the early 21st Century, In Plain Sight starred Mary McCormick as Mary Shannon, a no-nonsense US Marshal connected with a Federal Witness Relocation service known as WITSEC. It was Mary's job to "baby-sit" criminals and innocent bystanders who'd been given new identities and homes in exchange for courtroom testimony, and to keep her charges' whereabouts a secret from potential assassins. The pressures brought to bear on Mary during her working hours were exacerbated by the fact that she could not reveal the nature of her work to her friends or family members. Worse still, our heroine was saddled with an overgrown-delinquent sister named Brandi (Nichole Hilz) and a boozy, overbearing mom named Jinx (Lesley Ann Warren). Helping to get Molly over the rough spots were her boss Stan McQueen (Paul Ben-Victor), her partner and best friend Marshall Mann (Frederick Weller), and her lover Raphael (Cristian De La Fuente). Debuting with a special 76-minute episode on June 1, 2008, the sixty-minute In Plain Sight was seen by some 5 million viewers, a near-record for the USA network. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Zooey Deschanel, Aaron Stanford, Izabella Miko, and Christopher Lloyd star in director Michael Lehmann's comedy concerning a New Orleans cereal bar manager whose slacker lifestyle is turned upside down when a rival cereal shop threatens both his livelihood and his love life. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

While Jewish humor is a nearly inseparable part of the story of comedy in America, the contribution of Jewish women to laughter in the United States is less widely acknowledged, but filmmaker Rachel Talbot sets the record straight in this documentary. As four noted funny ladies -- Judy Gold, Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney, and Jessica Kirson -- chat about their craft over lunch at Katz's Delicatessen in New York City, they lend a framework to a celebration of iconic women in Jewish comedy and the influence of Jewish culture in American humor. Among the women chronicled in Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women are legendary musical comedy stars Molly Picon and Fanny Brice, saucy nightclub entertainer Sophie Tucker, pioneering standup comic Joan Rivers, Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Created with the support of the Jewish Women's Archive, Making Trouble premiered at the 2007 Silverdocs Film Festival, a competition founded by the American Film Institute and The Discovery Channel. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Three stories of how America's obsession with firearms impacts its citizens are explored in this independent drama. Carl Wilk (Donald Sutherland) runs a gun shop in Virginia that has been owned and operated by his family for generations. Carl sees the shop as his family's legacy without paying much mind to what happens with the weapons he sells. When his granddaughter Mary Ann (Linda Cardellini) needs money for college, Carl gives her a job in the store, and while she's hesitant at first, she becomes fascinated with the merchandise as time passes. On the West Side of Chicago, Carl Carter (Forest Whitaker) is the principal of a high school where violence has become a sad fact of life. As Carl and his wife, Sara (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon), fear for their young son as they worry he could either fall prey to the violence of their community or embrace it himself, Carl receives a severe emotional blow when Jay (Arlen Escarpeta), one of his most promising students, is discovered carrying a pistol. And in Oregon, Janet (Marcia Gay Harden) is a single mother still troubled by the death of her teenaged son three years before, who took his own life after killing a handful of his classmates in a violent incident at a high school. As Janet deals with sharp words from the community, many of whom believe she should be held responsible for her late son's actions, she is unsure how to handle her surviving son, David (Christopher Marquette), who is now of high-school age. American Gun was the first feature film for writer and director Aric Avelino. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The American film industry took it upon itself to act as a cheerleader for United States and Allied military interests during World War II, but Hollywood was initially reluctant to directly condemn Nazi anti-Semitism, and it wasn't until years after the war ended that American filmmakers began offering a realistic, dramatic look at the horrible toll of Hitler's "final solution." Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust is a documentary which examines how filmmakers reacted to German scapegoating of Jews before, during, and after the war, ranging from the boldness of Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Mortal Storm (both of which were produced before America entered the war) to more oblique statements during the war itself, and then finally leading to an honest portrayal of the full consequences of the Holocaust beginning in the '50s. Produced for the cable television network American Movie Classics, Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust was premiered at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

From a script by first-time screenwriter Benjamin Brand, filmmaker Greg Harrison helmed this fantastical, psychological drama, the follow-up to his 2000 Independent Spirit-award nominated debut, Groove. Courteney Cox Arquette (TV's Friends) stars as Sophie Jacobs, a photographer who is stricken with feelings of guilt and sadness when her boyfriend is murdered during a robbery. Haunted by a belief that she could have somehow prevented the death, Sophie soon begins to see things that ought not be there and is forced to question the reality around her. Also starring James LeGros and Anne Archer, November had its premiere at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

Celebrated as the "Greatest War Photographer in the World," the Hungarian-born Robert Capa (1913-1954) vividly recorded no fewer than five wars, beginning with the Spanish Civil War of 1936. It was during this conflict that Capa achieved fame with his heartbreaking Falling Soldier, capturing the death of a Spanish freedom fighter at the moment of the bullet's impact. Capa went on to photograph several of the major battles of WWII, including D-day (his coverage of this epochal event inspired the harrowing opening sequence of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan). His brilliance with the camera transformed Capa into an international celebrity, bringing him in close contact with several other notables, among them actress Ingrid Bergman, with whom he had a brief romance (Bergman's daughter Isabella Rosellini is among those interviewed in this documentary). It was during his coverage of the French-Indochina war of the early '50s that Capa was killed in action after he stepped on a land mine. First exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2003, the 90-minute Robert Capa: In Love and War made its American TV bow four months later on the PBS American Masters anthology. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this gritty drama, a woman discovers that her long-lost mother is now her partner in a cutthroat prison gang. Treasure (Yolonda Ross) is a young African-American woman who grew up without a mother and has been in trouble with the law most of her life after falling in with a rough-and-tumble street gang. Treasure has long been told that her mother, a hard-as-nails female criminal nicknamed "Brownie," died years ago, but one of Treasure's best friends and gang-sisters tells her about meeting a hard-core "lifer" named Brownie in an adult lockup, and Treasure wonders if she might be her mother. About to turn 21, Treasure goes out of her way to break enough rules to be sent to the State Facility for Women, where Brownie (Davenia McFadden) is also held. Treasure soon meets Brownie and discovers she is indeed her mother, but finds that the longtime prisoner would prefer to regard her as a gang ally than as a daughter. Treasure also learns that not everyone welcomes her presence in Brownie's gang, especially Kit (Rain Phoenix), a drug dealer who runs with Brownie and feels that her daughter is forcing her to divide her loyalties. Stranger Inside was directed and co-written by Cheryl Dunye, who previously made the controversial independent feminist satire The Watermelon Woman; the film was premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival prior to its telecast on the premium cable network HBO, which financed the project. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Noted indie filmmaker Beth B. directs this documentary about three Vietnam veterans travelling back to Indochina and confronting their pasts. With their grown family in tow, the three revisit cities, temples, villages, and jungle trails, an experience that proves to be difficult, though revelatory. Through one-on-one interviews, the veterans' children relate their resentment toward the war and the trauma that it inevitably wrought. This film was screened at the 2000 Rotterdam Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Actor Tom Hanks and producer-director Steven Spielberg, previously teamed for the epic WWII film Saving Private Ryan, again join forces for this two-hour ABC TV documentary celebrating the bravery and accomplishments of wartime combat photographers. Among those interviewed are Hollywood directors Richard Brooks and Russ Meyer, both of whom put in hard time filming the activities of American fighting men in Europe and the Pacific. Much of the footage shown herein -- the storming of Normandy beach on D-Day, the stomach-turning charnel of the Nazi death camps, the aerial shots of the first atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima -- is familiar, but compelling nonetheless. Hanks serves as narrator for most of the program, while historian Stephen Ambrose takes over for the final sequences. Written by film critic Richard Schickel, Shooting War originally (and significantly) aired on December 7, 2000. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Chief film critic of Variety and director of the acclaimed Visions of Light (1993), Todd McCarthy spins this love letter to tinseltown. Funded in part by the city of Los Angeles, the film charts Hollywood's rapid evolution from a sleepy town to a gleaming center of glamour in the 1950s to its slow decay during the 1970s. Pieced together from film clips, home movies, newsreel footage, and copious interviews from such figures as Charlton Heston, Robert Redford, Salma Hayek, and Steven Spielberg, this film is a sumptuously photographed, insightful look at Hollywood's legends and history. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide