Felicity Dean Movies

A group of trailblazing female musicians try to take another shot at success in this musical comedy-drama produced for the premium cable network HBO. In the 1940s, the Blonde Bombshells were the finest all-female jazz band in the U.K., playing hot swing music that helped raise England's spirits during the dark days of WWII. Fifty years later, Elizabeth (Judi Dench), one of the band's sax players, is trying to decide what to do with herself after the death of her husband. Pulling her axe out of mothballs, Elizabeth starts playing again, and after meeting Patrick (Ian Holm), the group's former manager (and drummer-in-drag), they decide to put the group back together for a reunion tour. But they soon discover that putting the band back on the road after over fifty years is no easy task. The Last of the Blonde Bombshells also stars Leslie Caron, Olympia Dukakis, and jazz vocalist Cleo Laine. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Adapted from what is arguably Jane Austen's most mature and subtlest novel, Persuasion is somewhat more nuanced and restrained than the more frequently adapted Emma and Pride and Prejudice. The protagonist, Anne (Amanda Root), is, by the conventions of society, considered an old maid when she remains unmarried at 27. However, a second chance arrives when her former love, Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds), returns from the Napoleonic Wars. The pair, who hardly speak throughout, are surrounded by the usual assortment of family members, friends, acquaintances, and distant relations, many of them what pass for stock characters in Austen novels. There's the social-climbing parent, the dour upper aristocrat, the scatterbrained younger relatives, and, of course, the apparently suitable suitor who turns out to be all wrong. Of course, Austen's protagonists are never dumb, but Anne, being somewhat older, is also a good deal wiser, and the characters around her accordingly take on greater dimension and subtlety. Naturally, this being an Austen story, all ends well, but the path is somewhat less straightforward than in other films adapted from her work. ~ Genevieve Williams, All Movie Guide

This period drama about the American Revolution has an overlay of rhetoric that thwarts the action, flattening out the story about a man and his loved ones caught up in the events of the time. Tom Dobb (Al Pacino) falls in love with Daisy McConnahay (Nastassja Kinski), an aristocrat who deserts her class to fight alongside the rebels. Tom teaches his son Ned (Dexter Fletcher) everything he needs to learn, though the growing rebellion consumes most of his attention. Eventually, the Redcoats are mowed down in large battle scenes, as the ragtag Colonialists go to war. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Meant to be a parody of the recent invasions of Grenada and the Falkland Islands, this comedy about the laid-back governor (Michael Caine) of "Cascara," a fictional British island somewhere in the Caribbean, and the international parade of characters who come through his territory is a pastiche without a clear center. Among these multinational characters are an American industrialist out to exploit the island's rich source of mineral water -- also the source of all the subsequent trouble on the island -- some inexplicable French-German visitors, a singing revolutionary with ties to Fidel Castro, and various parodies of Brit diplomats and politicians, Margaret Thatcher included. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The Blue Dress is a 70-minute romantic idyll which threatens to culminate in tragedy at any moment. Denholm Elliott plays a hard-bitten, middle-aged British journalist. Though he resists the sensation, Elliott falls in love with the much younger Felicity Dean. But Dean carries within her a secret that may destroy them both. Filmed for British television in 1983, The Blue Dress was given its American premiere two years later on cable's Arts & Entertainment network. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide