Richard Dysart Movies

Filmmaker David Lebrun casts his eye on the evolution of art, science, and the world around us in this fusion of documentary and experimental forms. Ernst Haeckel was a 19th Century biologist with a keen interest in art; he found a way to merge these two disciplines when he published the book Art Forms in Nature, in which he offered detailed sketches of nearly 4,000 different single-celled organisms. As Lebrun tells the story of Haeckel and his work, he meditates upon the vision shared by the artists and scientist and other great minds of the age, and uses Haeckel's images as a jumping off point for his own visual explorations. Proteus received its world premier at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This award winning made-for-cable movie tells the story of American President Harry S.Truman and his role in the second World War. Gary Sinese stars in the title role of this biographical account, which is based on Pulitzer Prize-winner David McCullough's book. The film chronicles Truman's rise from unknown farmer to infamous American President -- who is chiefly remembered for being the first to use the atomic bomb. Diana Scarwid stars as Truman's wife Bess. Nominated for many awards that year, the film won the Emmy for "Best Made-for-Television Movie." Gary Sinese won the "Best Actor" Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award for his impressive lead performance. ~ Bernadette McCallion, Rovi

The final installment in the Back to the Future trilogy picks up where the second film left off, but it casts off the dizzying time travel of the first two films for mostly routine comedy set in the Old West. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) receives a 70-year-old letter from his inventor friend, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who tells Marty that he has retreated a century in time to live out a relatively quiet life in the Old West. Doc Brown reveals that he hid his DeLorean car/time machine in an abandoned mine outside town, and when Marty does some research and discovers that the Doc died shortly after writing the letter, he decides to find the car, travel back in time, and warn the Doc about his demise. Meanwhile, the Doc, who has fallen in love with a local woman (Mary Steenburgen), realizes he can't hide in the past from the problems he has caused to the time flow in the previous two adventures. He reluctantly decides to return to the present with Marty, but first, they have to find a way to get the DeLorean up to time-travel velocity with a broken fuel line and no gasoline. ~ Don Kaye, Rovi

"Greed is Good." This is the credo of the aptly named Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), the antihero of Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Gekko, a high-rolling corporate raider, is idolized by young-and-hungry broker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen). Inveigling himself into Gekko's inner circle, Fox quickly learns to rape, murder and bury his sense of ethics. Only when Gekko's wheeling and dealing causes a near-tragedy on a personal level does Fox "reform"-though his means of destroying Gekko are every bit as underhanded as his previous activities on the trading floor. Director Stone, who cowrote Wall Street with Stanley Weiser, has claimed that the film was prompted by the callous treatment afforded his stockbroker father after 50 years in the business; this may be why the film's most compelling scenes are those between Bud Fox and his airline mechanic father (played by Charlie Sheen's real-life dad Martin). Ironically, Wall Street was released just before the October, 1987 stock market crash. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this 1986 made-for-television sequel to the 1971 film that won George C. Scott his only Academy Award, the acclaimed actor once again portrays General George S. Patton. While the original film dealt exclusively with the legendary military man's life during World War II, this follow-up picks up shortly after that war. After being seriously injured in an automobile accident, Patton lies in a hospital bed at death's door. As a team of doctor's struggle to save the General's life, he flashes back to the early years of his life, recounting his time spent fighting in the first World War. The Last Days of Patton also stars Kathryn Leigh Scott and Daniel Benzali. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi

Blood and Orchids was adapted from Norman Katkov from his own fact-based book. The scene is Hawaii, 1937. The wife (Madeline Stowe) of a naval officer (William Russ) is beaten nearly to death by her lover (Matt Salinger)--her husband's best friend. Four native Hawaiians find the woman and take her to the hospital, then flee out of fear of being blamed for the assault themselves. The aristocratic mother (Jane Alexander) of the beaten woman knows the truth, but, coldly insistent upon maintaining white supremacy on the islands, orders her daughter to claim that the Hawaiian boys had abused her. A trial follows, complicated by an honest police officer (Kris Kristofferson), who doesn't believe the victim's story. This two-part TV movie digresses from the source novel by hoking up a romance between the cop and the young wife (Sean Young) of the prosecuting attorney (Jose Ferrer). Blood and Orchids was originally telecast in February of 1986. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

John Schlesinger directed this fact-based drama - adapted from Robert Lindsay's bestseller of the same title -- about two Californians, friends since boyhood, who are caught selling government secrets to the Soviet Union. Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) is an all-American boy, studying for the priesthood in a seminary. But Boyce decides to drop out of school, and with the help of his father (Pat Hingle), a FBI agent, he gets a job working for the CIA in a message-routing center. While reading the messages, Boyce is shocked to learn that the CIA is involved in fixing Australian elections. Watching the Watergate hearings on television, he feels an ever-mounting sense of outrage at the arrogance of the U.S. government and decides to do something about it. Deciding to supply the CIA messages to the Russians, he enlists his childhood friend Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) to help him. Lee is to deliver the CIA secrets to a Russian operative (David Suchet) at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. But Lee is an unreliable drug dealer, and his sloppy spy trail leads the two old friends into more trouble than they bargained for. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

This is the true story of Rocky Dennis (Eric Stoltz), a personable young man suffering from "lionitis," a fatal disease which causes hideous facial disfigurement. The son of freewheeling biker Rusty Dennis (Cher), Rocky is accepted without question by his mom's boyfriends and cycle buddies, but treated with pity, condescension, and disgust by much of the outside world. The local high school principal tries to get Rocky classified as brain-damaged so he won't have to enroll the boy in his school, but Rusty fights for her son's rights with the ferocity of a mother lioness. Rocky makes friends easily both at school and at summer camp. He also falls in love with Diana (Laura Dern), a blind girl who cannot see his deformed countenance and is entranced by the boy's kindness and compassion. Now that he's got his own life in order, Rocky sets about to wean his chronically depressed mother from her drug habit. Mask is the sort of story that might have ending up wallowing in its own pathos had the acting, direction and scriptwriting (by Anna Hamilton Phelan) been anything less than very good. The film proved a much-needed financial success for director Peter Bogdanovich, though unfortunately it didn't come soon enough to stave off his declaring personal bankruptcy. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In yet another ostensible thriller about deadly germs wreaking havoc on human life and psyches, this is a frenetic, uneven story about germs going berserk in a sealed-off lab, giving rise to infected humans more berserk than the germs. The lab is secretly developing weapons of biological warfare, and when an accident occurs that immediately seals off the building, it looks as though some of the workers have died from their exposure to the invisible killers. But, lo and behold, these apparent corpses leap up from death and, rabidly homicidal, they can hardly wait to kill off any human in their vicinity. This makes the potential victims about as vicious as their attackers in their need to escape from room to room, turning the lab into a kind of asylum for the homicidally insane. No wonder that chief cop Cal Morse (Sam Waterston) has a job and a half on his hands -- made worse because his girlfriend (Kathleen Quinlan) is in there with the loonies. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

John Carpenter's The Thing is both a remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 film of the same name and a re-adaptation of the John W. Campbell Jr. story "Who Goes There?" on which it was based. Carpenter's film is more faithful to Campbell's story than Hawks' version and also substantially more reliant on special effects, provided in abundance by a team of over 40 technicians, including veteran creature-effects artists Rob Bottin and Stan Winston. The film opens enigmatically with a Siberian Husky running through the Antarctic tundra, chased by two men in a helicopter firing at it from above. Even after the dog finds shelter at an American research outpost, the men in the helicopter (Norwegians from an outpost nearby) land and keep shooting. One of the Norwegians drops a grenade and blows himself and the helicopter to pieces; the other is shot dead in the snow by Garry (Donald Moffat), the American outpost captain. American helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell, fresh from Carpenter's Escape From New York) and camp doctor Copper (Richard Dysart) fly off to find the Norwegian base and discover some pretty strange goings-on. The base is in ruins, and the only occupants are a man frozen to a chair (having cut his own throat) and the burned remains of what could be one man or several men. In a side room, Copper and MacReady find a coffin-like block of ice from which something has been recently cut. That night at the American base, the Husky changes into the Thing, and the Americans learn first-hand that the creature has the ability to mutate into anything it kills. For the rest of the film the men fight a losing (and very gory) battle against it, never knowing if one of their own dwindling number is the Thing in disguise. Though resurrected as a cult favorite, The Thing failed at the box office during its initial run, possibly because of its release just two weeks after Steven Spielberg's warmly received E.T.The Extra-Terrestrial. Along with Ridley Scott's futuristic Alien, The Thing helped stimulate a new wave of sci-fi horror films in which action and special effects wizardry were often seen as ends in themselves. ~ Anthony Reed, Rovi