Barry Gifford Movies
Leading man Matt Dillon makes his directorial debut with the crime thriller City of Ghosts. Jimmy (Dillon) is a New York con man fleeing the U.S. for Bangkok in order to avoid an insurance scam investigation. He goes to Cambodia to meet up with his former business partner, Marvin (James Caan), to collect his half of the money. Along the way, he makes friends with local man, Sok (Sereyvuth Kem), and romances Sophie (Natascha McElhone). Also starring Gérard Depardieu and Stellan Skarsgård. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Matt Dillon, Natascha McElhone, (more)
Five years after the critical and commercial disappointment of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, director David Lynch returned to the big screen with this cryptic thriller about confused identities and erotic obsession. Fred (Bill Pullman) is an avant-garde jazz saxophonist who shares a luxurious but fashionably barren house with his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Fred suspects that Renee may be unfaithful to him, but realizes he has bigger things to worry about when a series of videotapes appear at his door that prove someone is watching his home from the outside and inside. When Renee is found murdered, Fred finds himself behind bars, but one morning Fred is no longer in his cell. He has seemingly been transformed into Pete Drayton (Balthazar Getty), a young auto mechanic who foolishly allowed himself to get involved with the wife of gangster Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia), a luscious blonde named Alice who looks exactly like Renee. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, (more)
The title character of this Alex de la Iglesia film made her first appearance in David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990) and was originally played by Isabella Rossellini. Rosie Perez takes over the role in this blend of black comedy, graphic sex and violence, voodoo, and weirdness. Perdita Durango is pure trash, a fact she establishes at the film's beginning. Her adventures begin when she hooks up with Romeo Dolorosa (Javier Bardem), a sleek, black-clad, sexually adventurous practitioner of Santeria who routinely kills, robs banks, and steals corpses from graves for his cannibalistic blood-soaked rituals. Santos (Don Stroud) is a pedophile and a crime boss. He hires Romeo to steal a truck filled with human fetuses that are slated to be used for cosmetic experiments. Romeo accepts but feels he must make a human sacrifice before he goes. This bothers Perdita not a bit and she even picks out a pair of blonde teens for the ritual killing. The two crooks kidnap the kids, ritually feather them, sexually abuse them, and are preparing to kill them when Romeo's cheated partner shows up with policemen. The crooks and their prey manage to escape, but the scheme to commandeer the truck gets botched and an ensuing shootout between Santos' men and DEA agents goes wrong. Santos loses many men and swears revenge upon Romeo and Perdita, who continue on their journey with their two doomed victims. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rosie Perez, Javier Bardem, (more)
Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch's surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage's Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern's Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta's thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, (more)
