Lawrence Trilling Movies

Billed as "a disturbingly perfect drama," Nip/Tuck is set in south Florida, where doctors Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) have built their own medical practice and are enjoying great success as the premier plastic surgeons of the area. Though physical perfection is their business, their private lives are far from flawless. Christian is an unabashed womanizer and uses sex to fill the void left by his abusive father, while Sean continuously tries to live up to the morally righteous standard he has set for himself only to fall repeatedly into personal hypocrisy and guilt. He certainly does so with Julia (Joely Richardson), his wife -- their seemingly ideal marriage is perilously close to crumbling beneath their feet and both constantly look outside of one another for what is missing from their lives. Though Christian catches a lot of flack from the McNamaras for his playboy ways -- which are, to be sure, emotionally abusive -- Sean and Julia are hardly innocent. Sean flirted with the idea of an affair when Dr. Grace Santiago (Valerie Cruz) joined McNamara-Troy and actually realized one with a patient of his; Julia, meanwhile, is harboring the secret of Matt's paternity. Matt, the McNamara's teenaged son, is carrying a burden of his own -- in addition to dealing with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, Matt was involved in a hit-and-run car accident and has been hiding his role in it ever since. Tying everything together is the string of patients filing into McNamara-Troy each day, whose physical imperfections more often than not force Sean and Christian to take a hard look at their internal ugliness. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

Convinced that Alliance counterintelligence head Ariana Kane (Faye Dunaway) plans to frame him on a murder-extortion rap, Jack (Victor Garber) is forced to rely upon Irina (Lena Olin) to turn the tables on Kane and clear his name. Meanwhile, while on assignment in France to retrieve the prototype for the Triad's missile-guidance system, Sydney (Jennifer Garner) and Vaughn (Michael Vartan) decide to take time out for a romantic rendezvous. Their passion is rudely interrupted by two of Ariana Kane's henchmen, who know that Vaughn is a CIA operative -- and intend to kill him on the spot. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Glenne Headly makes her first appearance as Karen Stottlemeyer, the woman whom Captain Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) disdainfully dismisses as "my hippie wife." While filming a documentary about Miles Holling (Patrick Cranshaw), the world's oldest man, Karen is thrown for a loss when Holling dies in bed. Though her husband is certain that Holling succumbed to natural causes (he was, after all, just one day shy of his 115th birthday!), Karen is convinced that the man was murdered--and she wants Monk (Tony Shalhoub) to prove it. In the course of his investigation, Monk uncovers a surprising link between Holling's death and a hit-and-run fatality that occurred five years earlier--the only unsolved case in Captain Stottlemeyer's career. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Cunningly presaged by the cliffhanger at the end of season one, the first episode of Alias' second season confirmed what heroine Sydney A. Bristow (Jennifer Garner) -- college student by day, counterespionage agent the rest of the time -- had feared most: that "The Man," the evil leader of a vast criminal cartel, was no man at all, but instead Sydney's supposedly dead mother, former KGB agent Irina Derevko (played by new series regular Lena Olin). Though Irina would eventually claim to have reformed and insisted that she was looking out for Sydney's best interests, her actions -- which included innumerable double-crosses, sellouts, and betrayals -- would seem to indicate otherwise. Even so, nothing that was ever "indicated" on Alias was ever quite what it appeared on the surface. Meanwhile, both of the spy organizations for which Sydney worked, the CIA and the more sinister SD-6, were dedicated to destroying the cartel formerly run by Irina and now in the hands of her mercurial lieutenant, Sark (played by another new series regular, David Anders). The two rival agencies also continued their search for the missing Rambaldi fragments, which when assembled would become a terrifying weapon of mass destruction, as well as "The Bible," the operations manual used by Irina's old criminal empire.

Still embittered by the knowledge that she had been used all her life by SD-6, Syd persisted in covertly working against the organization by throwing in with the CIA, under the supervision of agent Michael C. Vaughn (Michael Vartan), who by the time season two rolled around, was making no secret of his love for Syd. Two other SD-6 operatives, computer genius Marshall Flinkman (Kevin Weisman) and agent Marcus Dixon (Carl Lumbly), likewise crossed over to the CIA, with tragic results for at least one of them. Syd was given even more reason to despise the espionage business when she learned that, as a child, she had been a guinea pig for a program designed to indoctrinate spies at an early age -- a program developed by her own father, Jack Bristow (Victor Garber). There was another "father figure" in Syd's life in the form of her SD-6 boss, Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), who despite his cruel cunning and ruthlessness was genuinely fond of both Bristows. Sloane would launch a second career as a solo villain when, disillusioned by the SD-6, he bolted the organization and set about to harness the awesome power of the Rambaldi device for his own purposes. His replacement at SD-6 was the no-nonsense Geiger (Rutger Hauer), who, shall we say, harbored no great love for either Syd or Jack. In addition to Rutger Hauer, season two of Alias would feature guest-star turns by Faye Dunaway as the duplicitous head of SD-6 counterintelligence; Richard Lewis as a CIA counterintelligence analyst investigating Vaughn; and Christian Slater as a scientist who was kidnapped by the renegade Sloane -- and whose past life experiences bore striking resemblances to those of the Bristow family.

Elsewhere, it was business as usual for crusading journalist Will Tippin (Bradley Cooper), who doggedly continued his crusade to expose and destroy SD-6 and all the other agencies in the Alliance of Twelve. The basic through line of Alias took off on a radical and wholly unanticipated new direction with its January 26, 2003, episode "Phase One." In this truly shocking entry, Syd's roommate, Francie (Merrin Dungey), was murdered and replaced by an exact double, thereby further blurring the series' distinction between its heroes and its villains. Also in that episode, the CIA put an end to SD-6, thus freeing Sydney from her double-agent balancing act and allowing her and Vaughn to finally express their feelings for each other. But even those developments paled in comparison with Alias' second-season cliffhanger finale, in which after being rendered unconscious in a fight with the "bad" Francie, Syd awoke to discover that two whole years had passed -- and her erstwhile lover Michael Vaughn was now beyond her reach! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Viewers who tuned into the premiere episode of ABC's espionage series Alias did so already knowing the basic premise: Heroine Sydney A. Bristow (Jennifer Garner) lived a double life, as a "typical" college undergraduate and as an uncover agent for a government organization which she assumed to be the CIA. Sydney never told either her fiancé, Danny Hecht (Edward Atterton), or her roommate, Francie Calfo (Merrin Dungey), about her covert off-campus activities, not out of any great fear of blowing her cover, but merely because she assumed no one would believe her. Then came the fateful day that Sydney let slip her secret to Danny -- who turned up murdered not long afterward. It was then that Sydney began to suspect that her CIA bosses were not all they seemed to be -- and indeed, the truth came out that she wasn't working for the CIA at all, but for a rival agency, SD-6, one of several such organizations gathered together in a rather sinister group known as the Alliance of Twelve. The cruel ruthlessness with which SD-6 went about its business was personified by Sydney's boss, Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), an enigmatic character who was obviously very fond of Syd and the other agents, but who would not hesitate to sell anyone out who got in his way. Sloane was particularly nasty when dealing with those who would dare prevent him to carry out his obsessive, lifelong search for the fragments of the Rambaldi device, a doomsday weapon concocted some 500 years before by a Renaissance artist who happened to possess a Nostradamus-like gift of prophecy. Other perplexing facets of Sloane's personality were revealed in his curious relationship with Sydney's father, veteran SD-6 operative Jack Bristow (Victor Garber), as well as in an ongoing subplot involving Sloane's terminally ill wife, Emily (Amy Irving) -- who happened to be very close to Syd.

Upon realizing that she'd been a dupe of sorts, the embittered Syd allowed herself to be enlisted as a counterspy by the real CIA; thereafter, whenever she went on a mission for SD-6, she was given a countermission by her new bosses. Her contact at the CIA was Michael C. Vaughn (Michael Vartan), a man with quite a history of his own. As for Syd's father, Jack, he spent much of season one trying to make amends for so perilously misleading his daughter -- all the while trying to shield her from the truth about her supposedly long-dead mother, Laura, who in keeping with the title of this series was actually Irina Derevko, a KGB agent who'd been assigned to seduce Jack nearly a quarter of a century before. Other recurring characters included Francie's chronically faithless fiancé, Charlie (Evan Dexter Parke); Syd's fellow SD-6 employees, agent Marcus R. Dixon (Carl Lumbly) and computer expert Marshall J. Finkman (Kevin Weisman), who was blessed with a photographic memory; and Will Tippin (Bradley Cooper), investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Chronicle, whose determination to find out the facts behind the death of Danny Hecht and expose the activities of SD-6 rendered him a marked man. Getting back to Syd, she spent most of season one chasing and being chased, never quite knowing her friends from her enemies. A mid-season brush with a dangerous rogue agent (played by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino) put Syd on the trail of a vast criminal cartel, whose leader was known only as "The Man." The season's cliffhanger ending revealed that "The Man" was actually a woman -- none other than Syd's "late" mother. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Guy Ferland directed this comedy-thriller about aspiring cartoonist and pizza-delivery guy Will Sherman (David Strickland). College dropout Will delivers a pizza to murderer Reed (Ron Eldard), who later realizes Will can connect him to the crime scene. This prompts Reed to steal Will's tape-recorded diary and gather info on Will's friends. Will remains unaware that a psycho has taken an interest in his life -- but soon various people Will knows begin to die. Shown at the 1998 Seattle Film Festival and the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide