Joycee Katz Movies

Sally Field goes the Roseanne route in Punchline. Field plays a housewife and mother who suddenly develops the urge to be a comedienne. Her comic instincts are on target, but her timing and delivery stinks. Tom Hanks, a stand-up comic with a few years' experience under his belt, offers to teach Field the ropes. As they get to know each other, Hanks and Field begin to pick up on each other's shortcomings; though Hanks has far more talent than Field, for example, he has a positively ruinous habit of expressing his deep-down dislike of everyone else in the world, and this frequently alienates his audience. Writer-director David Seltzer times Punchline like a good joke; he continually sets up for the expected, then pulls a last-minute fast one, keeping the film lively and unpredictable throughout. The supporting cast, coincidentally including future Roseanne star John Goodman, is uniformly superb. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

George Lollar (Charles Grodin) overrides his wife's judgment and takes his family for a vacation on a sunny Caribbean island that just happens to be on the verge of a revolution. Their hotel is not the usual Hilton on the beach but a pick-up joint for singles where the main activities are sex, sex, and sex. In that order. As the horrified father watches almost helplessly, his wife becomes liberated, his daughter falls for a Frenchman who is actually a guerrilla, one of his sons loses his virginity to a buxom, worldly-wise woman, and his other son burns down the mini-camp he was forced to attend. But that's hardly the worst of it -- there is that small matter of a political overthrow about to explode on the scene. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi