Diane Ladd Movies

In this romantic comedy, a journalist who's become too much the life of the party finds a new lease on life in a drug and alcohol treatment center. New York newspaper columnist Gwen Cummings (Sandra Bullock) has a fondness for liquor, a boyfriend (Dominic West) with a similar taste for the bottle, and a party girl image that camouflages plenty of emotional baggage. At the wedding of her sister (Elizabeth Perkins), Gwen's pursuit of a good time goes a bit too far when she topples the wedding cake and steals the bridal party's limousine. The result is a court-ordered, 28-day stay in a rehabilitation facility for drug and alcohol abusers. Gwen's failure to get with the program causes her to butt heads with the clinic's director (Steve Buscemi), but her attitude begins to change when she meets Eddie Boone (Viggo Mortensen), a baseball player trying to deal with his substance abuse problems. Diane Ladd, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Azura Skye play Gwen's fellow rehab inmates, and legendary roots rock band NRBQ performs at the wedding reception. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Martin Scorsese's first Hollywood studio production also marked his first (and only) foray into a woman-centered story. Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn), a resigned Southwest housewife, takes advantage of her trucker husband's sudden death to hit the road with her bratty son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) and pursue her childhood dream of a singing career. She finds a job as a lounge singer, but after a horrific encounter with an abusive new beau (Harvey Keitel), she flees and winds up taking a waitress job at Mel's Diner, run by gruff cook Mel (Vic Tayback). With her career on hold, Alice soon finds strength and self-worth through her friendship with the other waitresses, saucy Flo (Diane Ladd) and spacy Vera (Valerie Curtin). When sensitive rancher David (Kris Kristofferson) starts courting her, Alice wonders if she wants to abandon her goals for domesticity again. To contrast Alice's dream life with her reality, Scorsese created a stylized opening sequence of Alice as a child reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, Duel in the Sun and Gone With the Wind, before shifting into the present-day atmospheric immediacy of location shooting and scenes built out of improvisations. That opening sequence alone cost over twice as much as Scorsese's debut feature, Who's That Knocking At My Door?. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Gene Hackman plays a disgruntled suburbanite who manages the Ultra-Sav, an all-night drugstore. He hates his job, hates his debts and responsibilities, and isn't overly fond of his wife (Diane Ladd) and son (Dennis Quaid). Partly as a form of protest, Hackman enters into an affair with Barbra Streisand, one of his wife's distant relatives (don't ask how she's related - it takes Hackman about thirty seconds to explain it to another character). Streisand doesn't belong in this picture at all, but she can be forgiven her acting excesses because she wasn't the first choice for the role anyway (Lisa Eichhorn dropped out just before shooting began). The best moments in All Night Long involve the steady stream of oddballs and losers who trickle into Hackman's establishment. There is also a cute Apocalypse Now parody involving a battery-operated toy helicopter. The principal attraction of All Night Long is Gene Hackman playing an endearingly recognizable modern type. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

E! Entertainment's debut original TV production is an over-the-top depiction of Hollywood decadence and desperation. Five down-and-out women vie for a major award. The five include a drugged-out indie queen; a plumy British actress with a womanizing director for a husband; a porn star looking for a legit turn; an African-American chanteuse whose career is on the skids; and a lipstick lesbian with a wily publicist. The plot twists when a body turns up and all five are suspects. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Black Widow bears no relation to the 1954 film of the same name--beyond its characterization of the female as the deadlier of the species, that is. Debra Winger stars as a federal agent who has sworn to bring Theresa Russell to justice. Ms. Russell has married several millionaires who have all died mysterious deaths, for which she has remained undetected because she has assumed a number of different identities. Ms. Winger is the only person in her department who suspects that all of the deceased millionaires' widows are the same person. Finally tracking down Russell, Winger finds herself inexorably becoming friends with the charming murderess. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

One of the more popular features from Roger Corman's "B"-factory Concorde/New Horizons, Carnosaur perpetuates the grand Corman tradition of zeroing in on a big-budget Hollywood studio moneymaker, then dashing off a quick-and-dirty poor man's version before moss gets a chance to grow on the larger film's concept. This bargain-basement spin on Jurassic Park was actually based on a novel by John Brosnan (under the pseudonym Harry Adam Knight). It features Diane Ladd (whose daughter Laura Dern took the high road on Spielberg's film) as a kooky mad scientist whose experiments on human and dinosaur DNA result in dual disasters -- first, a rubbery midget Tyrannosaurus bred from dinosaur and chicken DNA (imagine the barbecue potential!) which escapes the lab and goes on the requisite bloody rampage; and second, a specially-engineered virus with the ability to replace human beings with dino-babies. Although this exploitation quickie doesn't waste too much time delivering the standard Corman cargo (blood and breasts), the mayhem is too often derailed by endless genetic techno-babble from Ladd, whose freaked-out performance is the film's sole plus. The downbeat ending is pure '80s, and paves the way for the inevitable sequels. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't," warns water baron Noah Cross (John Huston), when smooth cop-turned-private eye J.J. "Jake" Gittes (Jack Nicholson) starts nosing around Cross's water diversion scheme. That proves to be the ominous lesson of Chinatown, Roman Polanski's critically lauded 1974 revision of 1940s film noir detective movies. In 1930s Los Angeles, "matrimonial work" specialist Gittes is hired by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) to tail her husband, Water Department engineer Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling). Gittes photographs him in the company of a young blonde and figures the case is closed, only to discover that the real Mrs. Mulwray had nothing to do with hiring Gittes in the first place. When Hollis turns up dead, Gittes decides to investigate further, encountering a shady old-age home, corrupt bureaucrats, angry orange farmers, and a nostril-slicing thug (Polanski) along the way. By the time he confronts Cross, Evelyn's father and Mulwray's former business partner, Jake thinks he knows everything, but an even more sordid truth awaits him. When circumstances force Jake to return to his old beat in Chinatown, he realizes just how impotent he is against the wealthy, depraved Cross. "Forget it, Jake," his old partner tells him. "It's Chinatown." Reworking the somber underpinnings of detective noir along more pessimistic lines, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne convey a '70s-inflected critique of capitalist and bureaucratic malevolence in a carefully detailed period piece harkening back to the genre's roots in the 1930s and '40s. Gittes always has a smart comeback like Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, but the corruption Gittes finds is too deep for one man to stop. Other noir revisions, such as Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975), also centered on the detective's inefficacy in an uncertain '70s world, but Chinatown's period sheen renders this dilemma at once contemporary and timeless, pointing to larger implications about the effects of corporate rapaciousness on individuals. Polanski and Towne clashed over Chinatown's ending; Polanski won the fight, but Towne won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Chinatown was nominated for ten other Oscars, including Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costumes, and Score. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Based on the best-selling books by Catherine Marshall, the original TV series Christy focused on 19-year-old Christy Huddleston, an idealistic schoolteacher who left a life of wealth and comfort behind to accept a job in the backward mountain community of Cutter, NC, in 1912. First telecast as a two-part, four-hour PAX Network miniseries on May 13 and May 14, 2001, Christy: Return to Cutter Gap picks up where the weekly series left off. Lauren Lee Smith replaces Kellie Martin as Christy, while Stewart Finlay-McLennan repeats his series role as the community's agnostic, Scottish-born doctor Neil McNeill. In part one of Return to Cutter Gap, titled "A Change of Seasons," the year is 1913, and Cutter Gap is in the throes of a deadly typhoid epidemic. The superstitious mountaineers believe that the illness has been brought on by such "outsiders" as Christy Huddleston and the community's new minister, Rev. David Grantland (James Waterston). Dr. McNeill realizes that the real cause of the epidemic is Cutter Gap's brackish water and squalid living conditions, but he is unable to convince the locals of his findings. Meanwhile, Christy suffers a crisis of faith when one of her closest friends dies of the fever, and on another front, she finds herself romantically torn between McNeill and Grantland. Part two, "A New Beginning," takes place three months later. This time, the community is literally torn apart by a raging storm. As the rest of the citizens head to the highest point in Cutter Gap, Christy and Dr. McNeill are stranded in a tiny hunter's shack. Shocked when McNeill declares his love for her, Christy rushes into the deluge, contracting a deadly fever. Also complicating matters is the presence of attractive aviatrix Harriet Quimby (Claudette Mink), who has apparently set her cap for McNeill. The story concludes with a wedding -- but which man does Christy choose for her life partner? Filmed in British Columbia, Christy: Return to Cutter Gap was originally telecast under the title Christy: Choices of the Heart). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A group of former CIA agents team up to ransom the entire world by staging an international crisis in the Orient. Only one man (Brian Kerwin), also an agent, can stop them. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

A Southern beauty whose habit of waking up in strange beds with head-ringing hangovers is beginning to wear thin determines to uncover her secret shrouded family past in hopes of discovering the truth about the woman she has become in the feature filmmaking debut of actor-turned-director Joey Lauren Adams. Lucy (Ashley Judd) is a small town thirtysomething who seems to have fallen into a downward spiral of alcohol-fueled benders and spontaneous one-night stands. In order to begin the transformation necessary to help her overcome her self-destructive ways, however, Lucy will have to look deep into her familial past and seek out the true weight of the burden that has led her down the darkened path she currently walks. Diane Ladd, Tim Blake Nelson, and Laura Prepon co-star in an intimate personal drama that made its premiere at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

In this prison drama, two adolescent girls are incarcerated with adults by an obsessive judge. There they are terribly exploited and abused. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this made-for-TV film, a high-school counselor (Joyce Brothers) faces ineffectual help from administration in combating drugs, so she recruits several students to help in the battle. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

Little Red Riding Hood (Mary Steenburgen ) is en route to Grandma's house when she encounters a hungry stranger in the woods whose carnivorous appetite may lead him in the same direction. Malcolm McDowell is delightfully smarmy as the Big Bad Wolf who races to Grandma's house with plans to gobble her up and then wait in disguise for Red Riding Hood to arrive. ~ Carrie Downes, All Movie Guide