Jeff Mandon Movies

A riot erupts in the Little Jamaica section of Baltimore when a white bus driver strikes a black pedestrian. In the ensuing fracas, both the driver and a Jamaican man are killed -- and without credible witnesses, it looks as if the killings were racially motivated. Mike Giardello (Giancarlo Esposito) doesn't buy this and opens what promises to be a very long and controversial investigation. By episode's end, a seriously injured Detective Rene Sheppard (Michael Michele) is ordered to turn in her gun. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) is the perfect suburban housewife and mother. She likes to cook, her home is immaculately clean, she's always well-groomed and cheerful, and she loves her husband Eugene (Sam Waterston) and her two children, Misty (Ricki Lake) and Chip (Matthew Lillard). There's just one problem with Beverly -- if you do anything to make someone in her family feel bad, you're dead meat on a stick. While she does a great job of hiding it, Beverly has a vicious and vengeful streak, and when she's not making obscene prank calls to the neighbors or bribing her garbagemen to save embarrassing items from her neighbors' trash, she's mowing down whoever would be so rude as to make her husband go into his office on a Saturday, break up with her daughter, or suggest that her son watches too many horror movies. Taking John Waters back to R-rated territory after the relatively sedate Hairspray and Cry Baby, Serial Mom captures a comfortable middle ground between Hollywood professionalism and Waters' subversive sense of humor, and Kathleen Turner has a field day as the sweet-on-the-outside, evil-on-the-inside Beverly. The supporting cast includes such Waters favorites as Patty Hearst, Traci Lords, Mink Stole, and Susan Lowe; Joan Rivers and Suzanne Somers appear as themselves, and all-female grunge-metal band L7 plays the all-female grunge-metal band Camel Toe. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A childhood friend of Detective Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) plans to assist in the suicide of his terminally ill father. When Felton hides his knowledge of this action, he runs afoul of investigating detectives Lewis (Clark Johnson) and Crosetti (Jon Polito). Elsewhere, Pembleton (Andre Braugher) looks into the fatal shooting of a drug dealer and uncovers a possible instance of police brutality. And Bolander (Ned Beatty) defies Giordello's (Yaphet Kotto) order to attend a sensitivity-training session. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In Patriot Games, Harrison Ford plays former CIA agent Jack Ryan, taking over from Alec Baldwin, who had played author Tom Clancy's brainy protagonist in Hunt for Red October. This time around, Ryan foils an attempted assassination, thereby incurring the wrath of a maniacal Irish radical (Sean Bean). After seemingly neutralizing the villains, and deciding to celebrate the occasion with his wife (Anne Archer) and daughter (Thora Birch), everything appears to be back to normal; then all hell breaks loose. Author Tom Clancy himself bemoaned the liberties taken with his novel in the final sequences; the picture scored with audiences, however, and soon inspired a followup, A Clear and Present Danger (1994), also starring Ford. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide