Samantha Mathis Movies
The daughter of actress Bibi Besch, Samantha Mathis earned respect and popularity for her work in such '90s films as Pump up the Volume (1990), Little Women (1994), and John Woo's Broken Arrow (1996). A native of Brooklyn, where she was born May 12, 1970, Mathis grew up surrounded by show business thanks to her mother's job. She made her professional debut alongside her mother in a TV commercial for baby products and had her first speaking role as Merlin Olsen's daughter in the short-lived 1988 TV series Aaron's Way. It was with her first onscreen starring role in the seminal '90s high school insurrection drama Pump up the Volume that Mathis first earned recognition; following the film's success, she began appearing in lead roles in mainstream and independent films alike. Although she worked fairly steadily throughout the decade, doing particularly strong work in films such as Nora Ephron's This Is My Life (1992), her career was affected by the death of her mother in 1996 and the 1993 fatal drug overdose of then-boyfriend River Phoenix, whom Mathis was with the night he died. She retreated somewhat from the limelight during the mid-'90s, but resurfaced in John Woo's commercially successful Broken Arrow (1996). In 2000, she could be seen as the mistress of a yuppie serial killer (Christian Bale) in Mary Harron's controversial and long-awaited American Psycho. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
The huge success of the video games featuring animated Italian plumbers the Mario Brothers led to this $42 million live action movie. The two brothers (Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo) live in Manhattan and are chasing Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis), who wears a necklace made from a meteor fragment. Its powers can free a race of reptilian creatures from the city's sewers. The villainous ruler of the creatures, who are descendants of dinosaurs, is King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). Koopa has kidnapped Daisy and taken her to the underworld of Dinohattan, which is rat-infested and strewn with garbage. The Mario Brothers must overcome many obstacles, just as they do in video games, to free the princess. The film spares no expense with its use of animatronic monsters and high-tech special effects. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, (more)
- 1993
- R
Documentary filmmaker Philip Haas made his dramatic feature film debut with The Music of Chance, adapted from Paul Auster's terse, existential novel. The film follows the plight of two hapless drifters -- Jim Nashe (Mandy Patinkin), who is escaping family and responsibility with an inheritance and a red BMW, and Jack Pozzi (James Spader), a down-on-his-luck gambler and world class manipulator. Pozzi convinces Nashe to shoot the works and put his remaining $10,000 into a high stakes poker game against two rich suckers -- reclusive lottery winners Willie Stone (Joel Grey) and Bill Flower (Charles Durning), who share a lavish but isolated country estate, using the remains of their lottery fortune to construct a self-contained world on the grounds of their mansion. Instead of bilking the two millionaires, however, Pozzi and Nashe lose their windfall and find themselves indebted to Stone and Flowers, who compel them to work off their losses by constructing a stone monument on their estate, a chore that results in deception, flight, and possibly murder. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- James Spader, Mandy Patinkin, (more)
A handful of up-and-coming songwriters discover that love is as difficult to navigate as the music business in this romantic comedy-drama from director Peter Bogdanovich. Miranda Presley (Samantha Mathis) is an aspiring singer/songwriter from New York City who loves country music and has decided to take her chances in Nashville, TN, where she hopes to strike it big as a musician. After arriving in the Music City after a long bus ride, Miranda makes her way to the Bluebird Café, a local watering hole with a reputation as a showcase for new talent. The bar's owner, Lucy (K.T. Oslin), takes a shine to the shy but plucky newcomer, and gives her a job as a waitress. Before long, Miranda has gotten to know a number of other Nashville transplants who are look looking to land a gig or sell a song, among them sweet and open-hearted Kyle Davidson (Dermot Mulroney), moody but talented James Wright (River Phoenix), and spunky Linda Lue Linden (Sandra Bullock). As the four friends struggle to find their place in the competitive Nashville music scene, both Kyle and James display a romantic interest in Miranda, while she finds it difficult to choose between the two. The Thing Called Love features cameos from a number of noted country performers, including Trisha Yearwood, Pam Tillis, Katy Moffatt, Jo-El Sonnier, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Sadly, The Thing Called Love would be best remembered as the last film actor River Phoenix completed before his death in the fall of 1993. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, (more)
- 1992
- G
- Add FernGully: The Last Rainforest to QueueAdd FernGully: The Last Rainforest to top of Queue
A man finds himself living among the animals and enchanted spirits of the rainforest, and learns of the true consequences of human destruction in this animated adventure. Crysta (voice of Samantha Mathis) is a young fairy who is being tutored in the powers of magic by the older and wiser Magi (voice of Grace Zabriskie) in an Amazon rain forest. While their home was once on the verge of destruction thanks to the evil spirit Hexxus (voice of Tim Curry), the demon has been trapped inside a tree, and Crysta is free to play with her friends Batty Koda (voice of Robin Williams), a bat who escaped from an animal testing facility, and Pips (voice of Christian Slater), who has obvious romantic intentions toward the attractive young sprite. However, a clear-cutting crew destroys the tranquil peace of the rainforest, and when Crysta sees a runaway logging machine about to run over lumberjack Zak (voice of Jonathan Ward), she saves his life by shrinking him to her own size. However, Crysta isn't able to bring Zak back to his normal size, so he's forced to live among the forest creatures and learn first-hand the devastation the humans have brought to this world -- especially when the loggers accidentally free Hexxus from captivity. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tim Curry, Robin Williams, (more)
- 1992
- PG13
Based on the book by Meg Wolitzer, This Is My Life is the directorial debut for Nora Ephron, who adapted the script with sister, Delia Ephron. Dottie Engels (Julie Kavner) is a single mother with aspirations of becoming a standup comedian. When her Aunt Harriet dies, Dottie gets an apartment in Manhattan with her daughters, teenaged Erica (Samantha Mathis) and ten-year-old Opal (Gaby Hoffmann). Soon, Dottie's career is taking off and her agent, Claudia Curtis (Carrie Fisher), gets her on a comedy tour. Everything seems to work out well for Dottie, except that her daughters are left without a mother. Erica, who has just started dating Jordan (Danny Zorn) gets especially mad when she hears Dottie talking about her personal information on a talk show. The two girls are further upset with their mother's choice for a boyfriend, Arnold Moss (Dan Aykroyd). Eventually, Erica and Opal try to track down their real father, Norm (Louis di Banco), in upstate New York. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Julie Kavner, Samantha Mathis, (more)
- 1990
Filmed in semidocumentary fashion, Extreme Close-up features Morgan Weisser as a 16-year-old boy grieving the death of his mother (Blair Brown). Trying to assuage his grief, Weisser runs family videotapes of his mother. It becomes increasingly clear that the woman was falling apart emotionally in the months before her death, and Weisser wants to know why. Looking for answers, he begins taping new videos of his turbulent home life -- which slowly mirror the disintegration of his mother. Made for television, Extreme Close-up was written by thirtysomething veterans Marshall Herkovitz and Edward Zwick; its director was Peter Horton, who'd played Gary on thirtysomething. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Blair Brown, Craig T. Nelson, (more)
83 Hours 'Til Dawn utilizes a plot device originally seen on another fact-based TV movie, The Longest Night (1972). Robert Urich stars as a wealthy business executive whose 20-year-old daughter is abducted by sociopathic Peter Strauss. The kidnapper seals his victim in a small box and buries it deep underground, with an air-tube as her only conduit to the outside world. Strauss threatens to never reveal the girl's whereabouts unless Urich ponies up half a million dollars. The original telecast of 83 Hours 'Til Dawn ran a distant second to a competing network showing of the theatrical feature Three Men and A Baby (87). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Teenage angst finds a new voice in this drama. By day, Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) is a quiet, studious student at an ordinary suburban high school in Arizona. But at night, Mark creeps down into his basement, fires up his pirate radio transmitter, and broadcasts to the community as Hard Harry, a sexually obsessed social commentator who passes along angry philosophy about the state of teenage life when not blasting punk rock or gangsta rap cuts. Hard Harry's sworn nemesis is high school principal Mrs. Cresswood (Annie Ross), who keeps SAT scores up at the expense of her students' dignity and individuality by eliminating "troublemakers" from the student body. Hard Harry's broadcasts, however, have become a rallying point for the school's misfit underclass, and Mrs. Cresswood is determined to track down the mystery student and bring him to justice (broadcasting without a license, he's not merely an annoyance, but a criminal). The war against Hard Harry intensifies when he broadcasts data from confidential school board reports; Mark's father is a school commissioner, but he has no idea what his son is doing in the basement. Meanwhile, Mark gains the attentions of Nora (Samantha Mathis), who has figured out who he becomes at night. More serious and intelligent than the average teen film, Pump Up the Volume was written and directed by Allan Moyle, who previously dealt with disaffected, music-obsessed teens in Times Square and would return to them with Empire Records. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis, (more)
- 1990
Made for television, To My Daughter stars Rue McClanahan as a well-to-do matron whose oldest daughter (Michelle Greene) dies. The girl was always McClanahan's favorite; the remaining children (Samantha Mathis and Ty Miller), though not unaffected by the loss, hope that now their mother will pay some attention to them. Instead, McClanahan's grief threatens to shatter her already shaky relationship with her younger offspring. She virtually shuts the kids out of her life in order to finish her older daughter's uncompleted book. To My Daughter was unofficially based on the career of real-life writer Nancy Lynn Schwartz, who did indeed die before completing her history of the Screen Actors' Guild, obliging her mother to finish the job. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1989
Set in the early 1900s in a small Southern town, this made-for-cable television romance centers on the "scandalous" love affair that blossoms between a free-thinking, strong-willed Northern widow and the much older owner of a local general store. The plot is based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1988
- R
Olympic gymnastics coach Francine Lake (Lauren Hutton) and her 12 students train on the Island of Crete. The rigors of training preclude most sexual activity with the locals, thus the girls spend their evenings in quiet frustration. Likewise repressed is training-school janitor Ulysses (Svestislav Goncic), a notorious peeping tom. When one of the girls is sexually assaulted, Ulysses is the most likely suspect. It turns out, however, that the film's true antagonist is much closer to the situation than it first appears. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lauren Hutton, Cliff De Young, (more)
- 1988
Merlin Olsen stars as Aaron Miller, an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania. Aaron's oldest son leaves for Northern California, where he works in a grape vineyard before being killed in a wind-surfing accident; left behind is his pregnant girlfriend (Kathleen York). Thus it is that Aaron moves himself and his family to California, seeking to help out his late son's lady friend and to offer his services to the vineyard owners. Aaron's Way was the pilot for a "warm and fuzzy" Merlin Olsen TV series, which premiered in March of 1988. Plagued by a cumbersome premise, the series survived a scant 12 episodes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
