Susan Blommaert Movies

Can an independent, contemporary woman find happiness with a guy who sells pickles? Isabelle Grossman (Amy Irving) is an attractive, intelligent Jewish woman in her early 30s. She has a good job and a nice apartment on the Upper West Side, and she values her independence; she often visits her grandmother Bubbie (Reiz Bozyk), who lives on the Lower East Side and wants Isabelle to meet a nice Jewish man and settle down. Bubbie goes so far as to obtain the services of Hannah Mandelbaum (Sylvia Miles), a matchmaker who finds the "perfect" man for Isabelle: a pickle salesman named Sam Posner (Peter Riegert). Isabelle thinks Sam is a nice enough guy, but she has a hard time imagining herself spending her life with the pickle man, and she isn't sure if she wants to pursue the relationship. However, Sam is taken with Isabelle and goes out of his way to change her mind. Crossing Delancy was directed by Joan Micklin Silver, whose breakthrough film Hester Street also examined Jewish culture on the Lower East Side, albeit from the vantage point of the 1890s. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This Big Apple-based romantic comedy charts the tumultuous relationship between liberal arts student and budding chef Al (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and his first girlfriend, Imogen (Julia Stiles), a self-possessed freshman who wants to become an artist. After meeting in a bar, the pair jump into a giddy, passionate affair that's grown-up enough to include face time between the young lovers and Al's DJ mom and TV-chef dad (Henry Winkler). After a summer abroad, however, Imogen feels like the relationship is robbing her of her youth, and the couple must struggle with romantic and domestic growing pains. Meanwhile, their wacky friends -- who include porn stars (Selma Blair and Zak Orth), stoners (Rosario Dawson), a mullet-haired lunkhead (Shawn Hatosy), and a Jim Morrison look-alike named Jim Morrison (Ashton Kutcher) -- provide laughs, advice, and sexual temptation. The debut film from writer/director Kris Isacsson, the teen-themed Down to You marked a change of pace for normally grown-up Miramax Films. In addition to a slew of recent rock and pop, the film prominently features music from such downtown New York fixtures of the past decade as Deee-Lite ("Groove is in the Heart") and Cibo Matto ("Moonchild"). ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands opens as an eccentric inventor (Vincent Price) lovingly assembles a synthetic youth named Edward (Johnny Depp). Edward has all the essential ingredients for today's standard body, with the exception of a pair of hands. For what is initially thought to be a temporary period, he is fitted with long, scissor-like extremities that, while able to trim a mean hedge, are hardly conducive to day-to-day life. When the kindly inventor dies, however, Edward is left lonely and cursed with some very heavy metal for hands. He is eventually taken in by Peg Boggs (Dianne Weist), an Avon lady who takes pity on him after seeing his bleak existence. Edward, in spite of his inherent ability to slay anyone he comes across, is a gentle soul whose only wish is to be loved. His impromptu family has, at best, a limited understanding of Edward, but he finds himself drawn to Peg's weary but sympathetic daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder), who is dating Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), the neighborhood bully. Meanwhile, Edward finds himself a local celebrity after the town realizes that his talents include creative hedge trimming and an unrivaled ability to cut hair. His so-called friends are proven fair-weather when Edward is accused of a crime, after which his only supporters are Peg and Kim. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

In this comedy, a young German woman named Elaine Hines (Hanna Schygulla) moves to New York City with dreams of becoming a writer. Elaine becomes entangled in a mystery and falls in with a group of gangsters who lead her through a series of crazy adventures. Released on video under the title Crazy Streets, this movie featured an appearance by Deborah Harry and was Alec Baldwin's first screen appearance. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

After Henry (Jamie Harold) stages an ill-conceived, unenthusiastic suicide attempt in a fit of anger, he retreats to his Maine hometown to recover. Initially convinced that his classical music career is finished, he works through the ghosts of his past to rejuvenate his muse and his life. Henry Hill was screened at the L.A./AFI film festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Alfred Kinsey was an entomologist who taught at Indiana University and had a keen interest in an area of human behavior that had seen little scholarly research -- human sexuality. While the courtship and reproductive patterns of animals had been carefully documented, Kinsey believed that most "established facts" about human sexual behavior were a matter of conjecture rather than research and that what most people said about their sex lives was not born out by the evidence (a subject that had personal resonance for him given the troubles he and his wife Clara Kinsey had in the early days of their marriage). After introducing a course in "Marriage" at Indiana University which offered frank and factual information on sex to students, Kinsey began an exhaustive series of interviews with a wide variety of people from all walks of life in order to find out the truth about sex practices in America. When he published Sexual Behavior and the Human Male in 1948, his findings were wildly controversial, indicating that most men had a wider variety of sexual experiences than most people imagined, including a number of practices commonly thought to be dangerous or perverted (including pre-marital sex, same-sex contacts, and masturbation). An even greater outcry greeted Kinsey's next volume, Sexual Behavior and the Human Female, which contradicted common notions than most women went into marriage sexually inexperienced. Kinsey is a film biography written and directed by Bill Condon which examines Kinsey's life and work from his strict childhood until his death in 1956. Liam Neeson plays Alfred Kinsey, and Laura Linney co-stars as Kinsey's wife and colleague Clara. John Lithgow highlights the supporting cast as Kinsey's repressed and moralistic father, while Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, and Timothy Hutton play members of Kinsey's research team and Tim Curry appears as an IU faculty member at odds with Kinsey's teachings. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The ongoing debate over parental rights in medical procedures comes to the forefront when a five-year-old girl dies from a relatively minor throat infection. The child's parents, Ted and Nancy Driscoll (Byron Jennings, Kaiulani Lee) are arrested, whereupon they argue that their religious beliefs compelled them to deny medical treatment for their daughter. Incidentally, the unfortunate youngster is played by an uncredited Michelle Trachtenberg, who later co-starred on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A 12-year-old Harlem youth is killed in a hit-and-run. The driver, an elderly Jewish man named Joshua Berger (Michael Constantine), is not indicted. This is all it takes for outspoken (and blatantly bigoted) black activist Reverend Ott (Tony Todd) to foment racial tensions that explode in violence. The scenes involving Assistant D.A. Stone (Michael Moriarty) and black defense lawyer Shambala Green (Lorraine Toussaint) are among the most powerful ever seen on Law & Order; small wonder that "Sanctuary" was cited by TV Guide as one of television's best individual series episodes. As a bonus, actor J. K. Simmons, who later became a series semiregular in the role of police psychologist Dr. Emil Skoda, is here seen in an entirely different characterization. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Amazingly, Season Eight of Law & Order begins with the cast from Season Seven intact, with no additions or deletions. The case at hand: the murder of a pizza delivery man, which the detectives believe was deliberate and not a random shooting. As it turns out, the dead man was the victim of a thrill killing committed by a pair of teenagers (Rob McElhenney, Michael Marrona). Complications: Each teen blames the other for the murder, an eyewitness saw only one of the boys pulling the trigger, and the key clue is the recording of a Confessional -- which cannot be admitted as evidence. In the course of events, detective Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) receives some bad news. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Jamie (Helen Hunt) is perturbed when a fortune cookie promises "bad luck for the guilty." Her husband, Paul (Paul Reiser), bears the brunt of this prognostication as the couple heads for a party at the apartment of Yoko Ono. Beware the Blouse of Death, and always remember those sage words: "Life with no F is a lie." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Three years after the cancellation of her popular series Murder She Wrote, Angela Lansbury returns for the first of several TV-movie followups to that selfsame series. Once again, Lansbury is cast as Jessica Fletcher, best-selling mystery writer and amateur sleuth. As indicated by the film's title, Hitchcock references abound in the plotline, beginning when a lady vanishes on the train that Jessica is taking to El Paso to deliver a lecture. Helpful Jessica accepts a message for the mystery woman, whereupon she is attacked by an assailant in search of "it." Our heroine is rescued by a journalist who may not be a journalist, then when attempting to ascertain the missing woman's whereabouts Jessica is warned to mind her own business by a guy identifying himself as an FBI agent. Inasmuch as such warnings have never stopped Jessica in the past, she follows the trail of clues to the desert town of Agua Verde, Arizona, adopting a few aliases alng the way. The climax is an echo of Hitch's The 39 Steps, wherein Jessica not only solves the mystery but also unmasks the Least Likely Suspect (or in this case, Least Likely Suspects). Produced and directed by Angela Lansbury's sons, Murder She Wrote: South by Southwest first aired November 2, 1997 on CBS. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Three women whose lives have followed very different paths ponder their pasts and their futures in this omnibus film from second-time director Rebecca Miller, adapted from her acclaimed short story collection of the same name. Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) grew up in a fractured household; her mother abandoned the family when Delia was a child, and her father (Brian Tarantina) was a drug-addled loser who could barely be prodded off the couch. When she entered adolescence, Delia realized that she could use her body to get men to do as she pleased. While this gained her a feeling of power and self-sufficiency, it also earned her a reputation as the "class slut," and the end product was her marriage to Kurt (David Warshofsky). Greta (Parker Posey) is the daughter of a successful lawyer (Ron Leibman) who left her mother when she was young and offered Greta criticism rather than affection. Plagued with self-doubt, Greta is squandering her literary talents editing cookbooks and is married to Lee (Tim Guinee. When Thavi (Joel de la Fuente), a respected and successful young novelist, asks Greta to edit his next novel, it forces her to reassess herself on a number of levels. Finally, Paula (Fairuza Balk), yet another product of a fractured family, ran away from her mother and was homeless until she met Vincent (Seth Gilliam), who took her in and became her boyfriend. A year later, Paula is uncertain in her feelings about Vincent, unsettled to learn that she's pregnant, and startled after witnessing a murder while out clubbing with a friend; she hits the road again, and soon picks up a fellow alienated teen, Kevin (Lou Taylor Pucci), who bears the scars of a recent -- and very brutal -- beating. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits was honored with the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide