Ron Vawter Movies

Based on a popular one-man play and filmed in a single day at the theatrical space the Kitchen in 1993, this avant-garde drama contrasts the lives of two famous homosexuals, both of whom died of AIDS in the 1980s. Both men are played by original castmember Ron Vawter. Roy Cohn was a gay-bashing right-wing lawyer and a steadfast protector of the "American Family." He was also a closet homosexual. Jack Smith was an openly gay experimental filmmaker who was credited as one of the fathers of performance art. In this film version of the play, the opposing lives of the two men are woven together, whereas on stage, they were profiled in two separate acts. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Steven Soderbergh, after the success of sex, lies, and videotape and the commercial failure of Kafka, pulls a rabbit out of his hat with this quiet and evocative recollection of a childhood lived in the Depression, based on A. E. Hotchner's memoir. Twelve-year-old Aaron Kurlander (Jesse Bradford) is coming of age in a rotting working class section of St. Louis in 1933. As the film begins, Aaron's family is coming apart at the seams due to the increasingly bleak economy. His father (Jeroen Krabbe) ekes out a living with a series of failed sales jobs as the family lives in the dilapidated Empire Hotel in a seamy section of town. When his younger brother (Cameron Boyd) is sent to live with relatives to save expenses, his consumptive mother (Lisa Eichhorn) goes away to a sanitarium and his father abandons him to sell watches in Iowa. At first Aaron retreats into a concocted fantasy world but he gradually becomes drawn into the shattered lives of the tenants of the hotel. Aaron sees the rotting social fabric laid bare and discovers he must temper his childhood dreams with the hard-hitting realities of adult existence. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Women and Men 2 is the second installment of HBO's short-story anthology series. In the first episode, Carson McCuller's "A Domestic Dilemma," Ray Liotta plays a husband who has to cut back on his work in order to care for his children, since his alcoholic wife (Andie MacDowell) cannot be trusted. In Irwin Shaw's "Return to Kansas City," a boxer (Matt Dillon) is unwilling to take risks in order to win love. In Henry Miller's "Mara," Scott Glenn plays Miller in a story about his love for a Parisian prostitute. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

Michael Pare and Mary Mara star in this thriller about two police detectives who fall into a passionate relationship as they investigate a murder among the wealthy and privileged. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Tom Kalin directed this cool and aloof black-and-white study of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, a case told before in two previous films -- Rope and Compulsion. In 1924, in Chicago, Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, two 18-year-olds, kidnapped and murdered the 13-year-old Bobby Franks, immediately killing him and then stuffing his naked body up a culvert. The motive for the crime was simply that they wanted to prove to themselves that they were smart enough to get away with it. The previous film versions downplayed Leopold and Loeb's homosexuality, but Kalin's version plays it up into a psychosexual motif. Loeb (Daniel Schlachet) is the calculating intellectual, while Leopold (Craig Chester), the amateur ornithologist, is the emotional and weak one. In love with Loeb, Leopold is willing to do anything for him, and when Leob uses the withholding of sex as a prompt, Leopold is even willing to commit murder to have his sexual desires satisfied by Loeb. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

In this glossy L.A. crime drama by Mike Figgis, Andy Garcia stars as Sgt. Raymond Avila, a cop who just joined the Internal Affairs division of the L.A.P.D. An investigation into police corruption has led Avila and his partner, Sgt. Amy Wallace (Laurie Metcalf), to Officer Dennis Peck (Richard Gere). Avila suspects something about Peck from the beginning; his influence and dominance over others seems to extend further than the reach of his badge. When officers who wish to testify against Peck start dying, the depth of his corruption becomes increasingly clear; at his disposal, he has an army of cops and criminals alike. He even agrees to assassinate a sleazy businessman's own parents, and humiliates the businessman while they make the deal. In his drive to dominate others, Peck attempts to seduce almost every woman around him and is obsessed with children and fatherhood. Peck is most dangerous when the investigation threatens his territory and his extended family; he stalks Avila and turns him against his wife (Nancy Travis). ~ Jonathan E. Laxamana, Rovi

Don't mistake this movie for the stormy special-effects blockbuster of the same name; the two films are light years apart. Based on Mary Robison's novel Oh!, this Twister was the quirky first feature from screenwriter/director Michael Almereyda (Nadja, The Eternal) about an eccentric soda-pop tycoon and his dysfunctional family. Suzy Amis plays Maureen Cleveland, a single mother who lives with her precocious daughter, Violet (Lindsay Christman), and her very strange brother, Howdy (Crispin Glover), in the family mansion, tended by the young live-in housekeeper, Lola (Charlaine Woodward). Maureen's ex-boyfriend Chris (Violet's father) comes back to town with the intention of rescuing Maureen and Violet from Kansas so they can start a family of their own. This turns out to be more difficult than he expected. Maureen is still angry about their break-up and seems unresponsive to his earnest and somewhat clumsy displays of affection. Howdy is too busy writing nonsensical songs and hanging out with his new girlfriend, Stephanie (Jenny Wright), to be of any help. To complicate matters, their father, Eugene (Harry Dean Stanton), shows up with a prudish children's TV evangelist named Virginia (Lois Chiles) and announces their engagement. No one gets along, and soon all are trapped indoors during a particularly bad Kansas twister. As the storm rages outside, Maureen and Howdy cook up a plan to find their long-lost mother, who may be the only person who can explain why they are all so odd. Like Almereyda's later films, Twister is a kaleidoscope of absurd conversations, oddball characters, and events that seem to happen for no reason at all. It's a perfect vehicle for Crispin Glover, who delivers some of the film's wackiest dialogue as the rich kid comfortably living in his own fantasy world. Tim Robbins makes an appearance as Stephanie's jealous ex-boyfriend Jeff, and author William S. Burroughs has a cameo as a farmer shooting targets in an empty barn. ~ Anthony Reed, Rovi

This is an undistinguished, avant-garde film by director, editor, and narrator Ken Kobland that may confuse most viewers at best, and turn off others at worst. Ostensibly expressing a post-liberal depression, there is long monolog of an apparently disillusioned worker and some polemics written across the screen, as well as spoken, that are depressing indeed. Kobland throws in long takes of frying an egg or moving through an apartment, or the studied introduction of an orchestra as it is tuning up with the screen blank. Do other sequences, such as the sound of someone urinating or the view of a young man picking at his pimples in deep concentration, also represent a post-liberal funk? When the clips from Citizen Kane and footage of bombings and atrocities in World War II are added in, most viewers will indeed leave puzzled by it all.
~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Independent filmmaker, artist, and critic Lizzie Borden made her feature-film debut with this bold fusion of science fiction and feminist politics. In the near future, America is celebrating the tenth anniversary of a socialist revolution that has changed the political fabric of the nation, but some aspects of life have evolved much more than others. As some Americans become disenchanted with the new order, racism and sexism are on the rise, and though the new leaders may talk a good game about economic justice and equality in the workplace, women find they're still working harder and being paid less, and their jobs mysteriously vanish when they complain. Adelaide Norris (Jeanne Satterfield) is an educated African-American woman who is also a blue-collar laborer; fed up with the double standards that control her life, Norris helps form the Women's Army, a revolutionary feminist group that serves as a vigilante force to protect women on the street and a paramilitary unit to fight the powers that be. The Women's Army are successful enough in protecting women against rape and assault to gain the unwelcome attention of the FBI. The FBI succeeds in putting Norris behind bars, where she's killed in a shadowy incident, but New York City's female-run underground media rises up to make sure the people know the truth about her death. Eric Bogosian and Kathryn Bigelow each made their screen debuts in Born in Flames, with minor supporting roles - the former as a technician at a television studio, and the latter as an editor. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In this violent drama a pair of thugs become professional killers. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi