Grace Zabriskie Movies

When a successful newswoman receives an on-the-air shock, she begins to analyze her relationship with her philandering husband. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide

Lou Diamond Phillips stars in this contrived but entertaining thriller (which he also wrote) as Mitchell Osgood, an aspiring writer who runs a Los Angeles bookstore. When a heartfelt book about his father Haing S. Ngor fails to win him a publishing deal, Osgood decides to write something more eye-catching -- a book about recently-released serial killer Albert Merrick Clancy Brown. The media beats him to it, so the ruthlessly ambitious Osgood decides to spur Merrick to commit more crimes, hiring him to work at the bookstore and playing cruel mind games in hopes of setting Merrick off. He does, but the results are quite different from what Osgood had anticipated. Phillips' performance is weak, and the screenplay is predictably bland, but the film remains worthwhile thanks to a terrific job by Brown as the killer. Brown has turned in a number of fine psycho performances, but he has rarely been better than he is here, building from understated diffidence to full-blown psychosis in expert fashion. Grace Zabriskie and Willard E. Pugh co-star with Cecilia Peck. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Michael Bay (The Rock) directed this science fiction action thriller in the When Worlds Collide tradition. After astronomy students discover a comet-asteroid collision, an asteroid fragment "the size of the Super Dome" threatens. It's destroyed by a secret USA defense in space, but a large chunk veers off toward Singapore. With another asteroid "the size of Texas" en route, a plan is devised to send oil drillers to land on the asteroid and drop a nuclear device down a 1000-foot shaft, a scheme calculated to crack the asteroid into two halves, saving Earth. NASA begins a crash program to train beer-besotted oil roughnecks for the mission. During a stopover to refuel at the Mir Station, the space station is accidentally destroyed, so a Russian cosmonaut also joins the team. Produced by Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer (Con Air), and Gale Anne Hurd (The Relic, The Abyss). ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

Meet the Henricksons. They're the typical suburban American family, occupied with hectic schedules and bills to pay, as well as trying to make sense of an increasingly complicated world. Oh, and they also happen to be polygamists. In the first season of this unconventional, critically acclaimed drama, every day is a new adventure for patriarch Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), who lives outside Salt Lake City with his three wives -- Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) -- and their collective brood of seven children, including Bill and Barb's teenagers, Ben (Douglas Smith) and Sarah (Amanda Seyfried). Owner of a profitable home-improvement superstore, Bill is anxious to expand his empire (and support his growing family) by opening another Home Plus location with his business partner and fellow polygamist, Don Embry (Joel McKinnon Miller). However, an unwanted investor hoping to share in Bill's good fortune emerges: Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the scheming "Prophet" of the remote Juniper Creek polygamist compound who is also Nicki's father. There's been bad blood between Bill and Roman ever since the former was expelled from Juniper Creek as an adolescent, largely by the latter's hand. Bill also clashes with Adaleen (Mary Kay Place), one of Roman's wives, and their power-hungry son and chief enforcer, Alby (Matt Ross). But Bill is not alone in this feud, as his father Frank (Bruce Dern), mother Lois (Grace Zabriskie) and brother Joey (Shawn Doyle) still live at Juniper Creek and identify, to varying degrees of familial allegiance, with Bill's enmity for Roman. On the home front, third wife Margene risks exposing the Henricksons' illicit lifestyle by befriending a Mormon neighbor; Nicki tries to hide a shopping addiction and the tens of thousands of dollars of credit-card debt that goes with it; and Barb tiptoes into the spotlight after one of her kids nominates her for Utah's Mother of the Year award. ~ Joe Friedrich, All Movie Guide

Former Bewitched TV-star Elizabeth Montgomery plays against type and stars as a murderess in this made-for-television movie. Based on the book Preacher's Girl by Jim Schutze, Montgomery stars as the real-life killer Blanche Taylor Moore who was caught by authorities in 1989. The movie chronicles her transformation from the innocent 1950s daughter of a preacher into the serial killer known for poisoning her husbands with arsenic. ~ Bernadette McCallion, All Movie Guide

This passable made-for-cable-TV vampire opus explores the clever concept of a Transylvanian immigrant community in the western United States. Young Cody (Jason London) is introduced to their legacy one fateful night when his parents are awakened, staked, and set on fire by ruthless vampire-hunters. After a narrow escape, Cody seeks out a distant uncle in Long Beach -- who happens to be a key figure in the "Carpathian-American" mob. Cody is eventually inducted into the culture, which is represented by various social strata, from a lawyer/journalist couple (who encourage further assimilation into non-vampire society), to a bloodsucking teenage biker gang. Cody becomes a full-fledged member of the family, learning the real secret which binds the community... but the new path to his destiny is soon blocked by the untimely arrival of the hunters, who have tracked him cross-country to his new family's Long Beach lair. This was originally conceived as a pilot for a TV series, and it shows -- the tendency to lapse into soap-opera conventions is all too apparent -- but benefits from a glossy look, high production values and some interesting plot twists. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

Meant to cash in on the breakdancing mania of the early 1980s, this run-of-the-mill teen movie is undercut by casting Lorenzo Lamas in the role of Chilly D, a breakdancing king, while Magick (La Ron A. Smith) who teaches Chilly the fine art of the acrobatic moves is a real pro. Once Chilly has mastered his new talent, he gets an offer to perform in a high-class club. Lusting after fame and status, Chilly leaves his girlfriend, mother, and buddies behind to focus on a new lifestyle that includes an upscale apartment, a new girlfriend, and as one might guess, all the things he never really wanted. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Temistocles Lopez's Chain of Desire, based on Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, plays like an AIDS-era version of The Yellow Rolls Royce, in which a series of unrelated amorous lovers are connected by a "chain of desire." The film begins as Alma D'Angeli (Linda Fiorentino) flees from a lover and runs into a church, where she finds solace and a young Latino worker, Jesus (Elias Koteas). They make love. Then Jesus comes home to his wife Isa (Angel Aviles) and gets intimate with her. The next morning, Isa goes off to see Dr. Jerald Buckley (Patrick Bauchau), with whom she is having an affair. After seeing Isa, Jerald heads off to visit Linda (Grace Zabriskie), a sexy dominatrix. Linda returns home to her husband, Hubert (Malcolm MacDowell), a harried television commentator. After an unsatisfactory interview with women who claim to have had affairs with John F. Kennedy, he relieves his tensions by seeking the arms of Keith (Jamie Harrold), a teenage hustler. And the trail continues on as gay social worker Ken (Tim Guinee) offers Ken a place for the night, followed by Ken's lover David Bango (Dewey Martin) and hot dancer Diana (Holly Marie Combs), who wants David to deflower her. Coming on the scene after that is famed artist Mel (Seymour Cassel), who has a tryst with Diana, but he finds that he has to answer to his vindictive wife, Cleo (Assumpta Serna). At the end, all the characters arrive at a hip nightclub, where Alma, the singer at the club, has learned that the lover she had spurned at the beginning of the film has been diagnosed with AIDS. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

In trying to figure out the extent of baby Wyatt's powers -- and, eventually, to take over those powers herself -- the Crone (Grace Zabriskie) imposes the Curse of the Monkey Totem on the Charmed Ones. As a result, each girl loses one of her senses: Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) is deaf ("Hear no evil"), Piper (Holly Marie Combs) is blind ("See no evil"), and Paige (Rose McGowan) is mute ("Speak no evil"). In addition to compounding the girls' domestic, professional, and personal problems, their afflictions also leave little Wyatt defenseless -- or so it seems. Despite being unable to speak throughout most of the episode, Paige manages to belt out a rendition of Peggy Lee's "Fever." ~ All Movie Guide

Friendship and racism in 1880s America is explored in this made-for-television drama. Sidney Poitier stars as Gypsy Smith, a bounty hunter who, much to the chagrin of the local white population, leads a group of black settlers to Oklahoma to form their own free community. The film shows how racial tensions erupt between the black and white homesteaders. The Native American experience of racism is intertwined into the plot as well, with the story of a young Cheyenne boy who has lost his roots. Sidney Poitier and Regina Taylor were nominated for Image awards for their performances. Based on the novel by Clancy Carlile, the film originally aired in two parts. ~ Bernadette McCallion, All Movie Guide

What does a biographer do when the truth about his subject is far less pleasant than the legend? That is the moral dilemma at the heart of Cobb, which explores the lives of both baseball's premier hitter, Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones), and the sportswriter assigned to set his story down, Al Stump (Robert Wuhl). Stump arrives at the Tahoe home of the dying Cobb to write the official life story of the first man inducted into the Baseball Hall Of Fame. He finds a drunken, misanthropic, bitter racist who abuses his biographer as well as everyone else. Stump must either candycoat his subject's life or present an accurate picture of a disgusting man who happened to become an American sports hero. The movie's biting focus on Cobb, ferociously performed by Jones, is not matched by its weaker representation of Stump, an imbalance which ultimately weakens the film's overall effect. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

In this exciting action-adventure a crack team of military commandos infiltrate North Korea and then set about the dangerous task of trying to destroy a nuclear power plant to curtail the country's plans to build nuclear weapons. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide