Jeffrey Cohen Movies

A plucky seventeen-year old hockey player proves that he is good enough to play on the Canadian national team in this drama. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Martin Short and Annette O'Toole star in this comedy documenting a date from hell. Short is David, a sunglasses salesman, who makes a date with Kathy (Annette O'Toole) in order to celebrate his new promotion. David and Kathy have gone out a few times before, but they both think that this is the date that will put both of them over the top, convinced that they have finally found the right person. With anxiety in their hearts, they both prepare anxiously for the date. But there is trouble on the horizon. Before heading out on the date, David discovers that instead of getting a promotion, he has been fired. Afraid that Kathy will think that he is loser, he doesn't tell her that he lost his job. He has also borrowed the car and the apartment of his friend Bruce (Paul Reiser) for the date, permitting her to think that they all belong to him. But Kathy hasn't been entirely truthful to David either. For example, she has conveniently forgotten to tell him about the existence of her seven-year-old daughter. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

This macabre, whimsical, erotic, dark, seriocomic film is a complex tale about an eccentric family and the psychological and emotional maelstroms that follow them around from New England to New York to Vienna, where the Hotel New Hampshire is located. Writer-director Tony Richardson worked from the convoluted novel by John Irving that covers most universally saleable topics -- homosexuality, death, incest, abandonment, Nazis, masochism, terrorists, rape, mental instability, and anarchists. The children in the family are the main focus: John (Rob Lowe) is a womanizing high-school student with a deep-rooted desire for his own sister; Franny (Jodie Foster) is the eldest daughter, a victim of a gang rape, now morbidly fascinated by one of the rapists, and equally attracted to her brother with incestuous desire; Frank (Paul McCrane) is the younger gay brother; and Lilly (Jennifer Dundas) is the little sister who blossoms into a famous author. Associated with the family is Suzie the Bear (Nastassja Kinski) who is not secure enough to come out of her bear suit. One friend of the family, Freud (Wallace Shawn), has been blinded by the Nazis and is running the Hotel New Hampshire in Vienna when he asks everyone to come and help him out. By this time, the plot has run out of room, and the climactic endings to several unresolved relationships happen in quick succession. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide