Robert Elswit Movies

Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is a surveillance expert on the rise. He's living the American dream with a wife, Amy (Catherine Keener), infant daughter, and a house in the suburbs of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After the completion of an assignment for a U.S. Senator, Welles is summoned to the house of a recently deceased captain of industry. His widow, in settling his estate, has discovered an 8MM film in her late husband's private safe. The silent short depicts the apparent murder of a young woman by a large, masked figure, what is known as a "snuff" film. Greatly disturbed by the film's contents, the widow hires Welles to find the identity of the woman and determine if she is still alive. Welles finds the girl's identity and follows her trail from the time she ran away from home to Hollywood. Once there, Welles meets adult bookstore clerk Max California (Joaquin Phoenix) to act as Virgil to Welles' Dante. As the two begin their descent into the world of underground pornography, the detective grows more and more distant from his family, as if he cannot shake the taint of the world in which he now walks. Tom and Max eventually meet pornographers Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare) and Eddie Poole (James Gandolfini). By this time the detective finds he can no longer walk out of the inferno. ~ Ron Wells, All Movie Guide

To escape from the boredom of her small-town life, Sunday School teacher Candy Morrison (Barbara Hershey) engages in an affair with a fellow churchgoer. When his wife Peggy learns about the relationship, she attacks Candy with an axe; after a struggle, Candy kills Peggy, hitting her 41 times with the axe. In the resulting trial, her plea of self-defense is examined. This TV-movie is based on a true story. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

When young Chuck Murdock (Joshua Zuehlke) visits a nuclear missile site, he learns that one bomb would destroy the earth in less time than it would take a piece of silverware to drop from his hand to the floor. This information sends the sensitive boy into existential angst. Wondering why anybody should do anything when the world can be destroyed so quickly, and hoping to raise consciousness about nuclear weapons, Chuck quits his Little League team. He gains a little bit of local press. One of those stories is read by NBA star "Amazing Grace" Smith (Alex English), who is so moved by the boy's story that he too quits playing his sport. This produces a great deal of national press, as well as a handful of stars from other sports that decide to join the ranks of Amazing Grace and Chuck. Some powers that be in the sports world, as well as the government, do not look kindly upon these "strikes" and set about to end the movement. Amazing Grace and Chuck came near the end of a cycle of nuclear anxiety films that included Testament, The Day After, and Threads. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Successful LA marketing analyst Michael Boll (James Spader) seemingly has it all-except a sense of self-confidence. Enigmatic drifter Alex (Rob Lowe) enters Michael's life and immediately begins to exert a negative influence. As Michael's self-esteem zooms (aided by generous dollops of sex and drugs) he allows himself to be dragooned into a life of crime by the demonic Alex. The "doppelganger" aspects of Bad Influence, and the film's many unexpected twists and turns, echo films of Alfred Hitchcock, especially Strangers on a Train. The film's boldest stroke is to cast the likeable Lowe as the bad guy (albeit a charming one) and the often villainous Spader as the malleable milquetoast. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

While set within the milieu of the Los Angeles adult film industry, Boogie Nights is less a film about pornography than the serio-comic story of a group of misfits, losers, and lost souls who are embraced by Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), a director who makes "adult films, exotic motion pictures." In 1977, while hanging out at a disco, Jack spots Eddie (Mark Wahlberg), the new busboy at the club, and tells him he's convinced "there's something wonderful inside those jeans waiting to get out." Jack knows his business well and his expert eye has not betrayed him; Eddie is a pornographer's dream -- good looking, remarkably endowed, and willing and able to do as many takes as might be needed. The product of a woefully dysfunctional upbringing, Eddie is not terribly bright but is very ambitious and eager to prove he has a "special something" to share with the world. Eddie changes his name to Dirk Diggler and quickly becomes the biggest star in hardcore. Working alongside "Dirk" in Jack's films are Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a porn actress who applies her misplaced maternal instincts to anyone who needs nurturing; Rollergirl (Heather Graham), a cheerful but blank-faced high school drop-out who never removes her roller skates; Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), a none-too-bright actor, aspiring magician, and failing songwriter; Buck (Don Cheadle), a black actor fascinated with cowboy iconography who wants to open a stereo shop; Scotty J (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a stocky and awkward soundman infatuated with Dirk; Little Bill (William H. Macy), Jack's assistant director, who has trouble dealing with his wife's brazen infidelity; and Colonel James (Robert Ridgely), Jack's backer, who has a weakness for young girls. In the brief, late-'70s moment when porn was chic and sex films seemed poised to break into the mainstream, Dirk becomes a star and Jack a respected name. But a few years later, drugs and pride have taken their toll on Dirk and many of his friends, while the advent of the VCR radically changes the adult movie business; Jack goes from being a "filmmaker" to manufacturing and wholesaling videocassettes, a wealthy but emotionally broken man. In his second film, wunderkind director Paul Thomas Anderson juggled a broad range of characters in a manner reminiscent of Robert Altman's ensemble films, making Boogie Nights a sad but funny story of a makeshift family of damaged people and what happens before and after their brief moment in the sun. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Boys is a coming-of-age tale about an addled prep school student who nurses a woman back to health after an accident and becomes involved in her cryptic past. John Baker Jr. (Lukas Haas) is a tormented high school senior outcast who's weary of his upper-crust boarding school life and dreads his future as a supermarket chain manager. When he finds Patty Vare (Winona Ryder) unconscious in a field after being thrown from a horse, Baker sees this as an opportunity to break out of his humdrum existence, and he smuggles her into the school to take care of her. The relationship blooms into a somewhat bizarre love affair, as John discovers that Patty is concealing a mysterious secret involving a missing baseball player and a stolen car. Although the film takes a little time to get started, what originates as an analysis of guarded youths making foolish judgments evolves into a celebration of adolescent insurrection. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

This made-for-cable biopic originally went out under the simpler title Margaret Bourke-White. Farrah Fawcett stars as the famed photojournalist, whose work for Life magazine from 1936 onward gained her worldwide celebrity. The best scenes, showing the dauntless Bourke-White (Fawcett) at work in the most grueling and perilous of situations, are all too fleeting. The filmmakers evidently believed that the audience would be more intrigued by Bourke-White's stormy relationship with her husband, novelist Erskine Caldwell (played with a fluctuating Southern accent by Frederic Forrest). The film's chief assets are the well-focused performance of Farrah Fawcett, and the lensed-on-location sequences in Louisiana and Moscow. Margaret Bourke-White premiered over the TNT cable channel on April 24, 1989. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck) is a low-level Los Angeles mob enforcer. His volatile boss, Louis (Lenny Venito), hires Gigli to kidnap Brian (newcomer Justin Bartha), the mentally handicapped younger brother of a federal prosecutor who's about to bring Louis' boss to trial in New York. Gigli gets the kid home without a hitch. Then a beautiful woman (Jennifer Lopez) shows up at his door. She says her name is Ricki, and Gigli soon learns that the nervous Louis has hired her to keep an eye on him. "In every relationship," Gigli soon finds himself expounding to his unwanted partner, "there's a bull and a cow." His efforts to maintain control of the situation are further hampered by the brief appearance of the insane Detective Stanley Jacobellis (Christopher Walken) and a forced visit to his overbearing mother's (Lainie Kazan) house. To make matters worse, when Gigli expresses his attraction to Ricki, he learns that she's a lesbian. She, meanwhile, proves herself considerably more capable than the lunkheaded Gigli, winning their war of words and even scaring off a rowdy group of high school kids. As Gigli and Ricki continue to look after the young, innocent Brian, they find themselves increasingly attracted to one another. But their potential budding romance is put on hold when Starkman (Al Pacino) arrives from New York, angry about how his affairs are being handled. Director Martin Brest, in his first film since 1998's Meet Joe Black, returns to the crime comedy genre that made his reputation. Brest also wrote the script for Gigli, his first since 1979's Going in Style. Stars Affleck and Lopez began a well-publicized romantic relationship on the set of the film. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Before his commercial breakthrough with Boogie Nights (1997), writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson made this low-key drama. John (John C. Reilly), a half-bright loser stranded in Reno, is down to his last few bucks when Sydney (Phillip Baker Hall), taking pity on him, buys him breakfast and offers him a few tips on making money in the casinos. Two years later, John has become Sydney's partner, but his lack of common sense goes from problematic to dangerous when he falls in love with Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress who isn't above turning a few tricks when she needs to make money -- and isn't any brighter than John. Hall and Reilly, both first-rate character actors, are cast in rare leading roles, and Paltrow is cast strongly against type as a part-time prostitute with a serious lack of street smarts. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This teen comedy from Savage Steve Holland stars Corey Parker as an underachieving high schooler who hatches a crazy plot with valedictorian Lara Flynn Boyle to gain acceptance into a prestigious university. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

This made-for-cable thriller stars Powers Boothe as a former policeman whose son (C. Thomas Howell) has fallen prey to a band of white supremacists. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) handles all of the dirty work for a major New York law firm, arranging top-flight legal services and skirting through loopholes for ethically questionable clients. But when a fellow "fixer" decides to turn on the very firm they were hired to clean up for, Clayton finds himself at the center of a conspiratorial maelstrom. Once an ambitious D.A., Clayton is now a shell of his former dynamic self, thanks to a divorce, an unfortunate business venture, and astronomical debt. Though he longs to leave the cutthroat, ethically dubious world of corporate law behind, Clayton's poor financial situation and devotion to firm head Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) leave him little choice but to remain on the job and tough it out. Meanwhile, litigator Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) finds her entire company's future hinging on the outcome of a multi-billion-dollar settlement overseen by Clayton's friend, star lawyer Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson). When Edens snaps and decides to blow the whistle on the questionable case, sabotaging the defense, Clayton must decide between his loyalty and his conscience. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

In this romance, a woman campaigns against a handsome actor in a mayoral race in their small seaside town. Trouble ensues when she falls in love with him. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide