Lisa Lindstrom Movies

Although Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her does bear some similarities to Short Cuts and Magnolia in its setting (Southern California) and mood (modern malaise), and its multiple story format, its focus is exclusively on female characters, and it's possible to view each story on its own. The film begins with a prologue: Police detectives are investigating the apparent suicide of a Hispanic woman (Elpidia Carillo). "This Is Dr. Keener" deals with Dr. Elaine Keener (Glenn Close), a single professional woman attempting to care for her aging and infirm mother and deal with her own loneliness. She invites Christine (Calista Flockhart), a tarot card reader, into her home to make some sense of her life. "Fantasies About Rebecca" profiles a successful bank manager (Holly Hunter) involved with a married man (Gregory Hines). When she learns that she is pregnant, he coldly advises her to take care of the "problem." Before she visits Dr. Keener to have an abortion, she impulsively has a fling with a colleague (Matt Craven). She is also confronted by a female street person in the bank's parking lot. "Someone for Rose" is about a single mother (Kathy Baker), a writer of children's books. She is attracted to a new neighbor, a dwarf (Danny Woodburn), and he catches her spying on him in his house. She's also amazed to find that her son is more sexually active than she knew -- and more than she is herself. "Good Night Lilly, Good Night Christine" details the relationship between the tarot card reader Christine and her lover, Lilly (Valeria Golino), who is critically ill with an unnamed disease. The final story, "Love Waits for Kathy," concerns two sisters, Carol (Cameron Diaz), a lovely blind woman with an active social life, and her police detective sibling, Kathy (Amy Brenneman), one of the detectives who appeared in the prologue. Kathy is attracted to the medical examiner in the suicide case, and her story ends with him taking her out on a date. In an epilogue, Dr. Keener drops in to a bar, where she meets a male character from one of the earlier stories. Debuting director Rodrigo Garcia, a noted cinematographer, is the son of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Things You Can Tell made its debut on cable television, although it was originally intended to be a theatrical release. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi

The strong anti-China beliefs of actor and political activist Richard Gere were evident in this Hitchcockian thriller that sought to expose the civil and human rights abuses of that country's legal system. Gere stars as Jack Moore, counsel to a large media conglomerate seeking to open trade relations with China, thereby delivering American television shows by satellite to the largest untapped market in the world. After an evening out at a nightclub and fashion show, Jack goes home with a beautiful model (Jessey Meng), then wakes up the next morning to discover her dead body. To his horror, Jack is accused of murdering the girl, who is revealed to have been the daughter of a high-ranking general. Assigned a court-appointed lawyer, Shen Yuelin (Bai Ling), Jack discovers that the repressive Chinese court system does not grant bail, encourages quick guilty pleas and executions, and looks upon him with disfavor for his Western moral turpitude. Finally persuading Shen that he's innocent, Jack and his lawyer embark on an investigation impeded at every turn by Chinese authorities, eventually uncovering a plot to discredit Jack and his company's entry into China. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

Jon Avnet's The War is set in the rural south and brimming with lessons on social consciousness, much like his previous effort, Fried Green Tomatoes (1991). During the summer of 1970 in backwoods Mississippi, Stephen Simmons (Kevin Costner) is struggling to be a breadwinner for his family while still suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in the Vietnam War. His wife Lois (Mare Winningham) provides most of the family income. Stephen gets a job in a mine and saves a friend who has been injured, helping him erase his guilt over abandoning another friend during a firefight in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Simmons children, Stu (Elijah Wood) and Lidia (Lexi Randall) are feuding with an even poorer family of neighbors, the Lipnickis, over access to a tree fort that Stu and Lidia built. Mr. Lipnicki (Raynor Scheine) is drunken and abusive and helps escalate the disagreement into a major battle for the fort. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi