Gabriella Martinelli Movies

Following the death of her drug-addicted mother, a whimsical young girl follows her chemically dependent father to a remote prairie house to discover a wondrous world of magical fireflies and nocturnal bog men in this hallucinatory childhood fantasy from visionary filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Noah (Jeff Bridges) is a burnt-out rock star whose post-superstar voyage to obscurity is hastened by a serious drug addiction that is also shared with his wild-eyed wife (Jennifer Tilly). When the Noah's increasingly erratic wife suffers a fatal overdose, the faded rock star opts to escape the painful reality by retreating to a ramshackle remote home with his young daughter, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland). Left to her own devices as her father stumbles about the grasslands in a drug-induced haze, Jeliza-Rose soon ventures into her own fantasy land before making the acquaintance of mentally challenged youth Dickens (Brendan Fletcher). As the two become fast friends and Jeliza-Rose joins the swimsuit-clad Dickens in defeating the menacing shark that traverses the nearby railways, the pair are watched over by Dickens' black-clad sister, Dell (Janet McTeer), who acts as Dickens' guardian and whose overly enthusiastic interest in the art of taxidermy borders on obsessive. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Three women living in Toronto find themselves confronting emotional crises regarding the men in their lives in this drama. Olivia (Sophia Loren) is a woman who spends her days looking after her husband, John (Pete Postlethwaite), who is confined to a wheelchair. Olivia has long aspired to a career as an artist, but John, not emotionally generous, refuses to hear of her wasting her time on such things. However, Olivia does find encouragement from an unlikely source -- Max (Gérard Depardieu), an eccentric French gardener. Natalia (Mira Sorvino) is a news photographer who, while on assignment in Angola, took a memorable portrait of a crying child orphaned by war. Her father, Alexander (Klaus-Maria Brandauer), also a well-known photojournalist, is understandably proud of Natalia when her photo is used on the cover of a major news magazine, but she is haunted by the knowledge that while she made the child famous, she couldn't save its life. And Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) is a woman whose father, Alan (Malcolm McDowell), beat her mother to death when she was young. Catherine has never been able to resolve her hatred of her father, and when Alan is released from prison, she's willing to abandon her husband, her children, and her career as a musician to track him down and kill him, unable to accept the notion that he's a changed man. Between Strangers was directed by Edoardo Ponti, whose mother happens to be Sophia Loren; it marks the first time the two have worked together. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This family adventure concerns Ryan (Ryan Slater), a ten-year-old boy who has traveled to China with his father, a scientist working with a wildlife preserve dedicated to the rescue and protection of giant pandas, who are quickly becoming an endangered species in their native land. However, the preserve is faced with a severe budget cut that would close them down unless they can produce a living panda cub. Ryan, his father Michael (Stephen Lang), and a local girl acting as translator (Huang Fei) set out in search of a baby panda. However, when they find one, the bear is being pursued by poachers. Ryan becomes separated from the rest of the group, and he alone must guide the young panda to the safety of the preserve, with the hunters hot on his trail and without the help of his father or their translator. The Amazing Panda Adventure was shot on location in Mainland China's Sichuan province. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs to pay the bills. His wife, Joan (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, and soon he joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens; he visits the kindly yet sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) and walks away with his first dose of the black meat -- a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. Soon, monstrous beetles are whispering conspiracy theories in Bill's ears and his nebbish writer friends Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker) are sleeping with Joan under his nose. When a party trick involving a liquor glass and a gun goes awry, killing Joan, Bill flees to Interzone, a Mediterranean city full of talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, and plots within plots. As he navigates this paranoid landscape, Bill begins ingesting another drug called mugwump jism and writes fragments that Hank and Martin soon assemble into a novel under the title Naked Lunch. As beat literature aficionados know, Interzone is based on Tangiers -- the city where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. The incident in the film in which Hank and Martin appropriate Bill's writing and have it published closely approximates the real-life circumstances of the novel's publication, although it was Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who helped out the real-life Burroughs. The William Tell incident that kills Bill's wife is also drawn from the author's real life. "William Lee" is both Burroughs' literary stand-in and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky. Ian Holm, who plays Joan Frost's husband, Tom, would appear in Cronenberg's similarly experimental eXistenZ several years later. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Director Jack Sholder followed his surprise sleeper hit The Hidden (1987) with this action drama that re-teamed Young Guns (1988) co-stars Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips. Sutherland stars as Buster McHenry, a Philadelphia cop working undercover as a thief in the gang of wealthy, sadistic Marino (Rob Knepper). When the gang's heist of some diamonds goes awry, a few innocents are shot, and a valuable Native American spear is stolen landing Buster in bureaucratic hot water. Along comes Hank Storm (Phillips), intent upon retrieving the relic of his Sioux tribesmen and avenge the death of his brother. Hank and Buster team up to take Marino down and expose police corruption in the process. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide