Sue Moore Movies
- 1998
Her ongoing chemotherapy forces Murphy (Candice Bergen) to appear in public wearing a wig. This is humiliating enough for her without having to bare her soul on a weekly basis with her cancer support group--and accordingly, Murphy refuses to let her guard down with the other group members no matter how much they chip away at her veneer. Featured in the supporting cast are real-life cancer victims Tracy Nelson, Gail Strickland, Marcia Wallace andWendie Jo Sperber. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
It's 1958, and the producers of the quiz show 21 have a problem. Their current champ, Herbert Stempel (John Turturro), has a phenomenal memory and a broad range of knowledge. He's also a pudgy loudmouth with a grating personality, so Herbert is encouraged to "take a dive" and allow Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a handsome and charming college professor, to become the show's new champion. Audiences like Van Doren, and he's certainly not averse to the money he's winning, but the ethics of the situation begin to trouble him, especially when the show's producers begin to give him the questions in advance. Director Robert Redford and writer Paul Attanasio paint a telling portrait of how the network heads and advertising men who manipulated the quiz shows were also able to manipulate the responsibility for the scandal away from themselves. While on the surface a story about the scandal itself, Quiz Show is just as importantly about a turning point in the 1950s when TV and advertising began to change American character and culture. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- John Turturro, Rob Morrow, (more)
Steven Spielberg's phenomenally successful sci-fi adventure thriller is graced by state-of-the-art special effects from the team of Stan Winston, Phil Tippett and Michael Lantieri from George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic. The film follows two dinosaur experts -- Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler Laura Dern) -- as they are invited by eccentric millionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) to preview his new amusement park on an island off Costa Rica. By cloning DNA harvested from pre-historic insects, Hammond has been able to create living dinosaurs for his new Jurassic Park, an immense animal preserve housing real brachiosaurs, dilophosaurs, triceratops, velociraptors, and a Tyrannosaur Rex. Accompanied by cynical scientist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who is obsessed with chaos theory, and Hammond's two grandchildren (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello), they are sent on a tour through Hammond's new resort in computer controlled touring cars. But as a tropical storm hits the island, knocking out the power supply, and an unscrupulous employee (Wayne Knight) sabotages the system so that he can smuggle dinosaur embryos out of the park, the dinosaurs start to rage out of control. Grant then has to bring Hammond's grandchildren back to safety as the group is pursued by the gigantic man-eating beasts. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi
- Starring:
- Sam Neill, Laura Dern, (more)
In this black teen comedy, a young man is thrilled that his kindly older brother has arranged for him to date the bombshell next door. To further impress her, little brother takes his sibling's shiny sports car. If he had known that there were a pair of corpses in the trunk though, the youth may have changed his mind. Matters get really messy when the cops pull him over and check out the trunk themselves. Soon he and his date find themselves pursued by the police, the tong and an irate florist. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- Starring:
- Ethan Hawke, Teri Polo, (more)
Victoria Principal plays a deputy District Attorney; that we can believe. James Farentino costars as a judge; this is also believable. Opponents in the courtroom, Principal and Farentino are lovers in bed; okay, we'll buy that. Principal is trying to secure a murder conviction for a pimp/blackmailer; we're still with this. But what Principal doesn't know is that the actual murderer is none other than Judge Farentino. Now you've lost us. Naked Lie was first telecast February 26, 1989, an event deemed worthy of a TV Guide cover; one gets the feeling that Victoria Principal could have gotten a TV Guide cover in 1989 by reading the phone book. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- 1988
In this the third in the "Angel" series, former hooker Angel is reunited with her mom just long enough to make friends (her mom left when Angel was a baby) and learn that she has a half-sister somewhere. Mom is soon the victim of some sort of hit squad and Angel decides to find her half-sister and avenge her mom's death. Her half-sister, it turns out, is a prostitute, and former-hooker Angel, virtuously "born-again," is dead-set against prostitution so she's out to save her sibling. Unlike its predecessors, there's lots of nudity in this film. ~ Rovi
- Starring:
- Mitzi Kapture, Mark Blankfield, (more)
- 1986
Acclaimed children's author Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) was one of the chief creative forces behind this imaginative 1986 production of Sergei Prokofiev's 1919 fantasy opera The Love of Three Oranges, staged at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. The original work tells of a king whose hypochondriacal son can only be cured through laughter; nothing can do the trick except for an accident that befalls the witch Fata Morgana, who loses her skirt. Upon seeing this, the prince bursts into hysterics, which infuriates Fata Morgana. In revenge, she imparts the young man with a romantic obsession for three oranges, which he pursues to the ends of the Earth. Sendak fills the stage with oversized puppets, jugglers, body-builders, monsters, and laces the production with special animated sequences. It stars Willard White as The King, Ryland Davies as The Prince and Nelly Morpurgo as Fata Morgana. The London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Bernard Haitink, provides musical accompaniment. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
Based on the Stephen King short story The Body, Rob Reiner's easygoing nostalgia piece is set in Castle Rock, OR, over Labor Day weekend, 1959. A quartet of boys, inseparable friends all, set out in search of a dead body that one of the boys overhears his brother talking about. The foursome consists of intellectual Gordie (Wil Wheaton), born leader Chris (River Phoenix), emotionally disturbed Teddy (Corey Feldman), and chubby hanger-on Vern (Jerry O'Connell). The boys' adventures en route to the elusive body are colored by the personal pressures brought to bear on all of them by the adult world. Richard Dreyfuss, playing the grown-up Gordie, narrates the film, while Kiefer Sutherland dominates every scene he's in as a brutish high-school bully. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, (more)
- 1985
Not long after he lost that "chicken run" to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), actor Corey Allen switched professional gears to become a prolific film and TV director. Allen was responsible for putting television perennials James Brolin and Lisa Hartman through their paces in Beverly Hills Cowgirl Blues. Brolin plays a Beverly Hills cop who teams up with a luscious female private eye from Texas (Hartman, of course). While Brolin prefers peace and quiet, Hartman insists upon rooting out the murderer of a debutante-turned-hooker. Since both stars were gainfully employed on other TV series when Beverly Hills Cowgirl Blues first aired on October 5, 1985, we hesitate to suggest that this film was the pilot for a potential series. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- 1972
Produced during the short-lived "porno chic" period of the early to mid-'70s, Flesh Gordon was a (relatively) big-budget, adults-only parody of the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s, boasting amusing special effects and some fine stop-motion animation from Jim Danforth (who used an assumed name for the credits -- his own name spelled backwards) and Dave Allen. Flesh Gordon and his lady love Dale Ardor do battle with Emperor Wang from the Planet Porno (the names give you an idea of the level of humor) as they encounter a Penisaurus, rapist robots, a Lesbian Land, and a requisite amount of sex and nudity. The original version featured hardcore sex sequences, though the film was trimmed to a soft-X not long after its initial release and was in time cut further to an R. Co-produced by hardcore pioneer Bill Osco. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Jason Williams, Suzanne Fields, (more)
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