Barry Nolan Movies

Director Mike Nichols teams up with his former partner/screenwriter Elaine May for the first time in many years and for the first time together in films to create this sophisticated, remake of the phenomenally popular French musical farce La Cage aux Folles that stars Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman and Diane Wiest as two dramatically disparate couples who manage to reconcile their vast differences for the sake of their children who are getting married. Williams plays Armand Goldman, the owner of a popular South Beach drag club known for putting on elaborate showcases starring his long-time lover/wife Albert (Lane) who appears as "Starina." Lately poor flamboyant, flighty Albert has been in crisis over the inexorable onset of middle age. He has been moody, paranoid and unbearably. When he gets too inconsolably distraught, handsome but clumsy houseboy Agador quietly slips Albert "Pirin" tablets (which he explains to Armand are simply Aspirin tablets with the "as" scraped off). Still though Albert can be a royal pain, Armand dearly loves him and the two live happily in their splendiferous apartment above the club. One day Armand's son Val (the result of Armand's single foray into straight sex) comes visiting with joyous news: he has found his dreamgirl and is getting married. The only trouble is, Barbara Keeley's father is the blustery ultra-religious right-wing Senator Keeley (Hackman), the founder of the Coalition for Moral Order. Senator Keeley and his colleagues are not as upright as they seem and when his closest associate is found dead beside a black, underage prostitute, Keeley finds his house surrounded by ravenous newshounds, hungry for dirt. Knowing that they are poised to ruin him, Keeley and his proper but slightly addled-wife (Wiest) decide that a big, elaborate, church wedding will be just the ticket to save his reputation. Barbara has neglected to tell them that Val's parents are gay, preferring to claim that they are members of the South Beach social elite. In a panic, she panics and calls Val who breaks the bad news to Armand and begs him to make the apartment less flamboyant and worst of all to hide Albert (who functioned as Val's mother while the youth grew up) during the visit. Armand is angry, but loving his son, finally, reluctantly agrees, knowing that he will deeply wound his companion. Unfortunately, Albert finds out and as a compromise tries to learn how to be macho so he can pretend to be Val's uncle, he is too much the Great Dame to ever pass as one of the guys and so is banned from the party. Armand then locates Catherine and asks her to masquerade as his wife. She agrees to show up later that evening. Meanwhile their friends busily redecorate the apartment until it looks as if it were done in "Early Inquisition." During the fateful dinner party, Catherine is late and Albert gets uproarious revenge. Achingly comic chaos ensues as Armand tries to hold the increasingly tenuous evening together while outside the newshounds bay and threaten to make even more trouble for Senator Keely. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

A group of intrepid humans attempts to save the Earth from vicious extraterrestrials in this extremely popular science-fiction adventure. Borrowing liberally from War of the Worlds, Aliens, and every sci-fi invasion film inbetween, director Roland Emmerich and producer and co-writer Dean Devlin present a visually slick, fast-paced adventure filled with expensive special effects and large-scale action sequences. The story begins with the approach of a series of massive spaceships, which many on Earth greet with open arms, looking forward to the first contact with alien life. Unfortunately, these extraterrestrials have not come in peace, and they unleash powerful weapons that destroy most of the world's major cities. Thrown into chaos, the survivors struggle to band together and put up a last-ditch resistance in order to save the human race. As this is a Hollywood film, this effort is led by a group of scrappy Americans, including a computer genius who had foreseen the alien's evil intent (Jeff Goldblum), a hot-shot jet pilot (Will Smith), and the President of the United States (Bill Pullman). While some critics objected to the film's lack of originality and lapses in logic, the combination of grand visual spectacle and crowd-pleasing storytelling proved irresistible to audiences, resulting in an international smash hit. ~ Judd Blaise, Rovi

The 1939 Irene Dunne-Charles Boyer romance Love Affair, remade with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in 1957 as An Affair to Remember, became a vehicle for real-life couple Warren Beatty and Annette Bening in this 1994 rendition. The well-worn story remains the same, as a man and a woman, both engaged to other people, fall madly in love while traveling, indulge in a brief but intense affair, then agree to part and sort out their feelings. They are to meet again at the top of the Empire State Building if their feelings persist, but a series of unfortunate circumstances threatens to keep the lovers apart. Despite polished visuals and a time-tested narrative, this variation suffers in comparison to its two predecessors, not to mention the previous year's Sleepless in Seattle, which had drawn on An Affair to Remember for several of its most memorable sequences. It does features Katherine Hepburn's first film appearance in 13 years. ~ Judd Blaise, Rovi

Marilyn: The Last Word, a documentary, suggests that screen legend Marilyn Monroe was actually murdered, though authorities officially pronounced her death by pills a suicide. The film pieces together information from Monroe's biography, especially events surrounding the final months of her life, to construct a case for the celebrity's murder. Marilyn: The Last Word is the first documentary to present the viewpoint that America's so-called Love Goddess was slain to protect the powerful Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, with whom she reportedly had sexual affairs. ~ Betsy Boyd, Rovi

Leviathan, a sci-fi thriller directed by George Pan Cosmatos, is the story of a group of scientists who discover a sunken Russian submarine which contains a monster that is the product of a genetic experiment. This film, a hybrid of both The Abyss and Alien, has a decent cast, including Peter Weller as Beck, the lead oceanographer. Working with a good budget, action director Cosmatos, should have been able to put together better action sequences and a more frightening monster, but he gives this derivative, silly film below-par special effects and no particular visual style. Leviathan, while it may entertain a less-sophisticated viewer, has little to offer fans of the genre who are looking for thrilling special effects. ~ Linda Rasmussen, Rovi

Attendees of a Southern California cocktail party find themselves reevaluating their convoluted, faulted lives following a major earthquake and a series of aftershocks in this hip comedy. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

David Lynch wades through dark waters in his adaptation of Frank Herbert's cult science fiction novel. In condensing Herbert's rambling and complex book by eliminating characters and compacting events, Lynch succeeds in rendering the story incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the novel and making the film look like a sketchy greatest hits collection of the book for Herbert fans. The story takes place in the year 10,191. The universe is governed through a system of feudal rule, presided over by Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (José Ferrer), who appears to take his marching orders from something that resembles a talking vagina. In the kingdom are two rival houses -- the House of Atreides and the House of Harkonnen. Each house is trying to gain dominion over the universe, but that dominion can only be gained by the house that controls the Spice, a special substance that permits the folding of time. The Spice is only available on the desert world of Arrakis, or Dune. Shaddam, tired of the feuding between the two houses, permits the Atreides to take over the Spice production on Dune, while secretly working with the Harkonnens to launch a sneak attack on the Atreides and destroy them. The leader of the Atreides is Duke Leto (Jürgen Prochnow), who rules with the help of his concubine Jessica (Francesca Annis) and son Paul (Kyle MacLachlan). The rival Harkonnens are headed by the pus-oozing degenerate Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan, in a thoroughly through-the-roof performance) and his two unsavory nephews, Rabban (Paul L. Smith) and Feyd (Sting). When his father is murdered by the Harkonnens, Paul escapes to Dune, where he is greeted by the Fremen (the desert dwellers on Dune who prepare the Spice) as the messiah foretold in Fremen legend. Paul assumes the mantle of messiah and leads the Fremen in a revolt that topples the balance of power in the universe. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Famed producer Dino De Laurentiis tries to steal the thunder from Jaws, then the top-grossing film of all-time, in this big budget remake of King Kong. (De Laurentiis related his tactics to Tom Snyder: "When Jaws dies, nobody cries. When Kong dies, they all cry.") Updated to the 1970s, the original Robert Armstrong character is now Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin), a big-shot oil magnate from Petrox Oil, looking for new petroleum deposits on a recently discovered Pacific island. Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges) is a counter-culture paleontologist, stowing away on Wilson's ship, who warns that they are headed for "Skull Island," where prehistoric monsters still live and roam free. Also along for the ride is Dwan (Jessica Lange, in her film debut), a down-on-her-luck starlet, shipwrecked in the ocean after the sinking of a yacht. She really becomes down-on-her-luck when the group lands on the island and a giant ape, Kong, takes a shine to her. Kong kidnaps her and Dwan takes umbrage when the ape tries to remove her clothes by shouting, "You male chauvinist ape!" But Prescott comes to her aid and rescues her from the gorilla's big mits. Wilson, seeing money to be made on Kong, locks him in the cargo hold of his ship and transports him to New York City. Once there, Kong manages to escape and wreak havoc upon the beleaguered town, before being compelled to climb up the World Trade Center for sanctuary. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi