Michael Phillips Movies

Limbo was one of Hollywood's first big-studio films to concentrate on how Vietnam affected the families of the combatants. Kathleen Nolan, Kate Jackson and Katherine Justice play three service wives living at a Florida Air Force Base. Their husbands have all been called to active duty in Vietnam, and all have either been captured or are MIAs. Avoiding the propagandistic stance of most war films of its period (and of such World War II films as Tender Comrade), Limbo manages to accurately convey the churned-up emotions of women who love their husbands and their country, but do not love what husbands are expected to do on behalf of that country. Before it is overwhelmed by soap opera suds, the film (scripted by Joan Micklin Silver and James Bridges, both on the verge of bigger things) makes several cogent points about personal relationships in the face of national crisis. Limbo has also been released as Chained to Yesterday and Women in Limbo. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Four years after setting box offices ablaze in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill re-teamed with similar success for The Sting. Redford plays Depression-era confidence trickster Johnny Hooker, whose friend and mentor Luther Coleman (Robert Earl Jones) is murdered by racketeer/gambler Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). Hoping to avenge Luther's death, Johnny begins planning a "sting" -- an elaborate scam -- to destroy Lonnegan. He enlists the aid of "the greatest con artist of them all," Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), who pulls himself out of a drunken stupor and rises to the occasion. Hooker and Gondorff gather together an impressive array of con men, all of whom despise Lonnegan and wish to settle accounts on behalf of Luther. The twists and surprises that follow are too complex to relate in detail -- suffice to say that you can't cheat an honest man, and that you shouldn't accept everything at face value. The Sting became one of the biggest hits of the early '70s; grossing 68.5 million dollars during its first run, the film also picked up seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Adapted Score for Marvin Hamlisch's unforgettable setting of Scott Joplin's ragtime music. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

"All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate, Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind?

Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting Rocky. Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man," Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Heartbeeps stars Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters as domestic robots who fall in love and run off together. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Set in 1963, The Flamingo Kid finds 18-year-old Brooklynite Matt Dillon, the son of blue-collar Hector Elizondo, getting a taste of the Good Life by joining several of his friends at "El Flamingo", a swank Long Island beach club. Wealthy car salesman Richard Crenna, the uncle of Matt's girl friend Janet Jones, befriends the boy and takes him under his wing. Thanks to Crenna's influence, Matt secures a good job at the Flamingo. The boy is bedazzled by Crenna's sumptuous lifestyle, and most especially by the older man's reputation as the Flamingo's reigning gin rummy champ. Dillon begins taking on airs, which alienates his down-to-earth father. Watch for a scene in which, while channel-surfing with his new remote control, Richard Crenna watches a fleeting clip from the old TV sitcom The Real McCoys--featuring Richard Crenna. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

An adventure tale for movie buffs, Jake Speed deftly lifts scenes from detective films of the '40s through the '70s to bring an added dimension to its spoof of the detective and adventure genres. When a family gets word that their daughter has been kidnapped in Paris, her father comments that they should get "Jake Speed" to find her. However, Jake is a comic strip character, and the reaction is that he might as well ask for Batman. But lo-and-behold, the other daughter Margaret (Karen Kopins) gets a message to meet Speed (Wayne Crawford) and his author, Remo (Dennis Christopher), and the men tell her they must go to Africa, where her sister is being held. After a certain amount of trial and error, they eventually find the nation where she's being held -- which happens to be in the middle of a revolution. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Schoolteacher Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland) has been insulated all his life from the horrors of apartheid in his native South Africa. Perhaps he really didn't want to know. When the son of his black gardener is arrested and beaten as a result of a schoolboy protest in Soweto, at first he imagines the police must have had their reasons. However, the boy is picked up again, and this time he doesn't come back. Ben promises his servant that he will look into the incident, and discovers that the boy was killed simply to gratify the violent urges of Captain Stolz (Jurgen Prochnow), a "special branch" policeman. At long last he has gotten a glimpse into the truly arbitrary and violent nature of the system he has so long benefitted from, and he hires Ian Mackenzie (Marlon Brando) to prosecute the killer. It is a foregone conclusion that Stolz will not be punished, but Mackenzie rises to new heights of withering sarcasm and irony in the courtroom. This situation turns Ben into a radical firebrand, which alienates him from his white friends and neighbors, as well as members of his family. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Christina Applegate stars in this convoluted comedy that comes across as a teen fantasy combination of Home Alone and Working Girl. The premise is all in the title -- when the mother (Concetta Tomei) of a sniveling group of surly kids goes on a much-deserved summer vacation, she leaves her kids under the charge of an elderly distaff granny (Eda Reiss Merin). When granny ups and dies, the kids load her dead body in a trunk and deposit the package on the steps of the local funeral home. The kids are ecstatic thinking that with the big wad of cash Mom has left, they can have a summer of consumer madness. But when they find out that the money has been buried with the baby-sitter, the kids have to fend for themselves to make ends meet. Dream teen Sue Ellen (Christina Applegate) tries working at a fast food restaurant but she can't stand the grease. So, she puts together a false resume and, posing as a twenty-eight-year old, she applies for a job as a receptionist at a garment manufacturing company. The company vice president, Rose (Joanna Cassidy), is so impressed by her resume that she hires her on the spot as her executive assistant. Her deception looks to be working out great -- Sue Ellen manages to hold off the office lady killer Gus (John Getz), avoids exposure by the embittered receptionist, borrows money from the company's petty cash box for household incidentals, and continues her relationship with restaurant employee Bryan (Josh Charles). But suddenly, the clothing firm is set to go under, and Sue Ellen must use her teen fashion sense to save the company and her job . . . and she has to get the rest of the brood involved. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Director Michael Mann based this lushly romantic version of the James Fenimore Cooper novel more on his memory of the 1936 film version (starring Randolph Scott) than on Cooper's novel (in fact, Philip Dunne's 1936 screenplay is cited as source material for this film). Set in the 1750s during the French and Indian War, the story concerns Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), the European-born adopted son of Mohican scout Chingachgook (Russell Means). Hawkeye and his party, which also includes the Mohican Uncas (Eric Schweig), joins up with a group of Britons who have recently arrived in the Colonies. The group consists of Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe) and her younger sister, Alice (Jodhi May), who are rescued from a Huron war party by Hawkeye. Hawkeye's band accompanies them to the British Fort William Henry, which is being besieged by a French and Huron force. The fort falls to the French, and Colonel Munro (Maurice Roeves) surrenders to French General Montcalm (Patrice Chéreau). The terms of the surrender are that the British merely abandon the fort and return to their homes. However, the French's bloodthirsty ally, the Huron warrior Magua (Wes Studi), has made no such agreement, and, as the British retreat from the fort, he plans to massacre them in a terrible Huron attack. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

We usually assume that a Shotgun Wedding involves one each angry father, unwilling groom, and a compromised (usually pregnant) bride. However, although the bride is pregnant, in this Australian movie, the shotgun is being wielded by a couple of crooked policeman who are angry that a young convict has put the finger on one of them. Eventually, the "cavalry," in the form of honest policemen, rescue the couple, who are then able to marry. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Vietnamese director Pauline Chan, known for short films, made her feature debut with this story about a woman living in colonial Indochina. Chan co-wrote the screenplay based on a novel, Dreamhouse, by Kate Grenville. The sexual and emotional awakening of Louise Duffield (Saskia Reeves) takes place against the backdrop of the Vietnamese people awakening to the possibilities of liberation. Duffield is a British photographer who comes to southeast Asia with her husband Michael (Robert Reynolds), an Australian journalist, to fashion an article for a French rubber manufacturer. Louise is emotionally starved in her marriage and feels slighted by playing second fiddle to her husband professionally. Michael discovers that the rubber company is mistreating its workers, and he is trapped between his compulsion to tell the truth and his desire to please his corporate bosses, who may give him a job at their Paris headquarters if he turns in a favorable story. Michael and Louise are staying at the home of a tyrannical French plantation boss, Daniel Renouard (Sami Frey), whose little empire is crumbling as the natives become increasingly restless. His daughter Viola (Jacqueline McKenzie) is rebelling against her abusive father and looking for adventure. She finds some with her new housemates soon enough. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide