Robert Richardson Movies

The second of three films by co-writer/director Oliver Stone to explore the effects of the Vietnam War (Platoon and Heaven and Earth are the others), Born On The Fourth Of July tells the true story of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), a patriotic, All-American small town athlete who shocks his family by enlisting with the Marines to fight in the Vietnam War. Once he is overseas, however, Kovic's gung-ho enthusiasm turns to horror and confusion when he accidentally kills one of his own men in a firefight. His downfall is furthered by a bullet wound that leaves him paralyzed from the chest down. He returns home, spends an appalling, nightmarish stint in a veterans' hospital, and follows an increasingly disillusioned and fragmented path that ultimately leaves him drunk and dissolute in Mexico. However, Kovic somehow turns himself around and pulls his life together, becoming an outspoken anti-war activist in the process. The film is long but emotionally powerful; many consider it Stone's best work and Cruise's best performance. Both were nominated for Oscars, as was the film itself, but only Stone, who co-wrote the film with Kovic from the latter's book, won for Best Director. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

The inner-workings of a corrupt Las Vegas casino are exposed in Martin Scorsese's story of crime and punishment. The film chronicles the lives and times of three characters: "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a bookmaking wizard; Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), a Mafia underboss and longtime best friend to Ace; and Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone, in a role she was born to play), a leggy ex-prostitute with a fondness for jewelry and a penchant for playing the field. Ace plays by the rules (albeit Vegas rules, which, as he reminds the audience in voiceover, would make him a criminal in any other state), while Nicky and Ginger lie, cheat, and steal their respective ways to the top. The film's first hour and a half details their rise to power, while the second half follows their downfall as the FBI, corrupt government officials, and angry mob bosses pick apart their Camelot piece by piece. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide

Penelope Spheeris, director of the infamous documentary The Decline of Western Civilization may well have given the world its first punk-rock Western in the form of Dudes, a sort of Suburbia meets High Noon meets Deliverance. Three East Coast punks (Jon Cryer, Daniel Roebuck, and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) opt to leave behind the filth and gloom of New York City to become modern-day pioneers on the trail to California; that is, until a gang of redneck road warrior-types led by Lee Ving (of the punk band Fear) waylay the trio and kill Flea in a fashion brutal enough to justify the inevitable retribution. After their pleas to the local sheriff fall on deaf ears, Cryer and Roebuck decide instead to follow the law of the West and serve their own brand of justice as what appear to be a bondage-oriented cowboy and a squirrel on steroids. While the plot seems contrived and asinine, the violence often gratuitous, and the characters paper-thin, Spheeris nonetheless manages to create a likeable and highly watchable -- if often silly -- film. Cryer and Roebuck do the best they can with the material, Ving plays an adequately loathsome villain, and Flea lends a glimpse of his acting ability by offering a convincing portrayal of a dead body. Nowhere near being the time capsule that is The Decline of Western Civilization, Dudes still offers some insight into the punk subculture of the '80s. Spheeris later directed the hugely successful Wayne's World as well as The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide

Innovative documentary filmmaker Errol Morris often finds a startling surreal edge in the midst of reality, seeking unique subjects, and discovering humor and pathos in odd, off-the-beaten-path locales. After Morris attracted attention with his memorable look at pet owners and pet cemeteries in Gates of Heaven (1978), he traveled into a backwash of quirky humor by filming Floridians in Vernon, Florida (1981). His controversial The Thin Blue Line (1988) helped free the innocent Randall Adams from prison. Morris ventured into drama with The Dark Wind (1991), and he also made a biographical profile of Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1992). Now Morris returns with a film he described as "four versions of the myth of Sisyphus." Four eccentrics talk about their seemingly diverse lives, interests, and offbeat occupations: Lion tamer Dave Hoover, following paths trod by his hero Clyde Beatty, offers some curious theories about wild animal thought processes; topiary gardener George Mendo clips hedges to create giraffes, bears, and other creatures; mole-rat specialist Ray Mendez researches the insect-like behavior of these hairless, buck-toothed mammals; robotics scientist Rodney Brooks assembles autonomous robots. Morris finds thematic connections relating the four. While Hoover and Mendo provide footnotes on the fading American scene, Mendez and Brooks look to the future. Contrasting viewpoints are edited into an essay on existence and the human condition, incorporating Morris' reflection on his recently departed parents. Morris and cinematographer Bob Richardson employed a variety of film formats -- black-and-white, color, 35mm, Super-8, and 16mm. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

With Heaven and Earth -- cobbled together from two autobiographical reminiscences (When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace by Le Ly Hayslip -- Oliver Stone completes his self-declared "Vietnam Trilogy" (the other films being Platoon and Born On the Fourth of July) of films examining the Vietnam War from different perspectives. Heaven and Earth begins in the central Vietnamese village of Ky La during the 1950s. Phung Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) is an innocent peasant girl, helping her mother (Joan Chen) to tend the rice paddies while being lectured in the ways of life by her father (Haing Ngor). The idyllic peace of the village is disrupted when a jet bomber crosses the skies. Soon the village is decimated as the American-backed South Vietnamese government troops and the Viet Cong engage in brutal warfare in which the victims are the innocent villagers. Le Ly is both tortured and raped. She leaves Ky La for Danang for a life as a prostitute. There she meets the tall and craggy American soldier Steve Butler (Tommy Lee Jones), a kind but lonely man who isn't looking for sex but for someone to settle down with -- as he says, "I want an Oriental wife." They marry, and Steve takes her back to the United States, where her in-laws look at her not as a wife but as a pet. In the harsh glare of 1970s U.S. culture, Le Ly has trouble adjusting to the American way of life. But not as hard a time as her husband, who, after twenty years in Vietnam, discovers he cannot adapt to civilian life. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

The November 22, 1963, assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy shocked the nation and the world. The brisk investigation of that murder conducted under the guidance of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren distressed many observers, even though subsequent careful investigations have been unable to find much fault with the conclusions his commission drew, the central one of which was that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone. Instead of satisfying the public, one result of the Warren Commission Report was that an unimaginable number of plausible conspiracy theories were bruited about, and these have supported a sizeable publishing mini-industry ever since. In making this movie, director Oliver Stone had his pick of supposed or real investigative flaws to draw from and has constructed what some reviewers felt was one of the most compelling (and controversial) political detective thrillers ever to emerge from American cinema. Long before filming was completed, Stone was fending off heated accusations of artistic and historical irresponsibility, and these only intensified after the film was released. In the story, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is convinced that there are some big flaws in the investigation of Oswald (Gary Oldman), and he sets out to recreate the events leading up to the assassination. Along the way, he stumbles across evidence that a great many people had reason to want to see the president killed, and he is convinced that some of them worked in concert to frame Oswald as the killer. Among the suspects are Lyndon Baines Johnson (the next president), the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Mafia. Over the course of gathering what he believes to be evidence of a conspiracy, Garrison unveils some of the grittier aspects of New Orleans society, focusing on the shady activities of local businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones). Garrison's investigations culminate in his conducting a show trial that he knows he will lose and which he is sure will ruin his career in order to get his evidence into the public record where it can't be buried again. This movie won two of the many Academy Awards for which it was nominated: one for Best Photography (Robert Richardson) and the other for Editing (Joe Hutshing). ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Quentin Tarantino's sprawling homage to action films of both the East and the West reaches its conclusion in this continuation of 2003's ultra-violent Kill Bill Vol. 1. Having dispatched several of her arch-enemies in the first film, The Bride (Uma Thurman) continues in Kill Bill Vol. 2 on her deadly pursuit of her former partners in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, who, in a furious assault, attempted to murder her and her unborn child on her wedding day. As The Bride faces off against allies-turned-nemeses Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), she flashes back to the day of her deadly wedding, and we learn of how she was recruited to join the DiVAS, her training under unforgiving martial arts master Pai Mei (Liu Chia-hui), and her relationship with Squad leader Bill (David Carradine), which changed from love to violent hatred. Originally planned as a single film, Kill Bill grew into an epic-scale two-part project totaling more than four hours in length; as with the first film, Kill Bill Vol. 2 includes appearances by genre-film icons Sonny Chiba, Michael Parks, Larry Bishop, and Sid Haig; Wu-Tang Clan producer and turntablist RZA and filmmaker and composer Robert Rodriguez both contributed to the musical score. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Throughout his work, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has sought out characters lost in their own eccentric worlds, and he has managed to convey their sense of wonder with their passion, be it a topiary gardener arguing the merits of hand shears in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) or astrophysicist Stephen Hawking discussing the origin of the universe in A Brief History of Time (1992). In his most provocative work since The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris details what happens when this interior dreamscape collides with the hard facts of history. As a young man accompanying his father to work at a state prison, Fred A. Leuchter, a bespectacled mouse of a man, learned how inefficient and inhumane most executions were, and he set out to design and build a better electric chair. Soon he began getting offers from state institutions throughout the country to redesign their electric chairs, along with gas chambers, gallows, and lethal injection machines. He quickly became a renowned expert in capital punishment. When the notorious Nazi sympathizer Ernest Zündel was arrested in Canada, he needed an expert witness to corroborate his assertion that the Holocaust was a hoax; and Leuchter soon found himself chiseling chunks from the gas chamber walls in Auschwitz -- on his honeymoon. His illegal samples showed no significant residue of cyanide, so he concluded that the Holocaust did not happen. He soon became a celebrity of the neo-Nazi set: he testified on behalf of Zündel, gave lectures around the world, and published the Holocaust revisionist tract Leuchter Report. Much to his surprise, his death-machine business began to flounder, his marriage collapsed, and he found himself pursued by Jewish organizations and creditors. This film was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Oliver Stone, the most outspokenly political American filmmaker of the 1980s and '90s, directs this epic-length biography of Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the U.S., who was re-elected by a landslide in 1972, only to resign in disgrace two years later. Taking a non-linear approach, Nixon jumps back and forth between many different periods and events, from Nixon's strict upbringing at the hands of his Quaker mother, through the many peaks and valleys of his political career, to his downfall in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The facts of his life are blended with supposition and speculation to create a portrait that is often critical of the man's policies but displays an unexpected compassion toward his failings as a human being. Anthony Hopkins stars as Nixon, Joan Allen plays his long-suffering wife Pat, Mary Steenburgen portrays his mother Hannah, Bob Hoskins is cast as J. Edgar Hoover, Powers Boothe plays Alexander Haig, Paul Sorvino portrays Henry Kisinger, and Ed Harris plays E. Howard Hunt. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

While Salvador wasn't Oliver Stone's first film (a pair of offbeat horror stories preceded it), it defined his style of fiercely dramatic, politically oriented filmmaking, staked out his territory as one of the major directors of the 1980s and 1990s, and remains one of his strongest works to date. Veteran photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) has been taking his camera to the world's trouble spots for over 20 years; while he does good work, Boyle's fondness for booze and drugs, and his colossal arrogance, have given him a reputation that's left him practically unemployable. Broke and with no immediate prospects, Boyle and his buddy Doctor Rock (Jim Belushi), an out-of-work disc jockey, head to El Salvador, where Boyle is convinced that he can scare up some lucrative freelance work amidst the nation's political turmoil. However, when Boyle and Rock witness the execution of a student by government troops just as they enter the country, it becomes clear that this war is more serious than they were expecting. Increasingly convinced that El Salvador is a disaster starting to happen, Boyle eventually decides that it's time to get out; but he has fallen in love with a woman named Maria (Elpidia Carrillo), and he doesn't want to leave her behind. James Woods gives one of his best performances as Boyle; and the passion of Stone's message, aided by the power of its truth (the film is based on actual events), propels the film forward. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Nine years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a small town in the Pacific Northwest still struggles with the troubling legacy of U.S. policies against Asian-Americans. In December 1950, just off the shores of San Piedro Island in Washington, a Japanese-American man named Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune) stands accused of murder after his close friend Carl Heine (Eric Thal) is found drowned in icy waters. As the trial gets under way, with Alvin Hooks (James Rebhorn) prosecuting Kazuo and Nels Gudmundsson (Max Von Sydow) defending him, reporter Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) covers the proceedings for the local newspaper. It's difficult for Ishmael to view the trial objectively, as his first love was a Japanese-American girl named Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), who later married Kazuo. Now, Ishmael has discovered that, when the Japanese-American residents of San Piedro Island were sent to internment camps during World War II, Carl's mother used their incarceration to scuttle a land purchase by Kazuo's family. This could suggest a motive for murder, but Ishmael is reluctant to step forward with the story. Snow Falling on Cedars was based on the best-selling novel by David Guterson, adapted for the screen by Ron Bass and writer/director Scott Hicks. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Monologist Eric Bogosian's one-man theatre piece Talk Radio, co-written by Bogosian and Ted Savinar, is searingly brought to the screen by Oliver Stone. Bogosian plays a provocateur radio talk-show host, whose constant espousal of his inflammatory views and ceaseless hectoring of his callers and listeners reaps equal parts love and hate. As his program rolls on, Bogosian is revealed to be just as screwed up as any of his fans, if not more. And then he pushes one caller just a bit too far. In co-adapting the play for the screen, Oliver Stone interweaves elements of Steven Singular's factual book Talked to Death, the story of a liberal Denver radio personality who was murdered at the behest of a militant right-wing hate group. One word of warning: if you're not a fan of the sort of radio depicted herein, chances are you won't warm up to this film. Talk Radio was the indirect inspiration for the 1990 TV series Night Caller. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide