Chuck Aber Movies

Frank Pierson's made-for-cable adaptation of Nicholas VonHoffman's biography, Citizen Cohn stars James Woods as the controversial lawyer Roy Cohn. The film is structured as a series of flashbacks while Cohn lies in a New York hospital dying of AIDS. In the 1940s and early '50s, Cohn became one of the most powerful men in the country after becoming an important associate of Senator Joseph McCarthy (Joe Don Baker) and his Communist witch hunts. The film recounts those turbulent times and features portrayals of such real-life figures as J. Edgar Hoover (Pat Hingle), Dashiell Hammett (Frederic Forrest), Cardinal Spellman (Daniel Benzali), and Walter Winchell (Joseph Bologna). ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

In this multiple Oscar-winning thriller, Jodie Foster stars as Clarice Starling, a top student at the FBI's training academy whose shrewd analyses of serial killers lands her a special assignment: the FBI is investigating a vicious murderer nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who kills young women and then removes the skin from their bodies. Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) wants Clarice to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant psychiatrist who is also a violent psychopath, serving life behind bars for various acts of murder and cannibalism. Crawford believes that Lecter may have insight into this case and that Starling, as an attractive young woman, may be just the bait to draw him out. Lecter does indeed know something of Buffalo Bill, but his information comes with a price: in exchange for telling what he knows, he wants to be housed in a more comfortable facility. More important, he wants to speak with Clarice about her past. He skillfully digs into her psyche, forcing her to reveal her innermost traumas and putting her in a position of vulnerability when she can least afford to be weak. The film mingles the horrors of criminal acts with the psychological horrors of Lecter's slow-motion interrogation of Clarice and of her memories that emerge from it. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Two of the most venerable names in the horror field, author Stephen King and director George A. Romero, present this anthology of original twisted tales inspired by the E.C. horror comics of the 50's and 60's (themselves a more direct basis for the popular Tales from the Crypt TV series). The five stories are framed within the pages of a comic book which a boy's insensitive father has thrown in the garbage. The first tale, "Father's Day," features a zombie patriarch returning to claim his Father's Day cake; "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" stars King himself as a slack-jawed yokel whose discovery of a radioactive meteorite turns him into a walking weed; "Something to Tide You Over" presents a deadly-serious Leslie Nielsen as a cuckolded husband who plans an elaborate seaside revenge; "The Crate" unleashes its ferocious man-eating contents on the enemies of a meek college professor; and "They're Creeping Up On You" pits obsessively-clean billionaire E.G. Marshall against a swarm of cockroaches in his sterile penthouse. The chapters are uniformly creative, filmed in garish comic-book colors, and Tom Savini's makeup effects are quite memorable (particularly the monster from "The Crate"), though the campy treatment does become exhausting after two hours' runtime. The final segment is the most impressive, thanks to Marshall's over-the-top performance, though the planned scope of the cockroach invasion was drastically reduced (no doubt due to budget constraints). ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi