This respectful ode to the early days of the US movie industry was the third consecutive box-office flop for Peter Bogdanovich, and the movie that put an end to his wünderkind status in Hollywood. Not fair: Nickelodeon is an accomplished, unjustly-maligned movie very much in the same whimsical period vein as Paper Moon, reuniting the father/daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O'Neal and throwing in an on-form Burt Reynolds. Watch and be charmed.
The promising 1996 debut by Greg Mottola, The Daytrippers is the epitome of early-'90s Sundance syndrome, where fulsome character and sharp dialogue take precedence over narrative logic. Thus, on the whim of daughter Eliza (Hope Davis), the entire Malone family (including indie queen Parker Posey) take an entertaining but essentially unjustifiable day trip to Manhattan.
King Lear re-enacted in modern-day Liverpool as crime boss Richard Harris, broken by the senseless murder of wife Lynn Redgrave, splits his empire between his two black-hearted daughters. The dialogue's got a touch of the Guy Ritchies and the violence is silly, but Harris—cunning, lean, leonine—commands the screen.
In Alexander Payne's wickedly mordant satire, newly-retired Warren Schmidt is forced to acknowledge the sheer empty horror of a wasted life that has left him with a ghastly marriage to someone he no longer recognises as the woman he fell in love with, a neurotic daughter who's about to marry an hilariously useless water bed salesman and a past he can't remember because in all the years now behind him he did little of merit and nothing of note.
Dysfunctional families are currently all the rage, but About Schmidt has a dark individuality and coruscating comic edge that makes it uniquely compe
The Family Way sees squeaky-clean Hayley Mills as the perfect daughter to real-life dad John in this cautionary 1966 tale of a young married couple struggling with financial hardships and the apparently grim realities of married life. Accident, on the other hand, is a brooding psychodrama, written by Harold Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Dirk Bogarde as a tragic philosophy professor obsessed by Jacqueline Sassard's voluptuous student.
