They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for January, 1988
Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988)
It doesn’t take a film scholar to deduce that the title Braddock: Missing in Action III was inspired by Rambo: First Blood Part II. I first saw this title pop up on a television commercial the other morning while I was getting dressed and I snorted an unexpected bit of laughter that escaped my nose […]
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1988)
Maggie Smith has always occupied a role with dignity, refinement and with a certain charm. As Judith Hearne she displays a vulnerability that surprised me. She plays Judith, a homely spinster in her late forties who is respected in her Irish community but has arrived at the point in her life where she is becoming […]
Rent-A-Cop (1988)
I was at a friend’s house just recently and I saw his daughters playing with some magnets on the refrigerator. Each of the magnets was embossed with a word and when they arranged them just right, they formed a sentence. I thought about this all through the action picture Rent-A-Cop which I think may have […]
For Keeps? (1988)
I sensed a very present nervousness with the comedy For Keeps?, a comedy about two high school kids who finds herself pregnant by her boyfriend. Of course, this is the fodder for a dozen or so After School Specials but at least those film took the subject seriously, if not always realistically. For Keeps? takes […]
The Couch Trip (1988)
The Couch Trip looks and sounds like a movie that might have come off better in the pitch meeting. A radio psychiatrist reaches his breaking point and decides to go away for a while and leaves as his replacement a man who is, himself, a mental patient. The idea, you see, is that the psychiatrist […]
