Alan Rudolph

Synopsis – AMG:
Jennifer Jason Leigh offers an acclaimed performance as humorist Dorothy Parker, who together with such 1920s luminaries as Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman, was a charter member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table. The story is related in flashback form, as Mrs. Parker, in Hollywood to cowrite the 1937 feature A Star is Born with her second husband Alan Campbell (Peter Gallagher), recalls her glory days as an Algonquinite. A great deal of attention is afforded Parker’s vituperative bon mots, her alcoholism, her self-destructiveness, her suicide attempts, and her affairs with such literary contemporaries as Charles MacArthur (an uncharacteristically unsympathetic Matthew Broderick) and Robert E. Sherwood (Nick Cassavetes).Read More »

A New York cop and a lady sheriff investigate a string of cattle mutilations in the West.Read More »

Even when he’s not working with his own material, Alan Rudolph remains one of our sharpest film stylists. In this 1991 featurea somber thriller involving wife abuse and murder in New Jersey, written by William Reilly and Claude Kervenhe does such a good job with the storytelling and the actors that the broadness of the film’s depiction of a working-class milieu doesn’t seem unduly jarring, anchored as it is in an effectively distancing New Age score by Mark Isham. Demi Moore, who also coproduced, stars as the best friend and coworker of a hairdresser (Glenne Headly) married to an abusive layabout (Bruce Willis). If in the past Rudolph has tended to romanticize the sordidness of working-class life (as in Remember My Name and Choose Me), here he seems to be trying to overcompensate with a vengeance, but the fleetness of his camera moves and editing and the strength of his lead actors (who also include Harvey Keitel and Billie Neal as police detectives) keep one riveted to the screen.
Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »

Set in the city of Montreal, Alan Rudolph’s romantic comedy-drama “AFTERGLOW” paints a wryly comic portrait of two modern marriages drifting toward the rocks.

Lucky (Nick Nolte) is a contractor whose business owes its success in equal measure to his skill at repair work and to his amorous attentions to the lonely women who hire him. His marriage, however, has fallen on hard times– his wife Phyllis (Julie Christie), began to shut Lucky out of her heart years ago when a bitter argument violently disrupted their home. A former B-movie actress, Phyllis now passes her time in a nostalgic haze, watching her old movies and remembering happier days. She turns a blind eye to Lucky’s infidelities, but resists his attempts to bring romance back into their life together. “The hardest part is finding out too late that none of it lasts,” she tells him, resigning herself to her disillusionment.Read More »

After a dip into the mainstream with Mortal Thoughts, the wildest card in American cinema is back on his own bizarre terrain. This modern urban fairytale is a beautifully ambivalent re-telling of The Prince and the Pauper. Modine is the separated-at-birth twins (both of them), one a hood whose dream life – moppet children, a cooing fashion-plate wife (Singer) – is coupled with violent megalomania, the other a cringing wimp who can’t bring himself to date his best friend’s anguished, poetry-reading sister (Boyle). The whole is held together with a plot about an aspiring writer (Ferrell) on the track of her first real-life drama, and by an atmospheric soundtrack (Terje Rydal, Ali Farka Toure) that accompanies the characters’ hypnotically crazed manoeuvres. M Emmet Walsh steals the show as a garage boss in a drolly choreographed homage to Jacques Demy. Delirious stuff.Read More »

The lives and romantic entanglements of a group of young adults who have achieved “overnight” success in Los Angeles.Read More »

synopsis – AMG:
Jennifer Jason Leigh offers an acclaimed performance as humorist Dorothy Parker, who together with such 1920s luminaries as Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman, was a charter member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table. The story is related in flashback form, as Mrs. Parker, in Hollywood to cowrite the 1937 feature A Star is Born with her second husband Alan Campbell (Peter Gallagher), recalls her glory days as an Algonquinite. A great deal of attention is afforded Parker’s vituperative bon mots, her alcoholism, her self-destructiveness, her suicide attempts, and her affairs with such literary contemporaries as Charles MacArthur (an uncharacteristically unsympathetic Matthew Broderick) and Robert E. Sherwood (Nick Cassavetes). Read More »

Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy went on a debating tour in 1983. This odd couple apparently bonded in prison, or some shit, despite Liddy personally busting Leary in the 60’s! They debate about a wide variety of issues from their very unique perspectives.
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Quote:
Just released from prison, a young woman arrives in town to “start a new life”, but soon begins stalking a married construction worker for no apparent reason, turning his life inside out and eventually terrorizing him and his wife.Read More »