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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synopsis – AMG:
The lives of five L.A. natives intertwine in this romantic comedy from independent filmmaker and former Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph. Eve (Lesley Ann Warren) is a bar owner who has sworn off permanent commitments, seeking only the temporary sexual satisfaction of men. Her roommate Ann (Genevieve Bujold) is her polar opposite. In reality, Ann is secretly the radio sex therapist Dr. Nancy Love, but she has little romantic experience despite her profession. Into their lives comes Mickey (Keith Carradine), a recent mental patient who might be an enigmatic pathological liar. Though she’s powerfully attracted to Mickey, Eve’s kept at arm’s length by her lover Zack (Patrick Bauchau), a married man whose wife (Rae Dawn Chong) also finds Mickey irresistible. When Nancy sleeps with Mickey, he proposes marriage, but she rejects him, though the assignation does have a positive effect on her radio show. Considered Rudolph’s seminal work, Choose Me (1984) was the third in a thematically-linked trilogy from the quirky low-budget director, the first two being Welcome to L.A. (1977) and Remember My Name (1978).Read More »