James Foley

Synopsis
One of the overlooked films of the 1980s, perhaps because it is such a downbeat tale of an amoral family. Sean Penn plays a kid whose small-time criminal impulses are stoked to a new level when he falls in with his father (Christopher Walken), a vicious career criminal for whom no problem is so large that it can’t be solved by a murder. At first exhilarated by the attention from his father (and the jobs he gives him to do), he gradually catches on to just what a bad guy Dad really is. But when he tries to extricate himself, he discovers that Dad now has him squarely in his sights. Penn is terrific in a role of emotional complexity, while Walken, king of the creeps, is positively frightening as this soft-spoken but highly lethal patriarch. Read More »

ElmoOxygen writes:
James Foley’s (At Close Range, Glengarry Glen Ross) first film, as well as Aidan Quinn’s, this flashy, empty, very 80’s movie features Quinn and Daryl Hannah in a midwestern, steel-mill version of Romeo and Juliet. Shot by Fassbinder, Scorsese and Redford’s DP, Michael Ballhaus, and written by Chris Columbus (Gremlins, The Goonies, director of Home Alone 1 and 2, the first two Harry Potter films, and the classic, Bicentennial Man), it is filled to the brim with hideous, yet hilarious dialogue, mostly via setting up “tough guy” Aidan Quinn and his motorcycle antics, who, no matter how old he was at the time, always looks 35, betraying the notion that he’s a high school student.Read More »

The intriguing relationship between three desperados, who try to kidnap a wealthy child in hope of turning their lives around.Read More »