An E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial for people who need a little more grounding in reality in order to start the tears to flow, and who harbor no hopes that their hero will rise up off his deathbed and dry up the tears posthaste. The factual basis of this story, concerning a …

Meddlers gonna meddle. A widow decides to get involved in her daughter's life. But then: JK Simmons shows up doing his best Sam Elliott. Could it be love? Susan Sarandon and Rose Byrne star. Lorene Scafaria writes and directs.

Arch and artificial memory film about a hippie family outside Taos in the Seventies, during the time of the father's great depression (the adult daughter-narrator, looking back: "It was inescapable, my father's depression, like some fumigator's mist filling our lungs"), and about the IRS auditor who comes calling, gets laid …

One of Santa's reindeer is grounded with a bum leg in Small Town, U.S.A. How are all those presents going to get delivered this year? A Christmas fantasy positioned on the Schmaltz Scale somewhere above the Hallmark Card outfit. With Rebecca Harrell, Sam Elliott, and Abe Vigoda; directed by John …

Patrick Swayze, showing no signs of embarrassment and hence none of intelligence either, is a sort of Wyatt Earp of the nightclub circuit, a professional bouncer (a.k.a. "cooler") called in to tame the toughest of hellholes, just as Wyatt was summoned to Dodge and Wichita. This idea has possibilities, even …

The first directing job for producer Lili Fini Zanuck (not a born Zanuck, a Zanuck by marriage), whose seriousness about the job goes as far as, but not much farther than, the closeup of a hypodermic needle in the arm of the leading man. No shrinking violet is our Lili. …

The entire N.Y.P.D. appears to be on the take, but any incipient paranoia gets worked off in sweaty, hard-breathing, thoroughly preposterous action scenes. Peter Weller and Sam Elliott, as a dogged Legal Aid attorney and the Last Honest Cop, are a couple of cuties who need a less indulgent director: …

Laboring black comedy centering around a post-coital corpse in a hotel room. Bill Pullman, as an unconfidant vertical-blind salesman, gets good results for his pains. And Carrie Fisher gets some too, without breaking a sweat. But they're not the stars of the show. Kirstie Alley is, and she huffs and …

Satire with teeth, discolored though they may be. There is nothing exceptional cinematically about the directing debut of Jason Reitman, son of the mainstream comedy director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, and the like), but from the opening credits -- the witty cigarette-pack graphic motif, Tex Williams's C&W; oldie, …

A useful fusion of the two finest films on the Earp-Clanton feud, John Sturges's Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and -- fancy that -- John Sturges's Hour of the Gun. (The most simple measure of the fusion is that the titular gunfight in the first one comes at the very …

B.J. Novak the actor stars as Ben Manalowitz, a character who doesn't want to be a writer so much as he wants to be a voice. For his first feature as writer-director, Novak is more interested in arming his characters with clever cocktail party repartee than he is in shaping …

The post-Private Ryan fashion in war films now reaches the treacherous terrain of the Vietnam War. Call it the all-guts-all-glory look: the stomach-turning level of mayhem commonly associated with the anti-war film, and yet a crispness of salute more typical of the wartime flag-waver. Writer-director Randall Wallace, who wrote but …