Gus Van Sant's tactless satire on the national hunger for celebrity: "You're not anybody in America," chirps the Barbie Doll heroine, "unless you're on TV." The Buck Henry screenplay, lazily structured around interviews and flashbacks, is based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, based in turn on a true-crime story of a high-school teacher who recruited a student to murder her husband. The hilarious height of tactlessness: the grieving widow places a tape deck on the headstone at the funeral and punches the play button on Eric Carmen's "All by Myself." Joaquin (formerly Leaf) Phoenix -- sibling of River and Rain, both of whom had also worked with director Van Sant -- is a perfect fit in the role of the brain-dead teen, and the roles of his two closest classmates are hardly less snug. But Nicole Kidman, in the lead, is careful to put plenty of space between herself and her character: she wants to be seen as an editorialist, not a mere weather girl on Cable Channel 47; a smart cookie, not just a crumb. With Matt Dillon. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.