The Deep End Of The Ocean
Directed by Ulu Grosbard - Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Treat Williams, Whoopi Goldberg
Pfeiffer and Williams play a couple traumatised when their youngest son is abducted - and who find themselves in another dilemma nine years later when the mother becomes convinced a local boy is her lost son. This moral drama hinges on a twist which audiences may or may not buy, and even if its resolution is rather dubious after all, it remains thoughtful and unsentimental, and gains immeasurably from the strength and honesty of Pfeiffer's performance.
The Thomas Crown Affair
Directed by John McTiernan - Starring Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary
The ultra-chic 1968 crime caper movie is remade as a fairly stodgy and often daftly plotted movie in which Brosnan is perpetually suave as the bored millionaire art thief and Russo co-stars as an insurance investigator with truly remarkable powers of deduction. Forsaking the foreplay of the chess game between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the original, the remake features its forty-something stars in unusually explicit sex scenes for actors of their age.
Cookie's Fortune
Directed by Robert Altman - Starring Glenn Close, Charles S. Dutton, Julianne Moore, Liv Tyler, Chris O'Donnell, Patricia Neal, Donald Moffat, Ned Beatty, Lyle Lovett
A strong cast is mostly underused in Altman's slender social comedy which feels like a short story unwisely stretched out over two hours. It's set in a sleepy small Mississippi town where a pipe-smoking widow (Neal) commits suicide and her manipulative, grasping niece (Close) makes her death look like murder and the widow's heavy-drinking tenant (Dutton) becomes the chief suspect. Close's scenery-chewing performance struggles to inject life into this flaccid, soporific yarn.