True Believer movie review & film summary (1989) rogerebert.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from rogerebert.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
"Nothing to Lose'' is a five-peat: Buddy Movie, Fish Out of Water Movie, Road Movie, Mistaken Identity Movie and Corporate Espionage Movie. Okay, so maybe the fifth one isn't a genre of its own yet, but it sure seemed familiar when the heroes were creeping around the halls of power, eluding security guards.
It's time again to bring out of retirement our old friend the Idiot Plot. This is the movie plot, you will recall, so constructed that everyone in the movie has to be a complete idiot or the story will be resolved in 10 minutes flat. Since feature films last two hours or thereabouts, Idiot Plots have been a godsend to more than one project. "Hennessy" is another.It involves an Irish demolitions expert (Rod Steiger) who becomes deranged when his wife and daughter are accidentally killed during a battle between British troops and Belfast demonstrators. He skips the funeral and flies to London on a oneway ticket (an ominous portent, that, the police agree). His plan: To strap himself with explosives, smuggle himself into Parliament on opening day, and blow up everyone, including the royal family.This is a premise with similarities to Fred Zinnemann's great thriller "Day of the Jackal," which was about a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. Since we know in bo
Norman Jewison's "Only You" is the kind of lighthearted romance that's an endangered species in today's Hollywood. It is total fantasy, light as a feather, contrary to all notions of common sense, it features a couple of stars who are really good kissers - and it takes place mostly in Venice, Rome, and the glorious Italian hillside town of Positano. What more do you want? Movies like this were once written for Katharine Hepburn ("Summertime"), Audrey Hepburn ("Roman Holiday") and Rossano Brazzi ("Three Coins in the Fountain"). Or remember Clark Gable and Sophia Loren in "It Happened in Naples"? There is a case to be made that no modern actors have quite the innocence or the faith to play such heedless lovers, but Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. somehow manage to lose all the baggage of our realistic, cynical age, and give us a couple of fools in love.