In this family-friendly holiday film, all Ethan and Hallie want for Christmas is for their parents to get back together. Catherine (Parenthood's Harley Jane Kozak) and Michael (Chicago Hope's Jamey Sheridan) have been divorced for a year and now Catherine's dating a guy no one can stand, including her mother Lillian (Lauren Bacall). Michael, meanwhile, has opened a successful diner, but he misses Catherine. When Hallie (Thora Birch, years before American Beauty) overhears Catherine tell Lillian she and Tony (Kevin Nealon) are planning to marry, she and Ethan (Sweet Home Alabama's Ethan Embry) come up with a plan to strand their parents alone together on Christmas Eve. Hallie even asks Santa (Leslie Nielsen) to help them out. All I Want for Christmas doesn't pack any surprises, but it's suitable for all ages and features lively cameos from Andrea Martin as Lillian's housekeeper and Renée Taylor as Catherine's rodent-fearing wedding planner. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
""Rich! Deliciously eccentric! [A] brazen irrepressible original!"" -The New York Times. ""Lovely! Poignant!"" (The Wall Street Journal) and laugh-out-loud funny Shadows and Fog confirms Woody Allen's ""genius"" with its brilliant portrait of the hopeless - but hilarious - tragicomedy of human existence. Boasting a dazzling ""galaxy of stars"" (Leonard Maltin) including Woody Allen Mia Farrow John Malkovich Madonna Donald Pleasence Lily Tomlin Jodie Foster Kathy Bates John Cusack
The setting is a working-class neighbourhood of New York in the 1950s. Among the characters are prostitute Tralala her brutal pimp Vinnie an effiminate homosexual and a corrupt union official. Based on the book by Hubert Selby Jr. this is an extremely disturbing and effective adaption of his once-banned novel.
The mean and desolate streets of Brooklyn are home to a host of unhappy hopeless characters stuck in dead-end lives. A young prostitute emotionally numb from having sold her body so many times regularly leads her prospective clients to a dark alley where a gang beats and robs them; an office worker cannot deal with his repressed homosexuality; and a young girl's father refuses to admit that she is eight months pregnant. All these stories take place in a world waiting to explode: local workers are engaged in an angry strike against a nearby factory while not too far away at the Brooklyn Navy Yard soldiers sail daily for Korea many never to return. The personal and the political intermingle in this bleak look at poverty drugs and violence in the inner-city in the early 1950s based on Hubert Selby Jr's controversial book. Jennifer Jason Leigh received the Best Supporting Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle in 1990 for her work in this film.
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