Search
What's Hot
Day-by-Day Fall Schedule
Idol Winner Speaks!
Jim Parsons Comes Out
Game of Thrones Star's Sex Stare

Twilight

1998, Movie, R, 96 mins

Twilight: Review

TWILIGHT
starstarstarstar
Robert Benton's melancholy Hollywood detective story is a slight affair, but great, lived-in performances by its top-notch cast are a pleasure to watch. Washed-up ex-cop, ex-alcoholic and ex-private eye Harry Ross (Paul Newman) isn't doing much with himself, living over the garage at the palatial home of golden couple Catherine and Jack Ames (Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman) and doing little chores to earn his keep. Former actors now starring in the grand drama of their own lives -- in the words of their prematurely weary daughter Mel (Reese Witherspoon) -- the Ameses owe Harry one: Two years earlier he got shot in the groin retrieving the then-underage Mel from a Mexican escapade with low-life boyfriend Jeff (Liev Schreiber). Jack asks Harry to deliver an envelope to a mysterious woman named Gloria Lamar (Margo Martindale), an errand that lands him in a tar pit of trouble that has something to do with the 20-year-old disappearance of Catherine's then-husband, who apparently pulled a Norman Maine upon discovering she was about to decamp with Jack. Sarandon, Hackman and Newman's mellow, lived-in performances really are a pleasure, as are those of Stockard Channing as Harry's ex-partner and paramour Verna, and James Garner as former studio security chief Raymond Hope, around whom the phrase "knows where the bodies are buried" is not to be used frivolously. Kudos to Benton for selling bottom-line-obsessed executives on a project with no youth-market appeal whatsoever, but it would be nice if it were a better showcase for its mature stars. Even for a pensive, anti-noir detective picture, the mystery is a nonevent and the detecting painfully slight: It seems a shame to assemble such smoothly capable technicians and then not ask them to do much more than mope. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
Are You Watching?
Twilight
Loading ...
Advertisement

Our Partners

Advertisement

Related Websites

You might be also interested in the following websites:

Most Popular TV Shows

  1. American Idol
  2. NCIS
  3. Big Bang Theory
  4. Voice
  5. Person of Interest
more popular tv shows

Most Popular Celebrities

  1. Jessica Simpson
  2. Khloe Kardashian
  3. Kate Middleton
  4. Maria Menounos
  5. Kim Kardashian
more popular celebrities

Most Popular Movies

  1. Avengers
  2. Battleship
  3. The Dictator
  4. Dark Shadows
  5. What To Expect When You're Expecting
more popular movies

Top Videos

  1. Revenge
  2. Sneak Peek: Motor City Money
  3. The Big Bang Theory
  4. Modern Family
  5. Mom of the Fleet
more top videos