Movies starring Pat

History has labeled Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan as “a Madonna film” but a more accurate descriptor might be “a Rosanna Arquette film.” Indeed, at the time Seidelman was casting the film, Madonna was a footnote in the musi...

I love the beginning – the sense of time and place. Part of this has to do with the introductory voiceover narration (provided by the writer of the novel, Donald Ray Pollock, whose intonation has all the right qualities for this job). Part o...

With its themes of mental illness and alienation, Die My Love seems a natural fit for director Lynne Ramsay, whose searing 2011 film We Need to Talk About Kevin focused on the psychological trauma endured by the mother of a mass murderer. This...

Disconnect, Henry Alex Rubin's meditation on how we communicate in the age of electronics and social media, is a deeply flawed motion picture containing moments of brilliance that illustrate its strong thematic content. A triptych of tales connecte...

For many people, there is no hell more unimaginable than having a healthy, active mind trapped in a paralyzed husk of a body. Some of those in this situation seek a quick end to their misery (as was the case with Ramon Sampedro, whose tale was dra...

Warning: Significant spoilers starting in Paragraph #4. (But, in a case like this, do plot details really matter?) Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has gone from Dogma to Dogville. The director's latest, a three-hour political allegory, has fu...

Donnie Darko, the debut feature from writer/director Richard Kelly, is part psychological thriller and part science fiction mystery. The title character (Jake Gyllenhaal), a teenager in his last year of high school, is suffering from all manner of ...

Of all the indignities to have been visited upon Dracula during the past century (including being the "inspiration" for a cereal and a Sesame Street character, and being lampooned by Mel Brooks), none is more unsettling than what has happened...

Driving Miss Daisy, the first movie to win the Best Picture Oscar during the decade of the 1990s, is, at its heart, a buddy film. Although some may see that as degrading something that addresses serious issues (like racism and anti-Semitism in...

Most movies about teenagers come in one of two flavors: romantic comedies or sex comedies. Then there are films like Easy A - smart, satirical jabs at aspects of popular culture that defy simplistic classification. These may be set in schools but...