What a bummer! A college freshman returns home for Christmas vacation to find his best high-school friend on a downhill slide of drugs and debts and sexual degradation, and his ex-girlfriend being dragged down behind him. ("You don't look happy," he tells the girl, who promptly corrects his priorities: "But do I look good?") The storyline pieced together out of Bret Easton Ellis's small scrap-heap of a novel is a stern finger-wag at the empty-headed, pleasure-seeking rich kids of Beverly Hills -- while allowing the empty-headed, pleasure-seeking moviegoer to surmise that the trouble with them is just being rich and living in Beverly Hills. All in all, it's a relatively "serious" youth movie (college, for instance, is held up as an intelligent choice for a high-school graduate), but the accent there has to be on relatively. The editorial facial expressions of Andrew McCarthy suggest something rather more moony and sanctimonious than truly serious, and the direction by Marek Kanievska is too swoony and decorative to establish any artistic detachment. With Jami Gertz (who does look good, in her way) and Robert Downey, Jr (who looks a proper mess). (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.