A gangland comedy starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a Mafia widow sick of the whole environment, sick of living among "hot" furniture and appliances (many of them still in their boxes), sick of fending off the passes of Tony "the Tiger" Russo, sick of her son taking the neighborhood kids at three-card monte, and determined to start clean in a filthy little East Village walk-up. Its director, Jonathan Demme, proves here again, as before in Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, et al., that he has a capacious stomach but a not very discerning eye for the artifacts of American kitsch. He doesn't, that is, get the most from his décor, maybe because he wants to get everything from it. And in trying to stretch himself, and then to bounce on his toes, to the full height of his critical reputation, he drums up some odd stylistic touches: funny (funny strange, not ha-ha), jerky little zooms and pans, for example, or a dizzying camera rotation around four friends at the beauty shop. Stylistic strenuousness is almost always less useful in lighter moments, however, than in heavier ones: the commuter-train rub-out amid a red strobe-light effect inside a tunnel or the shootout in the Burger World drive-through lane, with its unexpectedly stirring image of a pampered kingpin prodded into a two-gun counterattack. The most interesting idea in the movie (although many customers will be out the exit by then) is the chronological recap beneath the closing credits: not repeated footage, much less out-takes, but instead brand-new information, sometimes minor embellishments or alternate camera angles of events we've already seen, and sometimes whole new events to be slotted retrospectively in their proper place in the sequence. Was this additional footage shot especially for the purpose, or is it simply sweepings from the editing-room floor? Either way, it has nothing whatever to do with the generation of laughter. Matthew Modine, Dean Stockwell. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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