In essence, Nancy Drew Goes to Law School. (And Solves the Murders of Two Supreme Court Justices, Where the FBI, the CIA, and the DCPD Have Failed.) (Or as the heroine herself puts it: "The hubris of the young, huh?") (Or as the White House Chief of Staff puts it, making a pre-emptive strike ahead of the nation's film critics: "The premise is so far-fetched it's absurd.") Alan J. Pakula, who wrote and directed, puts on his best paranoid face in order to pretend that this is All the President's Men revisited. Very few will be fooled. The finished product is so handsome, sumptuous, well-polished as to make you feel at any particular moment as though you are tooling along in a Mercedes-Benz. All the while, the actual route it takes is as simple and humdrum as an interstate freeway: ubiquitous, nebulous hitmen chase our damsel-in-distress from one end of the movie to the other. Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, John Lithgow, Robert Culp. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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