Louis Gossett Jr

[3] The shark is back, this time working its way into Sea World in Florida where it threatens the tourists. Now, I’m okay if you want to keep bringing back the same shark for four movies, even though it is literally blown to bits at the end of all four of them. For some reason I’ll never be able to explain, I’m even okay with …

[5] Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset play deep sea divers who stumble upon a sunken supply of morphine and Spanish treasure. They enlist the help of Robert Shaw (in one of his final performances) to excavate their findings, all while fighting off a giant moray eel and a voodoo drug lord played by Louis Gossett, Jr. The Deep, written by Peter Benchley, is an obvious …

[7] Richard Gere plays a navy cadet who falls in love with a factory worker played by Debra Winger. The romance part of the story doesn’t work as well as Gere’s combative relationship with his drill instructor, played by Louis Gossett Jr.  Director Taylor Hackford (Dolores Claiborne, Ray) does a remarkable job grounding the melodrama, especially in the tragic third act, but I have a …

[5] At her sister’s funeral, an eccentric woman meets her uptight nephew and takes him globe-trotting to find an old flame. The combination of the great George Cukor and the ever-acerbic Maggie Smith doesn’t add up to anything compelling in this Auntie Mame wannabe. The screenplay, based on Graham Green’s novel, is distractedly episodic and Smith’s performance is over-the-top even for her. The tone is …

[8] After tackling fantasy in The Neverending Story, director Wolfgang Petersen turned to science-fiction in this intimate tale of opposing fighter pilots who crash-land on a dangerous planet together. Dennis Quaid plays the human, and Louis Gossett Jr plays the alien, unrecognizable under Chris Walas’ incredible prosthetic makeup. The screenplay wisely spends the first two-thirds of the movie building a bond between the characters, taking …