Description
**The Saint of Fort Washington: A refutation of then-President George Bush's notion of 1,000 points of light, this film by director Tim Hunter is about what happened when holes in the social safety net created a homeless population of unprecedented size during the Reagan-Bush years. The film focuses on two of the homeless: a sweet but troubled young man (Matt Dillon) and a more rugged, worldly-wise homeless Vietnam veteran (Danny Glover), who befriends him and tries to teach him how to survive on the streets. Dillon's character is schizophrenic, unable to get the medication or attention he needs to treat his problem. Instead, he winds up in a Manhattan men's shelter, a kind of Darwinian house of horrors haunted by streetwise predators (led by a scary Ving Rhames). Though overly sentimentalized at times, the film also serves as an indictment of a system that lets too many people like Dillon's character slip through the cracks.**Night Falls on Manhattan: The dominant themes of director Sidney Lumet's distinguished career are in full force in this moral melodrama involving a young district attorney (Andy Garcia) who takes on a career-making case only to uncover his father's possible involvement in pervasive police corruption. Balancing personal ethics and political compromise in a high-wire act of power and its abuse, Lumet relies on dialogue and superb performances (including those by Ron Leibman, Richard Dreyfuss, and Lena Olin) to achieve a devastating impact. The script (based on the novel Tainted Evidence by Robert Daley) is too smart and Lumet's direction too sure-footed to fall back on the black-and-white exploits of conventional criminals and their crimes. The movie's moral framework is more realistic, dealing in the gray areas between right and wrong where misdeeds can arise from the best intentions. At the center of Garcia's dilemma is his father, a seasoned New York cop played so convincingly by Ian Holm that you'd never guess the actor was British.
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