Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

CIMECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Not Without My Daughter (1991)

Sally Field is Betty Mahmoody, the real woman who turned her experience being abducted with her daughter by her husband into a best-selling novel adapted here into a gripping movie with Alfred Mollina playing the Iranian doctor who tricks his American family into a one-way trip to Iran.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Species (1995)

A group of way too laidback misfit investigators (including Forest Whitaker as celluloid's least insightful psychic ever), chase after - no, stroll around after -- a scantily clad Natasha Henstridge who plays an escaped and rapidly evolving half-human, half-alien science experiment and temptress killing machine, in this police procedural "sci-fi" that spawned a number of unwarranted sequels.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Identity (2003)

Melding elements of film noir, slasher horror, and whodunnit (specifically Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (not a spoiler)), this unusual movie has John Cusack and Amanda Peet investigating a growing number of grisly deaths at an isolated motel, all of them linked by impossible coincidences, and while whodunnit purists may not appreciate it, the mystery is surprisingly, satisfactorily, and creepily concluded.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS