Screen:

...Sadly, director Jonathan Kaplan has made the rape scenes-as awful as they are-the film's most vivid ones...

...This year's Australian Shame, despite a strong screenplay, was also limited by meager publicity to art-house audiences...

...While limited by formulas, it isn't reduced to them...

...Louis Leakey, the anthropologist who urged her to study the few remaining mountain gorillas as a likely relative of early human beings...

...As in Aliens, Weaver here combines toughness and protectiveness in what might be termed a kind of maternal macha...

...Unfortunately, the power of this double injustice is never fully conveyed in the film...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...Fossey goes further than Isak Dinesen imagined-so high into treacherous mountains that the title could have been Up in Africa...

...Apted shows scenes of Weaver's greenhorn expectations, her learning process out in the bush, her bonding with a friendly native tracker, and a soupc,on of romance (with an Australian photographer, played by Bryan Brown...

...Gish, lighter in color than the others, is the girl with brains...

...The final effect is that the ends and means of this film just don't jibe...

...But Weaver shares scenes without losing face, probably because (again like Fossey) when among the animals she seems to become one, grunting, scratching, adopting submissive postures as needed, and deferring to the largest male,' whom she slowly lures into friendship...

...In a second case that she begins in response to Foster's angry charge of abandonment, McGillis prosecutes the bar bystanders who hooted the rape on...

...The Accused, with Paramount backing, promises to become the most widely seen movie yet about the tough subject of rape...

...The filmmakers (especially director Donald Petrie and writer Amy Jones) seem to hover between making a standard teen film and appealing to more sophisticated tastes...

...she's industriously perky, sexually innocent, and headed for Yale...

...But her distance is too distant, and her final warmth unconvincing...

...He wants "a wedding, inachurch, with the blessings of God upon us, for Chrissakes...

...Jodie Foster does a good job at portraying the victim's low-class habits and language, but never manages to compel full, outraged sympathy with her plight...

...Scenes between McGillis and Foster fall completely flat, especially a key explosion when Foster accuses McGillis of abandoning her by settling for a conviction on lesser charges of "reckless endanger-ment...

...But the characters are stereotyped...

...It is standard acting lore never to share a shot with animals, worse scene-stealers than babies...

...The trio acts well, especially Taylor, who gets to deliver broad comic lines...

...The film presents gruesome scenes of poachers slaughtering gorillas, scenes that revolt the conscience and reduce to insignificance some complaints that the film sentimentalizes Fossey and ignores evidence of her erratic behavior near the end of her life...

...The low budget Extremities (1986) dealt with the subject in, perhaps, both too brutal and too intellectual a manner...

...McGillis is supposed to be distant at first- better schooled, legalistic, and concerned more with the certainty than grade of conviction...

...The acting is partly to blame...

...To an extent, both McGillis and Foster suffer from the shape of the screenplay: it starts after the rape, which is seen in flashbacks from courtroom testimony...

...but during the trial her acting consists of wooden, lawyerly mannerisms...

...Mystic Pizza has a strange title...

...The very innocence of the gorillas pitted against the aggression of men was so strong in the film that I was overcome and had to leave before the last scene's conclusion...

...The film has some funny moments with a role reversal: Taylor's boyfriend (Vincent D'Onofrio, from Full Metal Jacket) refuses to make love to her before she marries him...

...Aside from exploring- the ethnic problems of Portuguese-Americans, the film makes use of the local color of the coast, its wetlands, port life, and half-elegant, half-ramshackle quaintness...

...Its plot is potentially strong, adapted from the news stories several years ago of a gang rape in a Massachusetts bar, whose patrons cheered on the assault...

...The title is clearly meant to reveal a dark irony: in rape cases-especially one in which the victim drinks heavily, smokes pot, and acts "sexy"-the woman often stands accused of a social crime while her assailants are accused of a legal one...

...Likewise, the best acting in the film belongs to one of the bar villains (Leo Rossi...

...Weaver, whose chin God made to embody forthright resolution, convincingly embodies Fossey's determination to save "her gorillas...

...too bad the plot isn't as odd...

...Lili Taylor as their friend...

...Most of the fault lies with co-star Kelly McGillis as the district attorney who must both prosecute on Foster's behalf and "defend" her from social stigma...

...The title puns about a pizza restaurant where the film's three young heroines work: their boss (Conchata Farrell) won't tell them the secrets of the special, Portuguese-style pizza she cooks to delight her patrons...

...Mystic Pizza is ambitious in its fourfold plot: the fate of the restaurant and its three waitresses (Annabeth Gish and Julia Roberts as two Portuguese-American sisters...

...Second, Weaver shares the camera with a band of wild gorillas that she too, like Fossey, had to work to know and engage in a trusting exchange...

...Such wit, however offensively put, would have been useful elsewhere in a screenplay which promises to let the characters escape their defining qualities, but never quite delivers...

...Weaver's "exchanges" with the gorillas are magical...

...This film is a memorial to its worth...

...It's an entertaining coming-of-age comedy that doesn't have the courage of its eccentricities...

...The pun is also literal: the restaurant is in Mystic, Connecticut, an area where Portuguese immigrants have long taken up waterfront or seafaring jobs...

...As a film about and partly for young adults, Mystic Pizza is interestingly idiosyncratic...

...Roberts plays a tall, feisty, strutting moll, luxuriating in her sexuality and its effect on men...

...Even the love scenes are shot in a subtle, punning way to convey a feminist slant...

...While they may be related to humans, "pre-hominids," in Leakey's terms, they engage in neither the homicide nor ecocide of the so-called higher species...

...The gorillas live in an Edenic world...

...Unfortunately, The Accused lacks the strengths of its predecessors...

...But the background is drawn unevenly at first, and never quite builds up the strength it should have...

...First, the hero in question is a woman...

...The movie's subplot traces the evolving relationship of the two women...

...The significance of Fossey's life wasn't her death (probably at the hands of poachers) but her work...

...Large segments of the film-directed by Michael Apted, starring Sigourney Weaver, and shot on location in Rwanda- are the conventional stuff of African heroic adventure...

...If this slaughter of innocents is what she was fighting, it would be enough to drive anyone mad...

...Taylor has little education but loads of energy, most of which she spends trying to evade early marriage to someone she's crazy about...

...But there are two key differences...

...Despite its limits, the power of the film is to show how Leakey's science became Fossey's religion...

...Fossey was inspired to her mission by Dr...

...Even in expressing anger or class misunderstandings, there has to be some chemistry, but McGillis's temperature is sub-zero...

...I guess half a pie is better than none .Still, one hungers for the lines to be more spicy, so to speak-to have some of the secret ingredient that makes the pizza special...