With Witness (CBS Sunday at 8 p.m.)...
With Witness (CBS Sunday at 8 p.m.) Australian director Peter Weir made an exceptionally potent American debut in this intelligent 1985 romantic thriller, which found Harrison Ford’s Philadelphia cop taking refuge in an Amish community, where he and a beautiful young Amish woman (Kelly McGillis) find themselves mutually attracted.
In Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction (Channel 9 Sunday at 8 p.m.), a 1983 TV movie, Dennis Weaver gives a harrowing performance as a successful realtor whose life goes into a tailspin once he’s addicted to cocaine.
Held Hostage: The Sis & Jerry Levin Story (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.), a new TV movie based on an actual incident, stars Marlo Thomas as the wife of a journalist (David Dukes) kidnaped in Beirut who launches a campaign to free him.
The ultra-violent 1983 Bad Boys (Channel 5 Monday at 8 p.m.) tells us nothing new about reform school horrors, but it does have a fiery Sean Penn and Ally Sheedy as his compassionate girlfriend.
Ed O’Neill stars in the new TV movie The Whereabouts of Jenny (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.) as a father battling against his limited access to his daughter (Cassy Friel), who has been sequestered in the federal witness relocation program.
The Kiss (Channel 5 Tuesday at 8 p.m., again on Saturday at 8 p.m.) is a smart, fast and sassy 1988 horror picture, as much fun as it is scary in its shock-cut grisliness (but is absolute not for the faint of heart). Joanna Pacula was born to play the film’s beautiful but oddly unsettling heroine.
The Presidio (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.), a skin-deep 1988 thriller about a compromised murder investigation on San Francisco’s venerable military base, makes poor use of Sean Connery and Jack Warden.
Directed by Genevieve Robert, the 1988 Casual Sex? (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) proves only that you don’t have to be a man to make lewd, preposterous comedies.
Steve Martin’s The Jerk (Channel 13 Thursday at 8 p.m.) is wild and crazy all right, but not nearly as funny as it might be, thanks to its crass dialogue. In essence it tries to emulate the silent classics in which a young man of total naivete leaves home to make his way in the world--ah, if only The Jerk were silent!
The Stepfather (Channel 5 Friday at 8 p.m.) is that 1987 horror sleeper in which Terry O’Quinn stars as a seemingly loving but actually lethal husband and step-dad.
In the amiable, though overly long and overly complicated 1970 western Chisum (Channel 13 Saturday at 8 p.m.). John Wayne scores a victory for law and order for the umpteenth time. He’s cast as real-life pioneering cattleman John Simpson Chisum, “The King of the Pecos,†who takes on crafty bad guy Forrest Tucker.
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