People I Know

Academy Award(R) winners Al Pacino (Best Actor, SCENT OF A WOMAN, 1992) and Kim Basinger (Best Supporting Actress, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, 1997) bring the star power to this powerful and provocative thriller! For old-school public relations kingpin Eli Wurman (Pacino), there's never been a crisis he couldn't fix or a scandal he couldn't handle – until now! When Eli's best client (Ryan O'Neal -- MALIBU'S MOST WANTED) and his starlet girlfriend (Téa Leoni -- HOLLYWOOD ENDING) become tangled in a particularly messy situation, Eli ends up seeing more than he's supposed to. Now, the man who made it his business to know everything suddenly knows too much! With an unforgettable performance critics are calling one of Al Pacino's best, you won't want to miss a minute of this gripping motion picture.

Al Pacino shambles about in pure weary Late Pacino form in People I Know, a 1970s-style paranoid number with a political tinge to it. Pacino plays an old-school publicist, once a friend to Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, who's now down to his last big client, a vaguely dangerous movie star (nice turn by Ryan O'Neal). As Pacino tries to keep his client's indiscretions out of the papers, he's dragged into an intriguing drugs-murder-politics conspiracy. There are juicy possibilities in Jon Robin Baitz's script, and with a topnotch director and a little more oomph they might have blossomed. As it is, despite a couple of nifty gotchas, the movie never quite gets into full stride. Tea Leoni shines as an addicted actress with a flinty vocabulary, but Kim Basinger is less lucky with her plot-device role. Pacino looks as though he's about to draw his last breath in every shot, which is precisely how he should look. --Robert Horton