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DARK OBSESSION. Gabriel Byrne (Miller's Crossing) feels guilty; Amanda Donohoe (L.A. Law) gets horny. And everyone else in this English country house does what aristocrats do best: prove they don't deserve their status. Go to Nick Broomfield's NC-17 thriller for the redeeming prurient interest and stay for the acid-etched portrait of a man with too much time and blood on his hands.
LIVIN' LARGE. Can a street kid with a nose for news become an anchorman at an all-white station? In this broad, funny fable, the answer is: guess! Senses of humor and human proportion have been lacking in recent black films, but writer William Mosley-Payne and director Michael Schultz find them both.
THE REFLECTING SKIN. The exploding toad, the embalmed fetus, the man who incinerates himself . . . Had enough? Then skip Philip Ridley's hallucinogenic melodrama about weird doin's down on the farm. But do so at the peril of missing a gorgeously bizarre chamber of horrors that taps into the everyday hell of growing up lonely.
THEATER
THE MATCHMAKER. Dorothy Loudon, the original Miss Hannigan in Annie, blends truth and charm as Dolly Levi in the premusical version of Hello, Dolly!, artfully revived off-Broadway.
MR. GOGOL AND MR. PREEN. How could Elaine May recover from the film fiasco of Ishtar? By returning to her roots in sketch comedy off-Broadway with this sweet, sentimental, intermittently delightful encounter between a lonely vacuum-cleaner salesman and his equally lonely old customer.
ARTHUR. Sans Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli but abetted by an abundant score and by amiable Broadway veterans Gregg Edelman (City of Angels) and Michael Allinson (Shadowlands) as a drunk and his butler, the comedy film turns musical at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam.
IN LIKE HIM
THE ROCKETEER. He died more than three decades ago, but Errol Flynn is the hottest new star in pictures. Kevin Costner makes a Robin Hood movie, and critics compare it invidiously with the classic Flynn version of 1938. Then there's The Rocketeer, set in that memorable movie year. The film's zestiest character -- swashbuckler, womanizer, Nazi agent -- is a thin, engaging caricature of Hollywood's most beloved rogue (played with a lovely, menacing silliness by Timothy Dalton). The Rocketeer, based on Dave Stevens' meticulously evocative comic books, mostly meanders where it means to soar. But Old Hollywood figures such as Howard Hughes and W.C. Fields are impersonated, and such aerial antiques as the Hindenburg and Hughes' Spruce Goose airplane are invoked as icons from a past so remote it seems like tomorrow. Flynn, of course, remains the most entertaining of these artifacts. And the most marketable. Anyone for a remake of Captain Blood?