With Friends Like These

Playing a venal producer in a sour cameo, Bill Murray looks around a Hollywood party full of B-list character actors and pronounces it a graveyard of familiar faces no one knows the names of. It's one of the better moments in Philip Messina's inane and earnest comedy, a film that does little to revive or honor the dead. Adam Arkin, David Strathairn, Jon Tenny, and Robert Costanzo play a cadre of bit players who take relief from their struggle to be typecast in bad TV shows and commercials by playing poker together and indulging in ritualistic riffs from Robert De Niro movies. When word gets out that Martin Scorsese (who makes a brief but embarrassed appearance) is casting an Al Capone movie and looking for an unknown to star, the boys' fragile kinship unravels in mild treachery. Silly when it tries to be serious, strained when it tries to be silly, Friends exceeds its abuse of its male cast with that of its women -- Amy Madigan, Laura San Giacomo, Elle Macpherson, and Lauren Tom play characters ranging from hapless housewife to bulimic incompetent. Screens at the Copley Place Thursday, September 10 at 7:15 and 9:30 and Friday, September 11 at 1, 3, and 5 p.m. Director Philip Messina and star Robert Costanzo will appear to introduce Thursday's 7:15 showing.

-- Peter Keough

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Film Festival Feature Films

| With Friends like These | Digging to China | Monument Ave. | Rounders | Lolita | God Said, 'Ha!' | My Son the Fanatic | The Mighty | Shattered Image | Gods and Monsters | Xui Xui: The Sent-Down Girl | Without Limits | Clubland | The Inheritors | The Celebration | Urban Ghost Story | The Boys | Living Out Loud | Stuart Bliss | The General | The Kindness of Strangers | Dancing at Lughnasa | Central Station | The Human Race | Double You Street | Oberwasser -- By U-boat to America | The Witman Boys | The Cruise | Confession of a Sexist Pig | Melting Pot |

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More Boston Film Festival information, film descriptions, and show times

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