The Gingerbread Man

(PolyGram)

Based on a John Grisham screenplay, Robert Altman's film is a canny, bittersweet, densely layered noir. Kenneth Branagh is a Savannah defense lawyer notorious for winning the kind of civil-rights cases that don't endear him to law-enforcement officials. Embeth Davidtz is his damsel-in-distress; Robert Duvall is her nutso father. Eventually the plot and the character motivations crumble, but by then Altman has again proven himself one of the leading geniuses in American filmmaking.