Black Eyed Dog

For a movie about music and the mob, Richard O'Connell's first feature is pretty tuneless and toothless. Paul Maguire (Paul Barnett), head of the San Francisco Irish bar band of the title, finds his dream of a record contract threatened by debts, domestic non-tranquility, and a checkered past. He's estranged from his wife, his bandmates are squabbling, and his brother Gerry, a local kingpin, wants to cash in on an old debt. Before we reach the film's moderately rousing climax (that old Coppola trick of intercutting violence with a lyrical interlude), Paul has traded his fiddle for a firearm and the film has sagged irrecoverably into genre and ethnic stereotypes -- do we really need a confrontation with a priest in a shadowy church and a Barry Fitzgeraldish leprechaun of a best friend? Barnett possesses an agreeable vulnerability and a hangdog grace, but the rest of the cast seems rote, as does O'Connell's uninspired direction and screenplay. Screens at the Copley Place Thursday, September 9 at 7:30 and 10 p.m. and Friday, September 10 at 11:30 a.m. and 2 and 4:30 p.m. Director Richard O'Connell will be present at tonight's 7:30 showing.

-- Peter Keough

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Film Festival Feature Films

| The Minus Man | The Tavern | Black Eyed Dog | The Last September | A Wake in Providence | Man of the Century | Pups | Dreaming of Joseph Leeds | Wisdom of Crocodiles | That's The Way I Like It | American Beauty | Mifune | Black Cat, White Cat | Hit and Runway | All the LIttle Animals | Me Myself I | The Alchemist and the Virgin | Trash | Old Man River | The Poet and the Con | Snow Falling on Cedars | Guinevere | East is East | American Movie | Rivers of Babylon | Two Ninas | Rats | Keepers of the Frame | The Runner |

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