This 1989 film, directed by Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon) brings together three notable actors in a story of generational and familial loyalty and crime. While ultimately a somewhat thin story, the film succeeds in great measure because of its powerful actors, who rise above the implausible casting to play three generations of men (Scottish, Italian, and Jewish) who each in their own way try to deny their roots. Matthew Broderick plays Adam, an MIT scholar who yearns for more excitement from life. He enlists the aid of his grandfather Jesse (Sean Connery)–a tough, lifelong thief–to steal some biological materials for a big payoff. But Adam’s father, Vito (Dustin Hoffman), who went straight to get away from Jesse’s lifestyle and to provide a stable life for his son, finds himself dragged back into Jesse’s criminal world in order to protect Adam. When the heist goes sour, Vito must decide where his true loyalties lie. The whole affair has a light, breezy atmosphere to it, but the performances give this film weight and make it a worthwhile diversion. –Robert Lane
1988’s “The Presidio” paired veteran actor Sean Connery with a young Mark Harmon and a younger Meg Ryan in a rather mundane San Francisco murder mystery. The movie was set at the U.S. Army’s beautiful Presidio of San Francisco military base and in San Francisco itself.
Connery is Lieutenant Colonel Caldwell, the cantankerous, by-the-book Provost Marshal of the Presidio; Harmon is Jay Austin, forced out of the military by Caldwell and now a hot-headed San Francisco police detective. When a military policeman is murdered during a break-in at the Presidio Officer’s Club, the two must cooperate on the investigation. Their difficult relationship is made more challenging by Austin’s attraction to Caldwell’s beautiful but rebellious daughter, played with aggressive gusto by Meg Ryan.
The murder investigation leads to a conspiracy with ties back to the Vietnam War, culminating in a violent shoot-out in a bottled water warehouse. The plot will seem clumsy to audiences now savy on crime forensics; the even clumsier dialogue sometimes threatens to bury the movie altogether.
The movie has its redeeming features. Connerly and Harmon manage to craft a little “old bull, young bull” buddy chemistry on screen. A scene in which Caldwell impresses Austin by using a little hopkido to clean up a bar with a loud-mouthed drunk may be the highpoint of the movie. The movie makes good use of its location shooting around the Presidio.
Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose is a flawed attempt to adapt Umberto Eco’s highly convoluted medieval bestseller for the screen, necessarily excising much of the esoterica that made the book so compelling. Still, what’s left is a riveting whodunit set in a grimly and grimily realistic 14th-century Benedictine monastery populated by a parade of grotesque characters, all of whom spend their time lurking in dark places or scuttling, half-unseen, in the omnipresent gloom. A series of mysterious and gruesome deaths are somehow tied up with the unwelcome attention of the Inquisition, sent to root out suspected heretical behavior among the monastic scribes whose lives are dedicated to transcribing ancient manuscripts for their famous library, access to which is prevented by an ingenious maze-like layout.
Enter Sean Connery as investigator-monk William of Baskerville (the Sherlock Holmes connection made explicit in his name) and his naive young assistant Adso (a youthful Christian Slater). The Grand Inquisitor Bernado Gui (F. Murray Abraham) suspects devilry; but William and Adso, using Holmesian forensic techniques, uncover a much more human cause: the secrets of the library are being protected at a terrible cost. A fine international cast and the splendidly evocative location compensate for a screenplay that struggles to present Eco’s multifaceted story even partially intact; Annaud’s idiosyncratic direction complements the sinister, unsettling aura of the tale ideally. –Mark Walker
Fans of Sean Connery who are curious to see him explore roles outside of his usual heroic characters may enjoy his robust turn as the mythic Green Knight in this 1982 British-made fantasy. Based loosely on the classic epic poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Connery is quite a sight as the glittering green figure, who challenges young Gawain (Miles O’Keefe of Tarzan the Ape Man infamy), a squire in King Arthur’s court, to solve his riddle or lose his head. O’Keefe is a stiff Gawain, and the film suffers under its low budget and awkward comic moments, but Connery and the rest of the cast (which includes Trevor Howard as Arthur, John Rhys-Davies, Lila Kedrova, and Peter Cushing) are game and provide sufficient star power to keep fantasy-adventure fans distracted from the film’s shortcomings. Writer-director Weeks also directed a version of this story in 1973, with Murray Head of Jesus Christ Superstar fame as Gawain. –Paul Gaita
After years of enduring Roger Moore in the role of James Bond, it was good to have Sean Connery back in this 1983 film for a one-time-only trip down 007’s memory lane. Connery’s Bond, a bit of a dinosaur in the British secret service at (then) 52, is still in demand during times of crisis. Sadly, the film is not very good. In this rehash of Thunderball, Bond is pitted against a worthy underwater villain (Klaus Maria Brandauer); and while the requisite Bond Girls include beauties Kim Basinger and Barbara Carrera, they can’t save the movie. The script has several truly dumb passages, among them a (gasp) video-game duel between 007 and his nemesis that now looks utterly anachronistic. For Connery fans, however, this widescreen print of the Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) film is a chance to say a final goodbye to a perfect marriage of actor and character. –Tom Keogh
Outland is another in a long line of Westerns retooled for science fiction. Writer-director Peter Hyams (Capricorn One, 2010, Timecop) restages High Noon in outer space, with Sean Connery as O’Neil, the marshal for a settlement on one of Jupiter’s moons. While investigating the deaths of some miners, O’Neil discovers that mine boss Peter Boyle has been giving his workers an amphetamine-like work-enhancing drug that keeps them productive for months–until they finally snap and go berserk. When Boyle sends killer henchmen to neutralize the lawman, O’Neil is unable to get the miners to back him up. Outland is no classic, but it offers solid suspense in an otherworldly atmosphere. Also starring Frances Sternhagen, James B. Sikking (Howard on television’s Hill Street Blues), and John Ratzenberger (later to become famous as Cliff on the sitcom Cheers). –Jim Emerson
Best-selling novelist Michael Crichton had already directed Westworld and Coma when he tackled the ambitious production of The Great 
Train Robbery in 1978. Adapting his own novel (which was inspired by the facts of the first known train robbery), Crichton sets this attractive, highly enjoyable film in London in 1855, where Edward Pierce (Sean Connery) and Agar (Donald Sutherland) plot to steal £25,000 in gold that is being transported by train to pay British troops in the Crimean War. Lesley-Anne Down plays Miriam, Pierce’s sophisticated paramour and the third partner in the scheme; while Pierce and Agar make copies of four keys for the train’s closely guarded safes, she uses her feminine wiles to distract a variety of officials and businessmen with connections to the gold.
A lively, humorous caper film of the first order, The Great Train Robbery also boasts a vividly authentic recreation of mid-Victorian England, all the more remarkable since the production was filmed primarily in Ireland on a budget of $6 million–a miraculously modest sum (even in 1978) for such a lavish-looking film. Although Crichton’s directorial style seems somewhat detached and bloodless, he maintains a vivid respect for place and time, and his three leads are splendid in their charismatic roles. Meticulous attention to details of costuming and production design enhance the breezy fun of the heist, which climaxes with an exciting sequence on the rushing train, with Connery performing his own stunt work. While the later hit Mission: Impossible would take a similar sequence to its high-tech, high-velocity extreme, The Great Train Robbbery remains an entertaining study of crime in a less hectic age, allowing Crichton to emphasize ingenuity over special effects. –Jeff Shannon
Sean Connery is an Arab diplomat who wants to not only make peace with Israel but admit the Jewish state as an OPEC member. One by one the leaders of the oil cartel are assassinated. On the run for his life Connery finds aide from Nicole a mysterious beauty he falls in love with. But when he discovers Nicole is an international hit lady he is left alone to fight for his life.
This underrated Richard Lester film is really a classic–and one of the most romantic movies ever made. Working from James Goldman’s script, Lester casts Sean Connery as an aged Robin Hood, returned after years away at the Crusades with an increasingly mad King Richard (Richard Harris). Robin and Little John (a very funny Nicol Williamson) return to find that the sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw) is up to his old nasty tricks–and that Maid Marian (Audrey Hepburn) is now a nun. Lester brings the same touch to this period film that he did to The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, blending authenticity with a knowing wink at the conventions of period films. But the heart of this film is the very palpable emotion between Hepburn and Connery (and between Connery and Williamson). The ending is guaranteed three hankies, minimum. –Marshall Fine
The up-and-down career of director John Milius had no finer moment than The Wind and the Lion, a dandy adventure tale. It’s based on fact: An American (played by Candice Bergen) and her two children were kidnapped in 1904 Morocco by a Berber tribe, an international incident settled by President Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” military muscle. The film’s sweep and swagger are unabashedly old-fashioned, even as Milius occasionally pokes fun at the grand characters. Some of the peripheral material is sloppy, but as long as Milius keeps his sights locked on the two powerful protagonists, he’s dead-on: Brian Keith makes a gutsy Roosevelt, and Sean Connery is in splendid form (with Scots accent in place–got a problem with that?) as the dashing Berber chieftain. Perhaps overshadowed by John Huston’s The Man Who Would be King the same year (Huston plays advisor John Hay in this one), Wind makes a marvelous companion piece. –Robert Horton