In retrospect, it seems amazing that writer/director Michael Tolkin was able to get The Rapture made. In the history of mainstream American filmmaking, it’s hard to come up with another example of a film that persuasively argues that even if the God worshipped by millions of evangelical Christians does exist, he/she/it is far too cruel and capricious to actually deserve their devotion.
In other words, this is definitely not Left Behind.
Mimi Rogers plays a bored telephone operator who has grown weary of her empty life of sexual promiscuity. Following a series of conversations and epiphanies, she becomes “born again” and convinces her lover (David Duchovny, with mullet) to join in her conversion. For a time, they are happy, but then he is killed by a disgruntled employee and she finds her faith tested by a series of signs from God that eventually convince her to murder her daughter.
Unable to kill herself, she is saved from imprisonment by the titular event, only to face the near-impossible choice of loving the deity who caused her so much pain or spending the rest of eternity in desolate isolation.
Tolkin largely gets away with the heavy-handedness of his thesis, thanks to dollops of near-exploitation levels of sex and violence, combined with very deliberate, almost dreamlike pacing. But the film ultimately succeeds thanks to Rogers’ amazing, career-defining performance, which allows us to understand the decisions her character makes from beginning to end, concluding with the most devastating act of cinematic defiance I’ve ever seen. —Allan Mott
Smiling Henry Silva and frowning Woody Strode are set up to comprise the Murtaugh and Riggs of Fernando Di Leo’s 
Violent, exciting and flush with oversized lapels, The Italian Connection has just about everything you could want from a Eurocrime effort: a swanky instrumental theme, topless go-go dancing, full-frontal whores, lots of face-slapping and cheek-pinching, a limping auto repairman, a junkyard explosion, one gratuitous blue Afro wig and one dead kitty cat. (As gruesome as that sounds, it proves Di Leo does not pussyfoot around. 
The intestinal problems start in New York City, when a ghost ship from the tropics wanders into port without a crew — alive, anyway. The conditions the investigating authorities find the seamen in will put you off deli meats for the day. And in boxes bearing a coffee company’s logo are slimy, green eggs that pulsate. Posits one investigator, “It could be somethin’ like a giant squash or an avocado or some kind of mango!” 
The rest of the flick’s a mixed bag. Patrick Lussier’s direction is competent (I’d expect nothing more or less from the maker of