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Reviews:
Hollywood Online:
"Respected film actor Peter Coyote was Dahl's first choice for the
role of Detective Don Bresler, a ruthless copy with a penchant for gratuitous
brutality. The director knew he would bring intelligence as well as an
unnerving ambiguity to a part that might come off as merely vicious in
another actor's hands."
Austin Chronicle:
"Liotta and Fiorentino are fine here running around chasing killers, but
it's Coyote, as Krane's detective boss, who really puts something
memorable into the film. Coyote remains one of the most criminally
overlooked American actors of our time."
New York Times:
"Tapping into some kind of virtual reality gambit seen in Strange
Days, Unforgettable deals with one person's ability
to borrow experiences of others. In this case, it's best if the others
are dead... Mr. Dahl's imagination is in fine form... Unforgettable
shares the cool look and the fine, sinister lighting effects of
his earlier work, and it unfolds in tough, intense style."
Los Angeles Times:
"Liotta, who exudes danger as well as intelligence, is ideally cast
as a man desperate to clear his name..."The supporting cast is top-drawer
(as are all the film's technical credits): David Paymer as Liotta's sympathetic
colleague, Peter Coyote and Christopher McDonald as very different cops,
and Kim Cattrall as Liotta's embittered sister-in-law."
Minneapolis Star Tribune:
"Coyote shines as Liotta's police department friend who appears to have
an agenda all his own. And Fiorentino shows she can convincingly play
more than femme fatales."
Syracuse New Times:
"Imagine the Sam Shepard murder case with a sci-fi slant and you'll
get a rough idea where Bill Geddie's script begins - but that doesn't take
into account the red herrings, false leads and other twists that form Unforgettable's
many pleasant surprises in its second hour... Flanked by strong supporting
work from Christopher McDonald, Peter Coyote and Kim Coates' suspected
murderer, Dahl's Unforgettable is a nifty, compact thriller
from an underrated auteur."
Chicago Tribune:
"Unforgettable is a head-trip movie, sort of a mystery-solving
Brainstorm fused with The Fugitive and Dahl plays
the point-of-view shifts for maximum stun-gun effect, as disturbing memories
and images explode like flashbulbs to jolt Krane and the audience. The
director, having shown a sure hand for noir in his past work, provides
the appropriate air of moody foreboding."
The San Diego Union-Tribune:
"Dahl puts us back in the nightmare domain of the '40s noir hero whose
problems are fed by a suction pump from his bilged soul...
Liotta is a sturdy, engaging hero, and Fiorentino, a devil-vamp in The
Last Seduction, is now more recognizably human... Peter Coyote and Christopher
McDonald, astonishingly cheap-jerk, are rancid cops in the high "low"
tradition of Barton MacLane, Eugene Meyer, Robert Ryan and Ed Begley.
Boston Globe:
"There's a nice noir-ish tone to the beleaguered-man-under-pressure
stuff. Dahl avoids visual cliche in the memory-transfer sequences, and
Vancouver, doubling as Seattle, looks interestingly gritty."
Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
"Fiorentino and Liotta make a formidable team, with able assistance
from gruff Peter Coyote as a tough-but-fair senior cop, David Paymer as
Liotta's skittish assistant and Christopher McDonald as an antagonistic
lawman. Dahl directs with an assurance powerful enough to keep the outlandish
premise from veering into the outer limits, and his staging of the induced
flashbacks seems fittingly dreamlike."
San Francisco Chronicle:
"Dahl's noir films owe so much to the genre that it is hard to get
a grasp on his individual style. But in Unforgettable, he emerges as a
master of inciting fear and dread... For a good 45 minutes of its two-hour
running time, Unforgettable has the viewer in a state of oppressive
tension. The rest of the time you're just nervous."
Magill's Survey of Cinema:
"...Christopher Young's music which heightens the drama without overpowering
it, recalling occasionally Bernard Herrmann's great scores for such Alfred
Hitchcock masterpieces as Vertigo."
Images
 "Bresler is a guy who walks through hell and has the morality
of hell. Yet he's asked to do a job for people who live in heaven, and
that brings all sorts of contradictions with it."
DID YOU KNOW?
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Unforgettable was filmed primarily in Vancouver. The city
allowed the company the use of Riverview, a partially shut-down psychiatric
hospital. The institution proved ideal to bring added realism to several
of the film's sets. The coroner's office, autopsy room, evidence storage
locker, Martha Briggs' lab and the nightmarish basement of Eddie Dutton's
childhood were all filmed in the atmospheric building.
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The story came to screenwriter (and producer of Barbara Walters Specials)
Bill Geddie after watching an interview with a neurologist on The
Today Show.
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In the theater release, when the film ended and the credits came up,
they played Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" but in the video
release, they omitted. it.
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Actress Stellina Rusich,who plays Mary Krane, was also in the TV movie
Murder in my Mind with Coyote. Again, she played a victim
whose memories needed to be captured from her cerebral spinal fluid so
that her attacker would be identified.
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Shown at the Berlin Film Festival (Panorama) February 16, 1996.
[ The
Official Peter
Coyote Web Site ]
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