everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Best movie of this year hands down!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Lawyer with a client she's defending whom she's having an affair with ends up at the scene of his bloody murder. (The two of them fought right before his death, and she hits him over the head, but storms off with him still alive--only to come back to find him murdered.)There's a complication in that the bloody weapon is in the front seat of her car (under the seat of course) because she was using it to defend herself after he attacked her, but she knows she didn't kill him cause he was very much still alive when she ran out of the building...so who did???Soon things get complicated because she ends up taking the case of the woman who ends up accused of the guy's murder---the guy's wife!!!! (Dun dun dun)There's also the detective played by Sam Shepard who's hunting around trying to put the pieces together. Would it make more sense for lawyer Barbra Hershey to just tell him that she had a fight with him and attacked him right before his death? Undoubtedly. Will she? Of course not, because then there'd be no suspense regarding if he's gonna figure out that she was there with the victim around the time of his death. Movie is engaging enough, decently hooking you into the story as it moves along, but the resolution isn't very good at all. It probably doesn't matter that the resolution isn't good because what really matters is if the movie keeps you watching and if you feel sympathetic towards the lead character despite some of the choices she makes out of fear. On that end the movie works largely because Barbra Hershey does make the character feel like someone you can understand the actions of, and the way the story moves and unfolds makes a certain kind of logical sense while you're watching it. I wasn't again crazy about the direction the story took, especially in the last ten to twenty minutes. I feel like characters who were previously sane abruptly go insane only to heighten the suspense and to give the movie a big dramatic push for the finish...and it just didn't work for me. Did not feel that that fit with what we had seen of that character throughout prior to the end. I was very much enjoying how nice and quietly suspenseful the movie was proceeding before that big dramatic outburst and feel like the movie really didn't need to "go big" for its ending.Close call but its a near miss for me.

The lawyer Thelma "T.K." Knudsen Katwuller (Barbara Hershey) is having a love affair with her client Steven Seldes (J.T. Walsh) that is accused of making under-age porn movies through the Blue Screen Production. When T.K. meets her old college friend Ellie Seldes (Mary Beth Hurt), she finds that she is Steven's wife and Ellie invites T.K. to have dinner with her family at her home. T.K. decides to break-up with Steven and he asks her to meet him in his office. While waiting for Steven, T.K. finds that he owns the Blue Screen Production and had lied to her. When Steven arrives in the office, T.K. fights with him and stabs him in self- protection. On the next morning, Ellie is arrested is accused of murdering her husband and Ellie hires T.K. to defend her. T.K. believes that the killer is the violent father of a teenager the made a porn movie produced by Steven, but Detective Beutel (Sam Shepard) feels that something is missing in the case."Defenseless" is one of my favorite thrillers from the early 90's. I have just watched it today on DVD, maybe for the third or fourth time, and I still like this underrated film. The plot has many twists, and Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard are in the top of their careers. The 27 year-old Kellie Overbey is convincing in the role of an abused teenager. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Sem Defesa" ("Defenseless")

This is not a bad little thriller complete with spooky garages and a scary fall down the elevator shaft scene although it's sometimes hard to figure out just who is who. The plot has many murky twists and turns (although I imagine the continuity suffered in being cut for television.) Nor do I understand why our lawyer/lover drives a beat up Karmann-Ghia. But this is obviously one of those films that took handouts from big tobacco. Everybody smokes everywhere. The good guys smoke. The bad guys smoke. The good guys who turn out to be bad guys smoke. The bad guys who turn out to be good guys smoke. The cops smoke. I'm surprised the judge and the jury didn't light up. The whole damn film is one big choking cloud of smelly blue smoke. Because of that I knocked my rating down two points.

This films opening scene takes place with a young girl cheerleader entering the mens locker room which turns out to be a porno film being produced. The story gets very complicated with murder and romance and the web of mystery keeps you spellbound through out the entire picture. Barbara Hershey(Thelma T.K. Knudsen),"Lantana",'01, is a lawyer who falls in love with a married man and gets deeply involved with his family and finds out that her best friend is married to him. There is a fight and the ice cubes seem to fly all over the place, besides blood in the mens bathroom which becomes a complete mess. There is even a fight in an elevator shaft and Sam Shepard (Detective Beutel),"Blind Horizon,",'04, comes to Thelma's assistance. Beutel is madly in love with Thelma but suspects her of not telling the truth about what is going on and feels she is becoming a number one suspect. This is a very enjoyable film worth viewing.