About Last Night...

Film lacks much of Mamet's grittiness, but is likable in its own right. Read full review

Sex and swearing from David Mamet: the family guy. Fun for grown-ups only. Read full review

You've a right to wonder why anyone would want to work so hard - with such an expenditure of imagination - to transform a play with such a distinctive voice into a movie that sounds like any number of others. Read full review

The second leads are far more interesting: Belushi brings a brash, hearty presence to the film, while Perkins is wonderfully acerbic. Their scenes together are the movie's best. Read full review

As the envious, destructive best friends of the central couple, Jim Belushi and (especially) Elizabeth Perkins have the actor's know-how to fill in the gaps, but as the lovers, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are hopelessly pallid. Read full review

The screenwriters work many nice little observations into their occasionally over-quippish script, but this is considerably smaller than the sum of its parts: it gets the detail, but misses the big picture. Read full review

Moore's Debbie is earnest but uninteresting, which is a problem when she is playing half of the movie's focal couple. [2 July 1986, p.D10]

The movie is adapted from David Mamet's play, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," but it bears little relation to it -- screen writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue nod to Mamet's structure, appropriate a couple of monologues and take off on their own. They and the director, Ed Zwick, could have done a better job of opening the play up -- outside life rarely intrudes on this foursome, as it needn't in the theater, but must in movies. [2 July 1986, p.D1]

The screenwriters retain much of Mamet's dialogue, but they piece it out, and the director punches up the breaks between scenes with rock music. It's like being pounded on the back every two minutes when your back is already sore (because the dialogue has been whacking you so hard).