Susan Seidelman follows up her breakout comedies with Cookie, a mob-family caper that hands its plot over to a teenage daughter nobody expected to be running anything.
What is Cookie about?
"Dapper" Dino is a labor racketeer just out on parole, trying to keep his head down while an ambitious prosecutor works to send him straight back to prison. His teenage daughter Carmel — nicknamed Cookie — has spent her whole life apart from him and arrives determined to make up for lost time, inserting herself into his business whether he wants that or not. Complicating matters further is a partner of Dino's who cannot be trusted and is quietly maneuvering to have him removed from the picture for good. What starts as a father struggling to manage his daughter's presence turns into Cookie becoming the one person sharp enough to see the double-cross coming and do something about it.
About the cast
Peter Falk plays Dino opposite Emily Lloyd as Cookie, with Dianne Wiest, Michael V. Gazzo, Brenda Vaccaro, Adrian Pasdar, Lionel Stander and Jerry Lewis rounding out a cast heavy with comic and dramatic character actors. The generational pairing of Falk's weary racketeer against Lloyd's brash teenager is the engine the rest of the ensemble is built around.
Context & significance
The film sits inside a late-1980s run of American crime comedies that treated organized-crime families as backdrop for domestic and generational friction rather than as straight gangster material. Its New York setting and courtroom-adjacent plotting give the comedy a legal-thriller undertow — the parole terms and the prosecutor's ambitions are as central to the plot as any of the family drama.
Watching Cookie on Ktime
Cookie is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login; the film's page is open to browse without signing in first. K-Time's catalogue is built with Persian-speaking viewers in mind, alongside a wide range of English-language titles like this one.