Joanou returned to fiction (albeit reality-based) with "State of Grace" (1990), a moody and violent story about Irish-American gangsters in NYC's Hell's Kitchen. Outstanding performances by Sean Penn, Ed Harris, and Gary Oldman helped make this the director's strongest film to date. Joanou returned to TV to cast a documentarian's eye upon American childhood with "Age Seven in America" (CBS, 1992), a special modeled on producer-director Michael Apted's acclaimed British series "Seven Up", which profiled and interviewed a group of subjects every seven years beginning in 1962. Joanou's follow-up was the uneven Hitchcockian homage "Final Analysis" (1992) starring Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, and Uma Thurman. Joanou spent the next year helming stylish installments of the ultra-cool TV miniseries "Wild Palms" (ABC) and "Fallen Angels" (Showtime). In 1996, he returned to the big screen with the thriller "Heaven's Prisoners", a character study about a retired Louisiana homicide detective (Alec Baldwin) who becomes enmeshed in a mystery.