Bovie Movie

Sarah Huttington, recently engaged, goes home to Pasadena with fiancé Jeff for a family wedding. She hears a rumor that “The Graduate” (book and movie) are based on her family. Did her grandmother and her mom have flings with the same man just before her parents married? Is she a strange man’s child; does this explain why she doesn’t fit in? Was her mother happy? Is she too facing a loveless marriage? Where can she seek answers: her mother’s dead, her father’s a pleasant naïf. Ask her salty grandma? Better to ask the man in the triangle, the real Benjamin Braddock. With Jeff’s blessing, Sarah heads for San Francisco, looking for the key to her past and to her future.

The creeping menace of addiction — in all its forms — is the subject of Darren Aronofsky’s powerful adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel. Junk TV shows, diet pills and Class A drugs are the lifeblood of these doomed characters. Ellen Burstyn plays the widowed mother hooked on game shows and sweet foods, whose desperate bid to lose weight leads to hallucinations and increased loneliness. Her heroin addict son (Jared Leto) and his friend (Marlon Wayans) pawn the TV for drugs money, while Leto’s girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) degrades herself at stag parties. Making stylish use of the split-screen technique, huge close-ups and exaggerated sound effects, Aronofsky depicts the highs and lows of drug-taking — to chilling effect. Like Trainspotting and Drugstore Cowboy before it, this is a powerful and unnerving trip into the narcotics dependent darkness of modern society. 

This truly tempestuous drama has to be the most waterlogged film since Titanic. (Those prone to mal de mer should take sick bags along with them.) Based on a true story, it concerns the Andrea Gail, a fishing vessel that, while sailing in the North Atlantic in 1991, was caught up in the 20th century’s worst storm. A stubbled George Clooney and a smooth-talking Mark Wahlberg, last seen together in Three Kings, head the crew, while director Wolfgang Petersen, who made the submarine epic Das Boot, takes a deep breath and plunges the audience in and out of skyscraper-tall waves. 

Scream writer Kevin Williamson teams up with From Dusk till Dawn director Robert Rodriguez for this enjoyable reworking of alien-invasion movies that’s bolstered by Williamson’s patented in-jokes and genre subversions. Considerably less subtle than the 1950s films that inspired it, this sci-fi horror thriller succeeds thanks to the assured performances of the teenage cast, zippy direction and the writer’s refusal to take even the most tense moments seriously. Along the way, there’s humorous homage paid to sci-fi related novels, TV and films. Despite a disappointing reliance on digital effects in the final third, this is classy extraterrestrial entertainment. 

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were one of the all-time great partnerships and this engaging comedy marked their seventh screen collaboration — the first was back in 1966 in The Fortune Cookie. In this high-concept tale, they are a gentler variation on Harry Enfield’s Old Gits — warring senior citizens whose feuding escalates as they battle for the hand of Ann-Margret. Although the script isn’t quite as strong as it could be, the chemistry between the two stars is irresistible and they are matched by an equally strong supporting cast that includes Burgess Meredith, Kevin Pollak and Ossie Davis. It certainly struck a chord for “grey power” at the box office and was followed by a not-so-successful sequel, Grumpier Old Men, which went straight to video in the UK. 

A young breakdancer hits his head during a talent show and slips into a coma for twenty years. Waking up in 2006, he looks to revive his and his team’s career with the help of his girlfriend and his parents.

Supermodel Cindy Crawford wants to be taken seriously as an actress, but she doesn’t get much chance to show what she can do in this, her big Hollywood debut. The T-shirt clad Crawford gets chased by baddies and falls into the water a lot, and that’s about all there is to this so-called action drama. If you can believe Crawford is a high-powered lawyer then you will probably swallow the nonsensical story about Russian villains who are convinced the former Mrs Gere has some valuable information about their American operation; William Baldwin simply looks bored as the cop who comes to her aid. Some enjoyably destructive set pieces aside, the only fun to be had is savouring Steven Berkoff’s over-the-top performance. 

It might not have the Disney stamp, but this wonderful Warner Bros version of Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man is a first-class achievement in cartoon virtuosity that liberally borrows images from 1950s comic-book art and science-fiction movies to stunning effect. To a soundtrack of American Graffiti-style hits, this heavy metal ET tells the riveting tale of nine-year-old Hogarth, the giant alien robot he saves from electrical overload, and the fiercely protective relationship that develops between them. But the real thrills begin when a Communist-hating FBI agent arrives who is convinced that the walking Meccano set poses a Cold War threat. With political allegory and clever nostalgia for the adults, and dazzling visuals and excitement galore for the children, this poignant fairy tale is outstanding on every artistic level. 

A young man trying to break out of his blue collar life in New Jersey finds himself snared by a web of crime and deceit in this independent drama. Just released after an 18-month stretch in prison, 20-year-old Eddie Dolan (Billy Crudup) has few prospects and nowhere to go, so he appears on the doorstep of his older brother Terry (Paul Schulze). Terry takes him in, giving him a place to stay and helping him get a job at the factory where their dad Nick (Frank Vincent) has worked nearly all his adult life. However, times are not happy around the Dolan household; money is tight, and Terry’s relationship with his wife Janey (Adrienne Shelly) has been rocky since the birth of their first child six months before. Eddie starts earning some extra cash by joining up with a group of car thieves pulling insurance scams, and in time, he makes enough money to buy a muscle car, which he races in his spare time. On the night shift at the factory, Eddie spends his days working on his car, while Janey, bored with her new role as a stay-at-home mom, starts spending more and more time with him; eventually they move past friendship into an affair, which like Eddie’s involvement with the carjackers becomes only more dangerous in the weeks to come. Grind marked the feature debut for writer/director Chris Kentis; Billy Crudup’s appearance predated his breakthrough roles in Inventing the Abbotts and Everyone Says I Love You, though both of those films were released before Grind could find a distributor.

Henry Perkins, a mild-mannered accountant, accidentally trades briefcases with another man, to find out that there’s a million dollars inside. Henry tells his unsuspecting wife of their new-found fortune, but she doesn’t embrace it as well as he does. Soon they’re joined by their best friends, a cop on the take, a cop on the hunt, and the dreaded Mr. Big, who has come to claim his million dollars.