Bovie Movie

Ron Howard makes pictures of quality if not always distinction. So after years of being ignored by the American Academy as a director, it seems that with this biographical drama he decided 2002 would be his Oscar year. The true story of maths genius John Forbes Nash Jr, who battled paranoid schizophrenia at the height of his academic success and eventually won the economics Nobel Prize, is tailor-made Oscar fare. It has the triumph-over-tragedy, against-all-odds theme going for it, plus a powerhouse performance from Russell Crowe as Nash. Any film that traces nearly 50 years of an influential man’s life is making a claim to some celluloid glory, but underneath all the impressive ageing make-up, what exactly do we have here? A difficult man with a complex psychological condition — reduced to a series of delusional episodes to furnish a thriller subplot — who has devoted his life to an almost insurmountably dry subject, namely advanced mathematics theory. This is in no way a badly made picture, and there’s reliable support from Ed Harris, Adam Goldberg and Paul Bettany. However, the film’s overweening desire to be taken seriously gets in the way of the story. That said, the film won the best picture Oscar, Howard walked away with best director and Jennifer Connelly won a best supporting actress statuette for her well judged performance as Nash’s wife, though Crowe lost out as best actor to Denzel Washington in Training Day. 

Absolutely ludicrous from its hokey start to senseless finish, the only shock in this ersatz haunted house thriller is that Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) considered it worth directing. When city slickers Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone move to a dilapidated country mansion, they face redneck prejudice and sinister threats from former owner and ex-con Stephen Dorff, who wants to keep a dark family secret buried there. With every plot twist telegraphed well in advance, the best thing to do is sit back and stoically tick off each plodding spooky cliché as it appears. Complete with Dorff emanating badness from scene one and his trailer-trash girlfriend (Juliette Lewis) and her inscrutable sheriff sister (Dana Eskelson) refusing to believe the patently obvious, nothing makes sense in this technically proficient but bogus horror. More hilarious than creepy — Dorff infesting the house with poisonous snakes is embarrassingly overacted — think cold, creaky mannerisms instead. 

The fourth film to chronicle the life of fourth-century B.C. ruler Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone’s Alexander stars Colin Farrell as the titular Macedonian conqueror. The film follows the young king as he leads his forces on a bloody empirical conquest across the known world, taking large parts of Asia and the Middle East to amass a giant empire, all by the time he turned 25. Anthony Hopkins co-stars as Ptolemy I along with Rosario Dawson as Roxane, Angelina Jolie as Olympias, Jared Leto as Hephaistion, Val Kilmer as King Philip II, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Cassander.

Everything is right about this film apart from the direction. Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer are suitably stellar — he as the middle-aged book editor, she as his boss’s daughter whose burgeoning romance is cursed by the fangs of a werewolf. Giuseppe Rotunno’s glossy photography lends a sinister sophistication, Ennio Morricone’s eerie score plays on our unease and make-up maestro Rick Baker’s transformations combine ingenuity with a real sense of agony. But director Mike Nichols is so interested in the romantic entanglements that he forgets to make the horror horrific. While this is more a study in pain than a shocker, it could still do with a tad more menace and a lot less refinement. 

Using the same multi-stranded technique as he did for his Oscar-winning screenplay of the drugs drama Traffic, writer/director Stephen Gaghan here weaves the threads of small, apparently barely linked narratives into a giant tapestry, revealing the global oil industry in all its hideous, venal and corrupt glory. The story is so labyrinthine that an adequate description is impossible (and indeed its deliberate complexity will be an irritant to some), but individual plot elements include George Clooney as a worn-out CIA agent involved in arms dealing and assassinations, Matt Damon as a grief-stricken energy analyst and Christopher Plummer as the head of a powerful Washington law firm. These seemingly disparate tales move at a relentless pace and, as a result, the whole picture is sometimes difficult to grasp — again deliberately so. Gaghan’s technique is not to convince you that you’re following a single set of characters involved in a coherent story, but rather to give you the jittery, exhilarating feeling that you’re eavesdropping on conversations you were never meant to hear. It’s an approach that makes this a compelling, richly detailed and, in the end, terrifying experience. 

Inspired by Chris Marker’s acclaimed 1962 short film, La Jetée, this labyrinthine sci-fi thriller was penned by the co-writer of Blade Runner, David Webb Peoples, and his wife, Janet. Yet it’s very much the work of Monty Python alumnus Terry Gilliam, who imposes his own pseudo-poetic vision onto a world that is doomed to viral annihilation unless time traveller Bruce Willis can prevent the disaster. Although it was Brad Pitt who landed an Oscar nomination for his twitchy performance as the leader of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, it is Willis’s anguished introvert who holds this gripping, hauntingly atmospheric film together. 

More than a decade after Speed, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock reteam in the rather more sedate setting of director Alejandro Agresti’s romantic fantasy. In 2006, a doctor (Bullock) moves out of her attractive Chicago lakeside house and begins a correspondence with its new occupant, a struggling architect (Reeves). It soon becomes apparent that these star-crossed lovers inhabit the same dwelling — but they’re actually in different time zones separated by two years. Their sole means of communication is via the messages left in a magic mailbox. To its credit, this remake of Korean movie Siworae doesn’t bother attempting to explain the hows and whys of it all. On the contrary, it sometimes makes over-contrived use of the fact that her present is his future and his present (2004) is her past. Essentially, this is the sort of film they just don’t make any more: perhaps movie-makers think audiences are too cynical to accept its absurdities. But there’s a surprising chemistry between the stars, especially in circumstances that mean they rarely share the same scene. Unfashionable it may be, but this is a sweet and entertaining yarn. 

Totally over the top and thoroughly enjoyable, this Barbara Cartland romantic thriller stars Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Fox. Helena plays tenacious Serena Staverly who’s sent to live with distant relative and veritable harpy Diana Rigg. There she falls in love with rake and emotionally frigid Marcus 

This seemingly shameless attempt to cash in on the success of novel The Da Vinci Code is part historical detective story, part conspiracy thriller and part action adventure. But director Jon Turteltaub never quite finds a successful way to marry all these elements together. An almost comatose Nicolas Cage sleepwalks his way through the role of Benjamin Franklin Gates, who embarks on a cross-country treasure hunt to discover the whereabouts of booty hidden by the Founding Fathers of the United States. En route, there are some limp action moments (although a sequence involving the theft of the Declaration of Independence is well handled), colourless characters (Sean Bean’s villain is particularly bland) and sluggish storytelling (the clues to the fortune’s location are frighteningly reminiscent of 1980s game show 3-2-1). Yet, against the odds, this Jerry Bruckheimer production still has enough to keep the undemanding interested in the predictable outcome.