Bovie Movie

This booming and bloody Second World War drama could have illuminated a little-known aspect of the conflict, in which native Americans used their language as a military code that couldn’t be cracked by the Japanese. Yet this fascinating angle is explored with the heaviest of hands by director John Woo. There’s a nicely performed relationship between genial Navajo Adam Beach and cynical sergeant Nicolas Cage, but it’s buried beneath a barrage of gargantuan explosions and melodramatic skirmishes, orchestrated with a surprising scarcity of excitement or energy. Following their moment of Hollywood magic with Face/Off, Woo and Cage seem to be going through the motions — or worse, taking themselves too seriously. 

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.

Director Mark Waters follows up high-school comedy Mean Girls with this romantic tale that evokes memories of Ghost and Truly Madly Deeply. Reese Witherspoon stars as Elizabeth, a workaholic emergency doctor who is involved in a serious car crash and wakes up — apparently dead — back in her own home. Not realising her predicament, Elizabeth takes exception to the apartment’s handsome new occupant, David (Mark Ruffalo), a man struggling to get over the loss of his wife. This fresh if somewhat bumpy look at the course of true love benefits from its stunning San Francisco backdrop, while Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite) is perfectly cast as the local bookshop psychic. Although Waters is noted for bringing out the comic in otherwise difficult situations, here he shows his flair for the dramatic, investing the story with a suitably melancholic tone as the disembodied Elizabeth and the emotionally damaged David fall in love. 

Even an overused and under-funny Mike Myers can’t salvage this flight-attendant comedy that never leaves the terminal, let alone gets off the ground. It’s not entirely the film’s fault — with several comedy sequences reportedly axed in deference to increased sensitivity about airline security post-9/11, it was never likely to take flight. Still, it’s hard to see what first attracted Myers and top-billed Gwyneth Paltrow to this mediocre tale of a small-town stewardess who wants to fly high with a major airline. Mercifully short, the film traces her training under Myers’s tutelage, plus her run-in with a cabin rival. 

Tom Cruise puts away his trademark toothsome grin to play Vincent, a cold-blooded hitman, in this edgy thriller from director Michael Mann. After hijacking a taxi and its driver, Vincent embarks on a series of ruthlessly efficient assassinations across night-time LA while the hapless cabbie (Jamie Foxx) tries to work out ways to escape. Meantime, LA cops and the FBI are closing in. Cruise, sporting steel-grey hair, is well cast against type and is surprisingly effective as the killer, but it’s Michael Mann’s astonishing style that really marks the film out. Shot on a mixture of film and digital video, the night-time lights of LA look alternately moody, surreal and dangerous. In fact, if the film has a problem, it’s that the style occasionally becomes oppressive and threatens to overwhelm the serviceable but slender plot. 

Susanna Moore’s notoriously explicit novel gives director Jane Campion another opportunity to explore her favourite theme — the self-destructive elements of female desire. Meg Ryan stars as Frannie Avery, a New York teacher who falls for Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), a man who’s all wrong for her, yet helps Avery to get in touch with herself and experience unknown pleasures. But Malloy is enigmatic, if not dangerous — he’s investigating a series of murders in her neighbourhood that he himself might have committed. And it’s not only Ryan who’s in trouble, but also her half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Campion’s trademark off-kilter camerawork matches the increasingly skewed world view of her protagonist and Ryan is a revelation, albeit doing an impression of a fragile Nicole Kidman (who acts as producer and was originally going to star). Ultimately, the film works as a study of sexual longing, but fails as a thriller. The plot mechanics are too obvious, the twist too predictable and the novel’s original, searing ending has been changed. Despite the frank talk and naked bodies, this is just another Hollywood cop-out. 

In his role as wily politician Willie Stark, Sean Penn does a lot of shouting and grand gesticulating, but fails to bring this remake of the 1949 Oscar-winning drama to life. Writer/director Steven Zaillian seems overawed by the task of adapting Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which shows Stark (a character inspired by real-life Louisiana governor Huey P Long) gradually being seduced away from his populist ideals by the lure of power. Jude Law plays Stark’s right-hand man Jack Burden, who tries to avert scandal while battling his own inner demons. Unfortunately, Zaillian’s script becomes so tangled up in numerous subplots — Burden’s relationship with an old flame (Kate Winslet), to name but one — that supposedly significant revelations have little impact, and so Zaillian is forced to rely on endless talky scenes and a ponderous voiceover to explain the story. And the performances of the undeniably A-list cast, which also includes Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins, seem affected thanks to the ostentatious direction.