Bovie Movie

Steven Spielberg’s lengthy historical courtroom drama has its moments of pure visual poetry, but it fails to ignite the same moral outrage that Schindler’s List so poignantly evoked. In 1839, a shipload of slaves heading for America overpower their captors, killing all but two crew members needed to navigate them back to Africa. Betrayed, intercepted and charged with murder, the slaves’ only hope for justice lies with the Abolitionist movement and an inexperienced lawyer. Anthony Hopkins and Matthew McConaughey lead the all-star cast, and there’s an amazing debut by Djimon Hounsou as the leader of the slaves. Although flawed, this chilling portrayal of outright racism further reveals Spielberg’s skill as an expert film-maker unafraid of tackling heavy political issues. 

Shakespeare’s famous play is updated to the hip modern suburb of Verona still retaining its original dialogue. The gun-toting members of the families wage a vicious war on the streets as the star-crossed lovers, their tragic destiny.

You can forgive Britain’s major movie magazines for not spotting the impact this audacious thriller was going to have. Few had even heard of director Bryan Singer or screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, and there wasn’t much feature potential in the jobbing actors of the mug-shot line-up. Yet, by the end of 1995, it was vying with Shallow Grave and The Shawshank Redemption for the number one spot in most people’s top tens and Kevin Spacey was suddenly the coolest actor in Hollywood. Was it because it gave the world the criminal mastermind Keyzer Soze? Maybe it was the intricacy of the flashback-packed script and the deft sleights of hand executed by its fledgeling director. Perhaps everyone admired the outstanding ensemble acting. Yes, Spacey stole the show and fully merited the best supporting actor Oscar for his mesmerising performance, but everyone in that rogues’ gallery played their part to perfection, not to mention the mysterious Pete Postlethwaite and confused cops Dan Hedaya and Chazz Palminteri. Or was it simply that noticeboard that kept coming back to haunt everyone? Whatever the reason, it’s a film that demands to be watched again and again — this is good old-fashioned pulp fiction told in the slickest 1990s style. 

This exciting mix of high adventure, romance and history lesson is wonderfully presented in a colossal, glossy package. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Hawkeye, the frontiersman raised by Mohicans, who gets caught between two cultures when he falls for Cora (Madeleine Stowe), a British army officer’s daughter. In the ensuing and, it must be said, often confusing bloody battles involving the French, the British and American Indians (the scalpings, by the way, are very realistic) he refuses to give up his adopted tribe’s cause, or his love. Directed by Michael Mann, this is one of the few war movies that has proved more popular with women than men. It’s an admirable effort, but Mann should also have paid more attention to his dialogue, which often sounds too contemporary for the 1750s. However, the well-staged action sequences and his grandiose sense of scale combine to produce an epic that harks back to the good old-fashioned adventure films of Hollywood’s heyday. 

The sci-fi actioner is set 400 years in the future, when disease has wiped out the majority of the earth’s population except for one walled, protected city-state, Bregna, ruled by a congress of scientists. The story centers on Aeon Flux(Theron), the top operative in the underground ‘Monican’ rebellion, led by The Handler(Frances McDormand). When Aeon is sent on a mission to kill a government leader, she uncovers a world of secrets…

Acclaimed director David Fincher’s promising career was lucky to survive this astonishingly wrong-headed, almost universally despised second sequel to Alien (1979). The film careens into oblivion virtually from the beginning, as Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only survivor of a crash-landing on a hellish, God-forsaken prison planet. Not only does the crash kill little Newt, completely obviating the entire point of the superior Aliens (1986), but Fincher then compounds his betrayal of that film’s fans by having Ripley attend the girl’s gruesome autopsy and barely bat an eye as the child’s chest is bloodily ripped open with a steel bonesaw. Things just go downhill from there, as the rather unthreatening rapists and murderers harass Ripley and curse a great deal before being torn apart by large fans, having their heads crushed by the unconvincing CGI alien, and finally volunteering to be murdered by the beast rather than letting the evil Company get hold of it. Fincher does the best he can with a terrible script, and there are some nice supporting turns by Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, and Brian Glover, but nothing could redeem the film’s first 15 minutes. By the time Ripley takes a suicidal swan-dive into a vat of molten lead, cradling a baby alien as it explodes from her chest, many viewers will not know whether to reach for the remote control or a warm bath and a razorblade. A loathsome experience by any standard, Alien 3 still made enough money for Weaver to return as a Ripley clone in Alien Resurrection (1997).

The icy mists, haunting sounds and shadows of the Newfoundland shores imbue The Shipping News with a bleak sadness that the intriguing storyline and strong performances fail to dispel. A miscast Kevin Spacey stars as Quoyle, a dull, uninspired man who is seduced into marriage and fatherhood by the sluttish Petal Bear (Cate Blanchett), then deserted and widowed in short order. An estranged aunt (Judi Dench) invites him and his daughter to return with her to the family home — a fishing village in Newfoundland, seemingly populated solely by eccentrics. Quoyle lands a job writing the shipping news on the local paper and begins a tentative love affair with widow Julianne Moore. However, this glimmer of romantic hope and the eventual uncovering of disturbing family secrets aren’t enough to energise Lasse Hallström’s muted movie. Still, the always watchable Moore and Dench go a long way in compensating for the film’s overall emotional chilliness, investing their characters with warmth and life. 

Three women living in Toronto find themselves confronting emotional crises regarding the men in their lives in this drama. Olivia (Sophia Loren) is a woman who spends her days looking after her husband, John (Pete Postlethwaite), who is confined to a wheelchair. Olivia has long aspired to a career as an artist, but John, not emotionally generous, refuses to hear of her wasting her time on such things. However, Olivia does find encouragement from an unlikely source — Max (G?rard Depardieu), an eccentric French gardener. Natalia (Mira Sorvino) is a news photographer who, while on assignment in Angola, took a memorable portrait of a crying child orphaned by war. Her father, Alexander (Klaus-Maria Brandauer), also a well-known photojournalist, is understandably proud of Natalia when her photo is used on the cover of a major news magazine, but she is haunted by the knowledge that while she made the child famous, she couldn’t save its life. And Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) is a woman whose father, Alan (Malcolm McDowell), beat her mother to death when she was young. Catherine has never been able to resolve her hatred of her father, and when Alan is released from prison, she’s willing to abandon her husband, her children, and her career as a musician to track him down and kill him, unable to accept the notion that he’s a changed man. Between Strangers was directed by Edoardo Ponti, whose mother happens to be Sophia Loren; it marks the first time the two have worked together.