Bovie Movie

Francois Girard directed this drama tracing the history of a musical instrument through five countries and three centuries. In 1681, to keep the spirit of his wife alive, an Italian paints the violin with a red varnish made from her blood. It is later found in the Austrian Alps when a prodigy gives a performance in the court of Vienna in 1792. Taken by gypsies, the instrument is acquired by a Dionysian composer. After a journey by boat to China in 1966, it is hidden during the Cultural Revolution. In contemporary Canada, it is spotted at an auction house by a violin expert (Samuel L. Jackson) who becomes obsessed with it. Scripted by Girard and Don McKellar. Filmed on a $10 million budget in Montreal, China, Italy, Austria, and Oxford.

An ex-cop trying to stay away from trouble finds it literally crashing into his backyard in this crime thriller. Dave Robicheaux (Alec Baldwin) is a former New Orleans police detective who, after kicking an addiction to alcohol and confronting some serious problems with his partners, has left law enforcement behind to run a bait shop in a small Louisiana bayou town. One day, Dave and his wife Annie (Kelly Lynch) see a small plane plummet from the sky and crash into the swamp; the pilot dies, but Dave is able to rescue a young Hispanic girl from the wreckage. Dave and Annie take the child in, but as they try to find out more about the plane crash and who the little girl might be, they discover that she’s actually an illegal alien from Salvador and that the pilot was involved with a local drug ring. Dave, constitutionally unable to let a mystery go unsolved, begins asking enough questions and making enough trouble that he finds himself on the bad side of his old High School friend Bubba Rocque (Eric Roberts). Bubba is a local crime boss who controls the area’s drug traffic, keeps a boxing ring in his front yard, and has a wife Claudette (Teri Hatcher) who enjoys greeting her guests naked. Dave’s inquiries eventually become too much for Bubba and his henchmen, and in the midst of a violent raid on their home, Annie is killed. Dave becomes obsessed with bringing Bubba and his men to justice and gets some unexpected help from Robin Gaddis (Mary Stuart Masterson), an exotic dancer with a heart of gold. While it was originally scheduled for release in 1994, Heaven’s Prisoners didn’t arrive on theater screens until two years later, by which time Teri Hatcher had risen to stardom on the TV series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

In this blend of psychological thriller and courtroom drama, Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) is a 19-year-old college student who begins displaying bizarre and troubling behavior; as her actions become increasingly destructive and shocking, Emily begins speaking in strange tongues and destroys religious symbols that surround her. Emily’s parents believe that their daughter has become possessed of the devil, and the Catholic Church agrees to authorize an exorcism of the young woman. As Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) attempts to drive the demons from Emily’s body, the girl dies in the midst of the taxing ceremonies, and Father Moore finds himself charged with negligent homicide. Attorney Erin Brunner (Laura Linney) is hired to represent Father Moore against prosecutor Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), who intends to prove there were concrete medical explanations for Emily’s behaviors, including epilepsy and schizophrenia, all leading to a heated courtroom debate between the notions of faith and science. The Exorcism of Emily Rose was inspired by the real-life story of Annaliese Michel, a young woman from Germany who died in 1976 after priests in Wurzburg spent eight months attempting to exorcise demons from her body.

A perfectly ghastly entry in what was shaping up as an eagerly anticipated annual event, A&E’s end-of-Summer dramatization of a Spenser novel.

As I was initially fearful, the re-casting of Ernie Hudson was a blunder… a shaven head and a leather coat does not a “Hawk” make! The new co-henchman character of “Vinnie,” who didn’t have a line of dialogue in the entire screenplay, was infinitely more interesting. Hudson makes one long for the over-the-top version portrayed by Avery Brooks in the Robert Urich TV series and subsequent tele-flicks.

After he is framed for the death of several colleagues and falsely branded a traitor, a secret agent embarks on a daring scheme to clear his name in this spy adventure. Though it drew its name from the familiar television series, director Brian DePalma’s big-budget adaptation shares little more with the original show than the occasional self-destructing message and the name of team leader Jim Phelps (Jon Voight). The film focuses not on Phelps but his prot?g?, Ethan Hunt (a reserved Tom Cruise), who becomes a fugitive after taking the blame for a botched operation. He responds by banding together with a group of fellow renegades, and he is soon maneuvering his way through a twisted series of double crosses that mainly serve as excuses for spectacular high-tech action sequences. Much of the activity revolves around a missing computer disk, with the film’s most famous scene depicting Hunt’s delicate efforts to retrieve the disk from a secure, well-alarmed room in CIA headquarters.

A family is touched by the shadows of hatred and violence in this Australian drama adapted from a short story by Raymond Carver. Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and Claire (Laura Linney) are a married couple in their early 40’s; Stewart runs a gas station while Claire looks after their son Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss). Tom has been grounded for the weekend after killing a small animal with his friend Caylin (Eva Lazzaro), and Claire keeps an eye on him while Stewart goes off on a fishing trip with his pals Carl (John Howard), Rocco (Stelios Yiakmis) and Billy (Simon Stone). After arriving at their favorite fishing spot, Stewart finds the naked body of a woman floating down the river; unknown to him, Gregory (Chris Haywood), an elderly man riddled with race hatred, killed Susan (Tatea Reilly), a young woman of Aboriginal heritage, and dumped her body in the water. Believing they wouldn’t be able to drive to town to report finding the body and get back to make camp before nightfall, Stewart decides to wait until morning to contact the police, and ties a line to the corpse so it won’t float away. The next morning, Stewart and his friends decide not to spoil their trip and spend the day fishing; they don’t contact the police until after they return home on Monday. Stewart’s callous actions cast an ugly light on himself, his friends and his family, and Claire finds herself implicated in the crime through Stewart’s poor judgment. Named for an Aborigine word for a valley, Jindabyne received its world premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

The wind whispers ominous warnings of death before a malevolent entity arrives to claim the life of a young girl as director Courtney Solomon brings author Brent Monahan’s chilling, fact-based tale of supernatural murder to the screen in this tale of terror starring Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek. The year was 1818 and the Bell family was a quiet clan residing on a remote farm in Red River, Tennessee. A normal, loving family by all accounts, the uneventful lives of the Bell family began to take a dark turn when strange noises around the farm preceded the arrival of a black wolf with piercing yellow eyes said to strike unspeakable fear into the very soul of all who encounter it. As the sadistic spirit singles out the youngest daughter of the Bell family for torment and her frightened parents search frantically for a rational explanation to the chilling events unfolding in their once happy home, an eerie, disembodied voice promises death from beyond the grave. With the struggle rapidly turning violent and the Bell’s desperate prayers for mercy going unanswered time and again, the shocking murder that followed would prove the only case in recorded American history where the death of a human being was directly attributed to an attack by an evil entity or spirit.

Jonathan Demme directed this updated remake of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cult favorite The Manchurian Candidate, a pioneering examination of political conspiracy and psychological reconditioning. Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) are two soldiers who served in the same company during Operation Desert Storm, but their paths following their tours of duty have been very different. Shaw, the son of powerful congresswoman Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep), has used his reputation as a war hero to quickly scale the ladder of American politics, and with the help of his mother earns the Vice Presidential nomination. Marco, on the other hand, has been troubled with mental illness, and is convinced that something strange happened to him and his compatriots during the war. As Marco struggles to find the truth behind his nightmares and emotional torment, he unearths some disturbing facts about how his mind and body have been reworked by shadowy forces, as well as those of his fellow soldiers — including Raymond Shaw. Featuring a stellar supporting cast (including Jon Voight, Miguel Ferrer, Ted Levine, and Dean Stockwell), The Manchurian Candidate credits George Axelrod’s screenplay for the 1962 film as its source, as opposed to Richard Condon’s 1959 novel from which Axelrod adapted his script.

Tobe Hooper, who directed one of the truly iconic American horror films of the 1970s, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, offers his take on another well-remembered scare-fest of the era with this remake. Steve (Brent Roam) and Nell (Angela Bettis) are a young couple living in Los Angeles who are short on money — she’s just started work as a teacher, while he’s a medical student doing his internship. They rent a flat in the Lusman Arms, a once beautiful but now decaying (and therefore affordable) apartment building managed by the sleazy Byron McLieb (Greg Travis), who tries to pass off the ramshackle accommodations as “charming” and “historic.” Watching over the Lusman Arms beside Byron is Ned (Adam Gierasch), a greasy simpleton who serves as the building’s handyman. Steve and Nell haven’t been living at the Lusman especially long when she notices that a growing number of young women living in the building have been meeting a violent death, and with some help from good-hearted part-time actor “Jazz” Rooker (Rance Howard), she begins looking into the murders and makes some disturbing discoveries about both the building management and her fellow tenants.

One of the most highly regarded haunted house films ever produced, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House) weaves the dark tale of a questionably sane young woman and a sinister house which holds a terrifying past. Invited to join anthropologist Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), ESP expert Theodora (Claire Bloom), and probable heir to the estate Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn) in order to dispel the near mythical tales that surround the house, unstable Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris) agrees to spend a few nights in the house following the death of her mother. As they slowly begin to discover, the horrific and seemingly unbelievable tales may hold more truth than the skeptical guests might have previously expected. With a seemingly unstoppable supernatural force lurking in every shadow, the probability of anyone escaping the evil clutch of the cursed mansion seems increasingly remote.