Bovie Movie

In 1989, Oregon Department of Corrections director Michael Francke was murdered near an office building. The case remains unsolved and in the opening and closing credits, the filmmakers offer viewers $1million for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the killers. This taut crime/courtroom thriller has a two-fold purpose. The first is to chronicle a brother’s search for the truth and the second is to call the fairness of the American justice system into question. Either way, it’s a scary tale. Shortly before Francke was killed he visited his brother Kevin in Florida. There he confided that he had accidentally discovered a drug smuggling ring that linked his colleagues with prison inmate. Later when the Salem police contact Kevin about the death, they assure him that Michael died during a routine robbery, but Kevin doesn’t buy it and so heads to the northwest to investigate. It doesn’t take long for him to get knee-deep into a complex conspiracy plot that leaves him wonder whom, if anyone in town he can trust.

Director Robert Rodriguez picks up where his successful independent debut El Mariachi left off with this slam-bang South of the Border action saga. Bucho (Joaquim DeAlmeida) is a wealthy but casually bloodthirsty drug kingpin who rules a seedy Mexican border town. Bucho and his men make the mistake of angering El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), a former musician who now carries an arsenal in his guitar case. Bucho was responsible for the death of El Mariachi’s girlfriend and put a bullet through his fretting hand, making him unable to play the guitar. Bent on revenge, the musician-turned-killing machine arrives in town to put Bucho out of business, though he finds few allies except for Carolina (Salma Hayek), who runs a bookstore that doesn’t seem to attract many readers. Desperado features supporting performances from Cheech Marin as a cynical bartender, Steve Buscemi as the cantina patron who sets up the story, and Quentin Tarantino as a man with a really terrible joke to tell.

Geena Davis stars in this adventure saga as the most swashbuckling female pirate to ever lay waste to the seven seas. Morgan Adams (Davis) is the daughter of a pirate who has followed in her father’s footsteps. When he dies, he passes along his ship, a crew of bandits, and one third of a treasure map (which happens to be tattooed on his skull). Morgan is eager to search out the rest of the map and retrieve the riches, but the fragment she holds is in Latin. Morgan then buys a well-educated slave, William Shaw (Matthew Modine), who can read the ancient language and already has a taste for the criminal life. However, Morgan and William are not long into their search when they discover that someone else is following the same trail for the rest of the treasure map: Dawg Brown (Frank Langella), Morgan’s uncle and as black-hearted a scurvy dog as ever boarded a ship. As Morgan and Dawg battle each other over the fragments of the map, a British journalist (Maury Chaykin) covers their feud for the penny press. William Shaw was originally to have been played by Michael Douglas, who dropped out in the early stages of this troubled production.

A stranger pulled into a deadly scheme races against time to save his daughter in this thriller. Gene Watson (Johnny Depp) is an accountant who comes to L.A. with his ten-year-old daughter Lynn (Courtney Chase) to attend a funeral. On the street, Gene and Lynn are pulled aside by Mr. Smith (Christopher Walken) and Ms. Jones (Roma Maffia), who flash what look like police badges and usher them into a van. Gene soon discovers that he’s been kidnapped, and his captors have an unusual demand — if Gene does not murder Gov. Eleanor Grant (Marsha Mason) within 75 minutes, his daughter will be killed. Gene now has just an hour and a quarter to tip off the authorities, spare Gov. Grant, and find out what Smith and Jones are trying to do, along with saving his daughter’s life. He finds a much-needed ally in one-legged shoe-shine man Huey (Charles S. Dutton). Most of the action in Nick of Time occurs in “real time,” meaning that the passage of time on screen matches that of real life, as the frequent shots of clocks and watches will attest.

The tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is always ripe for retelling. In this rendition, the sexy Richard Gere is Sir Lancelot, threatening to supersede the aging King Arthur (Sean Connery) by winning the love of his young wife Guinivere (Julia Ormond). This update of the age-old legend succeeds on the strength of Gere’s happy-go-lucky sex appeal, Ormond’s gorgeous period costuming, and Connery’s unbeatable wry nobility. The script focuses on the triangle of the three principals: the older man’s reluctance to relinquish his love and power to the younger man destined to supplant him; the young woman torn between her loyalty to her aged husband and her love for his rival; the young man balancing the demands of loyalty to his sovereign with the rewards of true love. This beautiful production forgoes the legend’s usual elements of magic and fantasy, leaving Merlin the Magician completely out of the picture.

This latter-day romantic screwball comedy stars Sandra Bullock as a love-starved subway toll booth operator, Lucy. Lucy pines for regular customer Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher), but the self-absorbed attorney pays her no heed. One day, Peter is beaten by a gang of thugs and tossed onto the tracks. Lucy rescues him from death. While he is comatose in the hospital, a comment she makes at his bedside is misinterpreted, and she then allows his family members, who haven’t seen Peter in awhile, to believe that she is his fianc?e. Peter’s parents, Ox (Peter Boyle) and Midge (Micole Mercurio), take a liking to Lucy. But Lucy takes a liking to Peter’s brother Jack (Bill Pullman), though Jack is suspicious about her claim to be Peter’s intended.

Ten years before Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility was transformed into a lavish theatrical feature by director Ang Lee, the property was adapted as a rather less lavish but no less entertaining British TV miniseries. Irene Richard and Tracy Childs starred as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, two attractive sisters from a prominent British family. When the Dashwoods go broke after the death of their father, the flighty Marianne and the more reserved (and, need we add, more intelligent) Elinor go on an exhaustive search for proper, and properly wealthy, husbands. Sense and Sensibility was served up in three 60-minute portions by the BBC.

Former video director Michael Bay had his first big hit with this action comedy, which also returned producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson to the big-budget, high-violence movies that they successfully churned out in the ’80s. Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) are two Miami cops who watch as 100 million dollars in heroin, from the biggest drug bust of their careers, is stolen out of the basement of police headquarters. This puts them hot on the trail of French drug lord Fouchet (Tch?ky Karyo), who leaves a trail of bodies in his wake and only one witness, Julie Mott (T?a Leoni), who quickly teams up with our heroes. Comic hijinks ensue when plot complications force Mike to impersonate the married Marcus, to the point of moving in with his wife and children, while Marcus takes over Mike’s bachelor pad and lifestyle. Car chases, snappy one-liners, and nonstop pacing fuel this umpteenth variation on the cop “buddy” formula.

A dark, bitter commentary on modern American life cloaked in the form of a surrealist western, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man stars Johnny Depp as William Blake, a newly-orphaned accountant who leaves his home in Cleveland to accept a job in the frontier town of Machine. Upon his arrival, Blake is told by the factory owner Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) that the job has already been filled. Dejectedly, he enters a nearby tavern, ultimately spending the night with a former prostitute. A violent altercation with the woman’s lover (Gabriel Byrne), also Dickinson’s son, leaves Blake a murderer as well as mortally wounded, a bullet lodged dangerously close to his heart. He flees into the wilderness, where a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) mistakes Blake for the English poet William Blake and determines that he will be Blake’s guide in his protracted passage into the spirit world.

An intense film about time travel, this sci-fi entry was directed by Terry Gilliam, a member of the comedy troupe Monty Python. The film stars Bruce Willis as James Cole, a prisoner of the state in the year 2035 who can earn parole if he agrees to travel back in time and thwart a devastating plague. The virus has wiped out most of the Earth’s population and the remainder live underground because the air is poisonous. Returning to the year 1990, six years before the start of the plague, Cole is soon imprisoned in a psychiatric facility because his warnings sound like mad ravings. There he meets a scientist named Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the mad son of an eminent virologist (Christopher Plummer). Cole is returned by the authorities to the year 2035, and finally ends up at his intended destination in 1996. He kidnaps Dr. Railly in order to enlist her help in his quest. Cole discovers graffiti by an apparent animal rights group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, but as he delves into the mystery, he hears voices, loses his bearings, and doubts his own sanity. He must figure out if Goines, who seems to be a raving lunatic, holds the key to the puzzle.