Bovie Movie

Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a bright and charming high-school student who also has a dark and willfully eccentric side; he does little to mask his contempt for many of his peers and enjoys challenging the authority of the adults around him. Donnie is also visited on occasion by Frank, a monstrous six-foot rabbit that only Donnie can see who often urges him to perform dangerous and destructive pranks. Late one night, Frank leads Donnie out of his home to inform him that the world will come to an end in less than a month; moments later, the engine of a jet aircraft comes crashing through the ceiling of Donnie’s room, making him think there might be something to Frank’s prophesies after all. The rest of Donnie’s world is only marginally less bizarre, as he finds himself dealing with his confused parents (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne), his college-age sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal), his perplexed analyst (Katherine Ross), a rebellious English teacher (Drew Barrymore), a sleazy self-help expert (Patrick Swayze), and the new girl at school who is attracted by Donnie’s quirks (Jena Malone). Donnie Darko was the first feature film from writer and director Richard Kelly; Drew Barrymore, who plays teacher Karen Pomeroy, also lent her support to the project as executive producer. A director’s cut played in select theaters on a limited basis in the summer of 2004, featuring original music cues and trimmed scenes originally in Kelly’s first cut of the film.

Jocelyn Moorhouse’s feature-film debut is a jet-black comedy starring Hugo Weaving as Martin, a paranoid blind man, made so because he is convinced that his mother, when he was a child, lied to him about the sights she described to him. As an adult, Martin is reclusive and ill-tempered. Perversely, Martin is also a photographer — he takes the pictures, has them developed, asks friends to describe the pictures to him, and then labels them in Braille to make sure no one is tricking him. His housekeeper, Celia (Genevieve Picot), is also a photographer. Obsessed with Martin, she papers the walls of her home with pictures of him. But this obsession doesn’t carry through to their relationship, which is a far from cordial one — Celia torments Martin and Martin humiliates her. One day at a restaurant, after a nasty confrontation with a waitress who ignores him, Martin makes friends with the dishwasher, Andy (Russell Crowe). Martin invites him home to describe his photographs to him. Back at Martin’s home, Andy meets Celia and he immediately falls in love with her. Jealous of Andy, Celia seduces him in an effort to discredit Andy with Martin and drive Martin into her arms.

A young man gets a crash course in the madness of war in this fact-based drama from director Sam Mendes. Anthony “Swoff” Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) decides to join the Marines, just like his father and his father before him, and signs on just in time to be sent to Iraq to fight in the Gulf War in 1991. After experiencing the rigors of boot camp, Swofford and his pal Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) are trained to be snipers, and under the leadership of Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx) and Lt. Col. Kazinski (Chris Cooper), the two land in the middle of a desert where they’re up against an enemy they can’t always see under a blazing sun with hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Swofford, Troy, and their fellow soldiers rely on the wits, their sense of humor, and their friendship of their brothers in arms to deal with a situation that doesn’t much resemble what they saw on television at home. Jarhead was based on the memoirs of the real-life Anthony Swofford, who did serve as a sniper in the 1991 Gulf War; the title comes from military slang for a Marine enlistee.