Bovie Movie

A boy’s best friend is his robot in this animated adventure from Brad Bird, best known for his TV work on such series as The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and The Critic. Set in 1957, The Iron Giant focuses on Hogarth (voice of Eli Marienthal), an imaginative nine-year-old boy who daydreams of alien invasions and doing battle with Communist agents. One day, Hogarth hears a local fisherman talk about something that surpasses anything he could dream up: a fifty-foot robot that fell from the sky into a nearby lake. Needless to say, Hogarth’s mom, Annie (voice of Jennifer Aniston) finds this a little hard to swallow, but when Hogarth finds the robot (voice of Vin Diesel) and fishes him out of the water, his pal Dean (voice of Harry Connick Jr.), a beatnik sculptor who also runs a junkyard, offers to help by hiding the robot with his salvage. A government agent named Kent Mansley (voice of Christopher McDonald) soon gets wind that there’s a mechanical invader of unknown origins in the neighborhood and wants to wipe out the potential threat. However, the robot (which loves to eat metal and is learning to talk) turns out to be friendly, and the boy in turn tries to teach his new pal the ways of humans. The Iron Giant is loosely based on the book The Iron Man by late British poet Ted Hughes, previously adapted for the stage by rock musician Pete Townshend, who executive produced the film.

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen concocted this stylish screwball comedic amalgam of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks. Tim Robbins stars as Norville Barnes, a dull-wit from Muncie, Indiana who wrangles a job with the big Hudsucker Industries. He has a singular idea for a new children’s toy that he wants to present to corporate executive Sidney J. Mussberger (Paul Newman). As he makes his way up to Mussberger’s office, the company president Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) is on his way down — through the window of the forty-fourth floor boardroom! Hudsucker’s death sets off a panic that Mussberger sees as an opportunity for taking over the company — by installing a total incompetent in Hudsucker’s place and devaluing the stock. When Barnes stumbles into Mussberger’s office, Mussberger sees his pigeon and appoints Barnes as the new company president. The only problem is that the new product Barnes proposes for the company, the Hula Hoop, turns out to be a tremendous success, and Mussberger has difficulty manipulating his new corporate president.

Clint Eastwood delivers one of his finest performances, as a secret service agent haunted by his past in Wolfgang Petersen’s taut thriller In the Line of Fire. Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a secret service agent who keeps thinking back to November 22, 1963, when, as an agent hand-picked by President Kennedy, he became one of the few agents to have lost a president to an assassin. Decades later, psychotic Mitch Leary (John Malkovich) is stalking another president (Jim Curley) running for re-election. He has spent long hours studying the psyche of Frank Horrigan, and he taunts Horrigan (feeling that there is a bond between them), telling him of his plans to kill the president. After his conversation with Leary, Horrigan makes sure he is assigned to presidential protection duty. Horrigan has no intention of failing his president this time around, and he is more than willing to take a bullet. But everything goes Leary’s way — he is smart and cagey and the president’s aides refuse to alter the itinerary. As the election draws closer, Horrigan’s chances to catch Leary look to be less and less a possibility, and he begins to doubt his own abilities — both now and in the past, when Kennedy was murdered.

This film was one of the more mainstream offerings in the array of films that emphasized the overly hyped “Generation X” phenomenon, a list that ranges from Slacker to Singles and includes a host of other films. Winona Ryder stars as Lelaina, a recent college graduate. Out on her own and independent from her supportive, but out-of-touch parents, Lelaina faces the realities of careers and relationships. She can’t stand her internship under a local television personality (John Mahoney), and she’s forced to choose between Michael (Ben Stiller), a well-intentioned music-video network executive, and Troy (Ethan Hawke), a brooding, sensitive slacker. Meanwhile, she must also protect the artistic integrity of “Reality Bites,” a video documentary that depicts the everyday lives of her friends (Hawke, Janeane Garofalo, and Steve Zahn). This 1994 release also marks the feature directorial debut of Ben Stiller.