Bovie Movie

Writer and director Woody Allen returns to the Manhattan of the past with this romantic comedy set in 1940, the era of fedora hats and gumshoe detectives. Allen stars as C.W. Briggs, an insurance investigator whose razor-sharp instincts have just led to the successful conclusion of another case, the recovery of a stolen Picasso. While he’s a valued employee, Briggs is under fire from efficiency expert Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt) for his antiquated attitudes and refusal to accept modern crime-solving techniques such as fingerprinting. C.W. claims he puts himself directly into the criminal mind, a skill that will do him no good when he and Betty Ann are hypnotized at a Rainbow Room gathering one night by the magician Volton (David Ogden Stiers). As a parlor trick to entertain their co-workers, Volton makes C.W. and Betty Ann believe they’re a couple that’s deeply in love. But the performer secretly keeps up the ruse after the party’s over, calling C.W. to whisper a magic code word and ordering the detective to rob wealthy homes with security systems that C.W. himself has designed. With no memory of his thieving activities, a frustrated C.W. can’t solve the high-profile jewel burglaries, while he and Betty Ann struggle with their odd new attraction for each other, made more complicated by the fact that Betty Ann is romantically involved with their boss (Dan Aykroyd).

A surreal crime drama told as only Jim Jarmusch could, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai stars Forest Whitaker as Ghost Dog, a hit man living in an unidentified but run-down city in what license plates call “The Industrialized State.” Known for his gift of being able to come and go without people noticing him, Ghost Dog is a self-taught samurai who is obsessed with order and his strict personal moral code, drawn from the philosophies of the Japanese warriors. As every samurai needs a leader to whom he swears loyalty, Ghost Dog has devoted himself the service of Louie (John Tormey), a low-level crime boss who once saved his life. When Louie’s superiors decide he must be executed, Ghost Dog leaps into action, methodically wiping out his many enemies. Along with a dizzying series of stylized shoot-outs, Ghost Dog also features carrier pigeons, characters who read Rashomon, a French-speaking ice cream man, and a score by RZA from the top-selling hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, who have their own well-documented obsession with Asian culture. Ghost Dog was screened in competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

A man struggling to save the life of another finds himself drawn into a strange netherworld he didn’t know existed in this stylish thriller. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) is a psychiatrist living in New York City with his girlfriend, Lila Culpepper (Naomi Watts), who was once one of his patients. However, it’s another one of his patients who becomes the focus of his obsessions when Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), a disturbed young man whom Foster took over from a colleague, announces during a session that he intends to commit suicide in three days, on his 21st birthday. Sam takes the threat quite seriously and tries to track down Henry, who seems to have disappeared. Sam speaks to a number of Henry’s friends and acquaintances — his mother (Kate Burton), the man he claimed was his father, Dr. Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins), a waitress who regularly served Henry at the coffee shop where she works (Elizabeth Reaser), and his former therapist Dr. Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo). As Sam talks to people in Henry’s circle, he finds he’s learning more about himself than the man he’s supposed to save, and he begins to drift into an emotional netherworld where the supposedly dead and the living cross paths. Stay was directed by Marc Forster, who had previously enjoyed breakthrough hits with two very different films, Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland.