Bovie Movie

A turning point in 20th century war history is the focus of this fact-based account of the 1942-1943 battle of Stalingrad, in which the Germans were finally defeated by Russian influence — one of the bloodiest battles in World War II history. The film stars Jude Law as Vassili, a marksman from the Urals who is transported to Stalingrad in 1942, and a master German sniper, Major Koenig (Ed Harris). Koenig, an expert German sniper, is determined to eliminate his formidable opponent by any means necessary; meanwhile, Vassili has joined forces with Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a young Russian political adversary, who is impressed by Vassili’s skills and raises his profile in the Soviet Union. Both Vassili and Danilov become involved with Tanya (Rachel Weisz), whose Jewish parents have been captured by the Germans and have forced her to take up with the men on a sniper expedition. Koenig and Vassili begin to develop traps for each other, until fate inevitably must bring the two sharpshooters together. This large-scale production, financed mostly by Teuton companies, also features Bob Hoskins as Nikita Krushchev and Ron Perlman as an aging Russian sniper.

After the Oscar-winning The English Patient, writer/director Anthony Minghella attempted another tricky literary adaptation with The Talented Mr. Ripley, which features heartthrob Matt Damon cast against type as a psychopathic bisexual murderer. Tom Ripley (Damon) is a bright and charismatic sociopath who makes his way in mid-’50s New York City as a men’s room attendant and sometimes pianist, though his real skill is in impersonating other people, forging handwriting, and running second-rate scams. After being mistaken for a Princeton student, Tom meets the shipping tycoon father of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), who has traveled to the coast of Italy, where he’s living a carefree life with his father’s money and his beautiful girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). Dickie’s father will pay Ripley 1,000 dollars plus his expenses if he can persuade Dickie to return to America. As Ripley and Dickie become friends, Tom finds himself both attracted to Dickie and envious of his life of pleasure. In time, he decides that he would rather be Dickie Greenleaf than Tom Ripley, so rather than go back to his life of poverty, Ripley impulsively murders Dickie and assumes his identity. The Talented Mr. Ripley was based on the first of a series of novels featuring Tom Ripley written by Patricia Highsmith; the story was previously filmed in 1960 as Purple Noon, with Alain Delon as Ripley.

Five years after achieving commercial and critical success with his film Three Kings, director and screenwriter David O. Russell returns to the more idiosyncratic territory of his earlier work with this intelligent and offbeat comedy. Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) are a married couple who run an existential detective agency where they sift through the lives of their clients in order to discover the source of their angst. The Jaffes’ latest client is Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), an environmental activist who has a very large rock and a great deal on his mind; their study of Albert’s problems lead Bernard and Vivian to Brad Stand (Jude Law), a public relations executive with a chain of successful variety stores, Huckabees. While publicly allying himself with Albert’s environmental initiatives, behind the scenes Brad is running roughshod over responsible land management with little care for the consequences. When Brad learns he’s being watched by the Jaffes, he hopes to co-opt them by hiring them himself; however, the plan has unexpected consequences when their questioning leads Brad’s girlfriend, well-scrubbed model Dawn (Naomi Watts), into reassessing her life and relationships. Meanwhile, Albert finds himself joining forces with Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a firefighter and fellow environmentalist who has been having second thoughts about Bernard and Vivian’s ideas and methods after a long-term investigation and has since fallen under the spell of nihilist poet and philosopher Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert).

Nancy Meyers’ romantic comedy Holiday stars Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet as two women who exchange houses in order to get a new lease on life. After each suffers her fair share of romantic disappointments, Englishwoman Iris (Winslet) and L.A. woman Amanda (Diaz) meet on-line at a website devoted to helping people exchange houses for vacations. Each agrees to spend the Christmas holiday at the other’s home. While each suffers from a minor case of culture shock, both women also end up becoming involved with a man. Iris makes the acquaintance of an upbeat everyman played by Jack Black, while Amanda spends time with a handsome Brit played by Jude Law. Both women must decide what to do with these new relationships as their pre-arranged house switch is scheduled to last less than two weeks.

A petty thief is the link between a well-to-do businessman and a single mother struggling to get by in his edgy, emotional drama. Will Francis (Jude Law) is a successful landscape architect who runs an upscale business with his friend Sandy (Martin Freeman) in the King’s Cross section of London, a neighborhood that has long been plagued by crime and poverty but has lately become the target of a major gentrification program. Will’s longtime girlfriend is Liv (Robin Wright Penn), a lovely woman troubled by a lack of communication between herself and her husband and emotional problems with their teenage daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), who can’t sleep and is obsessed with gymnastics. A thief has broken into Will and Sandy’s office not once but twice, taking Will’s laptop and the company’s computer equipment, and Will begins spending his evenings at the shop in hopes of catching the culprit in action. The burglar strikes a third time, and while giving chase, Will sees him make his way into a shabby apartment building. Will learns the criminal is Miro (Rafi Gavron), a 15-year-old refugee from Bosnia. Without revealing what he knows, Will makes the acquaintance of Amira (Juliette Binoche), Miro’s widowed mother — a Bosnian refugee who makes a living as a seamstress. As Will begins bringing Amira business on a regular basis, the two begin an affair which continues even as Will maintains his relationship with Liv. Breaking & Entering was written and directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Anthony Minghella; it was his first project made from his own original script since Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1991.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men is a roman ? clef inspired by the career of Louisiana governor Huey Long. Broderick Crawford won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Willie Stark, a backwoods Southern lawyer who wins the hearts of his constituents by bucking the corrupt state government. Journalist Jack Burden (John Ireland) is impressed by Willie’s seeming sincerity, and aids Stark on the road to political power. Once he’s reached the governor’s mansion, however, Willie proves himself to be as dishonest and despotic as the crooks whom he’s replaced. He also cheats shamelessly on his wife with both his campaign manager (Mercedes McCambridge, another Oscar winner) and with Anne Stanton (Joanne Dru), the sister of idealistic doctor Adam Stanton (Sheppard Strudwick). Fiercely protective of his power, Willie organizes a fascistic police force and arranges for “accidents” to befall those who oppose him; even so, he retains the love of the voters by lowering the poverty level, improving the school system, and financing building projects. Even when Willie all but orchestrates the suicide of Anne’s uncle, a highly respected judge (Raymond Greenleaf), those closest to him are unable to escape his power and the charismatic hold he has over people. Stockton, CA, stands in for the unnamed state capitol where most of the film’s action occurs. In addition to its Oscars for Crawford and McCambridge, All the King’s Men won the Best Picture prize. Warren’s novel would later be adapted into a stage play, a TV special, and even an opera.

Martin Scorsese directed this fast-moving, epic-scale biopic documenting the life and loves one of the most colorful Americans of the 20th century, Howard Hughes. The Aviator follows Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) as the twentysomething millionaire, having already made a fortune improving the design of oil-drilling bits, comes to Hollywood with an interest in getting into the picture business. It doesn’t take long for Hughes, with his passion for airplanes, to jump from producer to director of his first major film project, a World War I air epic called Hell’s Angels, which took three years to complete thanks to the shift from silent to sound filming and Hughes’ relentless perfectionism. However, the film was a massive hit, and the eccentric inventor became a mogul in Hollywood, making Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani) a star and enjoying a romance with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett). But Hollywood’s old-boy network never fully accepted Hughes, and in time his passion for flying began to reclaim his attentions as he began designing new planes, setting air speed records, flying around the world, and risking his life testing aircraft. Hughes also found time to romance Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) and founded his own airline, Trans-World Airlines, though as his ideas became bolder, his approach became more eccentric, and he gained many powerful enemies, including the head of Pan-American Airlines, Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), and Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), who attempted to prove that Hughes’ radical design ideas were actually part of an effort to bilk taxpayers for millions of dollars through government contracts. The Aviator’s star-studded cast also includes John C. Reilly, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, and Frances Conroy.

The best-selling series of subversive children’s books from author Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) come to the screen in this black comedy for the whole family (and how often do you get to see one of those?). The Baudelaire siblings — gadget freak Violet (Emily Browning), bookworm Klaus (Liam Aiken), and baby Sunny (Kara Hoffman and Shelby Hoffman) — were living a fairy-tale existence with their parents until they died in a fire that destroyed the family home. With few close relatives and a large fortune the children won’t inherit until they reach adulthood, the Baudelaire children are left in the care of the peculiar Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), an out-of-work actor who would love nothing more than to get his hands on the kids’ money. It doesn’t take long for the children to figure out that Count Olaf is up to no good, and they try to steer clear of his various murderous schemes with the help of wildly paranoid Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) and snake-fancying Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly). Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events also features Catherine O’Hara, Timothy Spall, Cedric the Entertainer, and Luis Guzman; Jude Law narrates in the guise of author Snicket.

Directed by Kerry Conran, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow revolves around the mysterious disappearance of some of the world’s most revered scientists. When an investigation is launched, Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), reporter for the prestigious Chronicle, and Sky Captain (Jude Law), resident flying ace, are at the forefront of the case. Though the mission’s perks include traveling around the world, the stout-hearted duo are nonetheless risking their lives with each passing moment, as the culprit is none other than the nefarious Dr. Totenkopf, and his goal, from what they can gather, is to destroying the earth in its entirety. Luckily, Sky Captain and Polly are not alone — Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie), the commander of an all-female amphibious squadron, and Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), an unparalleled technical genius, have joined them in hopes of saving the planet before it’s too late. Laurence Olivier appears posthumously as Dr. Totenkopf, via old film-clips “recycled” (or CG-altered) to fit the dialogue and scenes at hand.

Based on the 1969 short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss, this science fiction fantasy bears similarities to Pinocchio (1940) and originated as a long-gestating project of director Stanley Kubrick that passed to his friend Steven Spielberg after Kubrick’s death. Haley Joel Osment stars as David, a “mecha” or robot of the future, when the polar ice caps have melted and submerged many coastal cities, causing worldwide starvation and human dependence upon robotic assistance. The first mecha designed to experience love, David is the “son” of Henry (Sam Robards), an employee of the company that built the boy, and the grief-stricken Monica (Frances O’Connor). David is meant to replace the couple’s hopelessly comatose son, but when their natural child recovers, David is abandoned and sets out to become “a real boy” worthy of his mother’s affection. Along the way, David is mentored by a pleasure-providing mecha named Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) and a talking “super toy” bear named Teddy. His adventures take him to the Roman Circus-style “Flesh Fair,” where mechas are destroyed for the amusement of humans; Rouge City, where Gigolo Joe narrowly avoids capture by police; and finally a submerged New York City, where David’s creator, Professor Hobby (William Hurt) reveals the secrets of the boy’s creation. Brendan Gleeson and narrator Ben Kingsley co-star in A.I., which was adapted from Kubrick’s treatment by Spielberg, in his first crack at screenwriting since Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).