Bovie Movie

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).

With The Walker, Paul Schrader unofficially updates themes and tropes first explored by his controversial erotic thriller American Gigolo (1980). Woody Harrelson stars as Carter Page III, an overtly gay, Virginian senator’s son, paid as an asexual escort of middle-aged women in the upper-crust circles of Washington, D.C. Carter’s regular clients include three politicos’ wives: Natalie Van Miter (Lauren Bacall), Abigail Delorean (Lily Tomlin), and Lynn Lockner (Kristin Scott Thomas), to whom Carter is closest - so close that he squires her, regularly, to sexual rendezvous with her lover, the lobbyist Robbie Kononsberg (Steven Hartley). When an unknown perpetrator stabs Robbie to death, and Lynn discovers his murdered body at his condo, Carter attempts to protect Lynn and her husband, Larry (Willem Dafoe), from media intrusion by informing the police that he found the body himself, despite the fact that it makes him an immediate suspect. In time, Carter discovers from the women (during their gossip over a canasta game) that Robbie was involved with a shady insurance company, on the verge of being investigated - and that the investigation would have uncovered dirt and scandal on each woman. To shield Lynn from trouble, and deliver himself from incrimination, Page ultimately decides to investigate the crime himself, with the close assistance of his lover, the German-Turkish photographer Emek (Moritz Bleibtreu). Schrader authored the original script.