Bovie Movie

A young woman discovers a terrible secret while caring for an elderly man in this supernatural thriller. Caroline (Kate Hudson) is a care provider for the aged who is hired away from the hospice where she works by Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands). Violet needs someone to help take care of her husband, Ben (John Hurt), who is in poor health and doesn’t have long to live. Violet and Ben live in a decaying rattletrap mansion not far from New Orleans, and as she settles into her work, Caroline spends her spare time exploring the house. It isn’t long before Caroline discovers evidence that suggests Ben and Violet are members of a sinister voodoo cult, and that ghosts walk in the Devereaux mansion. The Skeleton Key also stars Peter Sarsgaard and Joy Bryant.

An unremarkable administrative assistant finds her life going to the dogs both literally and figuratively in actor/screenwriter-turned-director Mike White’s dark comedy drama. An inexplicably cheerful office worker whose somewhat sad excuse for a life seems to revolve around her pet beagle Pencil, Peggy (Molly Shannon) seems to relate better to her four-legged friend than she does to most humans. Most of her person-to-person interaction revolves around doting on other people’s children and treating her co-workers to daily donuts, and Peggy just doesn’t find much solace in the company of her know-it-all sister-in-law Bret (Laura Dern) or her anxiety-prone boss Robin (Josh Pais). When Peggy’s dog Pencil is taken before his time, the devastated dog-lover is wracked with guilt. Now desperate to fill the gaping void that has suddenly opened in her life, Peggy agrees to a date with her gun-nut neighbor Al (John C. Reilly) that ends in disaster when she begins to suspect that the boorish brute may have in fact poisoned her ill-fated pooch. Later, after adopting every dog at the local pound and transforming herself into an overzealous animal-rights activist, the increasingly unhinged Peggy reaches out to asexual activist Newt (Peter Sarsgaard) in a last-grasp attempt at forming a human connection that is met with casual indifference.

A man who has made good in an illegal business discovers going straight is a more complicated matter than he imagined in this urban drama. Victor Rosa (John Leguizamo) is a drug dealer who has made a small fortune selling a heroin-based drug cocktail he’s concocted called “Empire.” Victor doesn’t see himself as a dope pusher; instead, he considers himself an entrepreneur and a businessman who is simply making the most of the economic opportunities presented to him in the ghetto. Through his girlfriend Carmen (Delilah Cotto), Victor makes the acquaintance of Jack Wimmer (Peter Sarsgaard), an upscale investment banker who admires Victor’s business savvy and street smarts. Victor is interested in getting out of drug dealing and into a legitimate business, and when Jack offers Victor the chance to buy into a new business, Victor eagerly accepts and makes a good profit in the deal. After this, Victor is all the more enthusiastic when Jack gives him the opportunity to invest in a much bigger project; the price, however, is more than Victor can afford, and he has to borrow from another high-stakes drug dealer, La Columbiana (Isabella Rossellini) in order to make the nut. It isn’t long before Victor learns La Columbiana is not a good person to be in debt to — and that Jack may not be all he imagined him to be. Empire marked the directorial debut of dancer and choreographer Franc Reyes; the supporting cast includes Denise Richards, Sonia Braga, Ruben Blades, and rapper Fat Joe.

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.