Bovie Movie

A high-school senior finds that fate (and modern medicine) plays some interesting tricks with his personality in this dramatic comedy. Justin Conn (Lou Taylor Pucci) is a neurotic teenager who has a difficult time with his peers, especially Rebecca (Kelli Garner), a cute girl in his debate class with whom he is somewhat mutually infatuated. It isn’t much better at home with his obnoxious younger brother Joel (Chase Offerle), his father, Mike (Vincent D’Onofrio), who is busy having a midlife crisis, and mother Audrey (Tilda Swinton), who’s infatuated with one of her favorite TV actors (Benjamin Bratt). All this anxiety has to go somewhere, and Justin’s manifestation of his troubles comes in the form of sucking his thumb, which makes him even more of an outcast. Dr. Perry Lyman (Keanu Reeves), an orthodontist who seems to double as a new age therapist, treats Justin with hypnosis; meanwhile, the school psychologist decides he has Attention Deficit Disorder, and treats him with medication. Suddenly, Justin stops sucking his thumb and becomes an outgoing overachiever, single-handedly taking his school debate team to the state championship. But Justin’s relationshop with his debate coach, Mr. Geary (Vince Vaughn), becomes strained, and the boy tries to mold yet another new identity for himself. Thumbsucker was the first feature film from Mike Mills, who previously distinguished himself in commercials and music videos.

For his fifth effort as a feature-film director, one-time cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld brought his cartoonish visual style and darkly humorous sensibilities to this adaptation of, appropriately enough, a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi comic book. Will Smith stars as James Darrel Edwards, a New York City cop with an athletic physique and a flippant, anti-authoritarian attitude toward law enforcement. After chasing down a mysterious perpetrator one night who turns out to be an alien, James is recruited by “K” (Tommy Lee Jones), a veteran of a clandestine government agency secretly policing the comings and goings of aliens on planet Earth. Nicknamed the “men in black” for their nondescript uniform of black suit, shoes, tie, and sunglasses, the agents are assigned to recover a bauble that’s been stolen by an intergalactic terrorist (Vincent D’Onofrio). It seems the item is none other than the galaxy itself, and its theft has plunged humanity into the center of what’s shaping up to become an interstellar war, unless K and his new wisecracking partner, now renamed “J,” can stop the bad guy. On their side but somewhat in the dark is a pretty, unflappable city medical examiner (Linda Fiorentino) who has been zapped one too many times by K’s ingenious memory-sapping device. Men in Black was a box office smash, inspiring an animated children’s television series and a hit soundtrack album that featured a performance by star (and rapper) Smith.