Bovie Movie

Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story revolves around amiable underachiever Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn), whose rundown gym, Average Joe’s, is populated by a less-than-average clientele including a self-styled pirate, an ultra-obscure sports aficionado, and a pining high school nerd. It soon becomes apparent that Joe’s is in financial trouble and will soon be foreclosed by attractive attorney Kate Veach (Christine Taylor) - unless Peter can cough up $50,000. Despite Average Joe’s posing little threat to Globo Gym, a fitness Goliath across the street that is owned by egomaniacal White Goodman (Ben Stiller) - Goodman senses an easy acquisition and decides to take over the facility. Peter’s ragtag group of regulars, however, are less than thrilled with the prospects, and mobilize a showdown, winner-takes-all Dodgeball tournament against Globo Gym. The film also features Missi Pyle, Rip Torn, Stephen Root, and Alan Tudyk.

A clandestine love affair sends one man’s charmed life into a tailspin in this dark, disturbing drama written and directed by Woody Allen, his first film set and shot in Great Britain and one his few films sans any humor. Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is an Irish tennis player with an impoverished background. Just accomplished enough to make his way onto the professional circuit, but not skilled enough to be a consistent winner, he now works as an instructor at a London tennis club. The wealthy Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), who is as impressed by Chris’s charm and good looks as he is by his game, takes a tennis lesson from the young man. Chris’s intelligence and wit also make a strong impression on Tom’s pretty sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), who soon falls for him. It isn’t long before Chris and Chloe are engaged to be married, a match that pleases both Tom and his father, Alec (Brian Cox), a successful businessman who believes Chris has a bright future in his firm. However, Chris also feels an overwhelming attraction to Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a sexy blonde from the United States who is dating Tom. Though Nola initially puts up some resistance, Chris gently nudges her in the direction of an affair. Passion soon ignites between the two, and they have a one-time sexual encounter, even as Chris and Chloe plan their wedding. Nola resists, however, when Chris makes additional attempts to wheedle her into bed. Nola drops out of Chris’s life shortly before his wedding, but a chance meeting a few months later resurrects the relationship as Chris and Chloe try to start a family. Match Point received its world premiere in an enthusiastically received presentation at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

A mother is caught in a race against time to save her child in this taut suspense thriller. Dr. Will Jennings (Stuart Townsend) and his wife, Karen (Charlize Theron), find their world has been turned upside down when they’re taken hostage and held in different cities while their young daughter is kidnapped by the same band of ruthless criminals. Joe Hickey (Kevin Bacon) has hatched a seemingly foolproof plan with his wife, Cheryl (Courtney Love), and cousin, Marvin (Pruitt Taylor Vince): while Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Jennings are under guard and unable to contact the police, Hickey will demand a massive ransom for the return of their daughter. If the payment is not arranged in 24 hours, the girl will be killed. Will and Karen realize it’s imperative that they find their daughter as soon as possible, as she suffers from a medical condition that could claim her life if she doesn’t receive her medication within a day, but as Karen plots a way to get away from Joe and rescue her little girl, she discovers money isn’t the only reason Joe has chosen the Jenningses as his victims. Trapped was based on the novel 24 Hours by Greg Iles; 24 Hours was also announced as the film’s title before it was changed to avoid being confused with the popular television series 24.

Further cementing 2003 as the year of Ron Shelton cop movies, the director continued his vacation from the sports genre with Hollywood Homicide, a police comedy that comes right on the heels of Shelton’s Dark Blue, a decidedly grittier cop thriller. The film stars Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett as LAPD homicide detectives Joe Gavilan and K.C. Calden, two cops with bigger dreams. Gavilan moonlights as a real estate agent, while Calden teaches yoga and yearns for a career on the big screen. When an entire hip-hop group is murdered on-stage, Gavilan and Calden are called in to handle the case. As their investigation progresses, they begin to suspect that the rappers were offed for attempting to get out of their recording contract with label head Sartain (Isaiah Washington). Along with Bruce Greenwood and Keith David, the supporting cast boasts a plethora of real-life musicians, including Dr. Dre, Gladys Knight, Dwight Yoakam, Master P, and Ronald DeVoe of New Edition and Bell Biv DeVoe.

Much as Steven Spielberg followed 1993’s special-effects blockbuster Jurassic Park with a far more downbeat and personal project later the same year, Schindler’s List, in 2005 after tearing up the box office with War of the Worlds the director closed out the year with a powerful and thoughtful drama about the human costs of international terrorism. The 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, were supposed to be a peaceful gathering of outstanding athletes from around the world, but on September 5, the games took a sinister turn when eight masked Palestinian terrorists invaded the Olympic village, killing two Israeli athletes and abducting nine others. The kidnappers demanded safe passage out of Germany in addition to the release of Arab prisoners in Israeli and German prisons, but when they arrived at the Munich airport they were met by German police and military forces, and in the melee that followed, all nine hostages were killed. In the wake of the killings, the Israeli government gave Mossad, the nation’s intelligence agency, a special assignment — to track down and eliminate the Palestinians responsible for the death of the Israeli athletes. A young and idealistic Mossad agent (Eric Bana) is assigned to the four-man unit created to wipe out the Olympic terrorists, but while he believes in serving his country, as their bloody work goes on he begins to buckle under the weight of his work and wonders if he can morally justify his nation’s acts of revenge. Munich also stars Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Ciar?n Hinds.

Douglas McGrath’s Infamous represents the second major biopic about the avant-garde belletrist Truman Capote to be released within a year. It thus tells roughly the same story as Bennett Miller’s earlier Capote, recounting the events that belied the writer’s six-year authorship of the seminal “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. The story opens with Capote (Toby Jones) visiting the site of the 1959 Clutter family homicide, on a Kansas research trip, accompanied by his close friend and colleague, author Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock). As Capote settles into the community, McGrath uses the preponderance of screen time to explore the emotional tapestry of Capote’s increasingly risky emotional attachment to one of the two murderers, Perry Edward Smith (Daniel Craig), with whom he senses more than a few common bonds. McGrath weaves a decidedly bittersweet tale, contrasting the optimism and devil-may-care, “conquer all” attitude of Capote in his early years with a seemingly endless string of poor choices in the writer’s later years, from addictions to drink and pills, to a failure to maintain healthy output as a writer, to poorly chosen romantic and sexual entanglements. Most significantly, however, McGrath reveals how the relationship with Smith virtually destroyed Capote as an artist and a human being, by inducing him to sell out on all levels to satisfy his lust for accomplishment and notoriety.

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.

Michael Lehmann directed this post-modernist hash of To Catch a Thief and The Naked Gun starring Bruce Willis as Hudson Hawk, a cat burglar who wants to go straight, but the circumstances won’t allow it. The story begins in a pre-credit sequence that takes place in the renaissance. Leonardo Da Vinci (Stefano Molinari) is rushing through his Mona Lisa painting to work on his latest invention — a machine to turn lead into bronze. But Da Vinci makes a mistake and, instead of bronze, the machine turns the lead into gold. Realizing the danger of his invention if the contraption gets into the wrong hands, he hides three parts of the apparatus inside three of his other works. Four hundred years later, Hudson Hawk, the world’s greatest cat burglar, is being released from jail after pulling a ten-year stretch. He wants to retire from the profession of cat burglary and drink some cappuccino, but two screwball billionaires — Darwin and Minerva Mayflower (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard) — won’t let him. Their nefarious plot is to steal the three Da Vinci works, restore Da Vinci’s gold-making machine, and destroy the world’s monetary system. They blackmail Hawks into working with them to steal the Da Vincis by threatening the life of Hawks’s pal Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello). Along with the power-mad billionaires, Hawks has to deal with the CIA, in the person of George Kaplan (James Coburn), breathing down his neck. He also has Vatican art restorer Anna Baragli (Andie MacDowell) falling for his smirk.

A woman who has come to a strange land is torn between the life she knows and the new life around her in this epic-scale historical drama. In 1854, New Zealand’s indigenous Maori tribes were engaged in an ongoing battle to drive away European settlers eager to establish colonies in the nation’s wilderness, which the Maori saw as a threat to their way of life. However, some outsiders had made a home in New Zealand with the cooperation of the Maori, and an Irish settlement had been established, with Francis (Stephen Rea), the colony’s doctor, bringing his daughter Sarah (Samantha Morton) with him to this new land. Sarah becomes acquainted with the son of one of the Maori leaders, and in time their friendship grows into something deeper. When Sarah discovers she’s pregnant with the chief’s son’s child, the father has been called off to fight against the Europeans, and by the time her son is born, his father is dead. Sarah raises her child, whom she simply calls “Boy,” but when Boy reaches the age of six, he’s abducted by his father’s family, who believes he should grow up among the Maori. Fearing further reprisals, Francis returns to Ireland, but Sarah stays behind to care for the sick and look for her son. Years later, while in search of Boy, Sarah encounters Wiremu (Cliff Curtis), a Maori warrior whose father Te Kai Po (Temuera Morrison) is ill. When Wiremu learns that Sarah is well versed in medicine, he makes an offer — if she will treat Te Kai Po and return him to health, he will find Boy. Sarah is able to cure Te Kai Po’s ailment, and Wiremu returns the now-teenaged Boy (David Rawiri Pene) to his mother. Boy is not eager to leave behind the Maori people who have become his family, and he and Sarah stay with Te Kai Po’s tribe for a while, but in time she is drawn back to the Irish colony, where she finds herself torn between Doyle (Kiefer Sutherland), the soldier who loves her and wishes to protect her, and Wiremu, who she has grown to love.

When America’s number one NASCAR speed-demon is issued a direct challenge from a gay, French Formula One racer with a hunger for the top spot and a mean talent for tight-cornering, the race is on to become the number one man in all of NASCAR in a full throttle comedy starring Will Ferrell and directed by Anchorman cohort Adam McKay. Ricky Bobby (Ferrell) is a national hero with a “smokin’ hot” trophy wife, pair of borderline-abusively precocious sons, and an endless line of endorsement deals filling his mansion with toys and driveway with sports cars and Hummers. His racing partner and lifelong friend Cal Naughton, Jr. (John C. Reilly), never fails to provide him with a hand on the racetrack, frequently performing their trademark “slingshot” maneuver to shoot Ricky into first place, leaving Cal in second. While the public loves these buddies (popularly known by the meaningless childhood nicknames they find so exceedingly cool: “Shake and Bake”), a wedge comes between the two, as Ricky Bobby’s longstanding winning-streak is broken by flamboyand French Formula One driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen), robbing Ricky of everything in an instant as the trauma leaves him unable to drive. Ricky’s wife takes his fortunes while Cal takes his wife, and now he’s back with his mother (Jane Lynch) and long-estranged father (Gary Cole). Things look bad for Ricky, but his father was once a race car driver himself, and now with the help of a training montage, a live cougar, and the courage to drive without his gleaming white Wonder Bread endorsement, Ricky might be ready to face the track again.