Bovie Movie

Director Oliver Stone once again offers a powerful and provocative story based on real-life events in this drama. Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and William J. Jimeno (Michael Pena) were two officers assigned to New York City’s Port Authority who were working their beats on a quiet day in early fall when they received an emergency call. The day was September 11, 2001, and McLoughlin and Jimeno were among the policemen who attempted to evacuate the World Trade Center towers after they were struck by airliners piloted by terrorists. Both McLoughlin and Jimeno were inside the fifth building of the World Trade Center when the towers fell, and were two of the last people found alive amidst the wreckage. As McLoughlin and Jimeno struggled to hold on to their lives as rescuers sifted through the rubble, their spouses — Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhaal) — clung to the desperate hope that their husbands would survive and be found. As the McLoughlin and Jimeno families waited for word on the fate of the two men, they watched as a city and a nation came together with strength and compassion in the face of a tragedy. World Trade Center was based on the true story of John McLoughlin and William J. Jimeno, both of whom cooperated with producers in the making of this film. Producer Debra Hill died during production - hence the posthumous credit.

Haunted Highway concerns a husband who is facing serious ramifications for having an extramarital affair. As he drives with his wife’s dead body in the trunk, he sees a variety of frightening spooks. Are these manifestations of his guilt, or might his wife be able to exact revenge even after her death.

The second of Zucker-Abraham-Zucker’s theatrical-feature spoofs (Airplane was the first, discounting the patchwork Kentucky Fried Movie), Top Secret! lampoons practically every film genre. Specifically, however, this is a hybrid of an “Elvis” movie and a World War II “underground resistance” thriller. In his film debut, Val Kilmer plays Nick Rivers, a Presley-like American rock idol sent behind the Iron Curtain on a goodwill tour. Before long, he is involved in a complex espionage scheme thanks to beautiful Lucy Gutteridge, the daughter of a scientist (Michael Gough) held captive by the Communists. Also essential to the action is flamboyant resistance leader Christopher Villiers, who behaves like Victor Mature in Betrayed (1954) and talks like James Mason. Adhering to Z-A-Z’s cheerful disregard for people, places and events, the East Germans are depicted as Nazis, while the Underground is comprised of Frenchmen. The plot is mainly an excuse for the Z-A-Z team’s fondness for joke-a-minute lampoonery, skewering cinematic targets ranging from The Blue Lagoon (1980) to The Wizard of Oz (1939). As in Z-A-Z’s other efforts, Top Secret! scores its biggest yocks when invoking cliches that we never realized were cliches-and falls on its face whenever attempting a too-obvious gag (the biggest clinker: that pigeon statue in the park). Everyone has his or her favorite bits in this film: our faves include the resistance fighter named Deja Vu (”Haven’t we met somewhere before?”), Kilmer’s horrible nightmare while being tortured (he arrives too late to take final exams), the army-booted cow, the sensitive Pinto, and the East German National Anthem, sung to the tune of the Shorewood (Wisconsin) High School marching song. But let’s say no more: comedy of this nature is designed to be seen, not written or read about.

A mother and daughter flee to a strange abandoned town to seek out answers to the daughter’s nightly psychological turmoil in Brotherhood of the Wolf director Christophe Gans’ adaptation of the popular survival horror video game. Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) is a very sick child, yet rather than seeing her child suffer the cruel indignities of the medical profession, Rose (Radha Mitchell) ignores her husband’s (Sean Bean) pleas and absconds with her ailing daughter to the fog-enshrouded town of Silent Hill. A town drenched in darkness and inhabited by a strange collection of menacing specters, Silent Hill seemingly swallows young Sharon whole upon arrival. Determined to get her daughter back at any cost, Rose sets out to explore the mysterious Silent Hill, only to discover an evil so powerful that it possesses the ability to transform anything it wishes. With the deeply disturbing history of the town slowly coming into focus through the dense fog, Rose soon realizes that both she and her daughter may be little more than simple pawns in a much larger, and seemingly supernatural, game.

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch’s surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage’s Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern’s Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta’s thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery.

Self-centered, avaricious Californian Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) is informed that his long-estranged father has died. Expecting at least a portion of the elder Babbitt’s $3 million estate, Charlie learns that all he’s inherited is his dad’s prize roses and a 1949 Buick Roadmaster. Discovering that the $3 million is being held in trust for an unidentified party, Charlie heads to his home town of Cincinnati to ascertain who that party is. It turns out that the beneficiary is Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman), the autistic-savant older brother that Charlie never knew he had. Able to memorize reams of trivia and add, subtract, multiply, and divide without a second’s hesitation, Raymond is otherwise incapable of functioning as a normal human being. Aghast that Raymond is to receive his father’s entire legacy, Charlie tries to cut a deal with Raymond’s guardian. When this fails, Charlie “borrows” Raymond from the institution where he lives, hoping to use his brother as leverage to claim half the fortune. During their subsequent cross-country odyssey, Charlie is forced to accommodate Raymond’s various autistic idiosyncracies, not the least of which is his insistence on adhering to a rigid daily schedule: he must, for example, watch People’s Court and Jeopardy every day at the same time, no matter what. On hitting Las Vegas, Charlie hopes to harness Raymond’s finely-honed mathematical skills to win big at the gaming tables; but this exploitation of his brother’s affliction compels Charlie to reassess his own values, or lack thereof. A longtime pet project of star Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man was turned down by several high-profile directors before Barry Levinson took on the challenge of bringing Ronald Bass’ screenplay to fruition (Levinson also appears in the film as a psychiatrist). All three men won Oscars, and the movie won Best Picture.