Bovie Movie

Jack Nicholson becomes a werewolf in this bizarre comedy-horror film directed by Mike Nichols. Nicholson plays Will Randall, a book editor with a testosterone deficit who has just been sacked at his publishing firm by a new boss, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer). A colleague, Stewart Swinton (James Spader), whom Randall thought was his friend, betrays him. Randall’s personality changes after he hits a wolf with his car and gets bitten by the creature. He immediately feels more powerful, has heightened hearing and vision, and sets about to right the wrongs in his life. He visits Alden at the publisher’s mansion to protest his dismissal, and he is asked to leave — but Alden’s daughter Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer) asks him to stay for lunch. Laura loves to defy her father. Will tells her about the wolf bite, and she becomes attracted to him. But because werewolves usually kill the ones they love, Laura is in danger. Will reasserts his place in the publishing world, supported by his loyal secretary Mary (Eileen Atkins), and his relationship with Laura deepens.

Writer/director Nicole Kassell makes her feature film debut with the drama The Woodsman. Co-written by Steven Fechter, the original script won first place at the Slamdance Screenplay Competition in 2001. Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a child molester who gets out of prison after serving a 12-year sentence. He returns to his old town and tries to start over by working at a woodyard. Fortunately, his brother-in-law (Benjamin Bratt) helps him get a place to live. He even strikes up a relationship with local gal Vickie (Bacon’s real-life wife, Kyra Sedgwick). However, Walter still struggles with his past and the suspicions of co-worker Mary-Kay (Eve) and Detective Lucas (Mos Def). The Woodsman premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 as part of the dramatic competition.

Tom Jones director Tony Richardson might seem a curious choice to direct the contemporary western The Border, but he does his best to emulate Sam Peckinpah. Jack Nicholson stars as an El Paso border guard, saddled with avaricious wife Valerie Perrine. Hoping to stifle her nagging about money matters, Nicholson begins accepting payoffs to allow Mexican aliens to cross the border without interference. This leads to a relationship with a young Mexican mother Elpidia Carillo. Harvey Keitel and Warren Oates lend strong support to this atmospheric tale.

Old Smokey develops a bad temper in this volcanic disaster spectacle. Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a volcano expert whose interest became more than academic after he lost the woman he loved in a volcanic emergency. When he is sent to investigate unusual seismic activity in the quiet Pacific Northwest community of Dante’s Peak, he discovers people boiled to death in the local hot spring and plant and animal life dying or displaying unusual illnesses near the city’s supposedly dormant volcano. Harry becomes convinced that a major volcanic catastrophe is in the cards. Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton), the town’s mayor, is a single mother who also runs the local cafe, and now that Dante’s Peak has been named one of the most desirable small towns in America, tourists have been flocking to the diner and other local businesses. While concerned with the safety of her community, Rachel takes a cynical view of Harry’s warnings about the volcano; she has no desire to alarm either the town’s residents or the wealthy visitors lining the city’s pockets. Nevertheless, Harry tries to convince Rachel of the potential danger, as they begin to develop feelings for each other that are not strictly professional. The summer of 1997 was a big season for killer volcanoes at the movies, as Dante’s Peak and Volcano opened within a few months of each other.

A hard-nosed star reporter learns who her real friends are — and gets in way over her head — investigating a murder in this twisty thriller. Perfect Stranger stars Halle Berry as Rowena, a prominent New York journalist who writes using a pseudonym to entrap some of the tri-state area’s most corrupt individuals, using a network of informants, acquaintances, and digital gadgets. When her latest expos? is buried at the behest of her paper’s corporate backers, she walks off the job and into a personal quagmire. Her childhood friend Grace (Nicki Aycox) is murdered when she threatens to reveal she’s been sleeping with married advertising mogul Harrison Hill (Bruce Wills). With the help of her loyal techie friend Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), she goes undercover — and online — to find the smoking gun that will indict Hill. But Rowena soon finds herself caught in a web of manipulation, deceit, and false truths.

A middle-aged man finds love in the last place he was looking — his psychiatrist’s waiting room — in this dark comedy drama. Alex (William H. Macy) is a man in his mid-forties who is having something of a midlife crisis; he’s unhappy with his life; his marriage to Martha (Tracey Ullman) is going through a rough patch; he’s worried about his six-year-old son, on whom he dotes; and he wishes he hadn’t bucked under to the wishes of his domineering father Michael (Donald Sutherland) and started working in the family business. Making things even more problematic is the family’s line of work — Alex is a killer-for-hire. Alex feels as if he’s about to unravel from stress when he begins seeing Josh (John Ritter), a psychiatrist. One day, while waiting for his session with Josh, Alex meets Sarah (Neve Campbell), a sweet, pretty, but severely neurotic young woman with an omnivorous sexual appetite. Alex and Sarah take an immediate liking to one another, and Alex begins to pursue a romance with her, though he knows an affair could create more problems than it solves, especially after Michael informs Alex that Josh is his next target. Panic marked the feature debut for writer/director Henry Bromell, who previously distinguished himself as a novelist and a television producer. The supporting cast includes Barbara Bain as Alex’s mother, who helped get her husband started in the business.

A process server makes an unusual alliance with a beautiful but devious woman in this comedy. Joe Tyler (Matthew Perry) is a former attorney whose career went bust when he picked up some clients who turned out to be associated with the Mafia. These days, Joe makes his living as a process server, who presents people with legal papers — papers they would usually prefer not to get. One of Joe’s fellow servers, Tony (Vincent Pastore), is trying to weasel him out of his job, and has starting tipping off Joe’s targets before he can deliver their papers in order to get Joe in dutch with their boss, Ray (Cedric the Entertainer). Joe, however, is able to persuade Ray to give him another chance with a high-profile client, Gordon (Bruce Campbell), a wealthy Texas cattle baron who has decided to divorce his wife and business partner, Sara (Elizabeth Hurley), in order to marry another woman, Kate (Amy Adams). When Joe presents Sara with the divorce papers, she is shocked by the news, which would cost her her half of the Gordon fortune. After Joe gets carjacked and finds herself on the same bus with Sara, she makes him a deal: If he’s willing to take back the papers, say he never presented them, and serve a divorce petition to Gordon first, she’ll pay Joe an even million dollars. Serving Sara became the focus of some unexpected controversy during its production — first when Matthew Perry took a brief leave from the production to enter a rehabilitation clinic to fight an addiction to painkillers, and later when Elizabeth Hurley’s former boyfriend, Steve Bing, accused Perry of being the father of Hurley’s child (a charge both Hurley and Perry denied, and was proven false by blood tests).

Two fathers get a crash course in caring for kids other than their own in this family-friendly comedy. Charlie Hinton (Eddie Murphy) is an advertising executive whose job monopolizes his time, making it difficult for him to stay in touch with his young son, Ben (Khamani Griffin). However, after Charlie and his partner, Phil (Jeff Garlin), are given their pink slips in the wake of a disastrous campaign for a new breakfast cereal, Charlie’s wife, Kim (Regina King), goes back to work, and with the family budget tighter than before, Charlie becomes a stay-at-home dad. After pulling Ben out of an expensive and exclusive daycare center run by the humorless Gwyneth Harridan (Anjelica Huston), Charlie comes up with a brainstorm — since he and Phil watch their own children every day, how much harder could it be to watch a few more kids and open their own day care center? Charlie and Phil discover there’s much more to running a daycare center than they ever imagined, but after a very rough start, with the help of likable slacker Marvin (Steve Zahn) their new business becomes a success — so much so that Harridan finds herself losing customers to the upstart fathers, and she starts searching for a way to shut them down.

Writer/director Ernie Barbarash helms this prequel to the sci-fi thriller Cube, with events that unfold some time prior to those in first picture. Here, another group of prisoners navigate the treacherous confines of their futuristic trappings. Each step is potentially the last as the deadly last traps hidden in the sparse rooms find the numbers of the unwilling prisoners quickly thinning. Only when they can figure out the mysteries of their constantly changing prison will the surviving inmates have any hope for escape, and even then there is no guarantee of freedom — much less survival. As the cube workers who monitor the prisoners progress bear witness to their increasingly grim bid for survival, a sudden sting of remorse finds one of the employees empathizing with the victims and plotting to assist them in their unlikely escape.

Steve Martin wrote the screenplay and served as co-producer for this screen adaptation of his short novel, which takes a witty but bittersweet look at a young woman and the two men involved with her. Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) is an aspiring artist in her mid-twenties who, after graduating from college, moved to Los Angeles, where she works at the glove counter of an upscale department store. Mirabelle’s job is simple and not demanding, but it doesn’t pay especially well, and she finds herself struggling to get out from under a growing mountain of debt from student loans and credit cards. One night, while doing her laundry, Mirabelle meets Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a scruffy but likable would-be musician who makes ends meet selling guitar amps. While Jeremy is obviously infatuated with Mirabelle, she isn’t sure how she feels about him, especially after she meets Ray Porter (Steve Martin), a man in his fifties whom she meets at the store. Ray is independently wealthy, intelligent, and charming, and after asking her out on a date he sweeps her off her feet. However, while Mirabelle quickly falls for Ray and he’s generous to a fault with her, he refuses to commit exclusively to her and suggests they should both see other people, a prospect that no longer holds much appeal for her. Shopgirl received its world premiere at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.