Bovie Movie

The DVD of Goodfellas has got to be one of the very first DVDs ever released by Warner Brothers because they make a critical error in the release. While many films offer widescreen on one side and full screen on the other, this film offers only one version — a widescreen film broken into two sides. Viewers have to flip the DVD over to watch the second half of the film; 19 chapters are on side A and the last 15 chapters are on side B. Goodfellas is a classic film, and the DVD offers a great video transfer and excellent Dolby Digital 5:1 Surround, but no DVD fan will accept the two-sided format. In terms of extras, there are very few, limited only to theatrical trailers, production notes, and cast bios. For many, this Martin Scorsese classic is a must-have for any collection, but those who can wait for a future, corrected release of this film are better off watching the widescreen VHS tape. Language option in English and French and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.

As visually stylish as it is graphically violent, this thriller directed by Luc Besson concerns Mathilda (Natalie Portman), a 12-year-old girl living in New York City who has been exposed to the sordid side of life from an early age: her family lives in a slum and her abusive father works for drug dealers, cutting and storing dope. Mathilda doesn’t much care for her parents, but she has a close bond with her four-year-old brother. One day, she returns from running an errand to discover that most of her family, including her brother, have been killed in a raid by corrupt DEA agents, led by the psychotic Stansfield (Gary Oldman). Mathilda takes refuge in the apartment of her secretive neighbor, Leon (Jean Reno), who takes her in with a certain reluctance. She discovers that Leon is a professional assassin, working for Tony (Danny Aiello), a mob kingpin based in Little Italy. Wanting to avenge the death of her brother, Mathilda makes a deal with Leon to become his protégée in exchange for work as a domestic servant, hoping to learn the hitman’s trade and take out the men who took her brother’s life. However, an affection develops between Leon and Mathilda that changes his outlook on his life and career. Besson’s first American film boasted a strong performance from Jean Reno, a striking debut by Natalie Portman, and a love-it-or-hate-it, over-the-top turn by Gary Oldman. Léon was originally released in the U.S. in 1994 as The Professional, with 26 minutes cut in response to audience preview tests. Those 26 minutes were restored in the director’s preferred cut, released in 1996 in France as Léon: Version Intégrale and in the U.S. on DVD as Léon: The Professional in 2000.

After a break of more than 15 years, director Francis Ford Coppola and writer Mario Puzo returned to the well for this third and final story of the fictional Corleone crime family. Two decades have passed, and crime kingpin Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), now divorced from his wife Kay (Diane Keaton), has nearly succeeded in keeping his promise that his family would one day be “completely legitimate.” A philanthropist devoted to public service, Michael is in the news as the recipient of a special award from the Pope for his good works, a controversial move given his checkered past. Determined to buy redemption, Michael and his lawyer B.J. (George Hamilton) are working on a complicated but legal deal to bail the Vatican out of looming financial troubles that will ultimately reap billions and put Michael on the world stage as a major financial player. However, trouble looms in several forms: The press is hostile to his intentions. Michael is in failing health and suffers a mild diabetic stroke. Stylish mob underling Joey Zaza (Joe Mantegna) is muscling into the Corleone turf. “The Commission” of Mafia families, represented by patriarch Altobello (Eli Wallach) doesn’t want to let their cash cow Corleone out of the Mafia, though he has made a generous financial offer in exchange for his release from la cosa nostra. And then there’s Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), the illegitimate and equally temperamental son of Michael’s long-dead brother Sonny. Vincent desperately wants in to the family (both literally and figuratively), and at the urging of his sister Connie (Talia Shire), Michael welcomes the young man and allows him to adopt the Corleone name. However, a flirtatious attraction between Vincent and his cousin, Michael’s na?ve daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) develops, and threatens to develop into a full-fledged romance and undo the godfather’s future plans.

Popularly viewed as one of the best American films ever made, the multi-generational crime saga The Godfather is a touchstone of cinema: one of the most widely imitated, quoted, and lampooned movies of all time. Marlon Brando and Al Pacino star as Vito Corleone and his youngest son, Michael, respectively. It is the late 1940s in New York and Corleone is, in the parlance of organized crime, a “godfather” or “don,” the head of a Mafia family. Michael, a free thinker who defied his father by enlisting in the Marines to fight in World War II, has returned a captain and a war hero. Having long ago rejected the family business, Michael shows up at the wedding of his sister, Connie (Talia Shire), with his non-Italian girlfriend, Kay (Diane Keaton), who learns for the first time about the family “business.” A few months later at Christmas time, the don barely survives being shot by gunmen in the employ of a drug-trafficking rival whose request for aid from the Corleones’ political connections was rejected. After saving his father from a second assassination attempt, Michael persuades his hotheaded eldest brother, Sonny (James Caan), and family advisors Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) and Sal Tessio (Abe Vigoda) that he should be the one to exact revenge on the men responsible.

After murdering a corrupt police captain and the drug trafficker, Michael hides out in Sicily while a gang war erupts at home. Falling in love with a local girl, Michael marries her, but she is later slain by Corleone enemies in an attempt on Michael’s life. Sonny is also butchered, having been betrayed by Connie’s husband. As Michael returns home and convinces Kay to marry him, his father recovers and makes peace with his rivals, realizing that another powerful don was pulling the strings behind the narcotics endeavor that began the gang warfare. Once Michael has been groomed as the new don, he leads the family to a new era of prosperity, then launches a campaign of murderous revenge against those who once tried to wipe out the Corleones, consolidating his family’s power and completing his own moral downfall. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards and winning for Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Godfather was followed by a pair of sequels.

A surreal crime drama told as only Jim Jarmusch could, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai stars Forest Whitaker as Ghost Dog, a hit man living in an unidentified but run-down city in what license plates call “The Industrialized State.” Known for his gift of being able to come and go without people noticing him, Ghost Dog is a self-taught samurai who is obsessed with order and his strict personal moral code, drawn from the philosophies of the Japanese warriors. As every samurai needs a leader to whom he swears loyalty, Ghost Dog has devoted himself the service of Louie (John Tormey), a low-level crime boss who once saved his life. When Louie’s superiors decide he must be executed, Ghost Dog leaps into action, methodically wiping out his many enemies. Along with a dizzying series of stylized shoot-outs, Ghost Dog also features carrier pigeons, characters who read Rashomon, a French-speaking ice cream man, and a score by RZA from the top-selling hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, who have their own well-documented obsession with Asian culture. Ghost Dog was screened in competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Richard Roundtree cuts a startlingly new and powerful heroic figure as John Shaft, “the cat who won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about” in Gordon Parks’ seminal action film, Shaft. John Shaft is a black private eye with a small office near Times Square. On his way there one day, he gets pumped for information by Lt. Victor Androzzi (Charles Cioffi), a friend of his on the police force, about something big going down in Harlem involving black crime kingpin Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn). Shaft can’t help him and leaves, only to just miss being waylaid by two of Bumpy’s strong-arm men at his office, one of whom ends up dead on the pavement eight floors or so below. Squeezed by the cops, who are holding a potential manslaughter arrest over his head, Shaft contacts Bumpy, who reveals that his teenage daughter, whom he’s always kept away from his business, has been kidnapped. There’s been no ransom demand and no clue as to who did it, and he wants Shaft to find the culprits, insisting that he start with a group of Harlem-based black militants led by Shaft’s onetime friend Ben Buford (Christopher St. John). No sooner does he find Buford, holed up in a decaying part of Harlem, however, than his friend’s comrades are mowed down by submachine gun fire, and Shaft and Buford barely escape. With Shaft angry and out for blood, everyone is forced to come clean — Bumpy knows that it’s the Mafia that kidnapped his daughter, as they want in on the Harlem drug trade that he controls; they’re holding her somewhere else outside of Harlem, where his men are no good to him, which is why he wanted Shaft to hook up with Buford. Androzzi tells Shaft that a dozen Mob trigger men from out of town have been spotted in Greenwich Village. He doesn’t know why they’re there, but he does know that if fighting breaks out between Bumpy’s men and the Mafia, it’s going to look like a race war, and the whole city could erupt. Shaft doesn’t like the way he’s been manipulated, but he sees Androzzi’s point — he links the trigger men to the kidnapping and finds the girl, but loses her again, getting shot in the process. Even though he’s wounded, Shaft heads for a final confrontation with the kidnappers, supported by Ben’s friends in an armed assault on the building where they’re holed up.

Adapted from a novel by John Fante, Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust stars Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, a young writer who comes to Los Angeles during the Great Depression in order to write a novel. As the film opens, he is down to his last nickel and decides to spend it on coffee in a diner. He is served by Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican beauty he is instantly attracted to even though he treats her horribly during their first interaction. Soon the pair is involved in a relationship that finds them sparring with each other at first, but slowly learning to trust each other. Bandini meets the acquaintance of a desperate woman who sees him as the most desirable man in the world. Eventually Arturo and Camilla get away from the city and their love deepens as he attempts to finish his novel. Donald Sutherland co-stars as a seedy but helpful and loyal neighbor.

Having created an empire on girly shows and skin flicks, Jim Mitchell and Artie Mitchell achieved mainstream success with Behind the Green Door (1972), one of only a handful of hardcore porn movies to do so. Brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen star in the film about the life and troubled times of porn’s dynamic duo. Opening with the 1991 fratricidal murder of Artie (Sheen) at the hands of Jim (Estevez, who also directs), the film flashes back to their father lecturing them on the importance of family. In 1967, while studying film at San Francisco State, Jim’s professor (Peter Bogdanovich) upbraids him for including numerous leering shots of half-naked women in his student works. Soon Jim along with his brother, fresh out of the Army, starts a smut studio in an old warehouse. Their business takes off, and in no time they are being harassed by the police for obscenity. Along the way, the two hire former Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers, get married, and snort half of the cocaine in Bolivia. After the fleeting success of Green Door, their lives spiral into a drug-addled hell. Jim eventually bottoms out, but Artie, wracked by a profound inferiority complex, slides into cocaine dementia and begins to threaten Jim’s family. Things eventually boil over, culminating in that bloody night in 1991. This film was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.

Herbert Ross directed this Nora Ephron-scripted buddy comedy starring Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, and Joan Cusack. Steve Martin plays Vinnie Antonelli, a street smart mobster who agrees to turn state’s evidence and is forced to move to Fryburg, California as part of the witness relocation program. Rick Moranis plays the nebbish FBI agent Barney Coopersmith, who is assigned to help Vinnie adjust to small town life. Instead, Vinnie helps Barney come out of his shell, much to the consternation of divorced mother and relentless district attorney Hannah Stubbs (Joan Cusack).