Bovie Movie

George Armitage directs this big-screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce. Jack Ryan (Owen Wilson) is an occasional thief who tends to a judge (Morgan Freeman). A woman involved with Ray Ritchie (Gary Sinese), a real estate developer of questionable ethics, seduces Jack. Ritchie and the judge are old enemies, complicating Jack’s moral dilemma when the girls asks Jack to help her double-cross Ritchie. The book was adapted once before with Ryan O’Neal in the Owen Wilson role.

A nanny reveals ways of making children behave that are much more effective than a time-out in this fantasy comedy based on the “Nurse Matilda” books for children by Christianna Brand. Near the dawn of the twentieth century, Mr. Brown (Colin Firth) is a widower who must tend to his business as an undertaker while looking after his brood of seven children. Brown’s offspring are a singularly ill-mannered lot who have managed to drive away 17 different nannies when their father arranges for one Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson) to help out with the children. McPhee is an strange looking woman with a large nose, protruding teeth, and pock-marked skin, but it isn’t long before the kids realize she has magical powers and isn’t afraid to use them to help keep them in line. While the children aren’t taken with McPhee’s insistence on such things as saying “please” and listening to their elders, it becomes clear everyone has bigger things to worry about. Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury) has insisted that if Mr. Brown cannot find a new wife within a month, she’ll take custody of one of the children and cut off Brown’s inheritance, and while Brown and the widow Mrs. Quickly (Celia Imrie) seem fond of one another, his ineptitude in courtship seems to insure he’ll never get her to the altar. But while the Brown Children realize Nanny McPhee is a formidable opponent, she can also be a valuable ally as they learn to make use of her talents by being better children; they also discover that as they behave better, she begins to look less frightening. Emma Thompson, who played the title role in Nanny McPhee, also wrote the film’s screenplay.

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.

In this terrifying thriller Sarah Mia Farrow, a woman recently blinded in a horseback-riding accident, returns to her Uncle’s home after a visit with her ex-lover. She has been living with him and his family while she slowly recovers from the accident and learns to deal with her blindness. Unknown to her, the entire family has been killed by an intruder. The suspense builds as Sarah unknowingly wanders through the house where the bodies of the family lay visible to all but Sarah. In a particularly frightening scene, Sarah takes a nap beside the body of her murdered niece. Awaking, and finding herself alone, Sarah slowly discovers the bodies, one by one, and realizes that her life may be in danger. Before she can leave, she is trapped in the remote farmhouse and must fight for her life when the killer returns. Mia Farrow is excellent as the increasingly desperate woman stalked by the killer who is identified to the audience only by his boots. The film is suspenseful and crisply directed by Richard Fleischer, moving to a frightening conclusion as Sarah tries to make her final escape, not knowing who she can trust.

Screen newcomer Joseph Cross portrays Augusten Burroughs in director Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation of author Burroughs’ best-selling personal memoir of the same name. A child of the 1970s whose alcoholic father Norman (Alec Baldwin) and delusional, unpublished poet mother Deidre (Annette Benning) serve as the dictionary definition of the word “dysfunctional,” Augusten is sent by his mother to live with her eccentric psychiatrist Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) when his disagreeable parents ultimately decide terminate their turbulent marriage. Suddenly thrust into an environment that is as unfamiliar as it is unpredictable, young Augusten forms a curious relationship with the doctor’s two whimsical daughters while learning to adapt and survive under even the most unusual of circumstances.

Two self-styled criminal masterminds find themselves in a turf battle neither much cares about in this underworld story that balances comedy against drama. Alec Baldwin plays Mackin, a career thief who picks his jobs shrewdly and carefully, and prefers to spend his downtime with his collection of rare jazz LP’s and looking after his dog. Pointy (Michael Jai White) is a young upstart gangster trying to develop a taste for refinement and the good life. When Pointy sets up Mackin, Mackin is forced to retaliate, and before long both men and their associates are in the middle of a war neither is especially interested in winning, which begins to escalate in comic fashion. The skirmish eventually attracts the attention of a female cop (Rebecca De Mornay) who’s become interested in Mackin’s method of operation. Thick As Thieves received its world premiere at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.

Skip Woods made his directorial debut with this film, caught in a crossfire between thriller and comedy. After violence is unleashed in the opening sequence, the story settles on former L.A. drug dealer Casey Wells (Thomas Jane), now a Houston architect living with his attractive wife Christine (Paula Marshall). When past partner Nick (Aaron Eckhart) arrives out of the blue on a Thursday, asking for a place to stay for a few days, Casey invites him in but later gets curious about Nick’s briefcase. After he opens it to find a huge helping of heroin, panic sets in, and he flushes it all away — setting the stage for a variety of hoods and hitmen to turn up on Casey’s suburban doorstep. Shown at the 1998 Toronto World Festival.

Filmmaker Larry Clark reunites with Kids screenwriter Harmony Korine, with some additional directorial assistance from cinematographer Ed Lachman, for this look at a group of troubled teens and their guardians living in Southern California. Ken Park takes its name from the skate park where an ancillary character takes his own life in the film’s opening moments, and then proceeds to chronicle the somewhat-interrelated lives of his classmates. The audience is introduced to Tate (James Ransome), a young man living in relative misery with his board-game-playing grandparents. Also tormented by his living situation is Claude (Stephen Jasso), a quiet, shy teen constantly henpecked by his brutish father (Wade Andrew Williams). Meanwhile, the vapid Shawn (James Bullard) occasionally trades verbal spars with his mother, in between leaving the house for sex sessions with his girlfriend’s mom. Finally there is Peaches (Tiffany Limos), living alone with her devoutly religious father as she covertly experiments with her boyfriend (Mike Apaletegui). Though Ken Park played at such festivals as Toronto and Telluride in the fall of 2002, it would languish on the shelf for months and months afterward, as its explicit content made finding a U.S. distributor near-impossible.

After a rather decided departure with his 1999 homage to Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh returns to his usual form for All or Nothing, a melancholy look at the day-to-day lives of a dysfunctional lower-middle class British family called the Bassetts. Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville (familiar to fans of Leigh’s previous films) star as Phil and Penny, a common-law husband and wife who toil their gloomy days away as a cab-driver and grocery-store cashier, respectively. When the couple come to realize the growing emptiness in their relationship, an unexpected emergency within their family brings them closer together and offers the possibility of reigniting the long-extinguished spark in their marriage. Hoping to repeat the Palm D’or win of Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets and Lies, All or Nothing was screened in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

For some folks, the 1960s never really ended, and one woman still cheerfully stuck in the Summer of Love discovers her one-time best friend has left that decade as far behind as humanly possible in this comedy. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Suzette (Goldie Hawn) and Vinnie (Susan Sarandon) were two of Southern California’s most celebrated groupies. Affectionately nicknamed “The Banger Sisters” by Frank Zappa, best friends Suzette and Vinnie partied hearty with practically every rock star of the era who mattered, and kept a collection of Polaroid snapshots documenting their randy exploits. In 2001, Suzette is still her free-spirited self, and after losing her job as a barmaid at an L.A. rock club, she decides to look up Vinnie, whom she hasn’t seen for 20 years. Suzette hits the road for Phoenix, AZ, to pay Vinnie a surprise visit, and en route picks up Harry (Geoffrey Rush), a novelist with writer’s block who can’t drive and hasn’t had sex for a decade. Upon her arrival, Suzette discovers Vinnie isn’t quite the same person who used to chase any man with long hair and an electric guitar. Now going by her given name of Lavinia, she’s a straight laced social worker with a lawyer for a husband, Raymond (Robin Thomas), and two teenage daughters, Hannah (Erika Christensen) and Ginger (Eva Amurri), none of whom know a thing about her wild and crazy past, and have a pretty hard time imagining Lavinia even attending a rock concert. Eva Amurri comes by her role as Susan Sarandon’s daughter naturally enough — Amurri is Sarandon’s daughter in real life.