Bovie Movie

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.

An intense film about time travel, this sci-fi entry was directed by Terry Gilliam, a member of the comedy troupe Monty Python. The film stars Bruce Willis as James Cole, a prisoner of the state in the year 2035 who can earn parole if he agrees to travel back in time and thwart a devastating plague. The virus has wiped out most of the Earth’s population and the remainder live underground because the air is poisonous. Returning to the year 1990, six years before the start of the plague, Cole is soon imprisoned in a psychiatric facility because his warnings sound like mad ravings. There he meets a scientist named Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the mad son of an eminent virologist (Christopher Plummer). Cole is returned by the authorities to the year 2035, and finally ends up at his intended destination in 1996. He kidnaps Dr. Railly in order to enlist her help in his quest. Cole discovers graffiti by an apparent animal rights group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, but as he delves into the mystery, he hears voices, loses his bearings, and doubts his own sanity. He must figure out if Goines, who seems to be a raving lunatic, holds the key to the puzzle.

A man sets out to steal a lost fortune in order to save it in this adventure drama from producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage) is an archeologist who is from the eighth generation of a family who has shared an unusual quest. As Gates-family legend has it, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin hid a massive cache of gold during the waning days of the Revolutionary War and left clues as to its whereabouts in the original drafts of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. With no firm proof that it actually exists, Gates sets out to crack the code that will lead him to the fortune, which, as a member of the Gates clan, he is sworn to protect from wrongdoers. National Treasure also features Sean Bean, Harvey Keitel, Justin Bartha, and Jon Voight.

John Carpenter’s well-remembered thriller gets an update in this remake from director Rupert Wainwright. Nick Castle (Tom Welling) is a charter-boat captain in the small coastal town of Antonio Bay. Castle’s ancestors helped to found Antonio Bay, but while the city’s mayor (Kenneth Welsh) and the head of the local historical society (Sara Botsford) are spearheading an effort to raise money for a statue that would honor the city fathers, Castle is more interested in seeing the town’s rickety docks and aging sea wall replaced. However, Castle has been too distracted with personal matters to wage a campaign of his own — he’s been having an affair with Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair), a single mom who runs a combination radio station and lighthouse, while his former flame Elizabeth Williams (Maggie Grace) has returned to town to mend fences with her mother and finds herself renewing her romance with Castle. One night, Castle and his first mate, Brett Spooner (DeRay Davis), discover an antique ship’s bag filled with treasure, not knowing the salvage came from a ship that sank over a hundred years before. As it happens, there’s a terrible secret behind the ship’s disastrous fate, and now that Castle and Davis have unwittingly awakened the watery grave, the souls of the ship’s crew and passengers have come back to claim their revenge in the form of a thick and impenetrable fog. The remake of The Fog proved to be one of the last projects for producer Debra Hill, who also worked on the original film; Hill was fighting cancer when work began on the film, and she died shortly before filming commenced.

A thin thread of electronic data may be the only thing that can save a women and her family in this thriller. Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger) is a biology teacher who is kidnapped by Ethan (Jason Statham), a vicious criminal who has threatened to murder her husband and son if he doesn’t get what he wants. Ethan destroys the only working telephone in the cabin where she’s held, but Jessica manages to put enough of the pieces together to send out a call that’s picked up by Ryan (Chris Evans), a college student, on his cellular phone. Jessica manages to convince Ryan of the gravity of her situation, but she has no idea of where she’s being held, leaving his cell phone as the only link to her whereabouts — and his batteries are starting to wear out. Cellular was scripted by Larry Cohen, the exploitation film auteur who enjoyed a major comeback with his script for another telephone-based story, Phone Booth.

Returning to his action feature terrain after a short hiatus, Steven Seagal plays Orin Boyd, a maverick Detroit detective with an unconventional way of taking down foes. After a failed intervention in a terrorist kidnapping case that humiliates his superiors, Boyd — who is hailed as a top-drawer investigator but frowned upon for his tactics — is forced to do time in a tough downtown precinct. After discovering the covert drug operation performed by several corrupt cops at his new assignment, he decides to break the rules yet again. While the cops are planning a massive heroin deal with big-time gangster Latrell Walker (DMX), Boyd finds that Latrell is not who he once was, and Boyd persuades him to assist in bringing an end to the amoral police influence that helped ruin him. Exit Wounds is the second film from cinematographer-turned-director Andrzej Bartkowiak (Romeo Must Die) and also features Tom Arnold, Isaiah Washington, and Jill Hennessy.