Bovie Movie

Mimi Leder (The Peacemaker) directed this science-fiction disaster drama about the possible extinction of human life after a comet is discovered headed toward Earth with the collision only one year away. Ambitious MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) stumbles onto the story, prompting a White House press conference. United States President Beck (Morgan Freeman) announces the government’s solution: a team of astronauts will travel to the comet and destroy it. The team leader aboard the spaceship Messiah is Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall), who was once the last man to walk on the moon. However, the mission fails, splitting off a chunk of the comet, now due to land in the Atlantic with the impact sending a 350-foot tidal wave flooding 650 miles inland, destroying New York and other cities. The larger part of the comet, hitting in Canada, will trigger an E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event), not unlike a “nuclear winter” as dust clouds block out the sun and bring life to an end. President Beck reveals Plan B: a cavernous underground retreat constructed to hold one million Americans, with most to be selected through a national lottery. Since teenage amateur astronomer Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) discovered the comet, his family gets a pass to enter the cave, but his girlfriend Sarah (Leelee Sobieski) and her parents will be left behind. Meanwhile, still in space, Spurgeon Tanner devises a plan for a kamikaze-styled operation that could possibly save the Earth. Special visual effects by Scott Farrar and Industrial Light & Magic.

A man with no memory struggles to make sense of the troubling details that are still stuck in his mind in this psychological thriller. Frank (Val Kilmer) wakes up in a small town in the New Mexico desert with a severe head wound and most of his memory wiped away. However, Frank is somehow convinced that someone is planning to assassinate the President of the United States, and that Chloe (Neve Campbell), the woman who is claiming to be his girlfriend, is some sort of imposter. When Frank learns that the president is indeed passing through town that day, he tries to warn Sheriff Kolb (Sam Shepard) that something sinister if afoot; as it happens, Kolb believes him, though he’s more than a bit busy dealing with a hard-fought election campaign against former Deputy Cash (Noble Willingham). Blind Horizon was screened at the 2004 South by Southwest Film Festival.

A turning point in 20th century war history is the focus of this fact-based account of the 1942-1943 battle of Stalingrad, in which the Germans were finally defeated by Russian influence — one of the bloodiest battles in World War II history. The film stars Jude Law as Vassili, a marksman from the Urals who is transported to Stalingrad in 1942, and a master German sniper, Major Koenig (Ed Harris). Koenig, an expert German sniper, is determined to eliminate his formidable opponent by any means necessary; meanwhile, Vassili has joined forces with Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a young Russian political adversary, who is impressed by Vassili’s skills and raises his profile in the Soviet Union. Both Vassili and Danilov become involved with Tanya (Rachel Weisz), whose Jewish parents have been captured by the Germans and have forced her to take up with the men on a sniper expedition. Koenig and Vassili begin to develop traps for each other, until fate inevitably must bring the two sharpshooters together. This large-scale production, financed mostly by Teuton companies, also features Bob Hoskins as Nikita Krushchev and Ron Perlman as an aging Russian sniper.

Set amidst the controversy of the handover of the Panama Canal from Panama to America in late 1999, this espionage thriller follows seductive British spy Andrew Osnard (Pierce Brosnan), who has found himself recently banished to Panama. When Osnard stumbles into a tailor shop, he meets Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a garrulous sort with an unmatched penchant for “fluence” — that is, fabricating wild tales with real-life details. Osnard threatens to expose his shady past, until Pendel agrees to provide him with information about the political situation in Panama. Pendel’s wife Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis) tries to remain unscathed by her husband’s constant follies, which escalate and put him in the midst of international discord, while also threatening the shaky relationship between himself and Osnard, who cannot escape each other’s grasp. Based on John le Carr?’s popular 1996 novel, the film also features Catherine McCormack, David Hayman, and young Daniel Radcliffe, who completed this film before his starring role in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, released later in the year.

Tony Curtis stars as The Great Leslie, a hero among heroes whose purity of heart is manifested by his spotlessly white wardrobe. Leslie’s great rival, played by Jack Lemmon, is Professor Fate, a scowling, mustachioed, top-hatted, black-garbed villain. Long envious of Leslie’s record-setting accomplishments with airships and sea craft, Professor Fate schemes to win a 22,000-mile auto race from New York City to Paris by whatever insidious means possible. The problem is that Fate is his own worst enemy: each of his plans to remove Leslie from the running (and from the face of the earth) backfires. Leslie’s own cross to bear is suffragette Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood), who also hopes to win the contest and thus strike a blow for feminism. The race takes all three contestants to the Wild West, the frozen wastes of Alaska, and, in the longest sequence, the mythical European kingdom of Carpania. This last-named country is the setting for a wild Prisoner of Zenda spoof involving Professor Fate and his look-alike, the foppish Carpanian king. When Leslie and Fate approach the finish line at the Eiffel Tower, Leslie deliberately loses to prove his love for Maggie. Professor Fate cannot stand winning under these circumstances, thus he demands that he and Leslie race back to New York. The supporting cast includes Peter Falk as Fate’s long-suffering flunkey Max, Keenan Wynn as Leslie’s faithful general factotum, Dorothy Provine as a brassy saloon singer, Larry Storch as ill-tempered bandit Texas Jack, and Ross Martin as Baron Von Stuppe. The film also yielded a hit song, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s The Sweetheart Tree. The Great Race was dedicated to “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy”.

Three brothers who would argue that crime does pay have a hard time getting their fair share of the proceeds in this witty action thriller from Australia. Dale Twentyman (Guy Pearce) and his brothers, Mal (Damien Richardson) and Shane (Joel Edgerton), are serving time together in prison for robbery. Dale is the brains and the cool head of the group, Mal is the eager-to-please nice guy, and Shane is something of a loose cannon. Dale and his siblings are eager to get out of jail, and their lawyer, Frank Malone (Robert Taylor), has pulled a deal that could pare some time off their sentences, though the arrangement is strictly off the books. Mick Kelly (Vince Colosimo) and Jack O’Riordan (Paul Sonkkila) are a pair of crooked police detectives who have arranged with Malone to give the Twentyman brothers day passes from jail in order to pull bank robberies, with the siblings’ share held in escrow until they’re released. Dale thinks something a bit off in this operation, and his suspicions are confirmed when Malone tells the brothers after they’re granted their early release that they won’t get their money until they pull one last job — an ambitious robbery at a Melbourne race track on the day of the nation’s biggest horse race. Dale is convinced he smells a rat — especially since he has good reason to suspect that Malone is having an affair with his wife, Carol (Rachel Griffiths). The Hard Word marked the directorial debut for writer/director Scott Roberts.

Your friendly neighborhood web-slinger is back, only this time his sunny outlook has become partially overcast in the third chapter of director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man saga. Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and James Franco return to reprise their roles from the previous two installments, with Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, and Bryce Dallas Howard making their first appearances in the series as Flint Marko (aka Sandman), Eddie Brock (aka Venom), and Gwen Stacy, respectively. Peter Parker (Maguire) has finally leaned to walk the middle ground between being the superhero that his city needs, and the man that Mary Jane (Dunst) loves. All is well in New York City until one night, as Peter and M.J. set gazing at the stars, a falling comet streams across the sky and crashes into the ground close by. But this isn’t any ordinary shooting star, and upon impact the mysterious space rock is split open to reveal a shape-shifting symbiote with the power to overtake anything that it comes into contact with. Later, as Harry Osborn acquires his late father’s flying board, engineers a powerful new Goblin outfit, and takes to the sky to avenge dad’s death, the mysterious space sludge infects both Peter’s Spider Man suit and ambitious street photographer Eddie Brock (Grace). His strange new suit giving him a newfound sense of power as it gradually overpowers his personality, Peter discovers that escaped convict Flint Marko was in fact the man responsible for the death of Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). Unfortunately for Peter, Marko has recently acquired the power to morph at will and quickly completes his transformation into the dreaded Sandman. As the Sandman gives in to his darkest criminal instincts and the slithering space symbiote transforms Eddie Brock into the nightmarish fanged villain known as Venom, the citizens of New York City must once again call on Spider Man to fend off destructive forces that are far too powerful for the likes of mortal man.

Douglas McGrath’s Infamous represents the second major biopic about the avant-garde belletrist Truman Capote to be released within a year. It thus tells roughly the same story as Bennett Miller’s earlier Capote, recounting the events that belied the writer’s six-year authorship of the seminal “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. The story opens with Capote (Toby Jones) visiting the site of the 1959 Clutter family homicide, on a Kansas research trip, accompanied by his close friend and colleague, author Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock). As Capote settles into the community, McGrath uses the preponderance of screen time to explore the emotional tapestry of Capote’s increasingly risky emotional attachment to one of the two murderers, Perry Edward Smith (Daniel Craig), with whom he senses more than a few common bonds. McGrath weaves a decidedly bittersweet tale, contrasting the optimism and devil-may-care, “conquer all” attitude of Capote in his early years with a seemingly endless string of poor choices in the writer’s later years, from addictions to drink and pills, to a failure to maintain healthy output as a writer, to poorly chosen romantic and sexual entanglements. Most significantly, however, McGrath reveals how the relationship with Smith virtually destroyed Capote as an artist and a human being, by inducing him to sell out on all levels to satisfy his lust for accomplishment and notoriety.

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen concocted this stylish screwball comedic amalgam of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks. Tim Robbins stars as Norville Barnes, a dull-wit from Muncie, Indiana who wrangles a job with the big Hudsucker Industries. He has a singular idea for a new children’s toy that he wants to present to corporate executive Sidney J. Mussberger (Paul Newman). As he makes his way up to Mussberger’s office, the company president Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) is on his way down — through the window of the forty-fourth floor boardroom! Hudsucker’s death sets off a panic that Mussberger sees as an opportunity for taking over the company — by installing a total incompetent in Hudsucker’s place and devaluing the stock. When Barnes stumbles into Mussberger’s office, Mussberger sees his pigeon and appoints Barnes as the new company president. The only problem is that the new product Barnes proposes for the company, the Hula Hoop, turns out to be a tremendous success, and Mussberger has difficulty manipulating his new corporate president.

George Clooney pays homage to one of the icons of American broadcast journalism, Edward R. Murrow, in this fact-based drama, which was Clooney’s second feature film as a director. In 1953, Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn) was one of the best-known newsmen on television as host of both the talk show Person to Person and the pioneering investigate series See It Now. Joseph McCarthy, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, was generating no small amount of controversy in the public and private sectors with his allegations that Communists had risen to positions of power and influence in America, and an Air Force pilot, Milo Radulovich, had been drummed out of the service due to McCarthy’s charges that he was a Communist agent. However, Radulovich had been dismissed without a formal hearing of the charges, and he protested that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. Murrow decided to do a story on Radulovich’s case questioning the legitimacy of his dismissal, which was seen by McCarthy and his supporters as an open challenge to his campaign. McCarthy responded by accusing Murrow of being a Communist, leading to a legendary installment of See It Now in which both Murrow and McCarthy presented their sides of the story, which was seen by many as the first step toward McCarthy’s downfall. Meanwhile, Murrow had to deal with CBS head William Paley (Frank Langella), who was supportive of Murrow but extremely wary of his controversial positions, while Murrow was also trying to support fellow newsman Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), battling charges against his own political views, and working alongside Fred Friendly (George Clooney), the daring head of CBS News. Good Night, and Good Luck also stars Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, and Robert John Burke; the film won Best Film honors after its world premiere at the 2005 Venice Film Festival.