Bovie Movie

Directed by Michael Mayer and based on The Hours author Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name, A Home at the End of the World chronicles the 1980s reunion of childhood best friends Bobby (Colin Farrell) and Jonathan (Dallas Roberts). Where they were once best pals — and teenage lovers — in the suburbs of Cleveland, Bobby has become a charismatic but go-nowhere heterosexual slacker, and Jonathan is now living as an openly gay man in New York City, hoping to serve as father to his eccentric roommate Clare’s (Robin Wright Penn) child. When Bobby impulsively moves to the city to be closer to his former friend, their bonds are tested sooner than anyone would have thought. Bobby falls for Clare, and in doing so, effectively eliminates what would have been Jonathan’s position in the baby’s life. Jonathan temporarily takes off; when his father dies, and he attends the Arizona funeral, Bobby and Clare unexpectedly turn up with the news that she’s expecting. Despite the still-existent tensions, the trio becomes a family unit among themselves, ultimately buying a house in Woodstock, Upstate New York, where they all move together, challenging traditional notions of family, commitment, love, and devotion.

Steven Spielberg followed Jaws (1975), his first major box-office success, with this epic science fiction adventure about a disparate group of people who attempt to contact alien intelligence. Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is an electrical lineman who, while sent out on emergency repairs, witnesses an unidentified flying object, and even has a “sunburn” from its bright lights to prove it. Neary’s wife and children are at first skeptical, then concerned, and eventually fearful, as Roy refuses to accept a “logical” explanation for what he saw and is prepared to give up his job, his home, and his family to pursue the “truth” about UFOs. Neary’s obsession eventually puts him in contact with others who’ve had close encounters with alien spacecraft, including Jillian (Melinda Dillon), a single mother whose son disappeared during her UFO experience, and Claude Lacombe (celebrated French filmmaker Fran?ois Truffaut), a French researcher who believes that we can use a musical language to communicate with alien visitors. Lacombe’s theory is put to the test when a band of government researchers and underground UFO enthusiasts (including Neary) join for an exchange with alien visitors near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. In 1980, a “Special Edition” was released. While its primary selling point was the addition of scenes inside the alien spaceship, Spielberg claimed that he also cleaned up some choppy editing in the second act.

In this elliptical ensemble piece, which marks the directorial debut of indie bad boy Harmony Korine, the teens of tornado-scarred Xenia, OH, kill cats, tape their boobies, arm-wrestle, bathe, cross-dress, huff glue, avoid perverts, pay to have sex with retarded girls, lift makeshift dumbbells to the strains of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” fight, cuss, shave their eyebrows, undergo cancer treatment, euthanize senior citizens, and pee on passing cars. A hallucinatory barrage of images and scenarios with little in the way of traditional plot, Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm’s-eye view of white-trash suffering. The main characters include Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who sells cat carcasses to a middleman who procures them for use at a local Chinese restaurant; his mother (Linda Manz), who teaches him to tap dance while reminiscing about her dead husband; Tummler (Nick Sutton), a mullet-haired local sex symbol; a midget (Bryant L. Crenshaw); a pair of boy-crazy, bleach-blond sisters named Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Bara); a slut with a lump in her breast (Lara Tosh); a group of drunken louts; and Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), who wanders the town enigmatically in a pair of long pink ears. In between scenes of these characters enacting their bizarre routines, Korine intersperses impressionistic and quasi-documentary scenes with voice-over narration that ranges from incest memoirs to arty dialogue along the lines of “He’s got what it takes to be a legend: He’s got a marvelous persona.” Shot just outside Nashville, TN, Gummo includes costume designs by Korine’s then-girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, who also plays Dot and who previously starred in the Korine-scipted, Larry Clark-directed Kids. Jacob Reynolds would go on to appear in Getting to Know You, though few of the director’s other discoveries have appeared on film since.

The true story of one woman’s effort to keep her family afloat under difficult circumstances comes to the screen in this bittersweet comedy drama. Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore) was a woman of intelligence, talent, and pluck living in the small town of Defiance, OH, in the 1950s. Evelyn was married to Kelly Ryan (Woody Harrelson), a man who gave her ten children but not much else; Kelly had a severe drinking problem, struggled to hold on to a job, and tended to spend his money as soon as he earned it. It was seemingly up to Evelyn to support the family, but with ten kids to look after, taking a job outside the home hardly seemed practical. But the resourceful Evelyn discovered a way to bring some extra money into the household — at a time when a number of companies held contests to find new advertising jingles for their products, Evelyn had a genius for coming up with slogans and winning contests, and for the better part of a decade Evelyn kept food on the table and a roof over her head by dreaming up jingles, tag lines, and ad headlines and winning contests with her handiwork, often selling the merchandise she won to pay the bills. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was based on the best-selling memoir by Terry Ryan, who was the sixth of Evelyn Ryan’s ten kids.

In this multiple Oscar-winning thriller, Jodie Foster stars as Clarice Starling, a top student at the FBI’s training academy whose shrewd analyses of serial killers lands her a special assignment: the FBI is investigating a vicious murderer nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who kills young women and then removes the skin from their bodies. Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) wants Clarice to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant psychiatrist who is also a violent psychopath, serving life behind bars for various acts of murder and cannibalism. Crawford believes that Lecter may have insight into this case and that Starling, as an attractive young woman, may be just the bait to draw him out. Lecter does indeed know something of Buffalo Bill, but his information comes with a price: in exchange for telling what he knows, he wants to be housed in a more comfortable facility. More important, he wants to speak with Clarice about her past. He skillfully digs into her psyche, forcing her to reveal her innermost traumas and putting her in a position of vulnerability when she can least afford to be weak. The film mingles the horrors of criminal acts with the psychological horrors of Lecter’s slow-motion interrogation of Clarice and of her memories that emerge from it.