Bovie Movie

Twenty-two people become unwitting participants in a tragic and defining moment of the 1960’s in this period drama from actor and director Emilio Estevez. It’s early June in 1968, and the California presidential primary elections are occupying the minds of many in the Golden State, with Robert F. Kennedy in a close race against Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. The Kennedy campaign staff has set up camp at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, while the staff and guests become observers as the brother of fallen president John F. Kennedy sets out to pick up where his sibling left off. Paul (William H. Macy) is the manager of the Ambassador, and his wife Miriam (Sharon Stone) is a hairdresser who runs’s the hotel’s beauty salon. Angela (Heather Graham) is a receptionist working the hotel’s switchboard who has been sleeping with Paul behind Miriam’s back. Timmons (Christian Slater) is in charge of the hotel’s restaurant and catering department, and makes no secret of his dislike of the African-Americans and Latinos under his employ. Miguel (Jacob Vargas) and Jose (Freddy Rodriguez) are two young Chicanos on the kitchen staff who have it in for Timmons, while Robinson (Laurence Fishburne) is an older black man who counsels them on dealing with their rage. Virginia Fallon (Demi Moore) sings in the hotel’s cocktail lounge and has a serious problem with alcohol; her husband Tim (Emilio Estevez) is a Kennedy supporter and also her manager, and he’s nearing the end of his rope in dealing with her problem. William (Elijah Wood) is a young man desperate to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam; Diane (Lindsay Lohan) is a pretty young woman dating William’s brother who agrees to marry him so William can avoid being drafted, though William is clearly infatuated with her while she considers this a marriage in name only. John Casey (Anthony Hopkins) is one of the owners of the Ambassador, and Nelson (Harry Belafonte) is an old friend who works at the hotel. And Jack (Martin Sheen) is a wealthy Kennedy campaign financier who is married to Samantha (Helen Hunt), an attractive but much younger woman. Bobby also features Joshua Jackson, Nick Cannon and Shia LaBeouf as young Kennedy campaign volunteers, while Ashton Kutcher, Joy Bryant, Kip Pardue and Mary Elizabeth Winstead also highlight the supporting cast.

Jocelyn Moorhouse’s feature-film debut is a jet-black comedy starring Hugo Weaving as Martin, a paranoid blind man, made so because he is convinced that his mother, when he was a child, lied to him about the sights she described to him. As an adult, Martin is reclusive and ill-tempered. Perversely, Martin is also a photographer — he takes the pictures, has them developed, asks friends to describe the pictures to him, and then labels them in Braille to make sure no one is tricking him. His housekeeper, Celia (Genevieve Picot), is also a photographer. Obsessed with Martin, she papers the walls of her home with pictures of him. But this obsession doesn’t carry through to their relationship, which is a far from cordial one — Celia torments Martin and Martin humiliates her. One day at a restaurant, after a nasty confrontation with a waitress who ignores him, Martin makes friends with the dishwasher, Andy (Russell Crowe). Martin invites him home to describe his photographs to him. Back at Martin’s home, Andy meets Celia and he immediately falls in love with her. Jealous of Andy, Celia seduces him in an effort to discredit Andy with Martin and drive Martin into her arms.

After making a striking directorial debut with her screen adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola offers a story of love and friendship blooming under unlikely circumstances in this comedy drama. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a well-known American actor whose career has gone into a tailspin; needing work, he takes a very large fee to appear in a commercial for Japanese whiskey to be shot in Tokyo. Feeling no small degree of culture shock in Japan, Bob spends most of his non-working hours at his hotel, where he meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) at the bar. Twentysomething Charlotte is married to John (Giovanni Ribisi), a successful photographer who is in Tokyo on an assignment, leaving her to while away her time while he works. Beyond their shared bemusement and confusion with the sights and sounds of contemporary Tokyo, Bob and Charlotte share a similar dissatisfaction with their lives; the spark has gone out of Bob’s marriage, and he’s become disillusioned with his career. Meanwhile, Charlotte is puzzled with how much John has changed in their two years of marriage, while she’s been unable to launch a creative career of her own. Bob and Charlotte become fast friends, and as they explore Tokyo, they begin to wonder if their sudden friendship might be growing into something more.

This Steven Spielberg-directed exploration into a long-ago episode in African-American history recounts the trial that followed the 1839 rebellion aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad and captures the complex political maneuverings set in motion by the event. Filmed in New England and Puerto Rico, the 152-minute drama opens with a pre-credit sequence showing Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) and the other Africans in a violent takeover of the Amistad. Captured, they are imprisoned in New England where former slave Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman), viewing the rebels as “freedom fighters,” approaches property lawyer Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), who attempts to prove the Africans were “stolen goods” because they were kidnapped. Running for re-election, President Martin Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) overturns the lower court’s decision in favor of the Africans. Former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) is reluctant to become involved, but when the case moves on to the Supreme Court, Adams stirs emotions with a powerful defense. The storyline occasionally cuts away to Spain where the young Queen Isabella (Anna Paquin) plays with dolls; she later debated the Amistad case with seven U.S. presidents. The character portrayed by Morgan Freeman is a fictional composite of several historical figures. For authentic speech, the Africans speak the Mende language, subtitled during some scenes but not others.

Robert Redford directed this adaptation of a novel by Steven Pressfield that uses golf as a metaphor for one man’s spiritual and philosophical journeys. Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon) was a gifted amateur golfer from Savannah, GA, until traumatic experiences during World War I shattered his confidence and sent him into a spiral of alcoholism. In 1931, Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron), a beautiful heiress who once loved Junuh, inherits a spectacular but financially ailing golf course after the suicide of her father. To attract customers, she proposed a high-stakes match between the two most famous golfers of the day, Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch) and Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill). Local businessmen sponsoring the match insist that a local golfer be added to the card, and Junuh is drafted for the position, but it soon becomes obvious that his game is just a shadow of its former glory. When things seem hopeless, a mysterious gentleman named Bagger Vance (Will Smith) volunteers to serve as Junuh’s caddy and coach, using a mixture of ancient wisdom and past-life knowledge to help Junah “remember” the swing he’s lost. Jack Lemmon narrates the story, and J. Michael Moncrief plays Lemmon’s character as a boy.

Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer), a photographer, is married to Pat (Treat Williams), a restaurateur, and they would seem to have a perfect life in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1988, they have three small children that Beth takes along to her high school reunion in Chicago. While checking in at a crowded hotel lobby, her middle child, three-year-old Ben, disappears. Despite a frantic search and much media coverage, the boy is not found, and Beth soon falls apart. Nine years later, the family has only barely recovered when they move to Chicago so Pat can open a restaurant with his father. A few months later, a neighborhood boy named Sam Karras (Ryan Merriman) knocks on the door, asking to mow the lawn. Beth notices the boy’s appearance exactly matches a time-elapsed photo of Ben constructed by the police; she takes pictures of the boy and contacts both her husband and police detective Candy Bliss (Whoopi Goldberg). School fingerprints of Ben and Sam match, and the boy is taken to foster care while Candy and Beth confront the father, George (John Kapelos). It seems Ben was abducted by an unbalanced woman who was Beth’s high school classmate; the boy was eventually adopted by George when he married “Sam’s” new mother, and she later committed suicide, leaving no one to blame. Having grown up happily with George, Sam has no memories of his real parents. Now Beth and Pat must find a way to bond with Sam, and heal older brother Vincent (Jonathan Jackson), who was supposed to be watching Ben at the time he disappeared, and has been suffering from guilt ever since.

In medieval Paris, a deformed foundling named Quasimodo grows up under the care and tutelage of Dom Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Quasimodo is humpbacked, lame, and blind in a drooping eye — a human gargoyle who keeps to the shadows of the great church as its bellringer. But the tolling bells inflict upon him another handicap: deafness. On the Festival of Fools in the cathedral square, a crowd elects Quasimodo King of Fools, and a wag quips that the hunchback’s attributes qualify him to become King of France. During the festival, a Gypsy woman of transcendent beauty, Esmeralda, dances for the crowd. Watching her sultry undulations from a cathedral niche, Frollo falls in lust with her. Quasimodo, too, is captivated by her, but in a childlike, innocent way. Though Frollo is a priest committed to celibacy, he decides he must possess Esmeralda, even at the expense of his immortal soul. But after realizing she is beyond his reach, he promotes her execution for a crime she did not commit. When the noose closes around her neck, Quasimodo swoops down on a rope from the fa?ade of the church and rescues her, then ensconces her in the bell tower. The film concludes when mobs storm the church and Quasimodo defends it, believing the attackers will harm Esmeralda.

Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands opens as an eccentric inventor (Vincent Price) lovingly assembles a synthetic youth named Edward (Johnny Depp). Edward has all the essential ingredients for today’s standard body, with the exception of a pair of hands. For what is initially thought to be a temporary period, he is fitted with long, scissor-like extremities that, while able to trim a mean hedge, are hardly conducive to day-to-day life. When the kindly inventor dies, however, Edward is left lonely and cursed with some very heavy metal for hands. He is eventually taken in by Peg Boggs (Dianne Weist), an Avon lady who takes pity on him after seeing his bleak existence. Edward, in spite of his inherent ability to slay anyone he comes across, is a gentle soul whose only wish is to be loved. His impromptu family has, at best, a limited understanding of Edward, but he finds himself drawn to Peg’s weary but sympathetic daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder), who is dating Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), the neighborhood bully. Meanwhile, Edward finds himself a local celebrity after the town realizes that his talents include creative hedge trimming and an unrivaled ability to cut hair. His so-called friends are proven fair-weather when Edward is accused of a crime, after which his only supporters are Peg and Kim.

For his first film since 1998’s Twilight, acclaimed director Robert Benton helmed this tense drama written by Fatal Attraction co-scribe Nicholas Meyer and based on the novel of the same name by Philip Roth. Set in the late ’90s at the height of the Clinton sex-scandal, The Human Stain stars Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk, a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeper and deeper into Silk’s life. Eventually, matters are made worse when an affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) is exposed. But amid the controversy, Silk must struggle to keep his greatest secret, a secret he’s held for the majority of his life, from becoming public. Ed Harris, who previously worked with Benton in 1984’s Places in the Heart, also stars.