Bovie Movie

Director Gus Van Sant returned to the low-key style of his early independent efforts with this semi-improvised exploration of how violence makes its way into a typical American high school. Eric (Eric Deulen) and Alex (Alex Frost) are two close friends who are students in a well-to-do suburb of Portland, OR. Eric and Alex are at once ordinary and misfits; while they seem to be confined to the edges of the clique-oriented social strata of high school, little about their behavior draws attention to itself. Or at least not during a typical school day; on their own time, the two boys are fascinated by Nazi iconography, enjoy violent video games, tentatively explore homoerotic desires, and coolly begin to make plans for an armed ambush of the school, drawing up working diagrams of the lunch room during study hall and buying rifles over the Internet. Drawing an expected degree of controversy, Elephant had its world premiere when it was screened in competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, where it won both Best Director for Van Sant and the Golden Palm award.

In this international action thriller, Paul Racine (Christopher Lambert) is an American salesman with a computer firm who is in Japan on business. While spending an evening in a bar, he meets Kirina (Joan Chen), a beautiful but mysterious woman. Paul buys Kirina a drink, one thing leads to another, and he ends up spending the night with her. However, when Paul returns to her room to retrieve a set of keys he left behind, he discovers that Kirina is being murdered by Kinjo (John Lone), the master of a cult of bloodthirsty ninjas. Kinjo informs Karina that no one has ever seen his face and lived, so when Paul witnesses Kirina’s execution and the face Kinjo hides behind his mask, he’s a marked man. With the help of Takeda (Yoshio Harada), an experienced ninja fighter, Paul learns how to defend himself against his new adversaries as he plots a final showdown with the deadly Kinjo. The Hunted represented something of a reunion for John Lone and Joan Chen, who previously starred together in The Last Emperor.