Bovie Movie

Master of disguise Sacha Baron Cohen hits the road to explore America as the crude Kazakstani reporter Borat in a feature mockumentary that brings one of the Da Ali G Show star’s most popular characters to life on the big screen. Sent by the Kazakh Ministry of Information to gain a better understanding of American culture and bring his findings back home, Borat and faithful producer Azamat (Ken Davitian) set their sights in New York City. When the citizens and interview subjects of the Big Apple seem less than receptive to Borat’s distinctively unrestrained approach and the curious Kazakh television personality stumbles across an episode of Baywatch while channel-surfing in his hotel room, he becomes instantly smitten with screen siren Pamela Anderson. Now confident that the only way to discover the true essence of America is to travel to California and make the bikini-clad beauty his bride, Borat purchases a ramshackle ice-cream truck in which he and Azamat will make their way across the Great Plains and on to the sunny West Coast — all the while coming into contact with a wide variety of “typical” Americans. Within this loose, scripted framework, Borat engages in his usual misbehavior with unsuspecting strangers, from accidentally releasing a chicken from his suitcase on a New York subway ride to a formal interview with Alan Keyes.

Bruce Willis returns as misfit cop John McClane in the third film in the Die Hard series. McClane has fallen on hard times; after moving to New York City and breaking up with his wife, he’s developed a drinking problem and has been suspended from the NYPD. However, his past comes back to haunt him in the form of Simon (Jeremy Irons), a terrorist bomber who has been using McClane as his contact as he plants a series of bombs in public places and gives McClane inane “clues” to their whereabouts in the form of riddles and bizarre games. McClane soon discovers he’s been involved in Simon’s scheme as part of a personal grudge; while associated with an international terrorist group, Simon is also the brother of the man McClane threw off the side of a skyscraper several years back (in the original Die Hard). Now McClane, with the help of a Harlem shopkeeper named Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson), has to find out where Simon has planted the bombs, guess where he’ll strike next, and try to find his base of operations before more bombs go off and thousands of people die. The supporting cast features Graham Greene and Colleen Camp; singer Sam Phillips made her acting debut as a member of Simon’s terrorist group (Phillips never speaks, so as to not to reveal her Texas accent).

Lethal Weapon 2 reteams Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as, respectively, “loose cannon” LA detective Martin Riggs and Riggs’ partner, the cautious family man Roger Murtaugh. The villain this time is a South African diplomat (Joss Ackland) who doubles as a drug dealer. Though Riggs knows what’s going on thanks to characterless character witness Joe Pesci, he can’t touch the villain because of “diplomatic immunity.” After perils too numerous to mention, Riggs and Murtaugh shoot it out with the heavies on the deck of a South African cargo ship. Lethal Weapon 2, of course, contains as one of its comic high-points a now famous suspense scene: Mel Gibson agonizingly attempting to extricate a terrified Danny Glover from a booby-trapped toilet seat. Gibson, Glover, Donner and Joe Pesci would be reunited three years later for Lethal Weapon 3 and in 1998 for Lethal Weapon 4.

A true-life story of a basketball team who broke down barriers while racking up victories is the basis for this sports drama. Don Haskins (Josh Lucas) was a high school and college basketball star who, after six years of working with high school teams, became the head coach at Texas Western University in 1962. At that time, Texas Western’s basketball program was not well respected, but Haskins was determined to change that, and in 1966 Haskins assembled what he was certain was a winning team. However, Haskins’ starting lineup was comprised entirely of African-American athletes at a time when racially integrated teams were still a novelty in the South and West. Despite generating a firestorm of controversy, Haskins and his players showed they could succeed where it counted — on the court. In post-season play Haskins and the Texas Western team found themselves competing for the NCAA championship against the University of Kentucky’s all-white team, lead by legendary coach Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight). Glory Road also stars Derek Luke, Alphonso McAuley, Mehcad Brooks, Al Shearer, Damaine Radcliff, Sam Jones III, and Schin S. Kerr as members of Haskins’ winning team.

If you met Adolph Hitler when he was just a struggling cartoonist, wouldn’t you have done the world a big favor by murdering him? That philosophical question provides the linchpin of this black comedy. Jude (Cameron Diaz), Pete (Ron Eldard), Paulie (Annabeth Gish), Marc (Jonathan Penner), and Luke (Courtney B. Vance) are five graduate students who are confirmed members of the political left, participate in small-scale activism, and share a house together. One night, Pete is stuck in the middle of nowhere, and Zack (Bill Paxton), a truck driver, gives him a lift home. The housemates are just about to sit down to dinner, so to show his gratitude, Pete asks Zack to join them. However, it soon becomes obvious that Zack doesn’t share the group’s political views, and when he states that he thinks Hitler had the right idea, the argument turns into a fight, with Zack brandishing a knife. The trucker is accidentally killed in the scuffle, and rather than report the death to the police, his body is buried in the backyard vegetable garden. However, the event prompts much discussion among the housemates — if Zack was a hateful bigot, isn’t the world better off without him? And wouldn’t killing other ignorant hatemongers improve society all the more? Before long, the group is having a weekly dinner party in which they invite a special guest — including an anti-environmental activist (Jason Alexander), a right-wing religious leader (Charles Durning), a sexist who doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as rape (Mark Harmon), and a teenager campaigning against sex education in schools (Erin Bryn) — and serve them some wine, which happens to be laced with arsenic. While the group’s attempt at community improvement does wonders for their tomato plants, the recent disappearances eventually attract the attention of the local sheriff (Nora Dunn). The Last Supper was the first feature for director Stacy Title, who won an Academy Award for her short subject Down on the Waterfront; screenwriter Dan Rosen appears in a supporting role as a police deputy.

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.