Bovie Movie

Mr. Bean — the stick-legged goofball man-child created by Rowan Atkinson on television in the early ’90s, and in the 1997 feature Bean — undertakes his second cinematic adventure in the comic romp Mr. Bean’s Holiday. Growing thoroughly sick of the wet, cold, and clammy London weather, Mr. Bean (Atkinson) finds just the right tonic when he wins a trip to sunny southern France, all expenses paid, with a new digital video camera to accompany him. However, he runs headfirst into a series of outrageous and unpleasant situations, such as winding up in a French restaurant where a ma?tre d? (Jean Rochefort) convinces him to eat bizarre varieties of seafood that he’s never before encountered, and discovering that the “Very Fast Train” certainly lives up to its name. Eventually, Mr. Bean (accompanied by a Russian traveling companion whom he meets along his journey) stumbles onto the French Riviera and spoils the latest movie production of snobbish, egomaniacal filmmaker Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe) — little realizing that his own klutzy video footage will accidentally end up in Clay’s film and be screened at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. Unlike the first big-screen incarnation of Atkinson’s character, Mr. Bean’s Holiday adheres more closely to the formula of the original series by rendering the character almost completely mute.

Ralph Fiennes plays a grown man haunted by his childhood in David Cronenberg’s stylized psychological drama Spider. Upon his release from a mental institution, Spider (Fiennes) takes up residence in a halfway house. Paranoid, quiet, and forever making notes, Spider spends much of the film remembering scenes from his youth, specifically a horrific event from his childhood that occurred after he came to believe that his father (Gabriel Byrne) was having an affair on his mother (Miranda Richardson). The psychological terror builds to a climax that challenges how much the viewer can believe Spider’s recollections of the event. Bradley Hall plays Spider as a boy, and Richardson portrays many different women who come into contact with Spider. Spider was screened in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

It wasn’t as well received at the box office as the pictures that preceded it or followed it, but Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the finest of the James Bond movies and also arguably the last truly great movie in the series. James Bond, portrayed here by George Lazenby (in his only performance in the role) has spent nearly two years trying to track down Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), the head of SPECTRE. He has been taken off the case by his chief (Bernard Lee), an action the pushes him to the point of considering resigning from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, just as he opens a possible new avenue of attack on his quarry. Whilst in the field, Bond has chanced to cross paths with the Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, whom he rescues from one apparent suicide attempt and an embarrassing moment at a casino gaming table — the Contessa, who prefers to be called Tracy (”Teresa was a saint”), is the daughter of Marc Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti), an industrial and construction magnate and also a crime boss, who is impressed with Bond personally as well as professionally, and would like to see him marry his daughter. Bond is, at first, unwilling to involve himself with a woman — any woman — on that level, but Draco’s underworld contacts give Bond a vital clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts that get him back on the case and hot on the man’s trail. Journeying incognito to Blofeld’s mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, Bond finds the criminal mastermind posing as a would-be nobleman and also as a philanthropist, running a clinic devoted to the treatment and eradication of allergies. It’s all a front for a surprisingly sinister (and scientifically valid) plot for international blackmail that would make any previous Bond villain quake in fear. And in the process of staying alive long enough to have a chance of stopping Blofeld, Bond discovers the Tracy is truly like no woman he’s ever known before — one special enough that he finds himself willing to give up his life as a free-living, free-loving bachelor.

The time is the 1950s: seedy Brooklyn private eye Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired by shady Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to locate a pop singer who reneged on a debt. Harry ventures into Harlem, the first step of a Heart of Darkness-inspired odyssey. Each time Harry makes contact with someone who might know the singer’s whereabouts, he or she is killed in a horrible, ritualistic fashion; a Satanic cult seems to be at the bottom of all the carnage. Harry solves the mystery, all right. He just didn’t know that he had the answer all along — even before Louis entered his office. Also available in the “unrated” video version, Angel Heart is best known as the film that nearly got an X-rating due to a no-holds-barred sex scene involving Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet.

Can a high-attitude African-American politician who says what he thinks stand a chance in a presidential campaign? Mays Gilliam (Chris Rock) is a straight-talking alderman representing a inner-city neighborhood in Washington, D.C. In the midst of a hard-fought race for the White House, the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates are killed in an airline crash, and with little time to prepare a new campaign, the Republican candidate, Vice President Brian Lewis (Nick Searcy), seems all but guaranteed to win. With practically nothing to loose, party head Martin Geller (Dylan Baker) approaches Gilliam and asks him to stand as the Democrat’s presidential candidate. While Gilliam is dubious at first, before long his streetwise style and willingness to face the issues head-on earns him surprising figures in the polls, especially after he persuades his short-fused older brother, Mitch Gilliam (Bernie Mac), to join the ticket as vice presidential candidate — a big jump for a bail bondsman. Gilliam’s love life also becomes more complicated as his ex-girlfriend Kim (Robin Givens) decides she wants him back now that he has a shot at the White House, even though Gilliam only has eyes for Lisa (Tamala Jones). Head of State marked the directorial debut for comic and actor Chris Rock, who also co-wrote and co-produced the film.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s art-house classic, Marlon Brando delivers one of his characteristically idiosyncratic performances as Paul, a middle-aged American in “emotional exile” who comes to Paris when his estranged wife commits suicide. Chancing to meet young Frenchwoman Jeanne (Maria Schneider), Paul enters into a sadomasochistic, carnal relationship with her, indirectly attacking the hypocrisy all around him through his raw, outrageous sexual behavior. Paul also hopes to purge himself of his own feelings of guilt, brilliantly (and profanely) articulated in a largely ad-libbed monologue at his wife’s coffin. If the sexual content in Last Tango is uncomfortably explicit (once seen, the infamous “butter scene” is never forgotten), the combination of Brando’s acting, Bertolucci’s direction, Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, and Gato Barbieri’s music is unbeatable, creating one of the classic European art movies of the 1970s, albeit one that is not for all viewers.

Though some viewers might be put off by its length, graphic violence, and absence of likable characters, Sergio Leone’s final film is also a cinematic masterpiece. Spanning four decades, the film tells the story of David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro) and his Jewish pals, chronicling their childhoods on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1920s, through their gangster careers in the 1930s, and culminating in Noodles’ 1968 return to New York from self-imposed exile, at which time he learns the truth about the fate of his friends and again confronts the nightmare of his past. The acting, the re-creation of the time period, the cinematography, and the music are all superb. However, even more important is Leone’s ability to make the film work on so many different levels: it’s both a criticism of gangster-film mythology and a continuation of the director’s exploration of the issues of time and history. Strange as it may seem, the violence and gore in the first half of the film turn into a sad elegy about wasted lives and lost love. The film’s strengths emerge only in its full 229-minute version — the 139-minute and other edited versions don’t make nearly the same impact.

One of the most beloved American films, this captivating wartime adventure of romance and intrigue from director Michael Curtiz defies standard categorization. Simply put, it is the story of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), a world-weary ex-freedom fighter who runs a nightclub in Casablanca during the early part of WWII. Despite pressure from the local authorities, notably the crafty Capt. Renault (Claude Rains), Rick’s caf? has become a haven for refugees looking to purchase illicit letters of transit which will allow them to escape to America. One day, to Rick’s great surprise, he is approached by the famed rebel Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) and his wife, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), Rick’s true love who deserted him when the Nazis invaded Paris. She still wants Victor to escape to America, but now that she’s renewed her love for Rick, she wants to stay behind in Casablanca. “You must do the thinking for both of us,” she says to Rick. He does, and his plan brings the story to its satisfyingly logical, if not entirely happy, conclusion.