Bovie Movie

Adapted from Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel, director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose is a 14th century murder-mystery thriller starring Sean Connery as a Sherlock Holmes-esque Franciscan monk called William of Baskerville. When a murder occurs at a secluded Benedictine Abbey, William is called in to investigate. As he and his apprentice, Adson von Melk (Christian Slater), delve deeper and deeper into the case, more dead bodies begin to turn up. Eventually, Bernardo Gui, an inquisitor played by F. Murray Abraham gets involved, but he may not have the best intentions. Sean Connery’s performance earned him the award for Best Actor at the 1988 British Academy Awards.

One of the toughest and best-remembered sports movies of the 1970s gets a humorous makeover in this comedy. Paul “Wrecking” Crewe (Adam Sandler) was once a famous professional football player, but after several years out of the limelight and an alcohol problem have taken their toll, Crewe is arrested for a serious traffic accident aggravated by the fact he was drunk. Crewe is sentenced to Allenville Penitentiary, where Warden Hazen (James Cromwell) is something of a football fan. Hazen had organized his guards into an impressive football team, and clears a healthy profit by taking bets on their games. Looking to make the competition more interesting, Hazen suggests that Crewe put together a team from the inmate population to play his guards. With the help of fellow prisoner Caretaker (Chris Rock), Crewe recruits the heaviest hitters from the cell block for the team, but the guys don’t play like a unit until Crewe and Caretaker get some help from Nate Scarborough (Burt Reynolds), a former college and NFL coach doing hard time. Adapted from Robert Aldrich’s 1974 box-office smash of the same name, The Longest Yard also features rap star Nelly and Nicholas Turturro; the film has previously been loosely remade in 2001 as Mean Machine, with the action moved to England and the game changed to soccer.

Julia Roberts stars in this legal drama based on the true story of a woman who helped win the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit. Erin Brockovich (Roberts) is a single mother of three who, after losing a personal injury lawsuit, asks her lawyer, Ed Masry (Albert Finney), if he can help her find a job. Ed gives her work as a file clerk in his office, and she runs across some information on a little-known case filed against Pacific Gas and Electric. Erin begins digging into the particulars of the case, convinced that the facts simply don’t add up, and persuades Ed to allow her to do further research; in time, she discovers a systematic cover-up of the industrial poisoning of a city’s water supply, which threatens the health of the entire community. Erin Brockovich was directed by Steven Soderbergh; Julia Roberts earned a $20 million payday for her work on the film, the highest salary paid to a female film star up to that time.

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.