Bovie Movie

Director John Landis helmed this Cold War farce starring Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase as Austin Millbarge and Emmett Fitz-Hume — two loser misfits who dwell in the lower ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. Convinced despite much evidence to the contrary that they’re prime secret agent material, both men keep taking service exams in an effort to win promotion. Caught cheating on their latest round of tests, Austin and Emmett expect to be fired but are instead made full field agents and ushered into intense training. Little do they know that it’s all a ruse and that they’re about to be dumped in Pakistan to throw Russian spies off the scent of two real agents with an important clandestine assignment. A spoof of the “road” pictures popularized by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, the film features a cameo by the latter as his golf-playing self.

After he is framed for the death of several colleagues and falsely branded a traitor, a secret agent embarks on a daring scheme to clear his name in this spy adventure. Though it drew its name from the familiar television series, director Brian DePalma’s big-budget adaptation shares little more with the original show than the occasional self-destructing message and the name of team leader Jim Phelps (Jon Voight). The film focuses not on Phelps but his prot?g?, Ethan Hunt (a reserved Tom Cruise), who becomes a fugitive after taking the blame for a botched operation. He responds by banding together with a group of fellow renegades, and he is soon maneuvering his way through a twisted series of double crosses that mainly serve as excuses for spectacular high-tech action sequences. Much of the activity revolves around a missing computer disk, with the film’s most famous scene depicting Hunt’s delicate efforts to retrieve the disk from a secure, well-alarmed room in CIA headquarters.

“His code name is Condor. In the next 24 hours, everyone he trusts will try to kill him.” As the ads ominously announced, a low-level spook confronts the unfathomable in Sydney Pollack’s 1975 political thriller, adapted from the James Grady novel Six Days of the Condor. CIA researcher Joe Turner (Robert Redford) returns from lunch to find the entire staff of his small New York office assassinated. When he meets his boss (Cliff Robertson) at another location to tell him what happened, someone tries to shoot Turner as well. On the run from the cops and his agency, a desperate Turner resorts to holing up with innocent civilian Kathy (Faye Dunaway), who becomes his only ally. Joe decides to save himself the only way possible: by going to The New York Times. But will it work? One of a cycle of conspiracy films from the 1970s that also included The Parallax View (1974) and Redford’s All the President’s Men (1976), Three Days of the Condor pits a working Everyman (albeit a CIA everyman) against a far-reaching conspiracy, as it also criticizes the CIA during a period of increasing publicity about federal wrongdoing, from the Pentagon Papers through Watergate and other congressional investigations; the challenge of negotiating New York City, shot on location, becomes one more sign of the forces that Joe must face. With its timely subject matter, taut suspense, and sympathetic Redford hero, Three Days of the Condor became a substantial hit. Balancing the conspiracy cycle’s pessimism with a margin of attenuated hope, Three Days of the Condor suggests that one man can still discover the truth, but whether it helps him remains to be seen.

Based on the popular novels about that other suave, globe-trotting man of action, this genre picture from director Phillip Noyce mixed romance and character development with dangerous stunts, geopolitical intrigue, and a variety of elaborate disguises, resulting in an uneven stew of a spy thriller. Val Kilmer is Simon Templar, a classy, cunning master thief and “man of a thousand faces” who cribs his phony names from those of obscure saints and sells his illegal services to the highest bidder. Hired by an ambitious Russian politician (Rade Serbedzija) to steal the formula for cold fusion, Templar falls in love with Dr. Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue), the frail Oxford scientist who has unlocked the secret of the process. Back in Moscow, the thief debates whether to betray his new love or the powerful madman who is paying him millions, until he discovers that his client is concealing oil reserves that could save his freezing people. Often seen as an also-ran to the legendary James Bond, Templar, the creation of author Leslie Charteris, in fact predated the first Bond novel by decades and probably inspired Ian Fleming in his creation of the debonair agent.

Borrowing liberally from the French film La Totale, this is an action picture, domestic comedy, and political thriller rolled into a crowd-pleasing ball of entertainment. Producer James Cameron wrote and directed the film. Henry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a workaholic computer salesman neglecting his mousy wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), a legal secretary. Simon (Bill Paxton) seduces Helen with the lie that he is a secret agent; he’s really a used car salesman. Harry suspects that Helen is cheating on him, and he sends a few colleagues to kidnap them. Helen then discovers that Harry is a secret agent by night, working for a shadowy group called the Omega Sector. Harry and his partner Gib (Tom Arnold) are trying to find four nuclear warheads that have disappeared from a former Soviet republic.

A teen learns that all the gadgets in the world can’t help him overcome his awkwardness around the opposite sex in this big-budget family entertainment. In Agent Cody Banks, Malcolm in the Middle star Frankie Muniz plays a young man plucked from suburban obscurity to be trained as a CIA super-agent. His mission? Get friendly with his classmate Natalie (played by another teen TV star, Lizzie McGuire’s Hilary Duff) so that he can uncover her father’s diabolical scheme to create indestructible robots. To compound his problems, Cody also has to deal with the same stresses as any adolescent: nagging parents, insufferable classwork, and a fragile sense of self-esteem. Agent Cody Banks was produced by MGM, not coincidentally the studio responsible for another popular spy franchise, the venerable James Bond series.

Set amidst the controversy of the handover of the Panama Canal from Panama to America in late 1999, this espionage thriller follows seductive British spy Andrew Osnard (Pierce Brosnan), who has found himself recently banished to Panama. When Osnard stumbles into a tailor shop, he meets Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a garrulous sort with an unmatched penchant for “fluence” — that is, fabricating wild tales with real-life details. Osnard threatens to expose his shady past, until Pendel agrees to provide him with information about the political situation in Panama. Pendel’s wife Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis) tries to remain unscathed by her husband’s constant follies, which escalate and put him in the midst of international discord, while also threatening the shaky relationship between himself and Osnard, who cannot escape each other’s grasp. Based on John le Carr?’s popular 1996 novel, the film also features Catherine McCormack, David Hayman, and young Daniel Radcliffe, who completed this film before his starring role in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, released later in the year.

Dentist Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) is a respectable man. He has a daughter who is about to marry the son of a very suspicious character, Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk). They are practically relatives already, the wedding is so near. Certainly, Sheldon already despises Vince as if he were already a well-known relative. Nontheless, Vince calls on Sheldon and convinces him to go with him on a series of wild and hilarious adventures, claiming all the while that he is a CIA agent, and that what he is doing is in the national interest. Sheldon follows Vince to a South American country ruled by a very odd man, General Garcia (Richard Libertini), who talks to his hand (which talks back). It seems that the dictator is involved in a scheme to counterfeit and undermine U.S. currency.

The Living Daylights represents the first appearance by Timothy Dalton as “Bond…James Bond.” Based very, very loosely on an obscure Ian Fleming short story, the film finds Bond assigned to aid in the defection of KGB agent Jeroen Krabbe. 007 must prevent an unknown sniper from killing Krabbe before he can reach the West. The mysterious assailant turns out to be the luscious Maryam d’Abo, who like practically everyone in the film except Bond is Not All That She Seems. The plot wends its way through a scheme to trade several million dollars’ worth of diamonds for weapons, which will be shipped off to mercenaries worldwide. The climax takes place high above the clouds in a cargo plane loaded with opium. Dalton would play Bond one more time in License to Kill (1989) before handing the franchise over to Pierce Brosnan.

Director John Woo brings Hong Kong-style martial arts action to this comic book-flavored sequel that eschews the complicated plot and political maneuverings of its predecessor in favor of pure, adrenaline-charged thrills. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, an operative for the top-secret government agency IMF (Impossible Missions Force). Fellow agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) has gone rogue, stealing a sample of a deadly synthetic virus named Chimera that could rapidly wipe out the world’s population. Ambrose’s plan is to sell Chimera to the highest bidder in exchange for shares of stock in the winner’s company. Summoned by the new IMF chief (Anthony Hopkins in an uncredited cameo role), Ethan is assigned to recruit the help of Ambrose’s former lover Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton), a gorgeous woman who left Ambrose broken-hearted and who may be able to quickly regain his confidence. Once he meets and spends a night with Nyah, however, Ethan is smitten, and now must both capture Ambrose and keep Nyah alive as she infiltrates a nest of vipers. Sophisticated disguises, gun battles, and high-speed chases are the order of the day, very much in the James Bond mold. Mission: Impossible 2 is based on a story by Star Trek: The Next Generation writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, with a script polish by Robert Towne.