Bovie Movie

Five years after achieving commercial and critical success with his film Three Kings, director and screenwriter David O. Russell returns to the more idiosyncratic territory of his earlier work with this intelligent and offbeat comedy. Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) are a married couple who run an existential detective agency where they sift through the lives of their clients in order to discover the source of their angst. The Jaffes’ latest client is Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), an environmental activist who has a very large rock and a great deal on his mind; their study of Albert’s problems lead Bernard and Vivian to Brad Stand (Jude Law), a public relations executive with a chain of successful variety stores, Huckabees. While publicly allying himself with Albert’s environmental initiatives, behind the scenes Brad is running roughshod over responsible land management with little care for the consequences. When Brad learns he’s being watched by the Jaffes, he hopes to co-opt them by hiring them himself; however, the plan has unexpected consequences when their questioning leads Brad’s girlfriend, well-scrubbed model Dawn (Naomi Watts), into reassessing her life and relationships. Meanwhile, Albert finds himself joining forces with Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a firefighter and fellow environmentalist who has been having second thoughts about Bernard and Vivian’s ideas and methods after a long-term investigation and has since fallen under the spell of nihilist poet and philosopher Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert).

Two people develop an unusual relationship that bends the boundaries of time and place in this romantic fantasy. Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock) is a doctor who lives in a beautiful home by a lake. Forced to move elsewhere, she requests that any correspondence that arrives at the lake house be passed on to her new address. To her surprise, she soon receives a romantic note from Alex Burnham (Keanu Reeves), an architect who lives in the cottage she once called home. However, a look at the postmark on the letter reveals that he lived at the home two years before she did, and that somehow they’ve come in contact with one another through a space in time. A remake of Lee Hyun-seung’s acclaimed Korean romance Il Mare (aka Siworae), The Lake House was the first American production from Argentinean filmmaker Alejandro Agresti; the supporting cast includes Christopher Plummer, Dylan Walsh, and Lynn Collins.

A chance meeting between two middle-aged men leads one into a life of crime in this offbeat comedy. Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) is an American businessman whose life has been going through a sour patch after he and his wife, Carolyn (Hope Davis), lost their young son. During a business trip to Mexico City, Danny strikes up a conversation in a hotel bar with fellow out-of-towner Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan), and while Julian’s loud and brassy manner initially puts Danny off, in time the two become friends, and Julian feels comfortable enough with Danny to tell him what he does for a living. It seems Julian is a hired killer working under the auspices of underworld kingpins Lovell (Dylan Baker) and Mr. Randy (Philip Baker Hall), and Julian tries to persuade Danny to help him with his latest assignment. Danny refuses, but a few months later a distraught Julian appears unannounced on Danny’s doorstep. It seems Julian has blown his two most recent assignments due to a variety of psychosomatic illnesses, and now Lovell and Mr. Randy want him dead. Julian has also done something to put Danny in his debt, and the previously non-criminal businessman is forced to help his friend stage a hit, with Julian’s presence in his home upsetting the precarious balance of Danny and Carolyn’s marriage.

Washington Irving’s tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman gets a few new twists in a screen adaptation directed by Tim Burton. In this version, Ichabod (Johnny Depp) is a New York City detective whose unorthodox techniques and penchant for gadgets make him unpopular with is colleagues. He is sent to the remote town of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of bizarre murders, in which a number of people have been found dead in the woods, with their heads cut off. Local legend has it that a Hessian ghost rides through the woods on horseback, lopping off the heads of the unsuspecting and unbelieving. Ichabod refuses to believe in this legend, convinced that there must be a logical explanation for the murders. In time, Ichabod becomes smitten with a local lass, Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), who is the sweetheart of the burly Brom Bones (Casper Van Dien), and he becomes determined to capture the murderer to prove his bravery and win her heart. Christopher Walken, Jeffrey Jones, and Christopher Lee highlight the supporting cast; Lee’s appearance is particularly apt, since Burton has cited the Hammer films of the 1960s as a major influence in making this film. Andrew Kevin Walker and Tom Stoppard contributed to the screenplay.

They’ve kept television viewers laughing for nearly 20 years, and now the most popular animated family on the small screen makes the leap into theaters as Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, ad Maggie embark on their first-ever feature-length adventure. Directed by David Silverman and written by a whole host of Simpsons veterans including Matt Groening and James L. Brooks, The Simpsons Movie also features special guest appearances by Albert Brooks among others.

A man finds himself living among the animals and enchanted spirits of the rainforest, and learns of the true consequences of human destruction in this animated adventure. Crysta (voice of Samantha Mathis) is a young fairy who is being tutored in the powers of magic by the older and wiser Magi (voice of Grace Zabriskie) in an Amazon rain forest. While their home was once on the verge of destruction thanks to the evil spirit Hexxus (voice of Tim Curry), the demon has been trapped inside a tree, and Crysta is free to play with her friends Batty Koda (voice of Robin Williams), a bat who escaped from an animal testing facility, and Pips (voice of Christian Slater), who has obvious romantic intentions toward the attractive young sprite. However, a clear-cutting crew destroys the tranquil peace of the rainforest, and when Crysta sees a runaway logging machine about to run over lumberjack Zak (voice of Jonathan Ward), she saves his life by shrinking him to her own size. However, Crysta isn’t able to bring Zak back to his normal size, so he’s forced to live among the forest creatures and learn first-hand the devastation the humans have brought to this world — especially when the loggers accidentally free Hexxus from captivity.

Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky switches gears from drug-induced urban malaise to abstract science fiction with this time-tripping symbolic tale of a man’s thousand-year quest to save the woman he loves. Moving between representational stories and images, this meditation on life and death focuses on the concept of the mythical Tree of Life that is said to bestow immortality to all who drink of its sap. In one of the film’s allegorical timelines, a 16th century Spanish conquistador played by Hugh Jackman sets out to find the tree in order to save his queen (Rachel Weisz) from the Inquisition. Another conceptual story finds Jackman centuries later, struggling with mortality as a modern-day scientist desperately searching for the medical breakthrough that will save the life of his cancer-stricken wife, Izzi. The third and most abstract concept finds Jackman as a different incarnation of the same character-idea, this time questing for eternal life within the confines of a floating sphere transporting the aged Tree of Life through the depths of space. Still more avant-garde than his breakthrough film Pi, The Fountain finds Aronofsky almost completely abandoning conventional story structure in favor of something more cinematically abstract. Though the film was originally slapped with an R by the MPAA, Aronofsky & co. re-edited it to conform to a PG-13 rating.

Ang Lee directs the live-action feature film The Hulk, based on the Marvel comic book created by Stan Lee and illustrated by Jack Kirby. Emotionally stunted Dr. Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) is part of a research team at the University of California at Berkeley. Corporate hustler Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas) takes notice of the lab and makes plans to take it over. Then Bruce accidentally gets hit by an experimental ray and grows into a huge beast, destroying the lab in the process. A creepy janitor who claims to be his real father, Dr. David Banner (Nick Nolte), starts to secretly use the experimental ray on himself. He creates some mutant dogs and sends them after Bruce’s lab mate and ex-girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly). After Bruce saves her life in the form of the Hulk, she lets her distant father, General Ross (Sam Elliott), take him to an abandoned army base in the desert. However, Glenn Talbot takes over the operation and wants to patent the creature’s superpowers for his own profit, so he holds Bruce unconscious in an isolation tank. When provoked, Bruce turns into the Hulk and makes a break for San Francisco, leading to a desert chase sequence involving military aircraft, tanks, and bombs. Only the sight of Betty can make him turn back to his human form. When he is eventually captured, Dr. David Banner shows up for a final confrontation with his son and his old adversary, General Ross.

A charmingly na?ve boy from the English village of Wall travels to a magical, mythical world in search of the falling star that will help him win the heart of his true love in this fantasy adventure starring Charlie Cox, Claire Danes, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ricky Gervais, and Sienna Miller. For hundreds of years the massive cobblestone barrier that surrounds the sleepy English hamlet of Wall has kept the citizens of the village safe and secure from the malevolent supernatural forces that stir just outside its perimeter. When dashing Tristan Thorne (Cox) promises the fairest girl in the village, Victoria (Miller), that he will prove his love by bestowing her with a genuine falling star, his daring mission sends him on an adventure far outside the comfortable confines of Wall. In order to find the fallen star, Tristan will have to ascend the wall and venture deep into the forbidden heart of the fantastical realm known as Stormhold. Upon discovering that the meteorite he sought was in fact a beautiful girl named Yvaine (Danes), who has stumbled though space and is now being pursued by the King of Stormhold’s (Peter O’Toole) sons (who long to use her cosmic powers to lay claim to the throne), Tristan vows to protect the otherworldly visitor at all costs. But the king’s sons aren’t the only ones in search of the luminous Yvaine; fearsome witch Lamia (Pfeiffer) has become convinced that the young girl’s power can help her to achieve eternal youth and beauty. As Tristan makes his way through Stormhold on a mission to bring the star back to Wall, he will encounter a series of spectacular characters and creatures that will lead him to a fate he never imagined. Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn serves as director and co-screenwriter for this tale of witches and pirates adapted from the novel by fantasy icon Neil Gaiman, who also produces.

Following the death of her drug-addicted mother, a whimsical young girl follows her chemically dependent father to a remote prairie house to discover a wondrous world of magical fireflies and nocturnal bog men in this hallucinatory childhood fantasy from visionary filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Noah (Jeff Bridges) is a burnt-out rock star whose post-superstar voyage to obscurity is hastened by a serious drug addiction that is also shared with his wild-eyed wife (Jennifer Tilly). When the Noah’s increasingly erratic wife suffers a fatal overdose, the faded rock star opts to escape the painful reality by retreating to a ramshackle remote home with his young daughter, Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland). Left to her own devices as her father stumbles about the grasslands in a drug-induced haze, Jeliza-Rose soon ventures into her own fantasy land before making the acquaintance of mentally challenged youth Dickens (Brendan Fletcher). As the two become fast friends and Jeliza-Rose joins the swimsuit-clad Dickens in defeating the menacing shark that traverses the nearby railways, the pair are watched over by Dickens’ black-clad sister, Dell (Janet McTeer), who acts as Dickens’ guardian and whose overly enthusiastic interest in the art of taxidermy borders on obsessive.