Browse Movies : 2006 : Drama (Page #4)

From Academy Award winning filmmaker Mel Gibson, comes "Apocalypto" a heart stopping mythic action-adventure set against the turbulent end times of the once great Mayan civilization. When his idyllic existence is brutally disrupted by a violent invading force, a man is taken on a perilous journey to a world ruled by fear and oppression where a harrowing end awaits him. Through a twist of fate and spurred by the power of his love for his woman and his family he will make a desperate break to return home and to ultimately save his way of life.

Based on the Alice Hoffman novel, the film revolves around two teenage girls (JoJo, Emma Roberts) who discover a mermaid (Sara Paxton) in their beach club's swimming pool.

A story about theft, both criminal and emotional, "Breaking and Entering" follows a disparate group of long-term Londoners and new arrivals whose lives intersect in the inner-city area of King's Cross. "Breaking and Entering" tells the story of a series of thefts - some criminal, some emotional - set against the backdrop of a changing London whose geographical and cultural landscape is in flux. The central character, Will (Jude Law), is a successful landscape architect. His young, vibrant company, which he runs with business partner, Sandy (Martin Freeman), has recently relocated to King's Cross, the centre of the most ambitious urban regeneration site in Europe. Their state-of-the-art office immediately attracts the attention of a local group of thieves. After one of the break-ins, Will follows 15-year-old freerunner Miro (Rafi Gavron) back to the apartment he shares with his mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche) - a refugee from Bosnia. With his relationship to Liv (Robin Wright Penn) - his beautiful Swedish partner - already in crisis, Will embarks on a passionate journey into both the wilder side of himself and the city in which he lives.

"Children of Men" envisages a world one generation from now that has fallen into anarchy on the heels of an infertility defect in the population. The world's youngest citizen has just died at 18, and humankind is facing the likelihood of its own extinction.

Set against a backdrop of London torn apart by violence and warring nationalistic sects, Children of Men follows disillusioned bureaucrat Theo (Owen) as he becomes an unlikely champion of Earth's survival. When the planet's last remaining hope is threatened, this reluctant activist is forced to face his own demons and protect her from certain peril.

This rites of passage comedy introduces a shy and downtrodden Ben (Rupert Grint) with yet another dreary school holiday coming around. Seventeen years of living in an absurdly conservative and traditional household with his highly-strung and overbearing mother (Laura Linney) and quiet, mild mannered vicar father have taken its toll on young Ben. While the other kids are out having fun, Ben spends these precious few weeks attending bible classes, having driving lessons with his mother and helping out at a local old people's home.

However, Ben's world is turned upside down when he's employed by an eccentric retired actress Evie (Julie Walters). Vulgar, dignified and childish all at once, she certainly is not the kind of person Ben expected when searching through the job listings in the stuffy parish magazine, "Hello Jesus". Evie enters Ben's life with a cataclysmic force, whisking him away on a series of adventures from camping, to performing Shakespeare in the garden, to attending the Edinburgh festival — where he finally meets a girl much nearer his own age.

Evie's unconventional and often downright bizarre behavior challenges Ben's beliefs, and forces him to confront the very idea of who he wants to be. Then, when it seems that his new-found freedom is about to be taken away, Ben has to suddenly choose; should he continue to conform, or break out and live his life as his own man?

In "Edison", a young journalist (Justin Timberlake) uncovers an elite unit of corrupt cops. Realizing that he's over his head, he makes an uneasy alliance with a burnt-out reporter (Morgan Freeman) and the DA's ace investigator (Kevin Spacey).

Inspired by a true story, Eight Below is an exciting action-adventure about loyalty and the bonds of friendship set in the extreme wilderness of Antarctica. The film tells the story of three members of a scientific expedition: Jerry Shepard (Paul Walker), his best friend, Cooper (Jason Biggs), and a rugged American geologist (Bruce Greenwood), who are forced to leave behind their team of beloved sled dogs due to a sudden accident and perilous weather conditions in Antarctica. During the harsh, Antarctic winter, the dogs must struggle for survival alone in the intense frozen wilderness for over 6 months.

Based on the novel by Charles Bukowski, this drama follows the author's fictional alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, as he moves from town to town looking for work and women in the 1940s.

"Gridiron Gang" tells the uplifting story of detention camp probation officer, Sean Porter ("The Rock"), who creates a high-school-level football team from a ragtag group of dangerous teenage inmates as a means to teach them self-respect and social responsibility. He is joined in this experiment by co-worker, Malcolm Moore (Xzibit). But Porter must first overcome almost universal resistance from the powers that be — his skeptical bosses and coaches at rival high schools who don't want their players mixing it up with convicted criminals on the football field.

Looking to avoid the feds, two white-collar criminals flee to the Cayman Islands, but fleeing results in a British citizen committing a crime that has a wide-ranging impact.

Taking a much more macabre tone than did Eli Roth's feature debut "Cabin Fever", "Hostel" is an amalgamation of many of the most terrifying things about human nature and the world at large, culled from lots of pulpy-but-true stories of international organized crime, human trafficking, and sex tourism. Relentlessly graphic and deeply disturbing, the film is rife with explicit sex and brutal violence that is sure to delight hard core genre fans, and prove difficult to stomach for general audiences.

Set amidst the backdrop of a 1930s southern speakeasy, the film follows two characters, Percival (Andre Benjamin), the club's piano player, and Rooster (Antwan Patton), the club's lead performer and manager, through intersecting stories of love and ambition.

"Lucky Number Slevin" is a drama set in a world where African-American and Jewish gangsters collide. Hartnett plays a man who has to kill the son of a rival crime boss. Kingsley will play Shlomo (aka the Rabbi), the head of the biggest crime syndicate in New York. Hartnett's character is caught in a case of mistaken identity and used by the mob boss as a patsy in a murder conspiracy.

This is the strange, disturbing story of the Manderlay plantation.

Manderlay lay on a lonely plain somewhere in the deep south of the USA. It was in the year of 1933 that Grace and her father had left the township of Dogville behind them. Grace's father and his army of villains had spent the entire winter seeking out new hunting grounds in vain, and now they were heading south in one last attempt to find a favourable location in which to take up residence.

By chance their cars stop in the state of Alabama in front of a large iron gate bearing a thick chain and a padlock. Beside the gate, a dead oak tree towers over a heavy boulder with Manderlay hewn in monumental letters into the granite.

Just as Grace, her father and his men are about to leave after a short break and a quick lunch, a young black woman runs up to the car. She knocks on Grace's window. She hammers at the glass in despair. Ignoring her father's advice to leave others to their own affairs, Grace follows the girl through the gates of Manderlay and there, she finds a group of people living as if slavery had not been abolished seventy years earlier, with white masters and black slaves...

Grace believes that she has a duty to make it up to the slaves for injustices they have suffered at the hands of her kind: 'we brought them here, we abused them and made them what they are', as she argues to her father; and she decides that having liberated Manderlay, she will remain at the plantation until she has seen them through their first harvest.

Her father grudgingly leaves her with four henchmen and a lawyer, warning Grace that he won't be there to pick up the pieces when her plans for the resurrection of Manderlay fall apart...

An actress (Juliette Binoche) goes on a globe-trotting hunt for the truth about Mary Magdalene after portraying her in a movie.

They say opposites attract. What about a misguided racist who falls for a Black woman in a mental institution? What starts out as an impossible connection of opposites slowly turns into a wild, emotional story of love, romance, and disillusionment revolving around two people who shouldn't be together, but after meeting them you'll know they should never be apart.

Barbara Covett (Dame Judi Dench) is a veteran and cynical schoolteacher who is close to retirement. She is barely tolerated by her less brilliant and acerbic colleagues who know nothing about her private life which consists mainly of taking care of Portia, her aging cat, and spending countless hours alone. The only means she has found to take the edge off her desperate loneliness is writing in her journal. When Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a younger, attractive woman, joins the faculty as an art teacher, Barbara watches her from afar and has nothing but caustic things to say in her diary about her clothing and her care-free manner. Despite her disdain for this woman, Barbara finds herself reaching out to her. Sheba responds by inviting her to dinner at her house to meet Sheba's lecturer husband (Bill Nighy), who is twenty years her senior, and their two children, a sexy and rebellious 16-year-old daughter and a younger boy with Downs Syndrome. Instead of opening herself to these people, Barbara immediately sees them as competition to be beaten in the battle for Sheba's attention. Later, when Barbara discovers her new friend in a classroom having sex with Steven (Andrew Simpson), a 15-year-old from the school who has artistic talent; she realizes that knowledge of this secret gives her power over Sheba which she can use for her own purposes. Barbara promises to not tell anyone but insists that the affair must end immediately. Sheba says she will but finds herself drawn back to the boy again and again. Sheba seems uneasy with Barbara's friendship and is appalled when she discovers the older woman might have a sexual interest in her. The tenuous relationship between the two women reaches a crisis point when Barbara's cat is dying and she asks Sheba to go with her to the vet. She chooses to go with her family to see their son in a play instead. In revenge, Barbara sets in motion the scandal that will rock both their lives in ways they never imagined.

Tyler Gage is a street smart juvenile delinquent, with a reckless streak that lands him in a world of trouble after he and his friends trash an auditorium at a high school for the performing arts. Sentenced to do community service at the school, he at first wants nothing to do with the students, until he meets a beautiful dancer who's willing to give him a shot. Against all expectations, Ty gets drawn into her world, and discovers his own talent for dance.

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci—clues visible for all to see—yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion—an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.

In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret—and an explosive historical truth—will be lost forever.