October 2003 Movies

Posey plays a district attorney in New York investigating a series of unexplained deaths in the gay community. As she digs deeper, she discovers some shocking facts behind the cases.

When his only friend and co-worker dies, a young man born with dwarfism moves to an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey. Though he tried to maintain a life of solitude, he is soon entangled with an artist who is struggling with a personal tragedy and an overly-friendly Cuban hot dog vendor.

"Prey for Rock & Roll" is the adrenaline-filled story of a contemporary LA all-girl punk band led by singer/guitarist Jacki (Gina Gershon), bassist Tracy (Drea De Matteo), lead guitarist Faith (Lori Petty), and drummer Sally (Shelly Cole). The directing debut of esteemed music supervisor/producer Alex Steyermark, the film captures the color and energy of a veteran band struggling to make it while personal obstacles and disturbing new events threaten to tear them apart.

When the police chief (Denzel Washington) of a small Florida town "borrows" money from the evidence room so he can run away with a woman (Sanaa Lathan) he's always been in love with, she quickly betrays him, revealing that she only began having an affair with him as a way to seek revenge... Now, with his reputation and career on the line, an otherwise good cop must resolve his life before he runs... "Out of Time".

Hell-raising guitarist with delusions of grandeur Dewey Finn (Jack Black) has been kicked out of his band. Desperate for work, he impersonates a substitute teacher and turns a class of fifth grade high-achievers into high-voltage rock and rollers ready to compete in a local radio station's Battle of the Bands contest.

This concert documentary captures the performances of the "Concert for George" on November 29th, 2002 at Royal Albert Hall in London, as a celebration of the life and career of the Beatles' "quiet one," George Harrison. That day was the 1st anniversary of Harrison's death. The concert featured performances of Harrison's songs by the other two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as other friends and contemporaries of his like Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, and fellow Traveling Wilburys Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty. These performances include Jeff Lynne singing "I Want to Tell You," "Inner Light" and "Give Me Love"; Tom Petty singing "Taxman," "I Need You" and "Handle with Care"; Ringo Starr singing "Photograph" and Paul McCartney singing "For You Blue" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." There is also a performance of a special composition by Ravi Shankar, performed by his daughter Anoushka Shankar and a 16-piece Indian orchestra. The other Harrison songs that were performed were: "All Things Must Pass," "Here Comes the Sun," "Honey Don't," "Isn't it a Pity," "My Sweet Lord" and "Something." Finally, the musical performances are accompanied by some of George's favorite skits by his good friends, the Monty Python troupe, accompanied by Tom Hanks, including "The Lumberjack Song" and "Sit on My Face."

The film follows the story of a respected upper middle class family whose high social stature is burst following a murder. Chabrol reexamines the individual family members' lives in the time period leading up to the crime unveiling their secrets and probing their character.

This documentary captures what happened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 12th, 2000 when Bus 174 was highjacked by an armed young man, Sandro do Nascimento, with a dozen passengers. Nascimento threatened to kill all of the passengers, but eventuallly agreed to surrender, as TV cameras were rolling and an entire nation was glued to their screens watching the event take place. Then, a police officer decided to fire at Nascimento anyway, accidentally killing one of the female passengers instead. What followed was a revolt among the city's population, enraged at police brutality. The film intertwines the story of the standoff with biographical information about Sandro do Nascimento, including his childhood as a survivor of the "Candelaria" child mass murders in the early 1990s, and the trauma of seeing his mother stabbed to death in front of him.

A band of college students go to a rave on a mysterious island and get more than they bargained for when they find themselves stalked by killer zombies and terrifying creatures intent on feasting on the flesh of the living. With only a few weapons and time running out, they take shelter in an ancient house, inside which they will uncover the secrets of the "House of the Dead".

A slick Beverly Hills divorce lawyer (George Clooney) frames the wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) of a client to get him released from the marriage without a settlement. She vows to get revenge by marrying the attorney, aiming to take him to the cleaners in their own savage divorce, but what she doesn't expect is that she falls in love with him in the process...

Uma Thurman's character, a pregnant assassin named the Bride, is shot by her boss, Bill, and her co-workers at her wedding (the wedding guests are also shot). She survives, though, waking up exceedingly angry after a five-year coma, and decides to hunt down and kill every single one of the assassins who were responsible, saving Bill for last.

Twelve-year-old Owen Baker has been working as a dog- walker all summer long, and his hard work has finally paid off -- he gets to adopt a dog of his own! But Owen gets more than puppy love when he discovers his new dog, Hubble, is an interplanetary scout from the "Dog Star" Sirius. Thousands of years ago, dogs from Sirius came to colonize and dominate the Earth, but rumors have spread across the galaxy that Earth dogs have strayed from their original mission. Hubble has come to investigate. Now Owen must help Hubble train a group of undisciplined neighborhood dogs to shape up for a visit from their leader, the powerful Greater Dane. The fate of all Earth dogs hangs in the balance.

"11:14" tells the seemingly random yet vitally connected story of a set of incidents that all converge one evening at 11:14pm. It's a sort of musical chairs with a corpse, with the structurally intriguing storytelling style of Memento and Run Lola Run. The story starts at - 11:14pm - one evening with a young man named Jack who is driving down the freeway, on his way to a rendezvous with his girlfriend. His car hits a body at that moment. Thinking he killed him, Jack tries to hide the body. From there, we backtrack to follow the chain of events of five different characters and five different storylines that all converge and become party to Jack's hitting the body at 11:14pm.

On the afternoon of July 1, 1981, Los Angeles police responded to a distress call at 8763 Wonderland Avenue and soon discovered a grisly quadruple homicide, later compared to the gruesome slaughter at the Tate household at the hands of the Charles Manson family 10 years earlier. Ron Launius (Josh Lucas), Billy Deverell (Tim Blake Nelson), Barbara Richardson (Natasha Gregson Wagner) and Joy Miller (Janeane Garofalo) were brutally murdered, and Ron's wife Susan (Christina Applegate) was left in critical condition. The police investigation that followed - led by detectives Sam Nico (Ted Levine), Louis Cruz (Frankie G.) and Mike Peters (M.C. Gainey) - would unearth a seedy world of drugs and violence, ultimately revealing a motley crew from LA's underbelly including ex-con David Lind (Dylan McDermott), nightclub impresario Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian), the most unlikely of American heroes - porn legend John Holmes (Val Kilmer) - Holmes' estranged wife Sharon (Lisa Kudrow) and his teenage lover Dawn Schiller (Kate Bosworth).

This is the true story of the romance and marriage of American poet/novelist Sylvia Plath (Gwyenth Paltrow) and English poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig). Born in Boston during the Great Depression, Plath first attended Smith College, which was also the setting for her first suicide attempt. Receiving a Fulbright scholarship, she traveled to England to attend Cambridge, where she met a dashing young poet who would win her heart, and ultimately become her husband. Their marriage was rocky, however, and they eventually separated in 1963 when Hughes broke her heart by taking on another lover, Assia Wevill. Crushed, Plath attempted suicide again... and was successful. Hughes went on to publicly accept responsibility for causing her lethal anguish.

n their first film together, screen legends Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman face off in this electrifying nail-biter about a ruthless jury consultant who'll do anything to win. With lives and millions of dollars at stake, the fixer plays a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a jury member (John Cusack) and a mysterious woman (Rachel Weisz) who offer to "deliver" the verdict to the highest bidder.

Hayden Christensen stars as Stephen Glass, a staff writer for the respected current events and policy magazine The New Republic and a freelance feature writer for publications such as Rolling Stone, Harper's and George. By the mid-90s, Glass' articles had turned him into one of the most sought-after young journalists in Washington, but a bizarre chain of events - chronicled in Buzz Bissinger's September, 1998 Vanity Fair article upon which "Shattered Glass" is based - suddenly stopped his career in its tracks. "Shattered Glass" is a study of a very talented - and at the same time very flawed - character. It is also a look inside our culture's noblest profession, one that protects our most precious freedoms by revealing the truth, and what happens when our trust in that profession is called into question.

Takeshi Kaneshiro stars in this thriller as Miyamoto, an assassin who accidentally wounds a young woman during a shoot out. When Miyamoto goes to help her, she tells him that she has been sent from the future to prevent an alien invasion that will occur in 72 hours. She informs him that because he has injured her, he must now help her carry out her mission or else be responsible for the destruction of humanity.

On August 20th 1973, police were dispatched to the remote farmhouse of Thomas Hewitt, a former head-skinner at a local slaughterhouse in Travis County, Texas. What they found within the confines of his cryptic residence was the butchered remains of 33 victims, a chilling discovery that shocked and horrified a nation in what many still call the most gruesome mass murder case of all time. Brandishing a chainsaw and wearing the grotesque flesh masks of his victims, the killer became forever known as "Leatherface" when sensational headlines were splashed across newspapers throughout the state of Texas: "House of Horrors Stuns Nation - Massacre in Texas." Police and FBI eventually gunned down a man wearing a leathery mask and declared they had their killer and abruptly closed the case. However, in the years that followed, many close to the grisly murder case would come forward to level accusations that police had botched the investigation and knowingly killed the wrong man. Now, for the first time, the only known survivor of the killing spree has broken the silence and come forward to tell the real story of what happened on that deserted rural Texas highway when a group of five young kids inadvertently found themselves besieged by a chainsaw wielding madman who would leave a trail of blood and terror that would forever be known as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

Chicago residential novelist Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr.), crippled by a horribly severe case of psioriasis, starts rewriting his 1950s noir novel "The Singing Detective" in his mind in a desperate effort to hang on to his sanity. Becoming the title character himself, he heads off in pursuit of Nazis in the 1940's who serve in place of his own personal demons. With the help of eccentric psychologist, Dr Gibbon (Gibson), who uses the book as a road map into the Dan Dark's psyche, he slowly liberates himself from the trauma of his childhood.

Based on a true story, this is about the Irish journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), a reporter for the Dublin Sunday Independent, who exposed some of Dublin's most powerful crime barons and drug lords in 1996. But later that year she was gunned down by assasins hired by the same criminal drug lords she exposed.

The comedy spoof series that knows no fear is at it again with its funniest installment yet. Taking shots at the latest crop of block-busters, "Scary Movie 3" irreverently roasts "The Ring", "Signs", "Matrix Reloaded", "The Hulk", "8 Mile", "The Others "and more, as well as pop culture trends such as "American Idol". The film brings director David Zucker back to the genre he helped create with the classics "Airplane!", "Naked Gun" and "Naked Gun 2 1/2". The cast of "Scary Movie 3" includes Charlie Sheen as the aliens-attracting farmer Tom and Denise Richards as his hapless wife Annie; Eddie Griffin as the prophetic Orpheus and Queen Latifah as his very un-Matrixy wife Laquisha; Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy as Catholic School Girls; Leslie Nielsen as the President of The United States; Simon Rex as rap-star wannabe George; Jeremy Piven as reporter Ross Giggins; Camryn Manheim as the formidable Trooper Champlin; Anna Faris as eager anchorwoman Cindy Campbell; Regina Hall as eerie school teacher Brenda Meeks; William Forsythe as The Glench; Anthony Anderson as rap promoter Mahalik; as well as George Carlin. Fat Joe, Simon Cowell, Method Man, Redman, Macy Gray, Master P., Ja Rule, D.L. Hughley, Wu Tang Clan and The Coors Twins.

Based on the best-selling novel by Susanna Moore, "In the Cut" is a psychological thriller starring Meg Ryan and directed by Jane Campion. Ryan plays a lonely New York woman who discovers the darker side of passion after becoming involved with a tough homicide detective, who is investigating a series of murders in her neighborhood.

This love story chronicles the romance that develops between an American disaster relief doctor (Clive Owen) and an aristocratic philanthropist socialite (Angelina Jolie) who keep meeting over several years in countries torn apart by wars and disasters.

This is the decades-long story of the relationship between a prominent high school football coach (Ed Harris) in a small South Carolina town and the illiterate, mentally-challenged man nicknamed Radio (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) whom he mentors, who before that had always been the target of jokes and teasing by the community. Although their friendship raises some eyebrows at first, Radio's growth under the coach's guidance ultimately inspires the local townsfolk, from 1964 when he first starts helping the Hanna Yellow Jackets football team, through a 38+ career with the school that continues today.

In the small, rural town of Sandusky, Ohio, two goth kids are each other's best friends, sharing their experiences of being the town outsiders. Teenage photography enthusiast Clive (Kett Turton) is on his way towards coming fully out of the closet, and Gypsy (Sara Rue) is an overweight 25-year-old girl with a love of Stevie Nicks music and a low-pay job at the photo hut in the parking lot of the local mall. When the duo hears about a "Night of a Thousand Stevies" karaoke show in New York City, they decide to make a road trip of it as a way to escape the drudgery of small-town Ohio in the heady nightlife of NYC.

Set in a small New England college town, this drama follows the story of a respected classics professor with a terrible secret. His life starts crumbling after an affair with a young janitor is uncovered and the secret he had harbored for over 50 years is about to explode in a conflagration of devastating consequences.

A small cabin, hidden deep in the snow-covered hills of Northern Michigan is Hollywood animator Tom Kempton's only refuge after getting separated from his friends on a snowmobile trip. What started out as a relaxing getaway, becomes a waking nightmare when Tom finds himself at the hands of two psychotic sisters who plan to make him their next victim. A last minute rescue leaves both sisters presumably dead and Tom narrowly escaping with his life. Upon his return to Hollywood, however, Tom develops an unhealthy obsession with one of his captors that ultimately threatens the life and welfare of his family.

A ship sent to investigate an SOS distress call encounters an alien that begins to kill the crew members one by one.