Charlize Theron is the latest stunning blonde to be hanging around some big ape in a Hollywood movie, this one a remake of the 1949 semi-classic with echoes of the superior King Kong. Theron plays the daughter of an American researcher killed by poachers in Africa. The baby gorilla left in her care grows up to become a hugely tall and broad specimen named Joe, living in the mountains as a mostly unseen legend among people who live there. Along comes an eco-minded emissary (Bill Paxton) from a California sanctuary, who talks the jungle girl into providing safe haven for Joe at the LA facility. The transition is not without discomfort but everything is aggravated via a conspiracy of poachers to get Joe into their own greedy hands. Director Ron Underwood (City Slickers) uses a combination of special-effects techniques to give Joe life and personality, and he succeeds quite effectively. The requisite giant-ape-goes-amok scenes are all in place-a couple of them pretty intense--as is a conclusion that finds the simian hero performing a stunning feat of escalation. Underwood attempts to give a little modern spin to some classic Hollywood conventions regarding wild hearts lost in civilization and the results are pretty agreeable family fare. --Tom Keogh
Part of what was touted as a late-1980s revival of Westerns (and you can see how long that lasted), this good-looking, empty-brained film was like a spurs-and-chaps version of a Joel Schumacher movie, filled with pretty faces, prettier imagery, and absolutely no new ideas. Young Guns sees an idiotically grinning Emilio Estevez cast as Billy the Kid, who slowly accumulates a gang of Brat Pack buddies (Lou Diamond Phillips, Kiefer Sutherland, Dermot Mulroney) and fashions them into a group of male models with six-guns. The action is confused and the script is trite, though Terence Stamp is intriguing as the old reprobate who helps the gang get its act together. This is followed by an even worse sequel. --Marshall Fine
The opening and closing moments of Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis's Contact astonish viewers with the sort of breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these day--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a handful of sand. Contact traces the journey between those two visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact is exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from 2001 to The Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest)reaches Milky Way-level wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious, unpredictable--Contact is all of these things and more. Much of it remains open to speculation and interpretation but whatever conclusions one eventually draws, Contactdeserves recognition as a rare piece of big-budget studio film making on a personal scale. --Jim Emerson
A subjective documentary that explores the numerous theories about the hidden meanings within Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980). The film may be over 30 years old but it continues to inspire debate, speculation, and mystery. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic re-enactments. Together they'll draw the audience into a new maze, one with endless detours and dead ends, many ways in, but no way out. Extras: Secrets of The Shining: Panel Discussion from the First Annual Stanley Film Festival 11 Deleted Scenes The Making of the Music Featurette Mondo Poster Design Discussion with Artist Aled Lewis Trailers
It's up to a pair of trash-hauling heroes to clean up the city in this action-comedy starring brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. With hilarious supporting performances and an all-star soundtrack Men At Work is an engaging comic adventure. Garbage men James (Estevez) and Carl (Sheen) dream of opening a surf shop but often land in hot water due to their practical jokes. When they discover the body of a murdered politician on their route they attempt to sniff out the kille
A hit man with an aversion to crime hooks up with a sexy painter with a certain knack for it and together they go on a misguided and hilarious crime spree.
A woman disappears. Four marriages are drawn into a tangled web of love, deceit, sex and death. Not all of them will survive.
The third entry of 1998-99's cinematic TV trilogy kind of got lost in the shuffle following The Truman Show, an art film masquerading as a blockbuster, and Pleasantville, a heartfelt feel-good movie masquerading as a special-effects extravaganza. Edtv is nothing more than it appears: a scruffy comedy about fame and its discontents. Matthew McConaughey stars as Ed, a white-trash rube who gets his own dawn-to-midnight TV series in which every aspect of his life, no matter how sordid or dull or embarrassing, becomes mass entertainment (it inverts Truman by having the protagonist invite the pervasive cameras). Predictably, fame makes him miserable and, unsurprisingly, he finds a way out of his predicament. Albert Brooks covered this same territory in the funnier Real Life, and it's probably not the best idea for a load of comfy celebs to preach to us about how difficult fame is. But the film is cannily cast, including a number of performers who themselves have fallen victim to stupid media tricks (McConaughey, Ellen DeGeneres as the network executive, Elizabeth Hurley as a vamp hitching her star to Ed's and Woody Harrelson as Ed's even dumber brother). Structurally, the movie is a mess. It looks as if the filmmakers had the choice between making a fully realised, two-and-a-half-hour-long movie that no one would sit through or one that clocks in under two hours but has a lot of plot holes; they opted for the latter (Hurley's character disappears, practically without comment). Still, there are enough laughs to keep things moving and as a shaggy dog tale it's decent fun. --David Kronke, Amazon.com --This text refers to another version of this video.
Come join in a spectacular rainforest adventure - where the radar-impaired Batty and his magical friends Crysta Pips and the Beetle Boys try to save their special world from mankind's carelessness and the evil Hexxus.
A routine Space Shuttle mission becomes a nightmare after disaster strikes...
'Ride Or Die' tells the story of private investigator ""Rad"" McCrae (Martin) and his munitions expert partner Lisa (Fox) as they try to find the killer of Rad's boyhood friend Benjamin a promising rapper who the police say committed suicide. As Rad and Lisa's investigation takes them through the hip hop music scene confronting various record label owners attorneys rappers and video directors they eventually take on mega-powerful record exec B Free (Taliferro). Within his orga
She must tell the courts what she saw... even if it kills her. Grace McKenna has an unfaithful husband a difficult family and a drinking problem. Then one fateful day she witnesses a woman being brutally murdered. She decides against all advice to testify to what she saw. Only her testimony can put the murderer behind bars. But despite her evidence the killer is let off. Now that he's free he wants to silence the only witness to his crime. Grace's life is on the line. Desperate to stay alive she prepares to come face to face with her pursuer and her own fears. Based on a true story.
Melissa and Liz are best friends until Chris comes into Melissa's life and Liz isn't impressed. Haunted by his past Chris isn't all he seems...
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