“September Dawn” is a fictional Romeo and Juliet relationship love story set against the background of the controversial real-life massacre of 120 men, women and children traveling through Utah in the nineteenth century. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it is known, occurred on September 11, 1857, and was the first known act of religious terrorism on U.S. soil. A group of Mormons, many disguised as Paiute Indians, slaughtered all but 17 small children on a wagon train on its way to California. One man, the adopted son of Mormon leader Brigham Young, was eventually executed for the crime — 20 years after the event. The film is deemed controversial because it presents a point of view held strongly by hundreds of direct descendants of the massacre: that the iconic Brigham Young had complicity in the massacre, a view denied by the Mormon Church, even today.
STARRING: Jon Voight, Trent Ford, Tamara Hope, Terence Stamp, Lolita Davidovich, Dean Cain, John Gries, Taylor Handley, Krisinda Cain, Shaun Johnston
DIRECTOR: Christopher Cain
STUDIO: Slowhand Releasing
RATING: R (For violence)
“Stardust,” based on the best-selling graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, takes audiences on an adventure that begins in a village in England and ends up in places that exist in an imaginary world. A young man named Tristan (Charlie Cox) tries to win the heart of Victoria (Sienna Miller), the beautiful but cold object of his desire, by going on a quest to retrieve a fallen star. His journey takes him to a mysterious and forbidden land beyond the walls of his village. On his odyssey, Tristan finds the star, which has transformed into a striking girl named Yvaine (Claire Danes). However, Tristan is not the only one seeking the star. A king’s (Peter O’Toole) four living sons – not to mention the ghosts of their three dead brothers – all need the star as they vie for the throne. Tristan must also overcome the evil witch, Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), who needs the star to make her young again. As Tristan battles to survive these threats, encountering a pirate named Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro) and a shady trader named Ferdy the Fence (Ricky Gervais) along the way, his quest changes. He must now win the heart of the star for himself as he discovers the meaning of true love.
STARRING: Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Ben Barnes, Sienna Miller, Ricky Gervais, Jason Flemyng, Peter O’Toole, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, Ian McKellen (narrator)
DIRECTOR: Matthew Vaughn
STUDIO: Paramount Pictures
RATING: PG-13 (For fantasy violence and risque humor)
“2 Days in Paris” follows two days in the relationship of a New York based couple; a French photographer Marion (Julie Delpy) and American interior designer Jack (Adam Goldberg), as they attempt to re-infuse their relationship with romance by taking a vacation in Europe. Their trip to Venice didn’t really work out–they both came down with gastroenteritis. They have higher hopes for Paris. But the combination of Marion’s overbearing non-English speaking parents’, flirtatious ex-boyfriends’, and Jack’s obsession with photographing every famous Parisian tombstone and conviction that French condoms are too small, only adds fuel to the fire. Will they be able to salvage their relationship? Will they ever have sex again? Or will they merely manage to perfect the art of arguing?
STARRING: Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg
DIRECTOR: Julie Delpy
STUDIO: Samuel Goldwyn
RATING: R (For sexual content, some nudity and language)
Winner of 5 Cesar Awards (the French ‘Oscar’) including Best Picture and Best Director, “Lady Chatterley,” is a keenly perceptive, frankly sensual adaption of D.H. Lawrence’s classic novel about the turbulent love affair between a lonely British aristocrat’s wife and their estate’s gamekeeper. Director Pascale Ferran captures the author’s vision both of a society in transition, and the tremulous eroticism between two people drawn together despite its inequalities.
STARRING: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Couloc’h, Hippolyte Girardot
DIRECTOR: Pascal Ferran
STUDIO: Kino International
RATING: R (Nudity, sexual situations, language)
LANGUAGE: In French with English subtitles
Evening” unites a stellar cast, and is based on the beloved novel by Susan Minot and adapted for the screen by Ms. Minot and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham (The Hours), under the direction of Lajos Koltai (Fateless), who was previously an Academy Award nominated cinematographer. “Evening” is a deeply emotional film that illuminates the timeless love which binds mother and daughter – seen through the prism of one mother’s life as it crests with optimism, navigates a turning point, and ebbs to its close. Two pairs of real-life mothers and daughters – Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer – portray, respectively, a mother and her daughter and the mother’s best friend at different stages in life. Overcome by the power of memory, Ann Lord (Ms. Redgrave) reveals a long-held secret to her concerned daughters; Constance (Ms. Richardson), a content wife and mother, and Nina (Toni Collette), a restless single woman. Both are bedside when Ann calls out for the man she loved more than any other. But who is this “Harris,” wonder her daughters, and what is he to our mother? While Constance and Nina try to take stock of Ann’s life and their own lives, their mother is tended to by a night nurse (Eileen Atkins) as she journeys in her mind back to a summer weekend some fifty years ago, when she was Ann Grant (Claire Danes)…
…a young woman who has come from New York City to be maid of honor at the high-society Newport wedding of her dearest friend from college, Lila Wittenborn (Ms. Gummer). The bride-to-be is jittery, and turns to her maid of honor rather than her own mother (Glenn Close) for support. Ann stays close to her friend, yet is even closer to Lila’s irrepressible brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy).
Unexpected feelings surge forth once Ann meets wedding guest Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson), a lifelong friend and intimate of the Wittenborn family. Ann’s love for Harris will change her life, and those of her daughters, forever.
STARRING: Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy, Natasha Richardson, Dame Eileen Atkins, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep
DIRECTOR: Lajos Koltai
STUDIO: Focus Features
RATING: PG-13 (For some thematic elements, sexual material, a brief accident scene and language)
Yellow Movie” – Shot in New York and in Sanchez’s home country of Puerto Rico, this film brings to light a side of Sanchez’ acting and dancing talent that has never been seen on screen before. Sanchez, who can be seen on CBS’ hit show “Without a Trace”, and also in “Rush Hour 2 and 3”, had been developing this film as a labor of love for the last 8 years. Roselyn Sanchez plays Amaryllis Campos, a young, classically trained Latina ballerina, who dreams of leaving her impoverished home in Puerto Rico to pursue fame and fortune as a dancer. She heads for New York City, where she is forced to work in a seedy strip club to make ends meet. Setting audiences afire with her erotic moves, Amaryllis quickly becomes the strip club’s hottest attraction and falls in love with her best customer (D.B.Sweeney), who wants to take Amaryllis to live with him abroad. Finally winning an audition for a Broadway production, Amaryllis must now decide between true love and realizing her dream of becoming a star.
Broken English” – In a startling mature and nuanced performance, Parker Posey plays Nora Wilder, a thirty-something Manhattanite who is cynical about love and relationships, in this astute collaboration with first-time writer/director Zoe Cassavetes. Nora plugs away at her job in a posh downtown hotel and can’t help but wonder what it is she has to do to find a relationship as ideal as her friend Audrey’s (Drea De Matteo) “perfect marriage.” It doesn’t help that her overbearing mother (Gena Rowlands) takes every opportunity to remind Nora that she’s still unattached. After a series of disastrous first dates, she meets Julien (Melvil Poupaud), a seemingly devil-may-care Frenchman with a passion for living. Expecting another disastrous ending, Nora tries to avoid making the same mistakes. She finds herself in Paris looking to break old patterns. Inevitably, Nora has to look inward before she can find a new outlook on life and most importantly, love.
STARRING: Parker Posey, Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Peter Bogdanovich, Gena Rowlands
DIRECTOR: Zoe Cassavetes
STUDIO: Magnolia Films
RATING: PG-13 (For some sexual content, brief drug use and language)
On the heels of 2005’s blockbuster “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” writer/director Judd Apatow again mines hilarity from the relatably human in a comedy about a one-night stand with unexpected consequences: “Knocked Up.” Katherine Heigl (”Grey’s Anatomy,” “Roswell”) joins Virgin alums Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann for a comic look about the best thing that will ever ruin your best-laid plans: parenthood.
Allison Scott (Heigl) is an up-and-coming entertainment journalist whose 24-year-old life is on the fast track. But it gets seriously derailed when a drunken one-nighter with slacker Ben Stone (Rogen) results in an unwanted pregnancy. Faced with the prospect of going it alone or getting to know the baby’s father, Allison decides to give the lovable doof a chance.
An overgrown kid who has no desire to settle down, Ben learns that he has a big decision to make with his kid’s mom-to-be: will he hit the road or stay in the picture? Courting a woman you’ve just “Knocked Up,” however, proves to be a little difficult when the two try their hands at dating. As they discover more about one another, it becomes painfully obvious that they’re not the soul mates they’d hoped they might be.
With Allison’s harried sister Debbie (Mann) and hen-pecked brother-in-law Pete (Rudd) the only parenting role models the young lovers have, things get even more confusing. Should they raise the baby together? What makes a happy lifetime partnership after all? A couple of drinks and one…”Knocked Up.”
STARRING: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel
DIRECTOR: Judd Apatow
STUDIO: Universal Pictures
RATING: R (For language, nudity, drug use and sexual situations)
For those of you looking closely, and noticing that the release date for “Lucky You” on the above poster is September 8th, and the actual release date is May 4th, you’re not going blind. “Lucky You” was supposed to be released September 8, 2006, more than 6 months ago. It finally gets a new release date, opposite “Spiderman 3″ – yeah, that’s smart. Warner Bros pushed back a ton of movies last year, including the current bomb, “The Reaping,” starring 2-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank. Check out its original poster, which had it opening in November of 2006.
In “Lucky You,” director Curtis Hanson (”L.A. Confidential,” “Wonder Boys,” “8 Mile”) brings us a story based in the world of high-stakes Las Vegas poker. Huck Cheever (Eric Bana) is a blaster-a player who goes all out, all the time. But in his personal relationships, Huck plays it tight, expertly avoiding emotional commitments and long-term expectations. When Huck sets out to win the main event of the 2003 World Series of Poker-and the affections of Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore), a young singer from Bakersfield-there is one significant obstacle in his path: his father, L.C. Cheever (Robert Duvall), the poker legend who abandoned Huck’s mother years ago. As these two rivals progress toward a final showdown at the poker table, Huck learns that to win in the games of life and poker, he must try to play cards the way he has been living his life and live his life the way he has been playing cards – “Lucky You.”
STARRING: Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall, Debra Messing
DIRECTOR: Curtis Hanson
STUDIO: Warner Bros.
RATING: PG-13 (For some language and sexual humor)
Away From Her” is the lyrical screenplay adaptation of celebrated author Alice Munro’s short story, “The Bear Came Over The Mountain,” a beautiful yet unconventional story of a couple coming to grips with the onset of memory loss. Beloved by critics and audiences alike when it premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, the film marks the arrival of an exciting new filmmaker in Canadian actress Sarah Polley, who makes her feature screenwriting and directorial debut.
In the movie “Away From Her,” married for almost 50 years, Grant’s (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona’s (Julie Christie) commitment to each other appears unwavering. Their daily life is filled with tenderness and humor; yet this serenity is broken by Fiona’s increasingly evident memory loss – and her restrained references to a past betrayal. For a while, the couple is able to casually dismiss these unwelcome changes. But when neither Fiona nor her husband can deny any longer that she is being consumed by Alzheimer’s disease, the couple is forced to wrenchingly redefine the limits of their love and loyalty – and face the complex, inevitable transition from lovers to strangers. “Away From Her” also stars Olympia Dukakis, Kristen Thomson, with Michael Murphy and Alberta Watson. “Away From Her” is a love story about memory and devotion. The Andersson’s have remained committed to each other for fifty years, but now their marital tranquility is disrupted by Fiona’s failing memory at the hands of Alzheimer’s Disease. While Grant chooses to deny Fiona’s gradual deterioration, it soon becomes impossible to ignore. Fiona first looses hold of recent memories – largely a good time in the Andersson’s marriage – and plunges back into the trauma of the past, resurrecting old emotions that both Fiona and Grant would rather forget – “Away From Her.”
