David Marshall Grant

After a career setback, Joanna and her husband move their family from Manhattan to Stepford, a quiet suburb. But her fresh start is threatened by a dark secret behind the women of Stepford.

A young man fresh out of law school tries to win a reprieve for his racist grandfather who is on death row. Having survived the hatred and bigotry that was his Klansman grandfather's only legacy, young attorney Adam Hall seeks at the last minute to appeal the old man's death sentence for the murder of two small Jewish boys 30 years before. Only four weeks before Sam Cayhall is to be executed, Adam meets his grandfather for the first time in the Mississippi prison which has held him since the crime. The meeting is predictably tense when the educated, young Mr. "Hall" confronts his venom-spewing elder, Mr. "Cayhall," about the murders. The next day, headlines run proclaiming Adam the grandson who has come to the state to save his grandfather, the infamous Ku Klux Klan bomber. While the old man's life lies in the balance, Adam's motivation in fighting this battle becomes clear as the story unfolds. Not only does he fight for his grandfather, but perhaps for himself as well. He has come to heal the wounds of his own father's suicide, to mitigate the secret shame he has always felt for the genetic fluke which made this man his grandfather, and to bring closure -- one way or another -- to the suffering the old man seems to have brought to everyone he has ever known. But, would mercy soften his grandfather's heart? —Mark Fleetwood <mfleetwo@mail.coin.missouri.edu>

In an unexplained act of charity, Jeanne Holman, picks up an injured, apparent tramp and takes him home to care for him little realizing who he was, or the effect he would have on her life and those of her family. When Jane Holman is driving with her two sons, Tom and Gunny, she accidentally runs into a drifter, named Jack McCloud, who breaks his leg. Feeling sorry for him, Jane invites Jack and his dog Betty Jane to stay at her house until his leg has healed. After having some difficulties to adapt to this new lifestyle, Jack soon finds himself loved by the family and they all want him to stay. When he starts teaching baseball to Tom, who misses his father who's missing in the Korean War, the two of them develop a strong bond. Meanwhile, Gunny believes that there's more to Jack and Betty Jane than meets the eye, and he's determined to find out. —Peter Huiskes <huiskes@westbrabant.net>

In 1939, Captain Daniel McCormick (Mel Gibson) is a test pilot in the United States Army Air Corps. After a successful run and a subsequent crash landing in a prototype North American B-25 Mitchell bomber, McCormick greets his longtime friend, scientist Harry Finley (George Wendt). Finley confides that his latest experiment, "Project B", has succeeded in building a prototype chamber for cryogenic freezing. The following day, just as McCormick is about to propose to his girlfriend, Helen (Isabel Glasser), she goes into a coma following an automobile accident, with doctors doubting she will ever recover. McCormick insists he be put into suspended animation for one year, so he will not have to watch Helen die. Fifty-three years later, in 1992, 10-year-old airplane enthusiast Nat Cooper (Elijah Wood) and his friend Felix (Robert Hy Gorman) are playing inside the military storage warehouse housing the chamber, accidentally activating it and waking McCormick, leaving Nat's coat behind. McCormick awakens and escapes from the warehouse before realizing what year it is. He first approaches the military about his experiences, but they dismiss him as crazed; McCormick becomes more determined to learn what happened to him. McCormick follows the address on the jacket back to Nat, befriending him. While hiding in Nat's treehouse, he rescues Nat's mother Claire (Jamie Lee Curtis) from her abusive boyfriend Fred (Eric Pierpoint), slightly injuring his hand in the process. Claire fixes up his wound and a bond develops between the two; she allows McCormick to stay, and he and Nat build a simulated bomber-plane cockpit in Nat's treehouse so that McCormick can teach Nat how to fly. McCormick passes out and is hospitalized, where he discovers that his body is failing as his age begins to catch up with him. McCormick tracks down Finley's daughter Susan (Millie Slaven), who informs him her father died in a fire before she was born. She gives McCormick her father's journals, detailing the cryogenic process, and Finley notes disclose that the rapid aging is irreversible. Susan also reveals that Helen is still alive, but they escape before the FBI, who is now after McCormick, catch up with him. Claire drives McCormick to an air show and commandeers a B-52 bomber to fly to Helen's seaside-lighthouse home, with Nat stowing away on board. Claire gives Harry's journals to the FBI, for their plans to replicate and modernize the experiment. McCormick suffers another ageing attack, forcing Nat (who is now slightly familiar with the plane's controls after his simulated-training session with McCormick) to land the plane near Helen's house. The now-elderly McCormick reunites with the also-gray-and-wrinkled Helen and asks her to marry him; she happily accepts, proving that true love does indeed last forever. McCormick introduces Nat to Helen, and the film ends with the three joining hands and going for a seaside stroll together.

A young pilot finds himself recruited unwittingly into a covert and corrupt CIA airlift operation in Laos during the Vietnam conflict. Air America was the CIA's private airline operating in Laos during the Vietnam War, running anything and everything from soldiers to foodstuffs for local villagers. After losing his pilot's license, Billy Covington is recruited into it, and ends up in the middle of a bunch of lunatic pilots, gun-running by his friend Gene Ryack, and opium smuggling by his own superiors. —Jeff Cross <blackjac_1998@yahoo.com> Billy is a wacko pilot who loses his last straight job as a helicopter traffic reporter by getting into a screaming match with a driver. He takes a job working for what amounts to a CIA airline in Asia. Billy puts it as, "I'm used to being the weirdest person in the room. Here I don't even make the top ten." There is an insurgency shooting at them, government soldiers running drugs, a pilot who is supplying arms to the whole region, and those are the straightforward sub plots. —John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net>

The believable, fresh-faced characters are naive American college students; armed with their French-English dictionaries they compulsively seek out hundreds of monuments, romanticize the nomadic artist's life, and look for grown-up love. A group of American exchange students comes to Paris to study the language and culture for a year. The film depicts the various interactions between the students and the instructors, including the pretty female director of the institute where they are enrolled. —Ari Herzog <ari@ici.net>