Forest Whitaker

Russell Poole and Jack Jackson investigate the murder of rapper Notorious B.I.G. 1997. LAPD Detective Russell Poole investigates a case of an undercover cop killing another cop. This draws him into the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur murders. What he uncovers is huge, so much so, that the closer he gets to the truth, the more his superiors try to prevent him from getting to it. —grantss

When twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world, linguistics professor Louise Banks is tasked with interpreting the language of the apparent alien visitors.

Malcolm is a geek, carefully surviving life in The Bottoms, a tough neighborhood in Inglewood, CA filled gangsters and drugs dealers, while juggling his senior year of college applications, interviews and the SAT. His dream is to attend Harvard. A chance invitation to a big underground party leads Malcolm and his friends into a, only in Los Angeles, gritty adventure filed with offbeat characters and bad choices. If Malcolm can persevere, he`ll go from being a geek, to being dope, to ultimately being himself.

When Rodney Baze mysteriously disappears and law enforcement doesn`t follow through fast enough, his older brother, Russell, takes matters into his own hands to find justice.

After leaving his LAPD narcotics post, following a bungled operation that left him wracked with remorse and regret, Sheriff Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger) moved out of Los Angeles and settled into a life, fighting whatever little crime takes place in sleepy, Sommerton Junction. But that peaceful existence is shattered when Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega), the most notorious, wanted, drug kingpin in the western hemisphere escapes the FBI prisoner convoy. With the help of a fierce band of lawless mercenaries led by the icy Burrell (Peter Stormare), Cortez begins racing towards the US-Mexico border where the entire U.S. law enforcement, including Agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker) will have their final chance to intercept him before the violent fugitive escapes the border. At first reluctant to become involved, and, then counted out because of the perceived ineptitude of his small town force, Owens ultimately rallies his team and takes matters into his own hands.

In a dystopian world, a repo man who pursues customers that can no longer pay for their implanted organs ends up buying an artificial heart of his own.

In this action-packed thriller, eight strangers with eight different points of view try to unlock the truth behind an assassination attempt on the president of the United States.

A drama based on the true story of Melvin B. Tolson, a professor at Wiley College Texas. In 1935, he inspired students to form the school's first debate team, which went on to challenge Harvard in the national championship. Marshall, Texas, described by James Farmer, Jr. as "the last city to surrender after the Civil War," is home to Wiley College, where, in 1935-36, inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and his clandestine work as a union organizer, Professor Melvin Tolson coaches the debate team to a nearly-undefeated season that sees the first debate between U.S. students from white and Negro colleges and ends with an invitation to face Harvard University's national champions. The team of four, which includes a female student and a very young James Farmer, is tested in a crucible heated by Jim Crow, sexism, a lynch mob, an arrest and near riot, a love affair, jealousy, and a national radio audience. —<jhailey@hotmail.com>

A young beautiful but stressed out children's writer seeks out a holiday in the country but becomes the lead character in a supernatural mystery she must solve to save her life The successful children's writer Claire Holloway is troubled by scary nightmares and is under psychological treatment. While working out watching television, she sees the landscape of the Rose Marsh Farm in the Westmoreland County, and she notes that the farmhouse is linked to her nightmares. She decides to spend her vacation in the farm, which is located nearby a swamp, and she is haunted by the ghosts of a little girl and a teenage boy inside the house. She is befriended by the local publisher and historian Noah Pitney but after a sequence of disturbing visions, she decides to contact the paranormal consultant Geoffry Hunt. Together, they investigate the mystery and disclose a tragedy that happened in the farm about twenty years ago. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Trapped in their home`s panic room, Meg Altman and her daughter play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with three intruders. But what they really want is inside the room itself.

The alien is the result of the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) program. In 1974 Earth's scientists sent out transmissions with information about Earth and its inhabitants, DNA structure, etc., in hopes of finding life beyond Earth. Twenty years later, they receive two transmissions from an alien source. The first transmission was on how to create endless fuel effortlessly through a methane catalyst. Therefore, the scientists assume that this is a friendly alien species. But from a second alien transmission, the scientists receive information about an alien DNA sequence along with instructions on how to splice it with human DNA. A government team led by Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley) goes forward with the genetic experiment, hoping to induce a female with "more docile and controllable" traits. One of the one-hundred experimental ova produces a girl named Sil, who looks like a normal human but develops into a 12-year-old in three months. Sil's violent outbursts during her sleep make the scientists consider her a threat. They try to kill her using cyanide gas, but instead she breaks out of her containment cell and escapes out into the world. The government assembles a team composed of anthropologist Dr. Steven Arden (Alfred Molina), molecular biologist Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), empath Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker) and mercenary Preston "Press" Lennox (Michael Madsen) to track and destroy Sil. While sleeping, Sil has another dream of an alien train running her down. When she wakes up, tentacles start emerging from underneath her skin and mass to form an organic cocoon around her. While transforming within the cocoon, Sil kills a train warden before emerging as a blonde, twenty-something adult woman. Also, when Sil emerges she is naked, the reason for which is unknown. It can be assumed that the cocoon that enveloped her destroyed her clothes but it can also be assumed that she removed them during the process, though if the latter is correct it is unclear why. Sil waits in the train until it has arrived at Los Angeles. This makes tracking her extremely difficult. She is incredibly strong and intelligent with amazing regenerative powers. The scientists fear she may seduce someone to copulate with her in order to reproduce and any offspring could eventually exterminate mankind. Sil lacks inhibitions when it comes to harming or even killing people who get in her way and wants to reproduce as soon as possible. She tries first to mate with a man she meets at a night club, but she rejects and kills him after sensing he is diabetic. She then tries to mate with a man she meets after a car accident, this is interrupted by Press and Laura. While attempting to keep him from alerting them, she rapidly transforms into her natural form (a bipedal, humanoid creature with silted pupils, no hair, dark/colored skin and a pair of flexible tentacles both of which she keeps stored inside one of her breasts and can retract at will) and attempts to restrain him with her tentacles, forcing one of the tentacles into his mouth to keep him from screaming; inadvertently killing him. Sil then flees into the forest without being seen by the team but does not have enough time to retrieve her clothes, forcing her to flee naked. After cutting and dying her hair, she takes an attraction to Press. She eventually partially disrobes to seduce Arden. This succeeds and she and Arden remove the rest of their clothes before she copulates with him, becoming impregnated. Sil then quickly kills Arden when he realizes who she is and flees naked into the sewers where she gives birth to her son. The rest of the team follows her. Sil kills Fitch. Dan lights Sil's son on fire; the son then falls into the pool of oil, killing him. Enraged, Sil attacks Press but he shoots her into the burning pool, where she grabs onto Dan's leg. Press shoots Sil with his grenade launcher, instantly killing her. The last scene shows a rat chewing on one of Sil's severed tentacles; it mutates a long tongue and attacks another rat with it.

An Irish bomber targets an old foe in Boston. Jimmy Dove works for the bomb squad in Boston and he is always the one who is on the tough jobs. One day he decides to quit the force and to become a teacher for the rookies of the squad. A few days later his former partner is killed by a bomb and Jimmy becomes suspicious that maybe this bomb could have been built by a former friend of himself. He begins to investigate and finds out that his worst nightmare has returned from his past. —Harald Mayr <marvin@bike.augusta.de> There's a serial bomber loose in Boston, and he has killed Blanket, a member of Boston's bomb squad and the best friend of explosives expert Jimmy Dove. Dove has just retired from the bomb squad to marry a violinist named Kate, who has an 11-year-old daughter named Elizabeth. Haunted by grisly flashbacks, Dove soon figures out the identity of the bomber -- Irish explosives expert Ryan Gaerity, a man who is so radical in his views that even the IRA wants nothing to do with him. Gaerity has escaped from the maximum security Castle Gleigh prison in Ireland, using a bomb made from ingredients that include blood, wool, and a porcelain toilet. Gaerity has fled to Boston, where he saw Dove, who had just disarmed a bomb planted in a MIT computer lab, painted as a reluctant hero on TV. Gaerity was furious: it's because of Dove that he's spent years in prison. Dove was born Liam McGivney, and he used to be a naive Irish patriot. Gaerity recruited him and taught him to build bombs, and Gaerity conceived a terrorist plan that went terribly wrong. Liam helped Gaerity build a bomb, then he realized that Gaerity intended to detonate it on a crowded street. Liam tried to stop Gaerity from detonating the bomb, but bomb device went off, killing a lot of people, including Gaerity's sister. Liam escaped from Ireland and made his way to America, where he changed his name to Jimmy Dove. Gaerity was arrested, tried, and imprisoned until his escape. Gaerity, who has now taken up residence in an abandoned gambling ship called the Dolphin, has decided to get revenge on Dove, and Gaerity started terrorizing the bomb squad by killing Blanket. Now, Dove is the only one who can stop Gaerity. —Todd Baldridge

Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar) is a teenager alienated from her newly remarried father, an agent from the Environmental Protection Agency (Terry Kinney) and her new stepmother (Meg Tilly), and her 10-year-old brother Andy. Marti's father has been assigned to this remote military base on an assignment to check for contaminates which may be the cause of a recent outburst of mass hysteria on the base. Before arriving, the family stops at a rural gas station where Marti encounters a wild-eyed serviceman who tells her that "they are everywhere." When Marti runs to tell her father, the serviceman is gone. Upon arrival, Marti attempts to fit in with her new enviroment, hanging around with the base commander's rebellious daughter, and by flirting with a handsome attack helicopter pilot, Tim Young (Wirth). While examining a soil specimen, Marti's father is approached by a man named Major Collins (Forrest Whitaker), who asks him about psychological effects particularly narcophobia (the fear of sleep), saying that many people on the base are now frightened of sleep and are paranoid and suspicious. Marti's father doesn't take the Major very seriously. He is forced to take it seriously, however after extremely high levels of toxicity and mutant plant life are discovered on the base. That night, Marti Malone's step-brother approaches his sleeping mother, but she crumbles to dust as her soulless and egotistical pod double exits from the closet. Donning a nightgown, the pod-woman engages in an attempt to convince her husband that the pod invasion is a good thing, claiming it will cause the death of confusion and anger. She also claims that there's no place at all to go, as the invasion is not an isolated incident. He is almost shocked and saddened into compliance, but Marti and her step-brother arrive and drag her father out the door. His pod-wife dashes to the door and emits a shrill and mechanical scream that alerts her comrades to the danger of a human being. For the rest of the movie, Marti and her father and Andy are chased across the base by the taken over soldiers and civilians on the base, where they encounter a few remaining humans who join them and are also are chased by the pods. Searchlights go on, and the pod clones swarm over the base. Hiding Marti and Andy in a warehouse filled with barrels of poisonous waste, Marti's father promises to find help. He sneaks up to the window of Major Collins' office and enters by smashing a window. Inside, he finds the hysterical Major attempting to call for help, but gets blocked on the other end of the line by the bureaucratic pod-people. At first, he suspects Marti's father of being a pod-man, but when he realizes he isn't, he explains while wolfing down sleep-prevention pills that it is too late for running; all they can do is fight. Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of the fearsome pod-people, led by the base commander. Marti's father hides. Instead of shooting all of the pod-people with his gun, the Major allows them to try to convince him that the individual is never important, and that only mindlessness and heartlessness can solve problems. He shoots himself rather than live in such a world. Marti's father returns to Marti and Andy, and asks them to follow him, claiming to have found a way out. They drive aimlessly through the military base, as loudspeakers shout out instructions for spreading the invasion by carrying out pods in trucks. Frightened by all this, Marti asks her father where exactly they're going. He never gives her a straight answer, instead replying. "I know what I'm doing. Don't worry...I know exactly what I'm doing." Realizing that her father was "podded" while he was away, she swerves the car to the side and tries to escape with her brother, but her father tries to keep her in the van. Adding to all this is the helicopter pilot, Tim Young, who still hasn't figured out what has been going on, stepping onto the scene, and Marti takes his gun and shoots her pod-father dead. The pilot is horrified to see him shrink into a mass of seething and bloody goo. Marti, Tim, and Andy hide out in a nearby hanger where Tim tells them that it's too dangerous to be spotted in the open, so he'll go alone. As soon as he goes in, he is approached by the Pod-people, and pretends to be a pod-man, and although the pod-people suspect strongly that he's a human, they can't find any evidence and let him go. While he's starting up the helicopter, several of the pod-people approach Marti and Andy. Tim sees this from the air and follows them to a building on the base where humans are being duplicated. Tim lands the helicopter and enters the building to look for Marti, and finds her, nearly taken over by her pod clone on the bed next to her. Tim manages to revive her before the transformation is complete. Marti and Tim leave the building, pretending to be emotionless so they can get to Tim's helicopter to escape. However, they are spotted and confronted by the commander's daughter, whom gets suspicious and tells Marti that she saw Andy somewhere, and when Marti reacts, the game is up. Marti and Tim are forced to run to the helicopter and are joined at the last minute by Andy who runs up to them. However after taking off, Any attacks Tim, and Marti is forced to throw her taken-over brother out of the helicopter to his death on the ground far below. At dawn, Marti and Tim return to the military base and attack with with rockets and bombs from the helicopter's armaments, and destroy the pod-making facility and most of the pods and their clones with it. The final scene has Marti and Tim flying away in their helicopter and landing at a military base near the city of Atlanta where the ending of the film is an ambiguous one, quoting Marti's infected stepmother earlier in the film, suggesting that the phenomenon has already spread far beyond the army base, and nowhere, or nobody, is really safe: "Where are you gonna go, where are you gonna run, where are you gonna hide? Nowhere... 'cause there's no one like you left." The End

Dr. Richard Sturgess and his colleagues cut red tape at a poorly-run hospital for veterans. A group of doctors in a veteran's hospital must contend with their hopeless situation: too many patients and not enough beds. The main cause of their problems is bureaucratic belt-tightening by the hospital administrators. The doctors are determined to give the best service they can, even if that means defying the orders of management and performing unauthorized operations. —Murray Chapman <muzzle@cs.uq.oz.au>

"Bloodsport" follows Frank Dux, an American martial artist serving in the military, who decides to leave the army to compete in a martial arts tournament in Hong Kong where fights to the death can occur. Frank Dux has spent most his life being trained by Tanaka to participate in the Kumite, the ultimate martial arts tournament, where participants are seriously injured, even killed. Frank decides to go despite being told by his superiors in the army that he can't because they need him. Two army officers are sent to get him and the trail leads to Hong Kong but Frank eludes them. While Frank advances, he knows that he may have to face Chong Li, the defending champion, who has killed a few participants. —rcs0411@yahoo.com When a martial arts-trained soldier learns of an underground fight-to-the-death tournament through the last words of his dying sensei, he must travel to Hong Kong while avoiding capture from his military superiors so he can fight his way to the top in the deadly competition to honor the legacy of his sensei. —Turi Haim Frank Dux has entered the "kumite", an illegal underground martial-arts competition where serious injury and even death are not unknown. In town for the fight are a number of fighters (all with different styles), as well as a journalist determined to get her story. Chong Li, a particularly ruthless and vicious fighter is the favourite, but then again Dux has never fought him before. —Murray Chapman <muzzle@cs.uq.oz.au> Frank Dux is an American martial artist. His former teacher in the martial arts, gives him an invitation to "The Kumite", the secret martial arts tournament where only the world's best fighters are invited. Frank shows up in Hong Kong for the tournament, but his CO's in the US Army are right on his tail. Frank wins match after match, and shows promise that he may be the first person from the Western Hemisphere to win the tournament, until the defending champion gets his hands on Frank's friend, Jackson, and injures him in the Quarter Finals. Now Frank faces an uphill climb. His friend is hurt, the US Army is on his tail, and he is on the verge of making martial arts history. The question is, will he? —David Hammond (dickclarkfan1@yahoo.com)