Kate Capshaw

The life of a provincial town becomes stormy after the appearance of an anonymous love letter. The power of words and images to open hearts. Helen runs, miles a day, to burn off energy: she's an emotional celibate. Going through the post at her shop, she finds a romantic and poetic letter between the couch cushions, unsigned, and thinks it's for her. It melts her resistance to feelings, and soon she undertakes an affair with Johnny, a collegiate employee. (He sees the letter and thinks she wrote it to him; he quotes some of it, so she thinks he wrote it to her.) In the background are Helen's long-time friend, George, who loves her, and her mother who abruptly left on a long trip months before. Discovering who actually wrote the letter brings insight and promise. —<jhailey@hotmail.com>

A Harvard professor is lured back into the courtroom after twenty-five years to take the case of a young black man condemned to death for the horrific murder of a child. Bobby Earl (Blair Underwood) is facing the electric chair for the murder of a young girl. Eight years after the crime, he calls in Paul Armstrong (Sir Sean Connery), a professor of law, to help prove his innocence. Armstrong quickly uncovers some overlooked evidence to present to the local police, but they aren't interested, Bobby was their killer. —Rob Hartill The year is 1986. In Ochopee, Florida, eleven-year-old Joanie Shriver (Barbara Jean Kane) is kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Bobby Earl Ferguson (Blair Underwood) is arrested by officers Tanny Brown (Laurence Fishburne) and J. T. Wilcox (Christopher Murray), who proceed to beat Bobby into confessing to the murder. Bobby is placed on trial, where Bobby's defense attorney McNair (Ned Beatty) puts up a lousy defense for Bobby, and Bobby is sentenced to be executed. Now, eight years later, Bobby hands a letter to his grandmother Evangeline (Ruby Dee) and asks Evangeline to go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to hire Harvard law professor Paul Armstrong (Sir Sean Connery) to clear Bobby's name. At Harvard, Paul is attacking capital punishment in a campus debate, when Evangeline arrives and hands the letter to Paul. Paul goes home, where his wife Laurie (Kate Capshaw) is throwing a birthday party for their young daughter Katie (Scarlett Johansson). Laurie reads the letter and she encourages Paul to take the case, even though he hasn't practiced law in twenty-five years. Paul, Laurie, and Katie head to Florida, where Paul meets Bobby in the prison. Bobby tells Paul his side of the story and what Tanny and Wilcox did. Paul begins to believe that Bobby was railroaded. Bobby tells Paul to speak to Blair Sullivan (Ed Harris), a man who is also on death row. Blair gives Paul some clues that could prove Bobby's innocence, and Blair's own guilt. But in the process of trying to clear Bobby, Paul learns some disturbing truths about Bobby, putting Paul and his family in a fight for their lives. —Todd Baldridge

25 year old Finn decides to leave her fiancee Sam working on remodeling their home while she spends the summer at her Grandmother's country estate working on her master's thesis. Finn has been working on her thesis for a long time because each time she gets near finishing it she decides to start it over with a different topic. Her current topic is the ritual importance of country arts and crafts in various societies. Her Grandmother's home (an old country mansion surrounded by orchards) actually belongs to Grandmother's sister, Glady Joe, but Grandmother moved in with the sister after her husband died. When Finn arrives she finds a quilting bee group there working on a patchwork quilt. This group has for years been working on quilts together. The women all know Finn, and she is comfortable with them. Finn has her favorites but there is one who has an unhappy reputation for not well-tolerating children, and there is another one who is nosy about and critical of Finn. We learn that Finn's own mother and father were divorced when Finn was a child and that the mother has had a long succession of men she dumped. Neither of Finn's parents are in the film except that the mother appears near the end to reveal that she and Finn's father are getting remarried. The theme of both the movie and the quilt the ladies are making is love and marriage and the question of whether monogamous life long marriage is a realistic goal. As the film develops we learn via flashbacks the infidelity difficulties that affected the lives of the quilting ladies, some of which are still impacting their lives and are unsettled, including one younger member of the quilting bee who was recently widowed and is now involved with the husband of another member who has long suffered from her artistic husband's infidelity. Finn's fiancee visits and shows Finn a floor-plan that omits a separate room for Finn's writing that they had agreed to, but includes instead a guest room that he says they can also use as a baby's room. This start an argument and the fiancee leaves upset that the two have different ideas of how Finn will occupy her time after marriage. Finn gets further confused about her own desires as she learns of marital difficulties she hadn't suspected of the women she grew up knowing. One of the flashback stories is about an ancestor of a black woman in the group at the end of the Civil War. She started out searching for her parents who had been sold away years earlier, sees a crow that seems magical to her, and follows it because she thinks it will lead her to information about her parents. Instead she realizes later that it led her to the man who is her soul mate. Later, when Finn is struggling to decide whether she should continue a romance with an extremely handsome young farm boy she met at the neighborhood pool or whether she should break that off and marry Sam, she finds her own crow to follow. The story lines all are happily wrapped up by the end of the film.

Two New York cops are taking a member of the Yakuza to Japan, when he escapes. As they chase him, they get deeper into the Japanese Mafia scene and learn to play the game the Japanese way.

Indiana Jones, his sidekick Short Round and nightclub singer Willie Scott go from high-flying action in the Himalayas to a runaway mine car chase and finally an escape from a mine in India.

A military weapons engineer struggles to do his job responsibly, while a hapless tank commander has to live with the consequences in combat years later. Wylie is a lazy engineer. Landry is a Sergeant specialising in Armour. They have never met but their lives become entangled when Landry must take the tank Wylie designed into combat. Wylie is waiting for his employer to go out of business when he meets another engineer who gives him a disk with the plans for a system that will save his employer. The other engineer is dead moments later leaving Wylie with the disk and credit for the design. Suddenly Wylie is no longer a hack, but the saviour of his company and finds his life is no longer the same. —John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net> In 1982 Wylie is working for a company located in a former bowling alley which is about to go under. In 1984 Lt. Landry is demonstrating a tank in Kuwait that causes chaos. This is confusing, but the events are related. Wiley meets a man in a bar who is designing technology for a tank and is about to meet with KGB spy Jeff. Fearing what may happen (and he is right), he sneaks his design into Wylie's briefcase. Wylie finds the technology, and given that he will save his company by doing so, he reluctantly goes along with a co-worker's scheme to pass the work off as his own. The technology doesn't work perfectly but it can be improved. Wylie secretly asks a co-worker to investigate the plan further and discovers even worse problems. During all this Wylie also cheats on his wife with boss Clair and runs for his life from Jeff and other goons. Landry has troubles of his own. With plenty of silliness from the natives. In the end, one has to wonder if Wylie can fix the problems before Landry gets blown up by a tank that has already performed poorly. —This is essentially the plot summary from my user review.