Christopher Milburn Movies

Washed-up racecar driver Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) puts the peddle to the metal to rescue his kidnapped wife, enlisting the aid of a brilliant young hacker (Selena Gomez) to accomplish his deadly mission as a malevolent stranger (Jon Voight) issues orders while monitoring Brent's every move via remote cameras affixed to his car. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

A young couple gets a great deal on a foreclosed home, but winds up fighting for their lives after a gang of heavily armed drug dealers turn up determined to recover a fortune in heroin they had left hidden in the walls. Dave Nash wanted to give his wife Emma the perfect birthday gift. When he found a gorgeous home in a gated neighborhood, he knew it was the one. But shortly after moving in, Dave and Emma make a shocking discovery. The walls of the home are lined with heroin, and the men who hid it there have come to get it back. Outnumbered and outgunned yet determined to stand his ground, David decides that if he can't escape, he'll just have to fight back with everything he's got. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Broken Lizard alumni Paul Soter takes a break from comedy to craft this haunted house film about a pair of sleep deprived parents who begin to experience disturbing visions after moving from the city to the country. Alex and Penny have just become the proud parents of a baby boy when they decide that the big city is no place to raise a child. Relocating to a remote farmhouse, the once-happy couple finds their relationship slowly deteriorating due to the constant demands of caring for a newborn, including an acute lack of sleep. When both Alex and Penny begin seeing a mysterious woman around the home, they at first dismiss the sightings as hallucinations brought on by sleeplessness. But as the visions become more frequent, the frightened parents are forced to consider that dark forces are at work in their home. By the time the shocking truth about their new abode is revealed, however, their tenuous grip on sanity has already begun to slip. Pell James and Johnathon Schaech star. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Director John Hyams transplants Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo to the mean streets of New Orleans to tell the tale of a mysterious martial artist who pits two vicious street gangs against one another before setting his sights on the true cause of the community's problems -- the corrupt local sheriff. Rival crime bosses have turned the mean streets of the Big Easy into an all out war zone where no citizen is safe when Ryan Hong (Cung Le) drifts into town using the lessons of his master Tianto (Jean-Claude Van Damme) to clean up the city. Meanwhile, local Police Chief Mr. V (Peter Weller) gains a grudging respect for Hong's formidable fighting skills, but begins to see him as a growing threat to his grip on power. But when the two gangs unite to conquer a common enemy, it soon becomes apparent that Mr. V's corrupt regime is about to topple. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Six contestants in a staged reality game show compete to win 20,000 dollars apiece by spending the night in a deserted prison, but realize that the stakes are higher than they ever suspected when the malevolent spirit of the sadistic warden begins to stalk them through the darkened corridors. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

British filmmaker John Irvin directs the musical comedy drama The Boys From County Clare. Set in the late '60s, the story involves a pair of rival brothers reuniting for the All-Ireland Traditional Music Competition in County Clare, Ireland. As defending champion John Joe (Bernard Hill) gets his local Celtic band ready to compete, his estranged brother, Jimmy (Colm Meaney), blows into town from Liverpool with his own band. John Joe's pianist, Maisie (Charlotte Bradley), isn't happy to see Jimmy, who had left her years ago to raise their daughter, Anne, all by herself. Now the town's star fiddle player, Anne (Andrea Corr of the Irish pop group the Corrs) goes against her mother's wishes in order to seek romance with Jimmy's flute player Teddy (Shaun Evans). The Boys From County Clare was shown at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi

This drama takes place in Somerset, England in 1958. Eva is a twenty-year-old woman who fantasizes about travel, painting, classic books, and the attention of Joseph Lees, her second cousin, with whom she fell in love as a girl. Joseph, whom she has not seen for four years, is the only member of the family who has managed to get away from the stale domestic cycle. He has recently been injured in a truck accident and Eva imagines herself curing his wounds. She conceals her obsession from everyone except her sister, the precocious Janie, who is twelve years old. Reality is far away from Eva's dreams. Her artistic endeavors are confined to a local drawing class; she works for a meager salary at a dirty sawmill and the only male around to appreciate her female charm is the local pig farmer, Harry Flyte. Harry's sister Maria is anxious to marry off her brother so that she can be free to do as she pleases. Eva moves in with Harry, but when she meets Joseph at a family gathering, the old flame is rekindled. However, Harry is not so easy to get rid of. Dreaming of Joseph Lees is a family drama and the first feature of Eric Styles. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Rovi

A pair of British lads, one gay and one socialist, chafe at the restrictions of boarding school life in this period piece, which was adapted from Julian Mitchell's novel and play of the same name and loosely based on the Burgess-Maclean spy scandal of the 1950s. In the 1930s, upper-class scions Tommy Judd (Colin Firth) and Guy Bennett (Rupert Everett) are both nearing the end of their careers at an unnamed public school that bears a striking resemblance to Eton. Tommy, a Marxist intellectual, refuses to participate actively in the school's rigid social hierarchy. But Guy, when not mooning after pretty boys, angles for a position next term as one of the "gods," or master prefects, of his house. When a faculty member stumbles onto the homosexual fumblings of a pair of students, one boy commits suicide and a scandal erupts. The administration and senior students do their best to ensure nothing of this sort ever sullies their reputation again. Considering that homosexual experimentation is rampant and that Guy has slept with most of the prefects in his house, the strict new rules leave a bad taste in his mouth. They also put a damper on his Wildean lifestyle, especially after he falls hopelessly in love with James Harcourt (Cary Elwes), a dreamy boy from one of the other houses. Things come to a head when autocratic prefect Fowler (Tristan Oliver) intercepts a letter from Guy to James and sentences Guy to a savage beating. By film's end, Guy's complicity in the power games of the British class system has been challenged, and his friend Tommy's communist dogma has made a lasting impression; a framing device portrays Guy as an elderly former spy living in exile in Soviet Moscow. Another Country was shot at Cambridge, Oxford, and Althorp Hall (Princess Diana's childhood home) after the producers were denied permission to shoot at Eton. Everett and Firth both appeared in the original London theater production alongside Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Day-Lewis; on-stage, it was actually Firth who played Guy. For a more factual account of the Burgess-Maclean affair, see the TV movie An Englishman Abroad. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi