Marc Kolbe Movies

Visionary director Spike Jonze brings Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book to the big screen with the help of hipster icon Dave Eggers, who teamed with Jonze to pen the adapted screenplay. A mixture of real actors, computer animation, and live puppeteering, Where the Wild Things Are follows the adventures of a young boy named Max (Max Records) as he enters the world of the Wild Things, a race of strange and enormous creatures who gradually turn the young boy into their king. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

The disappearance of a military leader and the death of four of his men leads two investigators to wade through a morass of deceptions and half-truths in search of the facts in this thriller. Sgt. Nathan West (Samuel L. Jackson) is the leader of an elite team of U.S. Army Special Forces operatives known as the Army Rangers; West is known as a highly effective officer, but one with a short temper and aggressive attitude who is not well liked by his soldiers. During a seemingly routine training exercise in Panama, a hurricane sweeps in, and four of West's six men are dead, while West himself seems to have vanished. Eager to get the facts behind what happened, Col. Bill Styles (Tim Daly) assigns Capt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen) to investigate. However, Osborne is having a hard time getting the two survivors to talk, so Styles brings in Tom Hardy (John Travolta), a former Army Ranger who served under West and became a first-class interrogator; Hardy later became a DEA agent, but left law enforcement after allegations of corruption. Hardy interviews Dunbar (Brian Van Holt), who claims that the four soldiers had been murdered, and West was killed in retaliation. Kendall (Giovanni Ribisi), the other survivor (whose father is a powerful officer) has a very different story of how the five men turned up dead, and it's up to Hardy and Osborne to determine who is telling the truth -- or if anyone is saying exactly what happened. Basic marked the first time John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson appeared in the same film together since their breakthrough roles in Pulp Fiction. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

An abandoned teen attempts to learn the rules of the road after being left by his mother at a roadside motel in this quirky crime drama starring screen veterans Carol Lynley, Barbara McNair, and William Smith. Upon realizing that his mother has abandoned him at a seedy motel in the middle of nowhere, innocent teen Otis (Matt Dotson) sets out to find his place in the world with little more than a compass, a bag of Twinkies, and dreams of Las Vegas. Soon making the acquaintance of female bandits Faith (Lynley) and Grace (McNair), Otis tags along for the ride in hopes of making his way to Sin City. Little does Otis know that the two wanted women are about to rendezvous with seasoned con artist Clyde (Smith), who currently has his sights set on a high-stakes poker game that will serve as his last big score before retiring from a life of crime. Just as Otis thinks he is becoming savvy to the criminal code, he learns the hard way that the only rule on the road is to survive at any cost. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide