Brian Bennett Movies

Assigned the thankless task of teaching freshman English at a gang-infested Long Beach, CA high school, a 23-year-old teacher resorts to unconventional means of breaking through to her hardened students in director Richard LaGravenese's adaptation of Erin Gruwell's best-seller The Freedom Writer's Diaries: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. Her students had been written off, and her chances of succeeding scoffed at, but Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) wasn't about to go down without a fight. Long Beach is a place where a new war is waged with each passing day, and when the hardened students who walk those dangerous hallways sense an outsider attempting to understand their plight, their cynical resentment threatens to keep a deadly cycle in motion. Despite the initially hostile reaction she receives in the classroom, Gruwell uses the writings of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo to teach her students not only the basis of the English language, but compassion and tolerance as well. Later, when the time comes to tell their own tales in a project specially designed to explore the daily violence that the majority of students have grown numb to, the barriers that had once stood so strong gradually begin to crumble. When the only chance for survival is to befriend the person who was once your mortal enemy, the world is opened to a whole new realm of possibilities. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

In this throwback monster movie from producer Dean Devlin (Independence Day, Godzilla), David Arquette plays the son of a deceased mine owner, returning home to the economically depressed hamlet of Prosperity, AZ, after a long absence. His arrival coincides with a toxic waste accident in the local water supply, the result of a barrel jostled loose from the back of a passing truck. Unfortunately, said water source abuts the region's least-popular attraction: an exotic spider farm. The farm's owner (Tom Noonan) becomes the first victim when the spiders, already possessed of keen predatory abilities, grow to the size of small automobiles. Laying in wait underground, they begin picking off the town's pet and ostrich population, and soon it's all the local sheriff (Kari Wuhrer) can do to raise the alarm before the siege begins. Eight Legged Freaks was produced under the working title "Arac Attack," but the politically conscious producers, concerned the title sounded too much like "Iraq Attack," went with Arquette's brainstorm as a safer alternative. ~ Derek Armstrong, Rovi