Maggie Grace

Robin Swicord's adaptation of the novel The Jane Austen Book Club concerns a group of women and a man who meet regularly to discuss the works of the popular author, but soon discover their lives are playing out much like one of the author's fictional worlds. Among the members of the club are Sylvia (Amy Brenneman), a recent divorcée; Bernadette (Kathy Baker), who has decided to accept her advancing age; and Prudie (Emily Blunt), who feels guilty about her persistent fantasies of cheating on her loving husband. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

John Carpenter's well-remembered thriller gets an update in this remake from director Rupert Wainwright. Nick Castle (Tom Welling) is a charter-boat captain in the small coastal town of Antonio Bay. Castle's ancestors helped to found Antonio Bay, but while the city's mayor (Kenneth Welsh) and the head of the local historical society (Sara Botsford) are spearheading an effort to raise money for a statue that would honor the city fathers, Castle is more interested in seeing the town's rickety docks and aging sea wall replaced. However, Castle has been too distracted with personal matters to wage a campaign of his own -- he's been having an affair with Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair), a single mom who runs a combination radio station and lighthouse, while his former flame Elizabeth Williams (Maggie Grace) has returned to town to mend fences with her mother and finds herself renewing her romance with Castle. One night, Castle and his first mate, Brett Spooner (DeRay Davis), discover an antique ship's bag filled with treasure, not knowing the salvage came from a ship that sank over a hundred years before. As it happens, there's a terrible secret behind the ship's disastrous fate, and now that Castle and Davis have unwittingly awakened the watery grave, the souls of the ship's crew and passengers have come back to claim their revenge in the form of a thick and impenetrable fog. The remake of The Fog proved to be one of the last projects for producer Debra Hill, who also worked on the original film; Hill was fighting cancer when work began on the film, and she died shortly before filming commenced. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A passenger jet breaks apart in mid-air, crash-landing on a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Left without the creature comforts and basic necessities of civilization, the 48 survivors are forced to rely upon one another to stay alive -- and given the personality quirks of these survivors, this won't be easy during the first season of the ABC hit series Lost. Generally with the help of flashbacks, viewers learn a number of deep dark secrets about the castaways on a need-to-know basis, especially the demons plaguing Dr. Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and one-hit-wonder rock star Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan). Every so often, a crisis arises for the principal purpose of revealing a hitherto unknown and unsuspected aspect of one of the characters. Inevitably, hostilities both minor and serious arise from the basic fundamental differences among the survivors: Korean couple Jin and Sun Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim) are unable to uphold their family traditions under the circumstances, while their inability to speak English creates an additional barrier between themselves and the others; and the MacGyver-like resourcefulness of former Iraqi Republican Guard Sayid (Naveen Andrews) is not enough to overcome the racism of some of his fellow passengers. Then there is the unfriendly aura of the island itself, with its inscrutable topography, and the bizarre menagerie of wild animals, ranging from a polar bear to a (possible) dinosaur! Also, the discovery in one episode of two long-dead bodies certainly does nothing to uplift the rescue hopes of the hapless survivors. And finally, there seems to be someone else on the island...someone not on the passenger list...someone who kidnaps two of the castaways and threatens to kill off the rest one by one. The one overriding question near the end of season one is: who among the "major" characters will not make it to season two? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The first in a series of "true crime" cable-TV films based on the writings of Dominick Dunne, Murder in Greenwich retraces the brutal bludgeoning murder of Martha Moxley, a Greenwich, Connecticut high school girl, in 1975. Although the prime suspect is Martha's teenaged neighbor Michael Skakel (Jon Foster), the boy is able to evade arrest for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that he is related to the politically "untouchable" Kennedy family. Over two decades later, the case is re-opened at the urging of former police detectitve Mark Fuhrman (Christopher Meloni), whose recent association with the O.J. Simpson trial has branded him a racist pariah. Despite his tarnished reputation, Fuhrman is able to enlist the aid of another detective, Steve Carroll (Robert Forster), the original investigator of the Moxley murder. Although Fuhrman and Carroll are clearly never going to be the best of friends, their combined efforts ultimately bring the elusive (and now adult) Michael Skakel to justice. Not surprisingly, the real Mark Fuhrman was one of the producers of Murder in Greenwich, which made its USA Network debut on November 15, 2002. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide