Robert Harman Movies
Director Ron Howard turns to the Western genre in this tale of a father and daughter who are brought together under difficult circumstances. Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) is a man living in New Mexico in the 1880s. He had abandoned his family years before to live and travel with a band of Apaches, but his conscience has finally gotten the better of him and he's decided to return home. Jones, however, does not receive a warm welcome upon arrival -- his wife has died and his daughter Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett), now grown and raising two children with her husband Brake (Aaron Eckhart), has no desire to see the man who left her mother to fend for herself. As Jones prepares to depart on a note of bitterness, a band of ruthless bandits, let by Army deserter Chidin (Eric Schweig), descends upon the homestead, murdering Brake and kidnapping his 15-year-old daughter Lily (Evan Rachel Wood). While Maggie feels no desire to forgive her father, she realizes he's her best hope to track down the criminals who took her child, and Jones and Maggie team up to find the bandits before they can disappear into Mexico. The Missing was based on the novel The Last Ride by Thomas Eidson. Val Kilmer and Jenna Boyd highlight the supporting cast. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, (more)
This belated sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is directed by Peter Hyams. Roy Scheider plays the astronaut/skipper of a U.S.-Soviet space mission, sent to find out what happened to the missing Discovery flight that carried Keir Dullea into the beyond in the original 2001. Scheider's polyglot crew includes Americans John Lithgow and Bob Balaban (the latter a computer whiz, responsible for the notorious HAL 9000) and Russians Helen Mirren, Elya Baskin and Natasha Schneider. The reason for this international mixture is that the world is on the brink of nuclear war, and it is hoped that the space mission will assure east-west solidarity (in this respect, 2010 dates far more than 2001, given the collapse of the Iron Curtain). When the astronauts catch up with Dullea, still in orbit around Jupiter, producer/director/writer Hyams attempts to demystify the enigmatic climax of 2001. Arthur C. Clarke, author of the story upon which 2001 was based, appears in 2010 as a man on a park bench. Incidentally, the voice-over credited to Olga Mallsnerd is actually Candice Bergen. (The name Mallsnerd is a play on the name of one of the characters created by her ventriloquist father Edgar.) ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, (more)
