Heidi Jo Markel Movies

The life of one of the most infamous women in early '70s America gets a dramatization in this offbeat period biopic from co-directors Jeffrey Friedman and Robert Epstein. In the Florida suburbs, circa 1970, Linda Boreman (Amanda Seyfried) is an ordinary and unremarkable young woman, who moved back in with her parents (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) a year or so earlier, following an unplanned pregnancy. One night on the town, she crosses paths with Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard) a local bar and restaurant owner who sees Linda as an opportunity; he soon wins her over as a girlfriend, and not long after, the two are married. Within a couple of years,Chuck shoots a private stag film of Linda performing oral sex on a partner, and decides to show it to Gerry Damiano (Hank Azaria), an up-and-coming porn director with ties to the Mafia. Damiano is so impressed by the footage that he immediately decides to cast Linda in his new picture, the hardcore comedy Deep Throat, which becomes the single most lucrative adult film of all time and turns the young woman - renamed Linda Lovelace - into a household name. The film then flashes forward to six years later, when Linda authors a shocking tell-all book about what really happened when the cameras weren't rolling; she describes the sadistic abuse that she endured at the hands of Traynor and a series of increasingly futile attempts to escape from his clutches, and claims that she was coerced to appear in the movie. The media then turns Lovelace - now a Long Island housewife, Linda Marciano - into a feminist icon and a crusader against domestic violence and the enslavement of the porn industry. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

A burnt-out soccer star tries to win back his family but gets distracted by his wandering eye in this romantic comedy starring Gerard Butler. His bank account drained and his libido fatigued, professional soccer player George (Butler) hangs up his cleats and heads back to Virginia. Determined to do right in the eyes of his ex-wife (Jessica Biel) and their lonely son (Noah Lomax), George takes a job coaching a local soccer team and begins working to form the young players into true athletes. But with every cougar in town eyeing him from the sidelines, George finds that staying focused on the job and keeping his prurient impulses in check are easier said than done. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

A family is devastated by a crime committed against a teenage girl in this drama. Annie (Liana Liberato) is 14 years old and growing up in a suburb of Chicago. Annie's parents, Will (Clive Owen) and Lynn (Catherine Keener), are loving, but they've been busy with her older brother, Peter (Spencer Curnutt), who is heading off to college, so she spends a lot of time on-line chatting with a boy she met on the Internet, Charlie. Annie has developed a powerful crush on Charlie, and when he asks her to meet face to face, she eagerly agrees. However, Annie is startled to discover that Charlie isn't 16 years old, as she was led to believe, but in his mid-thirties (Chris Henry Coffey), and when he talks her into stopping by his hotel room, he sexually assaults her. Humiliated, Annie confides to a friend what happened, and eventually the police are notified; it turns out that "Charlie" is a sex offender they've been tracking for months. While Annie is devastated by the experience, her family is just as shocked by what happened, particularly Will, who becomes grimly obsessed with finding the man who raped his daughter. Trust was directed by actor-turned-filmmaker David Schwimmer, representing a significant change from the comedies that made his name. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

When an uptight federal agent's sexually liberated mother enters into an affair with a man suspected of being involved in an international art-theft ring, it's up to the fresh-faced agent to keep an observant eye on the couple in question in writer/director George Gallo's lighthearted romantic comedy. Colin Hanks, Selma Blair, Antonio Banderas, and Meg Ryan star in a Millennium Films production. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

A pair of writers inhabiting an abandoned New York tenement building become locked in an antagonistic battle of wills in director Danny Green's adaptation of novelist Bernard Malamud's studied exploration of faltering race relations. The time is the early '70s, and Jewish writer Harry Lesser (Dylan McDermott) is finally nearing completion on the novel that has taken him almost a decade to write. The last tenant in a crumbling inner-city apartment building, Harry soon discovers that he is no longer alone in the building when an illegal squatter named Willie (Snoop Dogg) claims a room down the hall and begins writing his own novel. When Harry attempts to offer writing advice to his new neighbor, his criticism of Willie's "immature" writing style ignites a heated confrontation between the pair that is quickly compounded by the growing relationship between Harry and Willie's white girlfriend Irene (Rose Byrne). As the situation quickly spins out of control and Willie sets fire to the only existing copy of Harry's treasured manuscript, the deep-rooted racial animosity explodes into rage and the two writers become locked in a life-or-death struggle to survive. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Bernard Rose directed this look at the sordid underside of the film business and one man's attempts to come to terms with his mortality in this fallen world, in a story loosely based on Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan Beckman (Danny Huston), a hot-shot talent agent at the powerful Media Talent Agency, unexpectedly dies, and soon his colleagues are scrambling among themselves over the shards of Ivan's leftover business, with Barry Oaks (Adam Krentzman) eager to take over representation of Don West (Peter Weller), a major star Ivan signed shortly before his death. Everyone assumes that Ivan died of a drug overdose, but as viewers watch his last few days in flashback, they learn that Ivan was diagnosed with a severe case of lung cancer as he was trying to put together a deal with firebrand director Danny McTeague (James Merendino), actress Constanza Vero (Valeria Golino), and West. As the dynamic businessman is forced to confront his mortality, he is dragged into a binge of booze, drugs, and women with West, while he also tries to decide how to confront his family and his girlfriend Charlotte (Lisa Enos) with the grim news about his health. Ivansxtc. (To Live and Die in Hollywood) was shot using digital video equipment and a skeleton crew -- according to Rose, a reaction in part to studio interference over his 1997 adaptation of another Tolstoy work, Anna Karenina. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi