M. Martinez Movies

A lonely man's search for companionship soon takes him to dangerous and unexpected places in this erotically charged drama. Luis Antonio Vargas (Antonio Banderas) is a successful coffee salesman living in Cuba in the 1880s. Luis has had little luck finding love among the women of his native island, and he sends away to America for a mail-order bride. To his pleasant surprise, his fiancée from the United States, Julia Russell (Angelina Jolie), turns out to be not only beautiful but passionate and devoted. But Luis' happiness proves to be short-lived when he learns that Julia is not the person he imagined her to be, and detective Walter Downs (Thomas Jane) appears, trying to get to the bottom of Julia's mysterious past and possibly deadly secrets. Original Sin is based on the novel Waltz Into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich, which Francois Truffaut previously adapted for the screen as La Sirene du Mississippi. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This is the third film based on Tom Clancy's high-tech espionage potboilers starring CIA deputy director Jack Ryan. Harrison Ford, returning to the Ryan role after his first go-round in 1992's Patriot Games, is assigned to a delicate anti-drug investigation after a close friend of the President (a Reaganesque Donald Moffat) is murdered by a Colombian drug cartel. When Ryan discovers that the President's wealthy friend was in league with the cartel, the President's devious national security adviser (Harris Yulin) and an ambitious CIA deputy director (Henry Czerny) send a secret paramilitary force into Colombia to wipe out the drug lords. The force is captured and then abandoned by the President's lackeys. It falls to Ryan to enter Colombia and rescue them, aided only by a renegade operative named Clark (Willem Dafoe), with both his life and career on the line. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

Based on a popular urban myth, The Harvest is about a screenwriter (Miguel Ferrer) who is seduced by a sexy dancer (Leilani Sarelle Ferrer) while he is researching and writing a script in Mexico. She leads him down to the beach, where a group of thugs knock him unconscious. When he wakes up, his kidney is missing! Instead of returning home, he decides to track down the men who stole his kidney. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide

This surreal variant on the classic vampire tale is the directorial debut of Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who garnered international acclaim and several awards. The film tells the story of elderly antique dealer Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi, in a role originally written for Max Von Sydow) who, with his eight-year-old granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath), discovers an ancient artifact secreted within a statue obtained from the estate of a 16th-century alchemist. Unbeknownst to Gris, the device -- which resembles an ornate, gilded mechanical beetle -- houses an immortal parasite which will grant eternal life to its host. Naturally, there is a terrible price for this gift, which Gris is doomed to discover after the object anchors itself to his body. He begins to develop an extreme aversion to daylight, as well as an agonizing thirst for human blood. To compound matters, dying millionaire Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) has learned of the device's existence -- thanks to an occult tome obtained from its inventor -- and wishes to obtain it for his own use. To this end he employs his vain, brutish nephew Angel (Ron Perlman) to retrieve it for him. Angel's techniques are less than subtle, and he inevitably winds up killing Gris in his futile search for the artifact... but death is not permanent for the host of the Cronos, and he rises from the mortuary slab to reunite with the long-suffering Aurora. Together they confront de la Guardia and his nephew one last time, hoping to find a way to reverse the horrible process before Gris suffers the same monstrous fate as the device's creator. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide