Kristin Herrera Movies
- 2007
A moonlit encounter with an urban legend sends the life of an unassuming high school kid spinning out of control. Seventeen year old Jeff Pryce (Kevin G. Schmidt) was driving down a winding country road when he nearly ran over a mysterious beauty walking alone by Resurrection Cemetery. After stopping to see if the girl is injured, Jeff learns that her name is Mary and agrees to give her a ride, all the while sensing a powerful mutual attraction. Later, when Jeff asks Mary to be his date for the Homecoming Dance, his friends begin falling prey to a mysterious killer. The police believe Jeff is the murderer, and if he fails to clear his name soon he could be in a world of trouble. The only person with any real insight into Mary is Jeff's grandmother (Sally Kirkland), though while the information she provides may clear her grandson of any wrongdoing, it will also set him on a frightening collision course with forces far beyond his understanding. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kevin Schmidt, Sally Kirkland, (more)
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, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hilary Swank, Scott Glenn, (more)
