James Bruce Movies

A journalist tries to uncover the circumstances that led to a shocking episode of violence in this drama from director James Bruce. Leonard Grey (Brett Davern) was a troubled seventeen-year-old who one day went on a shooting spree, injuring several students at his high school and killing one before he took his own life. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times is assigned to research and write an investigative piece about Grey. The journalist studies interviews conducted by the police with the boy's friends and family as well as conducting several of her own as she tries to understand what turned a seemingly ordinary youngster into a killer. She finds an especially intriguing subject in Cameron Porter (Evan Ross), Leonard's best friend, who may have been involved in the shootings through he carefully refuses to incriminate himself. Also featuring Melora Walters and Harold Perrineau, Case 219 was based on the novel Shooter by Walter Dean Myers, and was an award winner at the 2010 Honolulu Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Based on the memoir Last Thoughts Before Vanishing From the Face of the Earth by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, Oka! recounts his time spent in the Central African Republic with a tribe known as the Bayaka of Yandombe. Director Lavinia Currier and actors Kris Marshall and Isaach de Bankolé retrace Sarno's efforts to capture the music of the indigenous pygmies, while the tribe tries to balance its traditions with the progress spreading through the Congo. ~ Rachel Sprovtsoff, Rovi

Den of Lions stars Stephen Dorff as an undercover agent who infiltrates the criminal empire of Darius Paskevic (Bob Hoskins), a kingpin in the Russian mafia. Complicating the agent's work is his romantic relationship with the criminal mastermind's daughter. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

In this made-for-cable comedy-drama, Moe (Tony Danza) is a gangster who has done quite well for himself as part of a crew dealing illegal automatic weapons. However, Moe, like anyone else, is looking for love, and meets Monica (Elizabeth Barondes), a gun collector who shares a home with her sister Beth (Amy Locane) and mother (Louise Fletcher), who is dying of cancer. Moe asks Monica out on a date and she agrees, if they can double with her sister. Moe fixes Beth up with his partner and longtime friend Franco (Rustam Branaman), and the two couples head out on the town after Moe and Franco duck out of a shootout in the midst of a deal gone sour. The date goes well and Beth and Franco hit it off especially well, but Beth has a fatal accident, and Moe and Franco must decide what to do with the body. Moe is about to learn that the tempers of the most formidable mafiosos are nothing compared to the rage of Monica. The Girl Gets Moe was also shown under the title Love To Kill. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Like the old B movies it emulates, this mystery focuses on crooks, murder, and revenge. Sam is accidentally present during a robbery and somehow ends up in a scuffle that ends in the death of one of the three robbers. The other two track him down and slay his wife. He goes on the run as the crooks chase him form L.A. to San Diego, and finally, to a circus in Mexico where Sam makes his final stand. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this drama, a wealthy young heiress endeavors to discover if her life does indeed have any meaning after she participates in a far-from-harmless parlor game at an exclusive costume party held in a grand old mansion. Sasha, the heiress, has fallen into a deep depression following the suicide of her brother and is strongly thinking about joining him when she goes to the party and begins playing a card game in which the winner's reward is a drink of deadly poison. Unfortunately, Sasha wins and must now reconsider her rashness. The plot is based on a story from Robert Louis Stevenson. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Louis Malle's heartwarming and thoughtful 1986 PBS documentary God's Country carries the viewer to Glencoe, MN, for a loving and enduring portrait of the local citizenry. It's a time capsule -- a snapshot of the prairie heartlands during the late '70s and mid-'80s (Malle shot the first segment in 1979, and returned six years later to film the conclusion). The first half is sweet, gentle, and lyrical, the second half heartbreaking, for by the time of Malle's return, the optimistic small-parcel farmers whom Malle introduces at the outset have been wiped out by the Reagan-era recession. (One or two even bigotedly attempt to use minorities as scapegoats for the economic devastation they have suffered -- which makes for a sobering, jarring, and utterly unexpected wrap-up to the piece.) Malle's strategy is to simply tour the town and meet the locals, cameras rolling, never knowing what to expect. And what in other hands might become mundane or dull here gains a sweet and genteel intimacy, laced with small doses of offhanded humor and poignant insight into the lives of these people; Malle's goal involves making viewers feel, by the end of the documentary, that they have become an integral part of this community -- and that the participants (despite scattered objectionable attitudes) are their friends and neighbors. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi