Phone Booth

What do you do when you hear a ringing public phone? You know it’s a wrong number, but instinct forces you to pick it up.

When Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell, Daredevil, The Recruit) unthinkingly takes such a call, the caller (Kiefer Sutherland) – a serial killer with a sniper rifle – says that he’ll be shot dead if he hangs up.

A sudden and shocking act of violence near the booth draws the attention of the police, who arrive with a squad of sharpshooters. They believe that Stu – not the unseen caller of whom they remain unaware – is the dangerous man with a gun.

The senior officer on the scene, Captain Ramey (Forest Whitaker), tries to talk Stu out of the booth. But unbeknown to Ramey and the crowd that gathers at the scene, the caller has them all in his high-powered rifle sights.

As afternoon turns to evening, Stu faces his ultimate ordeal as the caller confronts him with his personal secrets, lies and evasions.

Waking Up In Reno

Billy Bob Thornton, Natasha Richardson, Charlize Theron and Patrick Swayze star as two married couples in this redneck road trip comedy.

These four best friends set off from Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a holiday at Reno, Nevada – the American working man’s paradise – for a massive Monster Truck extravaganza.

But the four friends’ relationships are sorely strained as they suffer temptation, guilt, cheating and complete misunderstandings.

And being stuck together for a 2,000-mile journey, they have nowhere to hide.

Igby Goes Down

This clever, funny but ultimately tragic film is very much in the vein of Catcher in the Rye. It is the story of Igby Slocumb (Kieran Culkin), a rebellious young teenager from a privileged but dysfunctional family.

His father, Jason Slocum (Bill Pullman), is suffering a nervous breakdown. His mother, Mimi Slocum (Susan Sarandon), is an icy cold matriarch dependent on sedative pills.

Igby’s mother tries to quell her son’s rebellious streak by keeping him at school. But he blows his chances as he bounces from posh East Coast prep schools, to an authoritarian military academy, and finally to a camp for drug addicts.

Mimi despairs of her son after he fraudulently uses her credit card to finance a hotel spending spree. She palms Igby off onto his godfather, D.H. Banes (Jeff Goldblum), a manipulative Manhattan tycoon with deep pockets.

Igby encounters Sookie Sapperstein (Claire Danes), an outsider like himself, and comes to realize that maybe he’s not alone in the world.

The Four Feathers

This gripping and romantic saga is set during the heyday of imperialism when the nations of Europe were scrambling to divide Africa among themselves.

The film, inspired by A.E.W. Mason’s classic novel, begins in 1875.

Harry Feversham (Heath Ledger) has a promising future in the military. But when his regiment is dispatched to North Africa to fight Sudanese Arabs rebelling against British colonial rule, he has doubts about the rightness of Britain’s cause. He resigns his commission.

Harry’s father – shocked by his son’s actions – disowns him. Three of Harry’s friends – and even his fiancée Ethne (Kate Hudson) – assume that he is afraid and each sends him a white feather, a symbol of cowardice.

Tormented, isolated and misunderstood, Harry learns that his best friend Jack (Wes Bentley) and his former regiment have been captured by the Sudanese rebels. Instantly, he resolves to embark on one mission that is stronger than his resolve against war – to rescue his friends at all costs.

White Oleander

Oleander can be poisonous… So can a mother’s love.

White Oleander, based on Janet Fitch’s acclaimed bestselling novel, tells the unforgettable story of Astrid, a girl who is shuttled through a series of Los Angeles foster homes – each with its own rules, dangers and hard lessons to be learned.

Her ordeal starts when her manipulative and domineering mother Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer) murders her boyfriend for abandoning her.

Ingrid is arrested and jailed. Suddenly 15-year-old Astrid is on her own and has to learn how to mature in the most adverse circumstances.

The Core

This is a fun B-grade science fiction movie about a disaster which engulfs Earth when its inner core mysteriously stops rotating.

This wreaks havoc with the planet’s electromagnetic field. Birds and whales lose their ability to navigate. The famed Northern Lights appear in the night sky dazzlingly brighter and further south than ever before.

And things can only get worse as the electromagnetic field, which shields the earth from solar radiation, slowly collapses. Static discharge in the atmosphere will create “super-storms” with hundreds of lightning strikes per square mile, and deadliest of all, microwave radiation will literally cook the planet.

The US government takes charge and hastily assembles a team of special scientists of whom two (Hilary Swank, Bruce Greenwood) are entrusted to navigate a newly invented craft that can travel deep into the earth.

The world’s first “terranauts”, they journey into unknown regions of the Earth, guided by NASA’s Mission Control, in order to detonate a nuclear device which they hope will reactivate the core and restore balance to the planet.