DAILY HOT MOVIES

The Rite

2011-01-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

Seminary student Michael Kovak is sent to study exorcism at the Vatican in spite of his own doubts about the controversial... practice and even his own faith. Wearing his deep skepticism like armor, Michael challenges his superiors to look to psychiatry, rather than demons, in treating the possessed. Only when he's sent to apprentice with the unorthodox Father Lucas -- a legendary priest who has performed thousands of exorcisms -- does Michael's armor begin to fall. As he is drawn into a troubling case that seems to transcend even Father Lucas's skill, he begins to glimpse a phenomenon science can't explain or control... and an evil so violent and terrifying that it forces him to question everything he believes.

The Dilemma

2011-01-24T15:04:00.000-08:00

Since college, confirmed bachelor Ronny and happily married Nick have been through thick and thin. Now partners in... an auto design firm, the two pals are vying to land a dream project that would launch their company. With Ronny's girlfriend, Beth, and Nick's wife, Geneva, by their sides, they're unbeatable. But, Ronny's world is turned upside down when he inadvertently sees Geneva out with another man and makes it his mission to get answers. As the amateur investigation dissolves his world into comic mayhem, he learns that Nick has a few secrets of his own. Now, with the clock ticking and pressure mounting on the biggest presentation of their careers, Ronny must decide how and when he will reveal the truth to his best friend.

The Green Hornet

2011-01-24T15:01:00.000-08:00

As the son of LA's most prominent media magnate, who dies mysteriously, Britt Reid inherits his father's vast empire.... Striking an unlikely friendship with one of his father's more inventive employees, Kato, Britt sees a chance to do something meaningful in his life: fight crime. To get close to the criminals, Britt and Kato plan to pose as criminals themselves. Britt becomes the vigilante Green Hornet, and Kato builds the ultimate in advanced retro weaponry, an indestructible car, equal parts firepower and horsepower. The Green Hornet and Kato quickly make a name for themselves. And, with the help of Britt's new secretary, Lenore Case, they begin hunting down the man who controls LA's gritty underworld: Benjamin Chudnofsky.

No Strings Attached

2011-01-24T14:54:00.000-08:00

A guy and girl try to keep their relationship strictly physical, but it's not long before they learn that they want something more.

Eagle Eye

2008-09-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

About. Jerry Shaw and Rachel Holloman are two strangers thrown together by a mysterious phone call from a woman they have never met. Threatening their lives and family, she pushes Jerry and Rachel into a series of increasingly dangerous situations--using the technology of everyday life to track and control their every move. As the situation escalates, these two ordinary people become the country's most wanted

Igor

2008-09-24T02:35:00.000-07:00

Best anima. A hunchbacked lab assistant has big dreams of becoming a mad scientist and winning the first place prize at the annual Evil Science Fair.

My Best Friend's Girl

2008-09-24T02:32:00.000-07:00

Sexy Kate Hudson. Smart, beautiful and headstrong, Alexis is the girl of Dustin's dreams. But after only five weeks of dating, the love-struck Dustin is coming on so strong that Alexis is forced to slow things down--permanently. Devastated and desperate to get her back, Dustin turns to his best friend, Tank, the rebound specialist. A master at seducing--and offending--women, Tank gets hired by freshly dumped guys to take their ex-girlfriends out on the worst date of their lives--an experience so horrible it sends them running gratefully back to their beaus. But when Tank works his magic on Alexis, he ends up meeting the challenge of a lifetime. Alexis is the first girl who knows how to call his bluff, and Tank soon finds himself torn between his loyalty to Dustin and a strange new attraction to his best friend's girl.

Burn After Reading

2008-09-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

About. An ousted CIA official's memoir accidentally falls into the hands of two unwise gym employees intent on exploiting their find.

Lakeview Terrace

2008-09-22T09:58:00.000-07:00

Check this latest movie. A young interracial couple move into their dream home and are increasingly harassed by their next-door neighbor, a tightly wound black LAPD officer. When the couple decides to fight back the feud turns deadly.

SAMUEL L JACKSON NOT TO BLAME FOR LAKEVIEW TERRACE TERROR

Heath Ledger as the Joker in Warner Bros. Pictures' The Dark Knight - 2008

2008-09-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

I realy like this movie. Heads up: a thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic-book movie. Feverish action? Check. Dazzling spectacle? Check. Devilish fun? Check. But Nolan is just warming up. There's something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe. Striking out from his Batman origin story, Nolan cuts through to a deeper dimension. Huh? Wha? How can a conflicted guy in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Just hang on for a shock to the system. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil — expected to do battle — decide instead to get it on and dance. "I don't want to kill you," Heath Ledger's psycho Joker tells Christian Bale's stalwart Batman. "You complete me." Don't buy the tease. He means it.

The trouble is that Batman, a.k.a. playboy Bruce Wayne, has had it up to here with being the white knight. He's pissed that the public sees him as a vigilante. He'll leave the hero stuff to district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and stop the DA from moving in on Rachel Dawes (feisty Maggie Gyllenhaal, in for sweetie Katie Holmes), the lady love who is Batman's only hope for a normal life.

Everything gleams like sin in Gotham City (cinematographer Wally Pfister shot on location in Chicago, bringing a gritty reality to a cartoon fantasy). And the bad guys seem jazzed by their evildoing. Take the Joker, who treats a stunningly staged bank robbery like his private video game with accomplices in Joker masks, blood spurting and only one winner. Nolan shot this sequence, and three others, for the IMAX screen and with a finesse for choreographing action that rivals Michael Mann's Heat. But it's what's going on inside the Bathead that pulls us in. Bale is electrifying as a fallibly human crusader at war with his own conscience.

I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to "savor the moment."

The deft script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, taking note of Bob Kane's original Batman and Frank Miller's bleak rethink, refuses to explain the Joker with pop psychology. Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."

The Joker represents the last completed role for Ledger, who died in January at 28 before finishing work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked. If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up. Ledger's Joker has no gray areas — he's all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman torn between Bale's Bruce (she knows he's Batman) and Eckhart's DA, another lover she has to share with his civic duty. "Hello, beautiful," says the Joker, sniffing Rachel like a feral beast. He's right when he compares himself to a dog chasing a car: The chase is all. The Joker's sadism is limitless, and the masochistic delight he takes in being punched and bloodied to a pulp would shame the Marquis de Sade. "I choose chaos," says the Joker, and those words sum up what's at stake in The Dark Knight.

The Joker wants Batman to choose chaos as well. He knows humanity is what you lose while you're busy making plans to gain power. Every actor brings his A game to show the lure of the dark side. Michael Caine purrs with sarcastic wit as Bruce's butler, Alfred, who harbors a secret that could crush his boss's spirit. Morgan Freeman radiates tough wisdom as Lucius Fox, the scientist who designs those wonderful toys — wait till you get a load of the Batpod — but who finds his own standards being compromised. Gary Oldman is so skilled that he makes virtue exciting as Jim Gordon, the ultimate good cop and as such a prime target for the Joker. As Harvey tells the Caped Crusader, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Eckhart earns major props for scarily and movingly portraying the DA's transformation into the dreaded Harvey Two-Face, an event sparked by the brutal murder of a major character.

No fair giving away the mysteries of The Dark Knight. It's enough to marvel at the way Nolan — a world-class filmmaker, be it Memento, Insomnia or The Prestige — brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art. It's enough to watch Bale chillingly render Batman as a lost warrior, evoking Al Pacino in The Godfather II in his delusion and desolation. It's enough to see Ledger conjure up the anarchy of the Sex Pistols and A Clockwork Orange as he creates a Joker for the ages. Go ahead, bitch about the movie being too long, at two and a half hours, for short attention spans (it is), too somber for the Hulk crowd (it is), too smart for its own good (it isn't). The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination. It's full of surprises you don't see coming. And just try to get it out of your dreams.