The Silent Matt Damon
If you like a real-world perspective in your spy films, Robert DeNiro's The Good Shepherd is new this week, the story of a hopeful young man of few words (played by Matt Damon) who is offered a counterintelligence job in the 30's, helps with the initiation of the CIA, and climbs the intelligence ladder at great personal expense... and keeping with assassinations and politics, Death of a President a conspiracy-busting retrospective on the assassination of George W. Bush. Attack of the Gryphon is more action and fantasy based, and could be serious competition for last month's Eragon. Aurora Borealis is a film about love and loss, and features Donald Sutherland, and Ed Harris plays Beethoven in Copying Beethoven, where a young student finds the man behind the music as she's hired to transcribe the legendary composer's music. The Beatles: Hamburg & the Hamburg Sound is also new, documenting the Beatles early period.For the kids, the new live-action version of the classic book Charlotte's Web is new this week, starring Dakota Fanning, and Julia Roberts as the voice of Charlotte. Opal Dream is the new PG film from the director of The Full Monty, about a young girl whose imaginary friends go missing, and the new Disney teen movie Jump In.
Several foreign language films are out this week, including Pedro Almodovar's (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Talk to Her) new film, Volver, starring Penelope Cruz... and, par for the course for an Almodovar picture, it is impossible to summarize. The Hidden Blade is Yoji Yamada's follow-up to his beautiful Twiligt Samurai, as he continues to make beautiful period dramas about the end of Japan's feudal period, and the Korean Woman is the Future of Man, a multi-faceted love story about old friends and new relationships.
It's taken Twin Peaks fifteen years, but with Season 2 hitting the shelves, the entire series is finally available on DVD. If you need your Hollywood fix, Entourage has just reached Season 3, and we have two new entries from Showtime's Masters of Horror series: Deer Woman and Chocolate. BBC's series Ultraviolet features vampires in a modern setting, but is otherwise completely unrelated to the movie of the same name (and that is a good thing), and the SciFi Channel series The Lost Room is a supernatural mystery starring Six Feet Under's Peter Krause.