“Rumor Has It” is a love story and journey of self-discovery and the meaning of ties to the past, but even with considerable star power, the movie has a tendency to simply trudge along to familiar plot points. Sarah Huttiger (Jennifer Aniston) is lost in her life, feeling alienated and distant from everything that she’s supposed to be happy about. She’s got a job that’s going nowhere, a family that she’s certain she was adopted into, and the perfect man who has just proposed to her. All of the things that are supposed to make her happy are bringing her grief, primarily because she’s unsettled in her own life. Then she finds out that her mother and grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) were involved with the same man. In fact, those relationships were the basis of the novel, “The Graduate.”. Not only that, but Sarah becomes convinced that the roguish Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) might actually ...

  Francis Ford Coppola gave moviegoers the story of royalty in the Mafia in his legendary “The Godfather” and its sequels, but Martin Scorsese delivers the goods on the blue collar working stiff in organized crime that had to deal with “made” men. Based on the non-fiction book by Nicholas Pileggi about the life and times of Henry Hill, a half-Italian, half-Irish hood who spent nearly thirty years as a wiseguy, the movie explodes with raw emotion and violence. The stellar cast provides flesh and blood to the gritty story, adding depth and layers, re-creating the real people that lived through those turbulent episodes. Although the disc is billed as an HD DVD, “GoodFellas” suffers from a noticeable lack of digital quality. The images are not much more than two-dimensional and tend to have softness around the edges. Near the beginning of the film, the colors don’t seem as vibrant and look washed out. For ...

  tanley Kubrick’s idiosyncratic war film, “Full Metal Jacket” was released during 1987’s upsurge of interest in Viet Nam films (following “Platoon” and “Heartbreak Ridge” in release and preceding “Hamburger Hill”), and finds the visionary director bringing his own fascinations and interests to a fairly simple story. The film follows private Joker (Modine) through an intense, dehumanizing basic training camp where he is put at odds with demonic drill instructor Hartman (Ermey) and befriends the troubled private Pyle (D’Onofrio). Later, while in Viet Nam, Joker and his platoon are caught up in the Tet offensive and during maneuvers and are pinned by a sniper after taking a wrong turn. “Full Metal Jacket,” while a Vietnam film, is told in a much more archetypal way, leaving almost all the political and cultural background out of the main body of the story. Those aspects combined with its non-tropical filming locales (it was filmed almost entirely in the ...