Brooklyn's Finest **

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Cast: Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes
Jesse Williams, Ellen Barkin, Brian F. O'Byrne, Shannon Kane
Lili Taylor, Will Patton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Logan Marshall-Green

Despite a cast that ought to guarantee a superb movie experience, Brooklyn's Finest often verges on parody with its treatment of the police genre.
Director Fuqua centers on the parallel stories of three police force members in the title borough.
Officer Eddie Dugan (Gere) is a mere week away from retiring when he's asked to train rookies that lead him to no good.
Detective Salvatore Procida (Hawke) is a family man in need of money to support his ever growing family (Taylor plays his wife), which he gets from cash gone unnoticed in drug raids.
Detective Clarence Butler (Cheadle) is working undercover who gets offered a chance at a promotion if he helps bust his friend Caz (Snipes), a known criminal who's been recently released from jail.
The three men show us what countless movies have shown us for decades: being a cop is not easy, noble or good if you're in New York City.
That Fuqua does so with a certain degree of condescension towards the audience seems absolutely bonkers.
There is not a single cop flick cliché these characters aren't willing to embody. Eddie's only friend for example is, you guessed it, a hooker with a heart of gold (Kane), while Salvatore's Catholic guilt forces him to pray before he shoots people and when the time comes for each of the three leads to get their comeuppance, it happens within the limits of the moral lesson they were meant to teach us about all along.
The film isn't lacking in good performances (how could it with this cast?) but most of the time it doesn't know what to do with the talent it's given.
Perhaps Brooklyn's Finest was just too ambitious and overreaching for Fuqua, who has no idea how to handle parallel storylines without turning them into a violent Destiny's Child video sans split screens.
Every time there is a major set piece, all the characters go through the same things at the same time; when to this unbelievable fact you add an ominous, overpowering score, we are left with a sloppy version of Magnolia that thinks it has important things to say about interconnections but really has nothing new or even interesting to contribute.

Nights in Rodanthe **

Director: George C. Wolfe
Cast: Richard Gere, Diane Lane
Viola Davis, Christopher Meloni, James Franco, Scott Glenn

Apparently single, middle aged, obscenely beautiful people find hurricanes to be the ultimate aphrodisiac. Or so thinks Nicholas Sparks, whose books lead to sappy film adaptations that make people swoon over the fact that they're so utterly corny.
Lane plays Adrienne Willis, who is separated from her husband (Meloni) and must endure the wrath of he teenage daughter (Mae Whitman) who blames her for her unhappiness.
One weekend she offers to look after her best friend Jean's (Davis playing the sassy, token best friend) seaside inn (a beautiful, if unstable looking dream house), located in the title town, where she is told there will only be one guest (in what must one of the dumbest economic strategies ever, but all's well in the name of potential love...).
The lodger is Dr. Paul Flanner (Gere) who has come to Rodanthe to make peace about an issue that has left him emotionally stuck. After his stay there he plans to visit his son (Franco) who works as a doctor in an Ecuador jungle.
This leaves them with a weekend to live up to the passionate affair audiences buy their movie ticket for and with an imminent hurricane that will leave them trapped there alone, somehow they deliver this.
It's rare for a film to rely on two mature film stars to work this kind of magic and because of this the film seems braver than what it is. Gere and Lane, who aren't as popular as say Hanks and Ryan or Hepburn and Tracy, make you feel as if this, their third onscreen reunion, is some sort of event that can't be missed.
She works her sensual charm to new levels of MILF-ness (with the necessary crying scenes now and then to remind us she's a serious actress) and Gere who becomes more subtle by the decade brings a barely there warmth to Paul that makes him irresistible.
The plot is as contrived as they make them (sunsets and wild ponies everywhere should sue for exploitation) and if you know Sparks, you know how this will end.
The surprise coming out of the cinema though is that this extreme corniness works! And you will find a tear or two falling down your cheek.
But as if with the emotions in this film you will find yourself wondering if they're CGI as well.