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Top Movies Eight Below Date Movie The Pink Panther Curious George Final Destination 3 Firewall Freedomland When a Stranger Calls Big Momma's House 2 Nanny McPhee New Releases Curious George Final Destination 3 Firewall The Pink Panther Date Movie Eight Below Freedomland Something New Failure to Launch When a Stranger Calls Top Celebs Reese Witherspoon Brad Pitt Paris Hilton Mariah Carey Lindsay Lohan Scarlett Johansson Phil Collins Britney Spears Angelina Jolie Jodie Marsh	25th Hour  Release Date - December 19th, 2002  Distributor - Touchstone Pictures  Duration - 2 hrs. 14 min.  Rating - R for strong language and some violence.  Type - Drama and Crime/Gangster  Writer : David Benioff  Producer : Julia Chasman, Jon Kilik, Spike Lee, Tobey Maguire, Nick Wechsler  Director : Spike Lee  Starring : Edward Norton, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Cox  Synopsis This is the story of the last twenty four hours Monty Brogan (Norton) gets to spend with his two best friends, Frank (Pepper), a bonds trader, and Jakob (Hoffman), a high school English teacher, and his girlfriend, Naturelle (Dawson), before he goes to prison for seven years for pushing heroin, as they party the night away in New York City one last time.  Critic Reviews Everywhere you look in Spike Lee's ''The 25th Hour,'' there's good acting. That's probably because everywhere you look, there are good actors — Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, and others. The trouble lies in the connective tissue, which doesn't always hold these excellent performances together. Lee carries a lot of baggage with movie audiences. He can be insufferably strident and self-indulgent; witness his bombastic ''Bamboozled.'' But he's also one of the most ambitious, exciting and talented filmmakers of his generation. Only Lee would mourn a post-9/11 Manhattan in such a dynamic manner. Strictly speaking, ''The 25th Hour,'' which was adapted by David Benioff from his pre-Sept. 11 novel, is about the last 24 hours of freedom in the life of Monty Brogan (Norton), a middle-class, midlevel drug dealer facing a seven-year stretch in prison. Yet it's also about a city bowed but unbroken by an atrocity unimaginable on Sept. 10, 2001. The opening credits are strobed by mysterious soft blue lights that finally are revealed as the evanescent Twin Towers of Light, which briefly infused the New York skyline with hope and resilience. Later, a lengthy conversation between Monty's best buddies — Jacob (Hoffman), a shy schoolteacher, and Francis (Pepper), a self-satisfied stockbroker — takes place in Francis' downtown apartment, with ground zero as a gaping-wound backdrop. Just as Monty has to find a way to face his 25th hour and beyond, so New York City must find a way to face this year and the next and beyond. Monty spends most of his last day tying up loose ends. There's his dog, a mangy mongrel he rescued after it was burned and left for dead, who needs a new home. There's peace to be made with his father (Brian Cox), who runs a fine Irish bar catering to firefighters (more 9/11 iconography). There's a final meeting with his Russian bosses, who play hard and rough. And there's the nagging question: Who ratted him out? Was it, as Jacob and Francis believe, his live-in girlfriend, Naturelle (Dawson), whose street smarts and supple beauty hint at betrayal? In the movie's best scene, Monty spews a New York rhapsody of hate, attacking everyone from the ''sheik'' cabdrivers who don't know where they're going to the screaming queens in Chelsea to the Upper East Side X-rays, whose idea of a bad day is missing the sale at Bergdorf's, to the Koreans who've never bothered to learn anything but pidgin English. His soliloquy has the anger and artistry of an Eminem rap. The picture bogs down during an extended party at a hip late-night club, where everyone drinks too much, talks too much and does things they really shouldn't. The sequence has a woozy incoherence, which is certainly intended, but it saps the movie's energy. Then, however, Lee pulls it all back together with a jaw-dropping, life-affirming finale that whirls around Cox's heartbreaking sentiment: ''This came so close to not happening.'' (You'll understand better when you see the movie.) Which you should see, despite its flaws. ''The 25th Hour'' may not have staying power, but it has sticking power. You'll occasionally drop out of the film, but you'll never forget seeing it. All in all, not a bad trade-off. Grade : B+ abc.net - But the drama draws it power from a sense of growing dread as Monty (Ed Norton) roams his city and his neighbourhood getting ready to go to upstate prison for drug dealing (a sentence that for a ‘pretty white boy’ could be the end). Around Monty swarm his buddies and lovers ...   more Grade : B Cincinnati Enquirer - Time after time, for good scripts and bad, Edward Norton marshals his uncanny concentration, his technical grace, his deceptively ordinary looks to paint portraits that invade ...   more   For rating reasons : filmrating.com, mpaa.com                                    For Parents : Parentalguide.com
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