Prince of Persia
Jake Gyllenhaal steps into the big budget blockbuster movie arena this week with his new movie Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Directed by Mike Newell the movie is the latest to be inspired by a computer game as Jerry Bruckheimer looks to do for this genre what he did for the pirate movie.
The movie follows an adventurous prince who teams up with a rival princess to stop an angry ruler from unleashing a sandstorm that could destroy the world.
So to celebrate the release of the movie we take a look at some of the Jake Gyllenhaal movies that you really should have in your collection.
- Donnie Darko
Gyllenhaal's breakthrough movie came back in 2001 when he led the cast of Donnie Darko, the first movie by director Richard Kelly.
Some may think that Donnie Darko is a typical maladjusted teenager. Actually, Donnie is borderline delusional, beset by visions of a monstrous rabbit which is trying to keep him under its sinister influence.
Prompted by this apparition, Donnie commits antisocial acts while he is undergoing psychotherapy, surviving the vagaries of high-school life and romance, and fortuitously escaping a bizarre death from a falling jet engine.
Donnie battles his demons, literally and figuratively, in a series of intertwining story lines that play with time travel, fundamentalist gurus, fate, predestination and the machinations of the universe.
Donnie Darko has become somewhat of a cult hit with it's dark and twisted script that promised much from Kelly.
It's twisted yet humorous look at adolescence it like no other coming of age movie that you will ever see and well worth a watch.
- Brokeback Mountain
But it's perhaps Brokeback Mountain that Gyllenhaal was best known for, directed by Ang Lee and also starring Heath Ledger.
In the Summer of 1963 Wyoming, two young men, Ennis a ranch hand and Jack an aspiring rodeo bull rider, are sent to work together herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain, and what had otherwise been anticipated to be a rather uneventful venture, will soon turn into an affair of love, of lust, and complications that will span through 19 years of their lives.
Through marriage, through children, and through the mighty grip of societal confines and the expectations of what it is to be a man.
The movie was the most talked about of 2005 as Ledger and Gyllenhaal produce two devastating performances in a movie that is incredibly brave.
Lee took a gay love story and placed it, with huge success, in the mainstream it's delicate and beautifully crafted.
The movie was net well by the critics and went on to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, rather controversially losing out to Crash.
- Jarhead
Jarhead saw Sam Mendes return to the director's chair and turn his hand to the war movie genre, a movie that was unlike any war movie that had come before it.
Set during the Gulf War, the episodic tale follows Anthony Swofford (a.k.a. "Swoff"), a third-generation enlistee, from his sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, where he's sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck sack on his back, while moving through Middle East deserts with no cover from the intolerable heat.
As well, he advances with no protection from the Iraqi soldiers--and there's always a potential enemy sighting, just over the next horizon.
Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves on humour and camaraderie as they tread the blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand, against an enemy they can't see, for a cause they don't fully fathom.
What is so interested about Jarhead is the lack of combat instead it looks a men who are highly trained unable to do what they were trained to do... kill the enemy.
Gyllenhaal gives a great performance as he leads the cast, in what was one of his strongest roles to date.
- Zodiac
He moved onto the thriller in 2007 when he starred alongside Robert Downey Jr in David Fincher's Zodiac, based on the real life Zodiac killings.
As a serial killer terrifies the San Francisco Bay Area and taunts police with his ciphers and letters, investigators in four jurisdictions search for the murderer.
The case will become an obsession for four men as their lives and careers are built and destroyed by the endless trail of clues.
Fincher delivered a class thriller that allows you to make up your own mind about the case and the killer and doesn't spring any unnecessary plot twists in at the end, which is always a relief.
Zodiac is a powerful portrayal of some chilling life events that never fails to engross you from beginning to end.
- Rendition
2007 also saw Gyllenhaal star alongside Reece Witherspoon, Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep in just one of the movies that looked at the war on terror.
The movie centres on Isabella El-Ibrahimi, the American wife of Egyptian-born chemical engineer Anwar El-Ibrahimi, who disappears on a flight from South Africa to Washington.
Isabella desperately tries to track her husband down, while a CIA analyst at a secret detention facility outside the U.S. is forced to question his assignment as he becomes party to the man's unorthodox interrogation.
rendition is another tense political movie that asks questions such as how reliable is information that has been gathered through torture?
And if these methods of interrogation have any role to play in the fight against terror? Rendition is a challenging film that leaves you questioning what is right and wrong.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is released 21st May
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in Jake Gyllenhaal