Anjelica Huston is renowned Hollywood royalty, but in the new movie 50/50, she's just right as a Seattle mother whose son (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is diagnosed with cancer and whose husband is a longtime sufferer of Alzheimer's disease. For the woman who's played everything from Maerose Prizzi to Morticia Addams, the role is yet another departure that always feels like a perfect -- and revealing -- fit. We caught up with the dynastic actress to discuss the real-life pain behind her performance in 50/50, the fun of discovering her grandfather Walter Huston's work, and the problem with winning an Oscar over Oprah Winfrey.
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You may not have realized it, but Tyrese Gibson had a billion dollar box-office summer. The worldwide grosses of his two blockbusters Fast Five and Transformers: Dark of the Moon totaled $1.7 billion to be exact -- a number that the former model/R&B artist/actor quoted twice during a recent chat with Movieline.
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This fall's hit baseball drama Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as a beleaguered Oakland A's general manager who turns his team around with a formula designed for quality optimization. Ironically, director Bennett Miller employed a similar strategy when adapting Moneyball, the long-gestating project based on Michael Lewis's book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game for the screen.
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Genre fans already know Kevin Sorbo for his long-running stints on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Andromeda, two shows for which he's earned international stardom on the small screen, and in recent years the erstwhile Hercules/Dylan Hunt has branched out by adding Christian flicks to his resume. But are audiences -- not to mention fans of his faith-based work -- ready to see Sorbo as the ultra-violent, masochistic lady-hunting sociopath he plays in P.J. Pettiette's horror satire Julia X 3D?
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If you haven't yet seen Woody Allen's fantastic Midnight in Paris, do yourself a favor and stop reading this now. (Then do yourself a bigger favor and go check it out.) Arguably the best way to enjoy the film is knowing little to nothing about its protagonist Gil (Owen Wilson) or his late-night exploits around the City of Light, which culminate in encounters with Gil's literary and artistic heroes. Sort of. Corey Stoll knows what I'm talking about.
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Following the success of his 2007 cop drama Elite Squad, Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padilha turned his lens back on Rio de Janeiro's corrupt system in a sequel, Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within. A critical and commercial smash that set box office records and was selected as Brazil's official Oscars entry, Elite Squad 2 played Sunday at Fantastic Fest where Movieline caught up with Padilha to discuss why his incisive films have resonated in Brazil and the philosophical questions raised in his remake of RoboCop, which he's currently writing. And what's up with those Michael Fassbender casting rumors?
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No one expected Paul Feig's summer comedy Bridesmaids to break the box office. But now that it has, the world has renewed hope for female comedies and a vested interested in Bridesmaids stars Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy and Rose Byrne, whose haughty turn as Helen, the Bridesmaid From Hell, earned her heaps of critical praise.
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Over the past four years, Yvonne Strahovski has acquainted herself with television audiences as CIA agent Sarah Walker on NBC's fast-paced, quick-witted spy series Chuck. Now, as the beloved comedy-drama gears up for its fifth and final season, the Australian actress is making her big-budget box office debut in Gary McKendry's action film Killer Elite which pits a retired British Special Air Service member (Jason Statham) against a violent hit squad. As Statham's onscreen girlfriend, Strahovski gets to retain her Aussie accent, stay away from the testosterone-fueled violence and share coffee with Robert De Niro.
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It's not just Twilight star Taylor Lautner who has a lot riding on this week's PG-13 action thriller Abduction, in which the erstwhile Jacob Black plays a suave teenager who turns spy-on-the-run after discovering his life has been a lie. Director John Singleton has something to prove with his first directorial effort since Four Brothers, even if he exudes nothing but confidence while discussing the high-octane action pic.
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Olivia Munn first became known for keeping geeks everywhere enthralled on a daily basis as the co-host of G4's Attack of the Show, but since leaving the program to pursue acting she's hit the ground running by joining The Daily Show, starring in the short-lived sitcom Perfect Couples, and snagging roles in upcoming projects from the likes of Aaron Sorkin and Steven Soderbergh. Speaking with Munn over the weekend about her latest film, I Don't Know How She Does It, Movieline was determined not to ask the pun-tastic question of how, in fact, she does it. What we discovered instead was the story of how, in the course of following her Hollywood dreams, she tried to do it all.
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UK writer/director Andrew Haigh's Weekend is pretty much perfect: a sweet, small, intimate story of an unassuming lifeguard named Russell (Tom Cullen), who meets and falls in love with a cheeky chap named Glen (Chris New) over one poignant weekend. Glen insists on tape-recording many of his conversations with Russell for a project, including the first exchange they have after making love. This confidential rapport evolves into a highly emotional, sexually frank connection, and when Glen announces that he's moving to the U.S. for schooling, Russell must resolve his own feelings about himself and Glen's departure.
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Look, people (that means you too, Twilight Moms): Taylor Lautner is all grown up now, legal and everything at 19 years of age. He's got his first non-Twilight starring role coming up in John Singleton's Abduction, which is also his first young adult bid for action supremacy. So even though he's arguably the most legitimately nice young actor of his generation -- seriously, this kid's poised like a pro -- he's growing up on-screen faster than teen mom Bella Swan. And you know what that means? Steamy love scenes!
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As soon as he took the reins on this week's remake of Sam Peckinpah's brutal 1971 classic Straw Dogs, writer-director Rod Lurie knew the haters would come in droves. "From the minute we announced it everybody was on my ass in the blogosphere, telling me that I couldn't carry his jockstrap and I'll never be Sam Peckinpah," Lurie told Movieline on the eve of his film's release. But with his updated take on the Peckinpah film, which transplants the violent tale to the American South and re-envisions protagonists David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth) as a Hollywood couple fighting off fire and brimstone-raised good ol' boys, Lurie was never attempting to mimic Peckinpah at all -- in fact, he was doing just the opposite.
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While accruing billions of dollars at the box office for his Transformers franchise, director Michael Bay has also gained somewhat of a reputation for his aggressive, dictatorial style of directing. Former Transformers star Megan Fox called Bay a nightmare who aspires "to be like Hitler on his sets." Other Transformers actors have agreed, claiming that a day on a Transformers set is like a day on the battlefield with General Bay shouting commands for explosions, choppers, Blackhawks, appleboxes and instructions to ignore lunch. But is there a softer side to Michael Bay that the public does not know about?
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After bookending the summer with prestigious appearances at festivals in Cannes and Toronto, acclaimed auteur Gus Van Sant brings his latest film, Restless, to theaters this weekend in limited release. The outcome of an unusual creative collaboration including co-producers Ron Howard and his daughter Bryce Dallas Howard, her former New York University colleague and screenwriter Jason Lew, and the visionary for hire Van Sant, Restless stars Mia Wasikowska as a terminally ill teenager who sparks up a star-crossed love affair with a gloomy, funeral-crashing, imaginary friend-confiding orphan (played by Henry Hopper).
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