John Michael Higgins is poised to be all over the pop culture landscape for the next six months. The veteran film and television actor co-stars as the principal in Bad Teacher (out June 24) and appears opposite Fran Drescher on the new TV Land series Happily Divorced, which debuts tonight after Hot in Cleveland. Plus, he's also got a supporting role in Cameron Crowe's We Bought a Zoo, due out in theaters at Christmas. In short: get used to merrily shouting, "That guy!" when his face appears on television and movie screens throughout the rest of 2011.
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Mere months after helping revive the Scream franchise, Emma Roberts is back onscreen in the decidedly smaller enterprise The Art of Getting By. Opening this Friday from Fox Searchlight, the film features Roberts as Sally, a uniquely privileged young New Yorker who develops a romantically tinged friendship with her high school's most notorious slacker (played by Freddie Highmore). We talked it over in an interview still to come, but for now, let's stick with Movieline tradition by checking out Roberts's favorite scene.
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Ten years ago, after completing his 20th film in 27 years, filmmaking legend John Carpenter took a sabbatical from filmmaking. "I was tired," he explained to Movieline, pointing to a decades-long career spent filming one project after the next, including genre classics like Halloween, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live. "I had given up my personal life and given up my health -- given up a lot of things, because of my love of movies, and I'd stopped loving cinema."
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John Slattery's Emmy-nominated performance as the pompous Roger Sterling on Mad Men has led to a number of film roles for the 48-year-old actor: He's turned up in Reservation Road, Charlie Wilson's War, and -- more recently -- in The Adjustment Bureau (out on DVD next week), playing a supernatural, crisply-suited agent named Richardson who's responsible for breaking up two fate-defying romantics (Matt Damon and Emily Blunt). Movieline caught up with Slattery to discuss filming The Adjustment Bureau, wariness about Roger Sterling knockoff roles, and the breakneck pace of directing Mad Men.
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Utah native Riley Griffiths landed the opportunity of a lifetime when he scored a role in J.J. Abrams' Super 8. Discovered during a nationwide search for the mostly unknown young actors (including Joel Courtney, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills, Gabriel Basso, and Elle Fanning), the 14-year-old makes his film debut as the ringleader of a group of amateur filmmakers who stumble upon a mysterious government conspiracy one night when a train crashes -- literally -- across their makeshift film set.
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Not so unlike the two-decade hiatus that took him away from feature filmmaking, legendary director Monte Hellman's new film Road to Nowhere is a fascinating, frustrating, languorous journey through the movies' heart of darkness. The noir-within-a-noir places director Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) back behind the camera after an extended absence, where he plans to make a true-crime film based on the illicit relationship between -- and supposed deaths of -- femme fatale Velma Duran (Shannyn Sossamon) and corrupt politico Rafe Taschen (Cliff De Young). But when Mitchell casts Velma doppelganger Laurel Graham (also Sossamon), the line between the filmmaker's life and art soon blurs beyond recognition.
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After a two-decade absence, legendary filmmaker Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) returns to feature-film directing this weekend with the movie-within-a-movie noir Road to Nowhere. Technically, it's more like a movie within a movie within a movie, at least when it comes to Hellman's favorite scene, which he shared today with Movieline.
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If you weren't familiar with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover model Brooklyn Decker last year, you certainly became acquainted with the Ohio-born blonde this February when Columbia Pictures used her -- more specifically, her body in a yellow bikini -- as the primary marketing tool for Adam Sandler's latest rom-com Just Go With It. Contrary to what the promos would have you believe, Decker didn't spend her first feature debut emerging from different bodies of water in slow-motion; she played a sweet-natured school teacher with whom Sandler's character falls in love and Jennifer Aniston's character falls in perpetual annoyance.
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Old pals and UK comedy heroes Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reunite this week for The Trip, the feature-film version of their mostly improvised 2010 BBC miniseries about versions of themselves who take off on a culinary and cultural road adventure through the north of England. Along the way they confront their perceptions of career, family and talent -- everything from who performs the better Michael Caine impression to how many octaves their respective singing voices cover.
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Last year, Barry Pepper earned glowing reviews for his portrayal of "Lucky" Ned Pepper in Joel and Ethan Coens' adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel True Grit. The Canadian actor appeared in less than a third of the film, but managed to steal his scenes as an outlaw gang leader opposite Oscar nominees Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. Perhaps it had something to do with his teeth.
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If J.J. Abrams' nostalgic summer sci-fi adventure Super 8 is intentionally evocative of producer (and Abrams mentor) Steven Spielberg's E.T. (1982), then 15-year-old newcomer Joel Courtney is its Elliott, the young, sensitive boy hero caught in the middle of an otherworldly mystery. It's a big role to hang on the shoulders of a newcomer -- one who won the part after visiting L.A. in hopes of landing a modest commercial gig -- but, as it turns out, the Idaho native now has bigger career goals in his sights.
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To give you an idea about what kind of mark Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie left on the pop culture landscape, think of it like this: 33 years later, the Donner origin story -- and its sequel, which he didn't get to finish -- is still being talked about in reverent tones. No disrespect to this summer's overloaded crop of superhero films, but: Does anyone think that 33 years from now people will still be talking about Thor?
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Last week, Deadline reported that Warner Bros. had hired Hustle & Flow's Craig Brewer to write and direct a three-part Tarzan reboot. The story was not only interesting because of the potential for a 21st century account of Edgar Rice Burrough's dated adventurer but because Warner Bros. had also hired screenwriter Adam Cozad to simultaneously develop another Tarzan project for the studio.
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The pressure is on for the stars of MTV's Teen Wolf, the foggy, adrenaline-injected series version of the classic 1985 Michael J. Fox movie. For lead actors Tyler Posey (who plays Fox's character Scott) and Crystal Reed (who plays his comely love interest Allison Argent), the show is already a much-hyped event: The hour-long pilot premieres this Sunday after the MTV Movie Awards, which is a daunting timeslot for any show, old or new.
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This week, for the second time in a month, Welsh stage and screen veteran Michael Sheen arrives in theaters playing an American with Beautiful Boy. It's about as thematically opposite from his other recent opening -- the light Woody Allen jewel Midnight in Paris -- as you can get: The drama traces the fraught trajectory of married couple Bill (Sheen) and Kate (Maria Bello) in the aftermath of their son's college shooting rampage and suicide.
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