Who says Hollywood isn't a meritocracy? Danny Trejo may be a 65-year-old ex-con and recovering addict -- and People magazine will probably never have the creativity to put him on the annual Sexiest Men Alive list -- but he's a full-fledged movie star. Working his way up from bit parts that mainly called upon him to glower threateningly, Trejo gives an engaging and exhilarating lead performance in the wonderfully trashy Machete, out on DVD today from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. What started out as one of Robert Rodriguez's joke trailers from Grindhouse became a fast and funny B-movie homage, mixing outrageous stunts, gratuitous nudity -- and at least one catch phrase ("Machete don't text") -- with some salient points about right-wing politicians who are only too happy to sell Mexican immigrants down the river at election time.
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Unlike most network TV actors who pay their entertainment dues in commercial work and soap roles, Castle's Jon Huertas cut his teeth in the Air Force. After serving in the military (while studying musical theater) for eight years, the native New Yorker traded assault rifles for auditions and moved to Hollywood, where he used his discipline to build a career acting, directing and recording. Following a breakout performance in HBO's critically acclaimed miniseries Generation Kill, the actor now stars as Detective Javier Esposito on ABC's comedy-drama Castle. Shortly before the holidays, Huertas phoned Movieline to talk about Castle's strict No A**holes policy on set, share his own Glee fantasy and explain why a Castle-Beckett hook-up would be a good thing for the ABC series.
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When speaking with Another Year star Lesley Manville, it's hard to not walk away with the impression that she feels this is her big break. Sure, her career has spanned over 30 years -- and Another Year is her sixth film with Academy Award nominated director Mike Leigh -- but, as Manville points out, no other performance of hers has ever generated this much buzz in the United States during awards season. An awards season that has already garnered Best Actress accolades from the National Board of Review.
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Will 2011 be the year of Claire Foy? She's getting an early-enough start: The 26-year-old British actress makes her big-screen debut this week in Season of the Witch, starring as a nameless, possibly accursed young woman whom a pair of 14th-century knights (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) must transport to an abbey in the hopes of curbing the Black Plague. If only it were that easy: One misfortune and suspicion after another befalls the knights' quest, threatening them, their cargo, and maybe the entirety of human civilization. All in a day's work, right?
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Another year, another... oh, couple hundred interviews in the books for the staff at Movieline HQ. It's next to impossible to whittle this towering stack down to a manageable year-end review, but read on for a reasonable cross-section of the best, smartest, funniest and/or most candid moments from our magnanimous guests of 2010.
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On the very first day of Movieline.com's launch last April, we introduced our weekly feature The Verge with the following spiel: "Ever watched a film and wondered, 'Who's that?' Now you'll know before you even have to ask. Welcome to The Verge, Movieline's weekly interview with up-and-coming actors on the verge of a serious career boost." Since that day, we've profiled 38 rising talents, and all of their profiles have only continued to surge. (Give yourself a pat on the back for getting in on the ground floor!) Here are ten of our favorites, who we can guarantee you'll be seeing more of soon:
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I could feed you that tired old line about Javier Bardem delivering the performance of a lifetime etc. etc. in Biutiful, but come on. Why lie? The reality is that Bardem has delivered such richly drawn, deeply layered work for years, from his role as doomed Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls to the right-to-die proponent Ramon Sampedro in The Sea Inside and even the affectless, coin-tossing killer Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men -- all canonical characters of the last decade, all justifiably Oscar-nominated (with the latter winning). It is fair to say Biutiful's struggling, terminally ill Barcelonan eclipses them all; so when will Bardem receive the awards-season recognition he deserves?
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Michael Cristofer is mostly known to recent audiences as the Corn Flakes-eating, conspiracy-plotting Truxton Spangler on the recently cancelled AMC series, Rubicon. What fans of Rubicon may not have realized is that Cristofer is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter who adapted Tom Wolfe's bestselling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities for the screen -- an adaptation, which, 20 years ago this week, became one of the biggest screen disasters of all time.
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Ali MacGraw has lived the sort of life that usually seems confined to airport novels -- a Wellesley grad who spent the '60s doing grunt work for legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, she became a fashion icon herself after starring in hits like Goodbye Columbus (1969) and Love Story (1970). Her passionate relationships, and eventual marriages, with Paramount chief Robert Evans and alpha-male Steve McQueen were the stuff of international headlines. She dried out at Betty Ford. And then she went to Santa Fe but remained active as an advocate for yoga and animal rights.
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Jon Lovitz still gets visibly annoyed when the subject of a 1991 Saturday Night Live joke is the topic of discussion. On Dennis Miller's last show, there was a short sketch where Lorne Michael's asked Miller, "You're not going to come back every week to hang out on the set like Lovitz, are you?" (Lovitz, who had left SNL the year before, had made four cameos during Miller's final season.) When Miller responded, "No," Michaels continued, "Because that would be pathetic. I mean, the man has no life ... I mean, thank God every now and then he gets a movie." Of course, it was a joke, but that doesn't mean Lovitz wasn't livid at the "cheap shot."
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Mike Leigh has a reputation among press for not withholding his displeasure when confronted with a line of questioning he doesn't particularly care for. So our interview began with that slight pang of trepidation, only to give way to the reality that Leigh -- the six-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker known for such talky, trenchant English surveys as Life is Sweet, Secrets and Lies, Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and next week's critically acclaimed (as usual) Another Year -- is willing to talk about most any subject if he finds that subject interesting. Up to and including, say, the almost ridiculous notion of a Mike Leigh-helmed superhero movie.
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Barely a week past her 14th birthday, Hailee Steinfeld has accomplished a fistful of feats most of her Hollywood contemporaries would kill for. Starting with this week's True Grit, she makes in her feature-film debut as the female lead of a Coen Brothers movie. Grit's studio Paramount, meanwhile, has Steinfeld at the front of the Oscar pack in the Best Supporting Actress category. And then there's the little matter of whom she's supporting -- and whom Steinfeld matches scene for scene, tone for tone, line for dense line.
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You might think Sally Hawkins got nominated for an Oscar after winning the Golden Globe for Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky in 2009, but you would be wrong. Despite a winning lead performance and the backing of both critics and the Hollywood Foreign Press, Hawkins was a bridesmaid in the Best Actress race that winter. Of course, being snubbed once by Oscar doesn't mean Hawkins is ready to pack it up; she's back on the awards circuit this fall for her performance as a striking (and striking) autoworker in Made in Dagenham.
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It's been a very long road for Tron: Legacy to finally make it to the big screen. Rumors of a sequel to the 1982 cult favorite have been circulating on the Internet for about as long as there's been a widely used Internet. The original Tron told the story of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a computer programmer who found himself materialized inside the very computer system that he designed. Even when a trailer for a sequel did materialize (originally titled TR2N) at Comic-Con in 2008 -- as director Joseph Kosinski explains, that was basically his audition tape -- it took two and a half more years before the film was actually put together and released. For Kosinski, today, the wait is finally over.
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Nicole Kidman didn't have to search far to find a visceral connection to the character she plays in Rabbit Hole, a woman rendered utterly devastated by the accidental death of her young child. She had given birth to daughter Sunday Rose while the film was being developed from David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning play and knew the timing was right precisely because of how much the material scared her.
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