With the year 2011 drawing to a close, the stars of Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve were a sentimental -- and cheeky -- bunch talking up the portmanteau rom-com recently in Los Angeles. "When I stopped wanting my New Year's Eve to be perfect, to ring in the New Year right, is when it started working out right," admitted Hilary Swank, seated at a podium about as long as the credit roll for the star-studded holiday pic. At the other end of the panel, Zac Efron faux-wooed co-star Michelle Pfeiffer. "You're coming out with me this year," he winked at her. "I'll show you how we do it."
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Patton Oswalt is hardly a screen rookie, having starred in various TV series, films, comedy specials; he's not even a stranger to awards season, having voiced the lead in Pixar's Oscar-winning Ratatouille. But there's an unmistakable milestone quality to this week's Young Adult, which places the actor and comic opposite Charlize Theron in a bitter stew of generational angst, woe and futility topped with a hint -- but just barely a hint -- of optimism.
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Mark Pellington's bromantic thriller I Melt With You made quite the splash at Sundance, just not the kind a filmmaker necessarily wants to make: Critics walked out of the film, recoiling at the bleakness on display in the tale of four former college friends (Jeremy Piven, Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe, and Christian McKay), reuniting for a weekend bender, who confront their collective middle-aged disillusionment with increasingly violent ends. Co-star Piven knew from the start it would be a polarizing project to take on.
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Drew Barrymore. Christian Bale. Bruce the Shark. It's an elite class of young talent that has found launching pads in the films of Steven Spielberg. And while Jeremy Irvine is a little older than those actors who preceded him, you can go ahead and add the 21-year-old to the list thanks to his breakthrough in Spielberg epic Oscar hopeful War Horse.
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As befits one of the contemporary stage and screen's more intense, challenging actors, Ralph Fiennes didn't make his directorial debut easy on himself. His adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (opening today in limited release) studies the vicissitudes of political pride, corruption and revenge -- an unflinching stare into a familiar powder keg that looks and feels increasingly like an abyss.
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Emily Browning, the Australian actress best known for Hollywood efforts Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events and this year's Sucker Punch, hits the art house this week for something completely different: Sleeping Beauty, writer-director Julia Leigh's disturbing dive into the realm of somnambulistic sex work.
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Whether or not you buy into Dane Cook's brand of humor, you must acknowledge that the Boston-born stand-up has cornered a sizable comedy market and successfully infiltrated the movie business. Up next, Cook attempts to make the most challenging transition of his career -- from dependable funnyman to respected actor.
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Another year, another blisteringly grand performance from Tilda Swinton: After a run that commenced with her Oscar-winning role in Michael Clayton and continued with her underseen creative triumphs Julia and I Am Love, Swinton arrives in theaters next week as the haunted lead in We Need to Talk About Kevin. If there is any justice in the Oscar cosmos, she'll be back in the Kodak Theater as at least a nominee come February.
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He's won a Tony Award (for Red) and held his own onscreen opposite everyone from Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd) to Julianne Moore (Savage Grace) to Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: The Golden Age). But there's something about Eddie Redmayne's role in My Week With Marilyn -- as Colin Clark, a glorified film-set gofer mediating the relationship between Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) and her Prince and the Showgirl co-star and director Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) -- that hints at just the right screen role at just the right time.
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Even Bérénice Bejo acknowledges there's not a lot left to say about The Artist, the heavily acclaimed silent-film throwback that has been on the awards (and thus the media) warpath since debuting at Cannes last May. But the Argentine-born, French-raised actress also knows full well what a good problem that is to have -- even it means wondering how to follow up the role of a lifetime.
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Paddy Considine's British drama Tyrannosaur opens with an act of violence so brutal and bleak that, as Olivia Colman told Movieline earlier this month, it caused some audience members to bolt out of theaters. If they had stayed, though, they would have seen the film evolve from the portrait of an alcoholic widower's despicably primal urges to the tale of his redemption.
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It was probably just a matter of time before French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius broke through in the United States: His OSS 117 diptych of spy spoofs had already acquired something of an international audience, and his curiosity about Hollywood has grown alongside his reputation. But no one -- least of all Hazanavicius himself -- likely foresaw him breaking through with The Artist.
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As arguably the film world's closest contemporary equivalent to Sir Laurence Olivier, the classically trained, commercially adventurous actor/filmmaker Kenneth Branagh makes an ideal candidate to play the great man in this week's My Week With Marilyn.
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Throughout the Twilight franchise, one screenwriter has adapted author Stephenie Meyer's bestselling book series about a teenager and her love for a vampire for the screen: Melissa Rosenberg. It's a tricky job, balancing the desire to satisfy fans with the need to make Meyer's 500+ page-novels cinematic, all while transforming heroine Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) from unsteady teen to self-possessed woman. But in Breaking Dawn - Part 1 Bella finally is an agent of her own destiny, her senses awakened, and her choices confident. Was she, as Rosenberg insists, an active heroine under the surface just waiting to spring into action all along?
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A little over six months ago, before The Artist premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, it might have been unthinkable to foresee what has since evolved into a very real possibility: Jean Dujardin, a bona fide movie star in his native France but relative unknown in the United States, is as likely as any contender to date to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Which would be surprising enough without The Artist being a black-and-white French import -- a silent black-and-white French import.
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