There has always been something innately memorable about actress Judy Greer. The curiously beautiful actress with razor-sharp timing, a scene-stealer in everything from What Women Want to Arrested Development, carries an underlying melancholy behind her eyes that lends the sweetest characters deeper layers and the over the top ones an even greater sense of unpredictability, whether in comedies or, increasingly, in dramatic fare. So maybe she was born to be in an Alexander Payne movie like The Descendants, which flits back and forth along the painful edge between tragedy and humor in ways that feel completely, and achingly, human.
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Even though you may not immediately recognize the name Warwick Davis, you are familiar with his work. That's because the English actor has been involved with two of the most storied franchises in all of film history -- the first being Star Wars, where Davis made his onscreen debut as Wicket in Return of the Jedi at the tender age of 13. Nearly three decades (and title roles in Willow and the six-part Leprechaun series) later, Davis helps close the door on the Harry Potter franchise, where he has played Hogwarts charms master Professor Flitwick and Gringotts goblin Griphook for 10 years.
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Ashley Greene has been playing Alice, an unwaveringly supportive sisterly friend to Kristen Stewart's Bella, since the beginning of the Twilight series. In Breaking Dawn -- Part 1 the psychic Alice serves as wedding planner and all-around helpful vampire girl, but also faces a sudden inability to help Bella by seeing her future, or that of the child she's carrying. Greene talked about Bella's well-being, the nature of relationships and the film's intense birth scene.
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Every director who's gone through the whirlwind circus that is filming and releasing a Twilight movie eventually gets to relax and breathe a sigh of relief, but Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) still has miles and miles to go. Fans and critics will finally see what the Oscar-winner brings to the YA vampire franchise when The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 hits theaters Nov. 18, but if they find themselves displeased with his treatment of Stephenie Meyer's beloved novel, it could be a tough year's wait until Condon's simultaneously-shot series ender (Breaking Dawn - Part 2) concludes the series next fall.
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Much has been made of British actor Henry Cavill's abs in this week's Immortals, or the strange, logic-defying Superman beard spied on the set of Man of Steel. Never mind that the 28-year-old actor turns in a persuasive dramatic performance in Tarsem's stylized fantasy myth, playing the classic hero Theseus as an honorable peasant battling a sadistic god-hating tyrant (Mickey Rourke) with the aid of a comely priestess (Freida Pinto) and supernatural bow and arrows. But therein lies the surprise: Go to Immortals for the bloody action, or the mythological spin, or the wonderment of Tarsem's visuals, and you'll also get the pleasant revelation that Cavill wears leading man status like a natural.
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Some directors clearly have no filter and suffer for it; others choose to live altogether filter-less, playing the game their own way, on their own terms. Which is why earlier this year Movieline anointed Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) the honey badger of Hollywood; an indie film talent recently gone mainstream -- who wore a homemade shirt proclaiming "I've been media trained" at WonderCon -- Tarsem's infamously cheeky public persona might threaten to overtake his work if only his films, just three features to date counting this week's Immortals, weren't so distinctive and gorgeous.
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The hardest-working filmmaker on Earth was back in New York last week, making the latest of what have basically become semiannual tours in support of his movies. Thus what felt like a continuation of last spring's chat with Werner Herzog, whose latest documentary, Into the Abyss, finds the endlessly curious director exploring one of American society's darkest. sparsest frontiers: Capital punishment.
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This week finally brings Melancholia to limited theatrical release in the US, where prospective viewers have spent the five months since its Cannes premiere attempting to parse the great, fraught, near-instant mythology of director Lars von Trier's latest masterpiece. Finally the work can speak for itself -- or mostly speak for itself, anyway, with help from co-star and modern-era von Trier muse Charlotte Gainsbourg.
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The sweetest feel-good flick of the holiday season may well be the one about two ex-BFFs, who'd once gone in search of White Castle sliders and tangled with Homeland Security, who reunite on Christmas Eve to hunt down the perfect fir, crossing paths with drug-sniffing babies, Ukrainian gangsters, and a sweater-clad Danny Trejo along the way. Stoner heroes Harold and Kumar have come a long way since 2004 -- and so has co-star John Cho, who sat down with Movieline recently to talk H&K, career moves, and his encounters with the likes of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President Obama.
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In a career spanning over four decades Lily Tomlin has virtually done it all -- but, as she told Movieline this week at the Savannah Film Festival, in town to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, she's not done yet. After rising to stardom on Laugh-In (where she created indelible characters like Ernestine the telephone operator and Edith Ann, the impossibly precocious 5-year-old), the funny woman won Grammys for her comedy albums, won a Tony for her one-woman Broadway show, earned an Oscar nod making her dramatic debut in Robert Altman's Nashville, and starred in '80s comedy classics like 9 to 5 and The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
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A quick scan of Ray Liotta's filmography indicates that the 56-year-old actor has played tons of officers, captains and detectives. He sticks to that milieu in The Son of No One, a Sundance-debuted thriller about a young cop (Channing Tatum) who is assigned to protect the rough Queens neighborhood where he grew up. As Captain Marion Mathers, Liotta works authoritatively alongside a veteran detective (Al Pacino), even after an anonymous source reveals new information about unsolved murders and a potential police cover-up. Movieline phoned Liotta to talk about the new movie, memories of Goodfellas and traumatizing moviegoers in Hannibal.
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An unusual thing happened to Kal Penn on the way to stardom: in April 2009, after making two successful franchise-starting Harold & Kumar comedies, appearing in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, and co-starring on TV's House, the rising actor opted to take a two-year sabbatical from Hollywood to work in the Obama administration. This week, he returns to screens as Kumar to John Cho's Harold in A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, which finds the former hamburger-seeking BFFs facing new, daunting life changes and, in the spirit of the holidays, renewing their friendship the old fashioned way: With giant spliffs, babies on drugs, and Claymation.
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Sure, it's a tough sell. But Anonymous has plenty going for it both behind the camera (director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff posit the legitimacy of Shakespeare) and in front of it as well, where a sterling cast including Rhys Ifans, David Thewlis, Mark Rylance and the estimable mother-daughter combo of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson -- playing Queen Elizabeth I some 40 years apart -- dig into the historical, political and romantic intrigues with relish.
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American audiences came to love English actor Stephen Moyer as sexy, small-town vampire Bill Compton on HBO's hit show True Blood. But when the award-winning Alan Ball series goes on hiatus -- as it is now between its fourth and fifth seasons -- the accomplished stage actor fits in as many film projects as he can. The latest being The Double, Michael Brand's directorial debut which co-stars Moyer as a Soviet psychopath assassin who is locked behind bars with only a gruesome facial scar and a secret -- a secret that Richard Gere and Topher Grace try to wheedle out of him as they investigate the murder of a senator in this political thriller.
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I interview a lot of people at this job -- many talented artists on an intellectual spectrum so wide and sometimes with personas so canned and specific that you rarely know from one chat to the next who you're going to get, or if they'll even be the same person the next time you meet. That's not a problem with Roland Emmerich, which is why he might be my favorite interview going right now.
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