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.
more »
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.
more »
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.
more »
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?
more »
Within the insular Traveller community in Ireland and parts of the United Kingdom, among clans that are closely related by marriage and birth, conflicts are solved through ritualized bare-knuckle fights buoyed by blood pride and machismo. Think Brad Pitt in Snatch and you get the lighter side of the boxing tradition, but in real life, as documentarian Ian Palmer discovered as he filmed one clan's champions over the course of 12 years, there's a dark and tragic nature to the custom that drives the culture.
more »
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?
more »
Twilight idol Taylor Lautner may be new to the action hero game -- well, at least as a young adult, now that his Shark Boy days are long gone -- but he had a seasoned vet by his side on the set of John Singleton's Abduction: Ellen Ripley herself, Sigourney Weaver. As a therapist to Lautner's thrill-seeking teenager, who stumbles into the spy game after discovering the truth about his own childhood, she shows her young co-star how it's done, effortlessly and with grace. But it wasn't Lautner who studied Weaver's body of work for pointers; instead, Weaver admitted, it was she who studied Lautner's work -- his work in the Twilight movies.
more »
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.
more »
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.
more »
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.
more »
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.
more »
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.
more »
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).
more »
On a recent day in Los Angeles the charismatic, now-83-year-old Robert Guillaume recalled with little effort and copious charm the skepticism he initially felt at the idea of a cartoon film about a lion who becomes the king of the animals, for which the filmmakers wanted him to voice a wise mandrill-baboon. "When they first described it to me I wasn't all that impressed with the idea," he admitted. "It didn't make a lot of sense." Eventually the parts combined into Disney's 1994 classic The Lion King, and Guillaume saw what made it all so special. "I still think it's kind of a miracle, that it must have touched people very deeply when they first saw it."
more »
Some moviegoers may recognize Stellan Skarsgård as the frequent Lars von Trier collaborator who this November will appear in Melancholia, his fourth film from the controversial Danish director. But more mainstream audiences will recognize the 60-year-old Swedish actor (and father of True Blood breakout actor Alexander Skarsgård) for his work in five mega-blockbusters in the past five years including Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Mamma Mia!, Angels & Demons and most recently Thor, which starred Skarsgård as a scientist who ultimately befriends Chris Hemsworth's title character.
more »
