At age 74, Jane Fonda still beams with a dogged courage that has fueled her cinematic, political, and entrepreneurial endeavors. Biographer Patricia Bosworth would know firsthand, having met the two-time Oscar winner during their thespian days with Lee Strasberg in New York City's Actors Studio. For four decades Bosworth has studied the shapeshifting Fonda, and when it came time in the early 2000s to write her biography, Fonda agreed to interview with the woman who had, by that time, written tomes about Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando.
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It's a curious version of the real pro wrestler Kurt Angle that you get from the ring persona he's projected over the years as a star of the WWE (née WWF) and now TNA Wrestling, where he's currently the reigning World Heavyweight Champion. The real-life former Olympic wrestler has played off his 1996 gold medal win as wrestling's bona fide "American Hero" since his 1998 WWF debut, juggling multiple wrestling companies and countless ring titles while a version of his own personal life, warped through the wrestling world's faux-realist backstage lens, is broadcast every week to millions of fans. But what Angle really wants to do -- what he wanted to do even before pro wrestling came calling -- is act. Seriously act.
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It's no coincidence that Josh Hartnett has been off the grid, so to speak, in the years following his most recent string of mainstream turns (The Black Dahlia, Resurrecting the Champ, 30 Days of Night); after spending a decade in Hollywood, the 33-year-old tells Movieline, other interests and challenges called. "I've been trying out a lot of different things," Hartnett explained during a chat about his latest art film endeavor, Guy Moshe's hyper-stylized Bunraku. "I started this business so young, I kind of grew up in it... I'm just living a rather unique life, I think, and I enjoy it."
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After a career in Hollywood that has spanned four decades, two Oscar nominations, three wives and one notoriously bad mug shot -- Nick Nolte returns to the big screen this Friday with his most personal role yet: that of a former alcoholic who desperately seeks forgiveness from his mixed martial arts-fighter family (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton) in Gavin O'Connor's Warrior. During the film's press day last month, both O'Connor and Nolte confessed that the struggles of Nolte's character Paddy O'Connor were based largely on the actor's own cycle of substance abuse, sobriety and redemption-seeking -- a cycle that sadly continued while the pair filmed Warrior in and around Pittsburgh last year.
Last month, the 70-year-old actor met with Movieline to discuss his R-rated Warrior adventures, his unlikely handgun crusade and the secret to playing a good, chain-restaurant-obsessed gorilla.
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They say to write what you know. Unfortunately, in the case of screenwriter Will Reiser, what he knew was cancer. Six years ago, Reiser was diagnosed with cancer in his back, and -- after surgery to remove the tumor -- decided to handle the life-changing situation the only way he knew how: by finding the humor. Thus, 50/50 was born.
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By virtually any Hollywood standard, even if another film featuring Jessica Chastain weren't released in 2011 after this week, she'd have already had a pretty phenomenally successful rookie year in the business.
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If it feels like Andrea Riseborough has been on the cusp of a breakout for the last calendar year, that's probably because she has. Last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, Riseborough appeared in three films -- Never Let Me Go, Made In Dagenham and Brighton Rock (out in limited release now) -- and this year she'll show up in Toronto, again, with the Madonna-directed W.E.; the life of a budding breakout actress never seems to slow down.
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Much of director Olivier Megaton's female assassin pic Colombiana coasts on a certain popcorn movie badass factor -- lithe star Zoe Saldana as stone-cold killer hell-bent on vengeance for the murder of her family, slinking through missions in skintight catsuits (or less) and gracefully blasting away bad guys with beautifully cold precision in the grand tradition of producer Luc Besson's most famous female killers. But Saldana feels a more weighty responsibility when it comes to her action heroine debut and how its success might affect opportunities for women in film to follow.
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When Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) set out to update the scariest movie he'd ever seen as a child -- the 1973 made-for-television movie Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, about inhabitants of a house who discover sinister creatures living in the basement -- he intended to frighten and thrill a new generation of youngsters. Even co-star Katie Holmes, who makes a rare genre appearance in the Del Toro-produced and co-scripted horror pic, found the script to so terrifying that she knew she had to do it. But is Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, as the MPAA deemed, too scary for kids?
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Actor Stephen Lang, award-winning veteran of stage, film, and television, earned his biggest success to date playing the hardened Colonel Miles Quaritch in James Cameron's Avatar. But in the wake of Avatar, the character actor was looking for a departure of sorts, and he found it in the mythic fantasy landscape conceived by Robert E. Howard playing a bloodthirsty warlord in Marcus Nispel's Conan the Barbarian.
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Back in 2007, Sam Riley burst on the scene with a starmaking performance in the critically acclaimed film Control. Poised to be the latest hot British import to invade U.S. shores, Riley followed Control up with two intriguing-on-paper titles -- Franklyn with Ryan Phillippe and Eva Green and 13 opposite Ray Winstone, Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, Michael Shannon and Alexander Skarsgaard. The rest, as they say, is history -- though maybe not the kind Riley initially envisioned.
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Devotees of Tom Holland's 1985 vampire pic Fright Night, Anton Yelchin would like to allay your fears about Craig Gillespie's remake of the horror cult classic. The new Fright Night, in theaters today, pays loving homage to the original even as it updates the setting to suburban Las Vegas, turns teen hero Charley Brewster (Yelchin) into a savvy, sneaker-freak cool kid with a hot girlfriend (Imogen Poots), and makes new changes to Fright Night's cast of characters, from the dangerously sexy vampire next door (Colin Farrell) to the angry geek "Evil" Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to the drastically re-imagined Peter Vincent (David Tennant), now a Criss Angel-like Vegas magician with a penthouse suit on the Strip.
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Somehow, despite his chiseled good looks, his True Blood fame, and the glut of comic book movies in Hollywood these days, 34-year-old Ryan Kwanten hadn't yet played a superhero until now. And the one he does play -- the only one that's interested him, he says -- comes in this week's small-scale Australian indie Griff the Invisible, in which the erstwhile Jason Stackhouse plays a mild-mannered, socially-awkward geek by day and vigilante crime fighter by night.
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In Lone Scherfig's One Day, adapted by David Nicholls from his own novel, young Brits Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) meet cute on the last day of college and spend the '80s and '90s flitting in and out of each other's lives. As the pair grows into adulthood, they begin to realize the love that existed between them from the start -- even if neither can fully see it. The film -- which occurs on a single day of each year throughout the relationship -- is not just about romance, however; it's about maturing, making mistakes and the memories we hold on to from precious moments spent with the ones we love.
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Jeremy Piven -- the three-time Emmy winner who just entered his eighth and final season as Ari Gold on Entourage -- is a bizarre, yet perfect choice for his roles in Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D. As both the Spy Kid-assisting Danger D'Amo and the nefarious time-hoarder Tick Tock, he gets to exercise a knack for broad comedy and old-school dual casting. (Like in Cat Ballou, anybody? Lee Marvin? Anyway.) Movieline caught up with the 46-year-old actor to discuss Robert Rodriguez's vision for the time-jumping flick, bringing his movie experiences back to Entourage, and his favorite film scene of all time. It's a grim one.
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