Last year, Barry Pepper earned glowing reviews for his portrayal of "Lucky" Ned Pepper in Joel and Ethan Coens' adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel True Grit. The Canadian actor appeared in less than a third of the film, but managed to steal his scenes as an outlaw gang leader opposite Oscar nominees Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. Perhaps it had something to do with his teeth.
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To give you an idea about what kind of mark Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie left on the pop culture landscape, think of it like this: 33 years later, the Donner origin story -- and its sequel, which he didn't get to finish -- is still being talked about in reverent tones. No disrespect to this summer's overloaded crop of superhero films, but: Does anyone think that 33 years from now people will still be talking about Thor?
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The pressure is on for the stars of MTV's Teen Wolf, the foggy, adrenaline-injected series version of the classic 1985 Michael J. Fox movie. For lead actors Tyler Posey (who plays Fox's character Scott) and Crystal Reed (who plays his comely love interest Allison Argent), the show is already a much-hyped event: The hour-long pilot premieres this Sunday after the MTV Movie Awards, which is a daunting timeslot for any show, old or new.
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This week, for the second time in a month, Welsh stage and screen veteran Michael Sheen arrives in theaters playing an American with Beautiful Boy. It's about as thematically opposite from his other recent opening -- the light Woody Allen jewel Midnight in Paris -- as you can get: The drama traces the fraught trajectory of married couple Bill (Sheen) and Kate (Maria Bello) in the aftermath of their son's college shooting rampage and suicide.
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Eight months or so after his film Submarine buzzed its way into audiences' hearts (and Harvey Weinstein's wallet) at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Richard Ayoade had said pretty much all he could about his feature debut. So when we sat down in New York last week to talk about the much-talked-about coming-of-age dramedy, we ultimately wound up discussing the next best thing: The discussion.
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What does Kung Fu Panda 2 have to do with King of the Hill, Midnight Run, and Animal House? Ask screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who co-scripted and co-produced the Oscar-nominated 2008 global hit Kung Fu Panda and its sequel, in theaters this weekend. After working their way up the ranks with TV comedy gigs, the duo has emerged one of DreamWorks Animation's strongest writing teams -- and to think, it all started with a stuffy office job in Boston...
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On the one hand, there's nothing Malcolm McDowell can tell you about A Clockwork Orange that he hasn't told someone else before. The 1971 Stanley Kubrick classic -- adapted from Anthony Burgess's novel about a young hooligan caught up in a dystopic society's attempts to cure "ultraviolence" -- has pretty much been parsed, discussed, annotated and mythologized down to atomic bits over the last four decades, most often with its star McDowell leading the way. On the other hand, it's hard to resist a storyteller so gracious and enthusiastic that you want to forget everything you know just to learn it all over again.
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Last year at this time, Will Forte had just wrapped his eighth season on Saturday Night Live and completed an exhausting round of promotion for MacGruber -- the film based on Forte's popular SNL character. Within a month, beleaguered by bad box office, MacGruber was entirely out of theaters. Then, in August, came the surprise announcement that Forte had decided not to return for his ninth season of Saturday Night Live.
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Physician-turned-comedian Ken Jeong (AKA Dr. Ken) got his start on the big screen with comic bits in films like Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, and Role Models, but he made his most memorable on-screen appearance in Todd Phillips' 2009 surprise hit The Hangover as a flamboyant gangster named Chow. This week in The Hangover Part II, Jeong returns to cause more mayhem on the streets of Bangkok with an entrance that manages to one-up the shocking sight of springing, fully nude, from the trunk of a Mercedes.
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Because of his unique brand of hilariously discomfiting stand-up comedy and, in particular, his mock-confrontational talk show satire Between Two Ferns, which lampoons the celebrity interview itself with clear-eyed vitriol, you might not peg Zach Galifianakis for a warm interviewee. But, like most comics, he's nothing like any of his own characters -- including Alan Garner, the delusional man-child who, along with his fellow "Wolf Pack"-ers (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and, this time around, a monkey) wakes up in a seedy Bangkok hotel room after yet another night of black-out debauchery in The Hangover Part II.
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In this summer's swashbuckling sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, British newcomer Sam Claflin goes toe to toe with Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and a much more fearsome pirate: Blackbeard (Ian McShane), the legendary captain of a zombie ship on a quest to find the Fountain of Youth. But while Claflin holds his own as idealistic young Philip Swift, the missionary who falls for a mermaid (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey) and defies Blackbeard on pain of death, in real life he owes a debt of gratitude to the erstwhile Al Swearengen.
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Despite the fact that the summer movie season is in full swing, only one new film opens in wide release on Friday: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Of course, if the idea of watching Johnny Depp do his Jack Sparrow thing for a fourth time in less than ten years doesn't exactly get your juices flowing, you can always open your laptop and watch Jackass 3.5.
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It's been an unusually prolific year to date for Todd Haynes, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker who will soon follow one of the year's most acclaimed films -- HBO's five-hour Mildred Pierce -- with one of the most radical directing experiments of his career. And this one won't be found in a theater either.
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How did Rose Byrne become the most unexpected comedic actress of her generation? After 15 years of acting, the Aussie native broke out of her dramatic shell with a fearless turn as Aldous Snow's pop star ex in Get Him to the Greek, and this week's Bridesmaids continues the streak: Byrne plays Helen, the rich and beautiful new BFF who tries to steal Maya Rudolph away from maid of honor Kristen Wiig. As director Paul Feig insisted to Movieline, "That woman should always be doing comedy."
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Behind the femme-dominated laughs of this Friday's Bridesmaids -- the movie that will prove ladies can carry blockbuster comedies, or not, but probably so -- is writer, actor, director, Judd Apatow compatriot, and creator of the well-loved cult series Freaks and Geeks, Paul Feig. After a successful run directing episodes of your favorite shows (The Office, Arrested Development), Feig is finally staking his claim in the film world with the Kristen Wiig starrer, about a woman tapped to play maid of honor at her best friend's wedding. But Feig, on the brink of a likely summer hit, is noticeably nervous.
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