We're coming up on a year since Jacki Weaver strolled into Park City, Utah with her Animal Kingdom director and castmates, dazzled the Sundance Film Festival and commenced a run of acclaim that continues to this day. But while the film's sweep last month of its native Australian Film Institute Awards was all but a foregone conclusion, Animal Kingdom's Stateside fortune -- particularly Weaver's chances in the Supporting Actress race at the Golden Globes and, Academy willing, the Oscars -- is a little more vague. So! Guess who's back on American soil this week?
more »
Last time Movieline caught up with Paul Giamatti, the actor was still getting his head around having played a version of himself in the curious indie Cold Souls. Then last year in Toronto, we reconvened to discuss a matter of similar weight and import: How a guy from Brooklyn came to play one of the most celebrated characters in recent Canadian literature -- in a film adaptation all of Canada had its eyes on.
more »
Guy Pearce wouldn't mind not being in an Oscar-winning film for a change. Not to say that he's not fully behind The King's Speech (or even the dark horse Animal Kingdom), but considering that his work in those films involve limited screen time -- not unlike his role in last year's Best Picture-winning The Hurt Locker -- "good-luck cameo" isn't a role Pearce necessarily wants to get used to.
more »
Who says Hollywood isn't a meritocracy? Danny Trejo may be a 65-year-old ex-con and recovering addict -- and People magazine will probably never have the creativity to put him on the annual Sexiest Men Alive list -- but he's a full-fledged movie star. Working his way up from bit parts that mainly called upon him to glower threateningly, Trejo gives an engaging and exhilarating lead performance in the wonderfully trashy Machete, out on DVD today from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. What started out as one of Robert Rodriguez's joke trailers from Grindhouse became a fast and funny B-movie homage, mixing outrageous stunts, gratuitous nudity -- and at least one catch phrase ("Machete don't text") -- with some salient points about right-wing politicians who are only too happy to sell Mexican immigrants down the river at election time.
more »
When speaking with Another Year star Lesley Manville, it's hard to not walk away with the impression that she feels this is her big break. Sure, her career has spanned over 30 years -- and Another Year is her sixth film with Academy Award nominated director Mike Leigh -- but, as Manville points out, no other performance of hers has ever generated this much buzz in the United States during awards season. An awards season that has already garnered Best Actress accolades from the National Board of Review.
more »
Another year, another... oh, couple hundred interviews in the books for the staff at Movieline HQ. It's next to impossible to whittle this towering stack down to a manageable year-end review, but read on for a reasonable cross-section of the best, smartest, funniest and/or most candid moments from our magnanimous guests of 2010.
more »
I could feed you that tired old line about Javier Bardem delivering the performance of a lifetime etc. etc. in Biutiful, but come on. Why lie? The reality is that Bardem has delivered such richly drawn, deeply layered work for years, from his role as doomed Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls to the right-to-die proponent Ramon Sampedro in The Sea Inside and even the affectless, coin-tossing killer Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men -- all canonical characters of the last decade, all justifiably Oscar-nominated (with the latter winning). It is fair to say Biutiful's struggling, terminally ill Barcelonan eclipses them all; so when will Bardem receive the awards-season recognition he deserves?
more »
Jon Lovitz still gets visibly annoyed when the subject of a 1991 Saturday Night Live joke is the topic of discussion. On Dennis Miller's last show, there was a short sketch where Lorne Michael's asked Miller, "You're not going to come back every week to hang out on the set like Lovitz, are you?" (Lovitz, who had left SNL the year before, had made four cameos during Miller's final season.) When Miller responded, "No," Michaels continued, "Because that would be pathetic. I mean, the man has no life ... I mean, thank God every now and then he gets a movie." Of course, it was a joke, but that doesn't mean Lovitz wasn't livid at the "cheap shot."
more »
Mike Leigh has a reputation among press for not withholding his displeasure when confronted with a line of questioning he doesn't particularly care for. So our interview began with that slight pang of trepidation, only to give way to the reality that Leigh -- the six-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker known for such talky, trenchant English surveys as Life is Sweet, Secrets and Lies, Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and next week's critically acclaimed (as usual) Another Year -- is willing to talk about most any subject if he finds that subject interesting. Up to and including, say, the almost ridiculous notion of a Mike Leigh-helmed superhero movie.
more »
You might think Sally Hawkins got nominated for an Oscar after winning the Golden Globe for Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky in 2009, but you would be wrong. Despite a winning lead performance and the backing of both critics and the Hollywood Foreign Press, Hawkins was a bridesmaid in the Best Actress race that winter. Of course, being snubbed once by Oscar doesn't mean Hawkins is ready to pack it up; she's back on the awards circuit this fall for her performance as a striking (and striking) autoworker in Made in Dagenham.
more »
Nicole Kidman didn't have to search far to find a visceral connection to the character she plays in Rabbit Hole, a woman rendered utterly devastated by the accidental death of her young child. She had given birth to daughter Sunday Rose while the film was being developed from David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning play and knew the timing was right precisely because of how much the material scared her.
more »
As television legend has it, the role of Dr. Lisa Cuddy was custom-designed for Lisa Edelstein in 2004 after the Boston-born actress impressed House executive producer Bryan Singer with her performance as a high-priced call girl The West Wing. Seven seasons later, Edelstein is still at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital as Dean of Medicine, long-suffering House colleague and one half of television's most beloved couples on TV today.
more »
While this summer's big-budget adaptation of the '80s TV hit The A-Team (out this week from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment) may not have been the franchise tentpole its studio hoped to get for the money it spent, the action extravaganza did confirm the star quality of Sharlto Copley, who first turned up on our pop culture radars after his starring role in the 2009 Best Picture nominee District 9.
more »
Sofia Coppola's new film is called Somewhere, but its location is specific: the present-day, alienating Los Angeles. Stephen Dorff stars as Johnny Marco, an action star whose boozy, despondent life brightens when his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) accompanies him abroad on a press tour for his insipid blockbuster Berlin Agenda. While Cleo's sunny optimism reinvigorates Johnny, it also confronts him with how joyless -- or is it worthless? -- he feels without her. Somewhere proves that with spiritual awakening comes damning reflection, and Coppola again exhibits her knack for weary characters who discover their sensitivities are firmly intact.
Movieline caught up with Coppola (who directed, wrote, and produced the film) and her two stars for an in-depth look at Somewhere's characters, conflicts, and hilarious -- and in one case, real -- moments of Hollywood insanity.
more »
John Wells, the director of the recession drama The Company Men, knows very well what it's like to be fired. In 2009, the creator/producer/director of TV institutions like ER and The West Wing lost his new prized show, the critically praised Southland, when NBC made the decision to remove five hours of prime-time per week in favor of Jay Leno.
more »
