When marriage stops being a given, realistic romantic comedies are born. In Save the Date, sisters Beth (Alison Brie) and Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) are on different relationship paths – one toward marriage, another away from it. Michael Mohan’s film reflects the attitudes of a generation who suffered through their parents’ divorces. Playing Andrew, Beth’s fiance, Martin Starr can identify all too well with that premise by looking at his circle of friends: He’s hit that time in life when everyone’s hearing or tuning out wedding bells.
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Watching mixed martial artist Gina Carano fight on television, director Steven Soderbergh was struck by inspiration: Why not build an action movie around the lethal (and yes, gorgeous) athlete to show audiences what a real action heroine could look like? Forget Angelina Jolie in Salt, or any number of actresses who’ve unconvincingly flitted their way through the genre. Carano was the real deal, a woman who can dole out punches with bone-shattering believability, leap between buildings, and battle Hollywood’s best leading men with aplomb, as evidenced in this week’s Haywire.
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In a career spanning three decades Michael Biehn has notched a number of iconic roles in beloved genre fare, from future freedom fighter Kyle Reese in The Terminator to Corporal Hicks in Aliens to one of his personal favorites, Tombstone villain Johnny Ringo. And that work has borne him witness to his share of tense, chaotic sets under some of the strongest personalities in the business. But no shoot of Biehn’s was as intense as the friction-filled production of this week’s The Divide, Xavier Gens’ bleak horror tale about strangers trapped in a basement after the apocalypse, which Biehn says was fueled by the “hatred” and “bitterness” of combative actors turning on each other under claustrophobic conditions.
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Another year, another couple hundred entries in the ever-deepening conversational archive known as The Movieline Interview. They're the collective backbone of our site, and in 2011, it was at its strongest. Look back with us now at the highlights, including the luminary likes of Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Segel, Jodie Foster, Paul Giamatti, and a certain honey badger of a director.
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Never one to let inhibitions stand in the way of a great creative opportunity, Emily Watson put aside her equinophobia for a while to join up with Steven Spielberg's new War Horse. Along the way, she also got to know the film's irrepressible goose, its neophyte leading man and its legendary filmmaker's one-of-a-kind facility with epic storytelling. Watson explained more recently in a chat with Movieline.
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In the decade or so since Nick Frost first made a name for himself on the BBC comedy series Spaced, much has happened. For starters, he's not waiting tables at that Mexican restaurant. He's moved with ease from television to film, most famously in genre riffs Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (with Spaced comrades Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg), and in the alien geek ode Paul (which he co-wrote and stars in with Pegg). Also notably, Frost has ventured out from the fold in films like Pirate Radio and the forthcoming Snow White and the Huntsman. And, with this week's The Adventures of Tintin, he notches another milestone: Working with his hero, Steven. Steven Spielberg.
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One week removed from his 82nd birthday, Christopher Plummer is winding up what one could arguably call a career year. And it's been a long career -- more than half a century's worth of stage and screen roles comprising such milestones as The Sound of Music, The Man Who Would Be King, The Insider and The Last Station, the latter of which earned the Canadian legend his first-ever Academy Award nomination. But as the curtain closes on a memorable 2011 -- most notably his acclaimed stage adaptation Barrymore, his awards-worthy performance in Beginners and this week's blockbuster hopeful The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- you'd be hard-pressed to find a time when Plummer wasn't more beloved.
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After more than four decades of creative peaks, valleys, experiments and triumphs that have established him as one of the most eclectic filmmakers of his generation, Wim Wenders has ventured into entirely new territory for his new documentary Pina: 3-D. The film's subject -- the late, legendary choreographer (and Wenders's longtime friend) Pina Bausch -- likely wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
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Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain have each had a well-documented great year, each no fewer than three well-received films -- and all their corresponding buzz -- arriving in theaters in 2011. Investigate slightly below the radar, however, and you'll find screenwriter John Logan faring just as well -- if not better.
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Matthew Lillard admits he's had three enduring cinematic moments -- in Scream, as its hilariously unhinged killer Stu Macher; in SLC Punk, as the spiky-haired Stevo; and in Scooby Doo, reprising Casey Kasem's beloved voice role Shaggy Rogers in living color. He is often both goofy and dark, and that dichotomy makes him a weird, but ingenious choice to play Brian Speer, a married real-estate hustler who has an affair with the wife of Matt King (George Clooney) in Alexander Payne's critical darling The Descendants.
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After earning back-to-back Academy Award nominations -- in 2010, for his breakout role in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and in 2011, for his supporting part in Ben Affleck's Boston crime drama The Town -- Jeremy Renner decided to dive headfirst into the action genre with four consecutive big-budget action projects. The first, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, which co-stars Renner as a mysteriously overqualified IMF agent assisting Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt on his latest globe-sweeping assignment, premieres this weekend in IMAX. The next three films, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy, will all hit theaters next year, making the California-raised actor the busiest action star of 2012.
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Aside from a few honors of the Teen Choice and MTV Movie variety, newly minted Screen Actors Guild Award and Golden Globe nominee Jonah Hill is an awards virgin -- which makes this year's lead-up to the Oscars particularly exciting for the actor, who earlier this year impressed critics with his role in Moneyball as Brad Pitt's Ivy League-educated, number-crunching Oakland A's wingman. The role, like his 2010 titular turn in Cyrus, was a welcome departure from the wise-cracking characters audiences have grown accustomed to seeing him play, from the early days of Knocked Up and Superbad to last weekend's The Sitter. Next up, Hill uses his sarcastic charm to crack down on a high school drug ring in the March 16 feature adaptation of 21 Jump Street, which Hill also wrote and produced.
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When Tom Cruise adapted the Mission: Impossible television series for the screen in the mid-'90s, he made an interesting decision: Instead of branding the spy franchise himself, he would let different directors customize each installment according to their unique strengths and visions. Following three distinct Mission: Impossible takes from Brian De Palma, John Woo and J.J. Abrams, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Brad Bird -- who, before Ghost Protocol, had never helmed a live action feature -- stepped up to the plate for the fourth M:I installment.
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The stakes are higher and the villains far more treacherous (Moriarty!), but everything in Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows is of a piece with the 2009 predecessor that introduced Robert Downey Jr.'s turn as the titular OCD turn of the century sleuth. For director Guy Ritchie it's felt like one long evolution from the days of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels; now, at the helm of his biggest film to date -- which features some of the most innovative action sequences of the season -- Ritchie is firmly in his wheelhouse. As he told Movieline recently in Los Angeles, "I enjoy playing in a bigger sandbox... and I enjoy having powerful friends to help me manifest a vision."
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At the center of Tomas Alfredson's marvelously taut espionage thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (based on the John Le Carré novel previously adapted into a celebrated 1979 British miniseries) is an unusually understated turn by Gary Oldman as George Smiley, a recently retired career spy of few words quietly trying to uncover a mole within British intelligence. Oldman acknowledges a departure of sorts from the wild, often manic characters he built much of his career on -- Sid Vicious, Count Dracula, Beethoven, DEA agent Stansfield of Leon, to name a few. Some of Oldman's best-known roles are, as he described to Movieline this week in Los Angeles, more rock 'n' roll. "Smiley," he explained, "is jazz."
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