Superman and General Zod unleash their best tough-guy stares on separate Man of Steel collector covers for the UK's Empire magazine this week, and, I'm calling it, Zod wins. All that screen time playing hard-asses (Premium Rush) and nut jobs (Revolutionary Road) has molded Michael Shannon's mug into an incredibly effective billboard for threat and danger. He looks pissed and lethal here, And that gives him the slight edge in this Kryptonian staring contest. more »
Even if you have no tolerance for Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, you've got to admit they can take a joke. My expectations were not high for scandal magnets' scenes together in Scary Movie V, but this clip is actually a hoot. more »
Whether Benedict Cumberbatch is Robert April, Khan or some other canon character entirely, he's going to be awesomely evil judging from this new international Star Trek Into Darkness trailer. He's also going to speak in a measured and lordly British accent that will surely have him competing with Ben Kingsley's the Mandarin for Affected Villain Voice of 2013. more »
After several hours during which it was assumed to be a very competent fake, Warner Bros. has confirmed that the autographed photo originally posted this morning on Ain't It Cool News is indeed our first glimpse of Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road. more »
Matt Damon says Michael Douglas is a "wonderful" kisser. He also tells Playboy magazine that he and the veteran actor strategized their onscreen make-out sessions for Steven Soderbergh's Liberace movie for HBO, Behind The Candelabra, "like a football plan," which scarily brings to mind John Madden and Al Michaels cavorting in Speedos while diagramming a play-action pass. more »
Donald Trump has put his pet birthing issue on hold at least for the moment, taking to Twitter calling those who opposed a golf course development he planned in Scotland as "morons" and chastising an award-winning filmmaker who spotlighted the scheme a "zero talent." OK, go ahead and insert a "You're fired" moment where appropriate…
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Dimension Films must be saving a butt load on its make-up budget for Scary Movie 5. For the second time in a week, the production company has sent out a photo from the movie that features tabloid stars who don't need no stinkin' prosthetics or CGI effects to deliver goose bumps. The above shot, taken on the set of the comedy horror picture, shows Big Ang Raiola from Mob Housewives, and Sherée Whitfield, from The Real Housewives of Atlanta, looking like Trouble. more »
After watching this trailer, I think Parker Posey should consider launching some sort of bad-girl management inspiration seminar. Clearly, she's breaking a lot of corporate cardinal rules in this trailer to Michael Walker's Price Check — you know, like the one where you're not supposed to sleep with your employees — but just watch how Eric Mabius, the sad-sack manager in her grocery store pricing and marketing department perks up over the course of this clip as he gets the focus of her manic attention. (The trailer plays after the jump.) more »
Looks like Taken 2 could be subtitled All in the Family, or maybe Bad-Ass & Daughter. Liam Neeson is back as retired CIA operative Bryan Mills, and based on the plot points covered by the two new trailers posted below, he enlists daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who he gallantly rescued in the first Taken, to assist him in saving her Mom (Famke Janssen) from the bad guys. Turns out the motive for moms kidnapping is familial in nature, too: She's been taken by the father of the kidnapper Mills killed back in the first flick. more »
The lineup for the 56th BFI London Film Festival was unveiled Wednesday with 225 fiction and documentary features set for the event, including 14 World, 15 International and 34 European Premieres. The lineup also includes a gala for the world premiere of Crossfire Hurricane, a documentary celebrating 50 years of The Rolling Stones, who are expected to attend the event. As announced earlier, the European Premiere of Tim Burton's 3-D animation Frankenweenie will open LFF on October 10th. The festival will close withMike Newell's Great Expectations with Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes.
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The scepter of free speech and the protection of intellectual property via the internet reared once again, nearly a year since the Motion Picture Association of America-supported legislation first landed in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, only to be resoundingly defeated after a well-coordinated backlash by internet heavy-weights Google Wikipedia and others. MPAA chief Chris Dodd, himself a former U.S. Senator from Connecticut (and a Democrat to boot) gave a thumbs up to the Republican Party's platform language on intellectual property and the internet.
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Reports that Target — Target! — will sell a limited-edition $999 Mockingjay pin to coincide with the DVD release of The Hunger Games later this month has visions of P.T. Barnum dancing in my head. If there are movie lovers who are willing to pony up that kind of dough for such a simple bauble, then surely their must be a market for the following memorabilia: more »
Comic-book movies can be many things — ridiculous, entertaining, stupendously dull – but very rarely are they erotic. I’m not talking about the garden-variety sexually neutral charge thrown off by a fit actor, man or woman, who happens to look good in a latex suit. Even in the best comic-book movies, made by filmmakers who know what they’re doing — people like Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, Guillermo del Toro and Jon Favreau — sex is often treated as a mild embarrassment, a thing that just doesn’t mix well with action inspired by comic-book panels. And so amid all the questions about whether or not the Spider-Man franchise ought to have been rebooted just 10 years after Raimi kicked off his own spin on it, maybe the real question to ask of Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man is — when it comes to sexual chemistry, why can’t more comic-book movies be like this one?
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If you’ve seen the red band trailer for Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a grown man whose best friend is his talking teddy bear, you may think you’ve seen the whole thing: Beware the comedy trailer that’s so packed with hilarity that you just know it’s cobbled from the best bits in the movie. But miraculously, Ted manages to sustain itself.
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Watching a thriller requires a certain willingness to be a dupe. The whole idea is to give yourself over, and the ideal is to find yourself moving from scene to scene – as if you were cautiously exploring the rooms of a very mysterious house -- asking, “And then what?” In the Paris-underworld thriller The Woman in the Fifth, director Pawel Pawlikowski is skillful enough to keep you wondering, from scene to scene, exactly what that what is going to be, and I was with the movie every step of the way, right until the final credits began rolling – at which point I realized that the whole thing made no sense whatsoever, and that none of my nagging questions about what the hell was going on would ever be answered. There’s a distinction to be made between being a dupe and being had.
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