"If you ride like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder," sounds like something Dennis Hopper would have said in the 1970s (and, actually, the 80s, too), but the always-compelling Ben Mendelsohn gets the line in Derek Cianfrance'sThe Place Beyond The Pines. Although you only hear Mendelsohn deliver it in voiceover in this trailer for the feature, it's a warning he delivers to his partner-in-crime motorcycle stuntman-turned-bank robber Ryan Gosling in the film. more »
Ben Mendelsohn has played a lot of memorable criminals over the last two years, but it's sign of his chops that the performances have virtually nothing in common. The son of a neuroscientist and a self-described "autodidact," Mendelsohn, 43, began as a TV actor in his native Australia in 1980s and encountered film stardom there in 1987 as the ill-fated juvenile delinquent Trevor in The Year My Voice Broke. more »
The film played to a mixture of reactions when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and this latest film by Andrew Dominik, starring Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta packs a wallop of gun shots, fights and explosions. Harvey Weinstein recently suggested a violence summit might be in order to take place among Hollywood types in the wake of the tragedy in Aurora, CO. If so, this Weinstein Company release may be a good example of what he's talking about. But in Cannes, both Dominik and Pitt took exception to suggestions the film had "too much violence."
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There's no stopping Joel Schumacher, the 72-year-old filmmaker who returns to screens this week with the thriller Trespass. Though to invoke his name in some circles is to invite wishes he would stop; Schumacher has never been an especially popular director among the critical elite, and his latest film, a wild home-invasion potboiler co-starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman, won't necessarily change things. But you know what? That's a good thing -- at least for Schumacher.
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Next March will see Brad Pitt re-teaming with Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) in Cogan's Trade, a crime thriller about an enforcer (Pitt) investigating the robbery of a high stakes poker game run by the mob. Which promises -- according to the very first official-ish image -- Brad Pitt in black leather, hair slicked back, shotgun in hand, wielding the cold stare of a killer. Watch out, Scoot McNairy!
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