Also in Monday morning's round-up of news briefs: Bradley Cooper is to receive a Hollywood award. CNN is launching a unit for documentary distribution and The Paperboy scores in the specialty box office over the weekend.
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Also in Wednesday morning's round-up of news briefs, Jon Favreau adds a Martin Scorsese-project to his schedule. European festivals in San Sebastian and Deauville release details about their upcoming events and Leonard DiCaprio is set to back a car-maker.
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Rare is the movie in which every cast member performs at the same level — unless maybe you're talking about the uniformly jaw-dropping performances of everyone in Witless Protection. So, here at Movieline, we'd like to begin a tradition of ranking performances within movies — a sort of intramural Oscars, if you will — and asking you to weigh in with your own. We'll introduce polling and a catchy title soon enough, but we just had to start with The Dark Knight Rises — a movie in which the performances range from sublime (Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to wince-inducing (Marion Cotillard). See how your favorite — or least favorite — character rates below, and then leave your own ranking in the comments section.
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The Batman brand is in the toilet at the outset of The Dark Knight Rises, the third and most self-consciously ornate pillar of Christopher Nolan’s caped crusader resurrection trilogy. The four years since The Dark Knight have passed as eight within the city state of Gotham — one of the neater doublings in a movie inlaid with prismatic tiling — and even the mayor condemns Batman as “a murderous thug.”
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The stars of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises descended upon NYC — the O.G. Gotham City — to premiere the Batman trilogy finale Monday night, with some surprise guest celebs hitting the red carpet alongside Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Wonder how red carpet guest Donald Trump enjoyed the flick, which sees the hulking villain Bane encourage the 99% to rise up and topple the system into ruin? Or if Hathaway shared the secrets of her Catwoman costume with feminist icon Gloria Steinem? Those snaps and more in Movieline's TDKR premiere gallery...
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The Dark Knight Rises director heaped praise on actress Anne Hathaway ahead of the final Batman installment, which opens July 20th. He said Hathaway performed so well as the human-feline-vixen that she deserves her own spin-off movie. But that doesn't necessarily mean the British-born filmmaker will spearhead a Catwoman enterprise himself.
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Ditto what New Yorker writer Hannah Goldfield says of Disney's 1992 flop-turned-Broadway hit Newsies, though I loathed the tepid romance between Christian Bale's Jack and that useless Sarah girl. Ahem: "A movie is fixed, eternal. Your perception of it may change slightly each time you watch it, but nothing else, not the tiniest of details, will. It’s a precise memory you can return to, over and over—I know I’ve found a movie I’ll love forever if I have the feeling of wanting to watch it again immediately after it ends..." [New Yorker]
The final trailer for Christopher Nolan's July Bat-sequel The Dark Knight Rises is now available for your viewing pleasure (see it in theaters attached to The Avengers this Friday), and something rose, all right: My nerd boner. Yours will too when you watch Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway & Co. in the eerily somber third trailer, then join me in running down all the juicy sights and not-so-muffled sounds and breathtaking moments glimpsed within.
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Oh...my...GOD, Becky -- look at Catwoman's butt. Ahem. In a new promo image from The Dark Knight Rises, Anne Hathaway poses as Catwoman and shows, as many salivating fanboys have already suggested, just why the Batman sequel might've earned that PG-13 for "sensuality." But wait! Why is everyone talking about Catwoman's butt and not Batman's meticulously sculpted-but-jaunty rubberized codpiece? Equal opportunity for costumed cosplay ogling after the jump, thanks to two new promo images for the July tentpole.
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Crazy Heart writer-director Scott Cooper isn't holding back with the follow-up to his double-Oscar-winning filmmaking debut, dialing in Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard and Zoe Saldana (not to mention producers including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ridley Scott and Relativity Media mogul Ryan Kavanaugh) for the family crime-and-redemption drama Out of the Furnace. Read on for full details just over the transom from Relativity; adjust your Oscar 2013 pools accordingly.
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After spending the last year with her Oscar and her new baby, Natalie Portman is set to return to acting with a busy year with not one, but two Terrence Malick films. The Black Swan star will join Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett to film Knight of Cups this summer, with all three reuniting in the fall to film Malick's Lawless with Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, and Haley Bennett. Plot details for both films have been kept under wraps, so tee off with your thoughts on the Portman addition and the unusual double film casting move below. [Deadline]
The great Fifth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou has gone from having films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern banned in his homeland of China to directing the lavish opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, his more recent work taking place in the safer territory of the grandiose historical melodrama of Curse of the Golden Flower and the Nicholas Sparks-worthy sentimentality of Under the Hawthorn Tree. Zhang has insisted that he's not interested in politics, a tack that certainly seems to have its benefits: With an estimated budget of around $90 million, The Flowers of War is one of the most, if not the most, expensive Chinese production to date, it stars Christian Bale and it's China's Oscar submission. But that doesn't mean that Zhang's latest output should be dismissed offhand as nationalist propaganda.
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After premiering this past weekend before Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows screenings, the latest official trailer for The Dark Knight Rises has hit the Internet today. Depicting a Gotham City eight years after the events in 2008's The Dark Knight, the trailer teases societal upheaval, (literally) explosive football plays and best of all, two new villains: Anne Hathaway's Catwoman (or at least, Selina Kyle) and Tom Hardy's mysterious, mumbling Bane. Let's parse the trailer the only way we know how: By the numbers.
Open the gates and seize the day! Following a successful run at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse, the Harvey Fierstein-adapted stage musical Newsies -- based on the best period musical of all time about turn of the century paperboys fighting Big Business (that also starred Christian Bale) -- will open on honest-to-goodness Broadway in March. This gives you bandwagon-jumpers plenty of time to catch up to the rest of us Newsies diehards who've known all along that one day, the family-friendly stylings of legions of dancing street urchins just trying to sell some 'papes would catch on like gangbusters. The world will know ...that we're not crazy! (Right?) [Wall Street Journal]
Maybe filming background scenes at Zuccotti Park wasn't a great idea after all, or perhaps it was never really going to happen, but still: EW reports that Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, which shoots this month in New York City, will not be using the Occupy Wall Street movement as a backdrop for one-percenter hero Bruce Wayne's latest shenanigans, despite speculations to the contrary. Probably a good idea, especially after the Occupy movement turned Oakland, CA into something resembling a war zone last night, tear gas and all. [EW]
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