Dustin Lance Black spoke of his conservative Mormon upbringing when he won the 2009 Oscar for best original screenplay for Milk, and traces of that childhood are all over his most recent directorial effort Virginia, a garbled coming-of-age story and portrait of a mentally ill mother. The titular character, played by a blonde Jennifer Connelly, suffers from traumatic onset schizophrenia — she's a fey, childlike woman who lives alone with her protective teenage son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) and has been carrying on a decades-long affair with the town sheriff Dick Tipton (Ed Harris), a devout Mormon who's married with kids.
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Movie producers routinely say they're about artistic integrity, but Metalwork Pictures' Andrew Levitas finds himself in the unique position of actually being an artist himself, having come up through the New York City art scene as a heralded painter, sculptor, and photographer. So when he speaks of box office potential as being almost incidental to a film as work of art, he's the rare producer who actually sounds genuinely unconcerned with financial returns.
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After 40 years in the horror movie business, Wes Craven has almost certainly seen it all. What's more, he's practically done it all -- whether confronting taboos with aplomb and with a social conscience (Last House on the Left), creating one of the most memorable monsters of all time (Nightmare on Elm Street), or turning the horror genre in on itself (Scream). But after this week's Scream 4, a sequel-skewering sequel notoriously hampered by production woes and Craven's own public airing of grievances over a lack of script control, will the veteran filmmaker finally be ready to throw in the towel on this particular series?
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When Ghostface starts picking off teens and townsfolk again in April's Scream 4, expect 22-year-old Chicago native Nico Tortorella to land somewhere near the top of your list of potential killers. Tortorella, who once compared his character Trevor to Skeet Ulrich in the original, played coy with his character's true nature with Movieline but was refreshingly candid when it came to addressing widespread rumors of behind-the-scenes drama, as well as his close ties to director Joel Schumacher and the appeal of dueling YA properties Mortal Instruments and The Hunger Games.
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