TIFF heads Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling gave details on galas and other festival highlights taking place in Toronto this September, including its opening film. In other news from Tuesday's round-up of briefs, Jeremy Renner and Bill Condon eye a WikiLeaks pic and Steven Spielberg set to honor Stanley Kubrick at an L.A. museum.
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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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Also in Monday afternoon's round-up of news briefs, Drafthouse Films picks up a lauded film festival circuit doc for U.S. release. James Franco has tapped an Outfest filmmaker to make a 'Homo-Sex-Art-Film.' And rounding things out, casting news for a pair of projects.
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The existential crisis inherent to writer-director Rian Johnson's (Brick, Brothers Bloom) upcoming sci-fi time travel flick Looper is, itself, quite a pickle: Mob hitman Joseph Gordon-Levitt finds his latest target, sent back in time from the future for execution, is... himself. (Well, in older, balder Bruce Willis form.) But how much more than that do you want to know about Looper? If Johnson himself is advocating going in fresh, should we even watch these trailers?
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt is looking to bring Little Shop of Horrors to the screen and a distributor nabs U.S. rights to Robert Pattinson's thriller Cosmopolis. Those are among the stories in Thursday afternoon's Biz Break. Also in the mix are highlights from upcoming festivals in Brooklyn and Austin, casting news and soundtrack details for Moonrise Kingdom.
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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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Looper! The full trailer for writer-director Rian Johnson's latest is here, planting Joseph Gordon-Levitt in time-travel assassin mode — at least until his older self (Bruce Willis) is one day sent back to the past to become his own next victim. What's a smirky, brash young hit man to do? Don't let him escape, that's for... Oh, wait. There he goes.
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Sony debuted the first poster for Rian Johnson's Looper, which feels like its been in the works for something close to ever but nevertheless has nearly six months remaining before it comes to theaters on Sept. 28. In the meantime, here are its stars doing their best playing-card imitation. Jack of hearts? King of clubs? Enh, forget it.
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This fall you'll see Joseph Gordon-Levitt as you've never seen him before: As Bruce Willis. In the sci-fi time-travel action pic Looper, from Brick director Rian Johnson, Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, an assassin who ties up loose ends for the mob by killing targets as they're sent back in time from the future -- until one day his own future self (played by Willis) comes through for extermination. Previewing a teaser for the September release at WonderCon, Johnson and Gordon-Levitt discussed the trickiness of transforming Gordon-Levitt into a young Willis, pulled off with the aid of prosthetics, and why it's particularly difficult to talk about their time travel thriller.
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The 2nd Annual YouReviewers Movie Awards aired on YouTube this past weekend, and we've got to say, it was quite a show! This year, our friends at ENTV played host as YouTube heavy hitters Jeremy Jahns, The Schmoes, and a host of other notables from the ever-opinionated YouTube film community presented their favorite films, performances and trailers (because, after all, this is YouTube) of 2011.
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Actor and multimedia DIYer Joseph Gordon-Levitt is set to make his directorial debut opposite fellow newbie director Scarlett Johansson in an untitled comedy co-produced under his own hitRecord Films banner. The pic, shooting in April, also stars JGL as a Don Juan-type ladykiller seeking to reform his ways; the actor-director also wrote the script. So yes, it's time to face facts: That kid from Third Rock from the Sun is officially way, way more accomplished than you. [Deadline]
As everyone looks back on the year that was, I've found myself returning to a few moments in the movies that resonated especially well thanks to a phenomenon that achieves soul-stirring status so rarely, though not for lack of frequency: Song choice. I'm not talking about dropping the latest Kelly Clarkson/Natasha Bedingfield ditty into a crap rom-com. I mean the special, skin-tingling magic that occurs when a song is married so perfectly to a character, story, or feeling that the music and the moment swell within us with new, layered meaning. Join me and let's hash it out: Which movie(s) used music the best in 2011?
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I don't care if you're sick of Zooey Deschanel's adorkable omnipresence, or if you've seen 400 videos already of Joseph Gordon-Levitt singing some song or another for his HitRECordJoe community. It's nigh on the new year and this video of the (500) Days of Summer co-stars dueting Nancy Wilson's "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" is just too cute, dammit! Give in to the twanging twee twosome and start planning your midnight kiss.
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Steven Spielberg couldn't be at the AFI Fest premiere of The Adventures of Tintin because he was filming Lincoln in Virginia -- and now we know that the Lincoln production process is a completely-effing-serious one. Not only does star Daniel Day-Lewis look remarkable as Lincoln in this new candid photo, but Variety's Jeff Sneider Tweeted a report that he "hasn't broken his Lincoln accent since March" and his "real name doesn't even appear on the call sheet." That is commitment. And insanity. And the new photo will haunt you like a specter in Ford's Theatre.
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