Before he skulked the streets of Seattle on The Killing and nabbed the role of Alex Murphy in the upcoming RoboCop reboot, Joel Kinnaman made a splash in his home country of Sweden with the crime drama Easy Money (nee Snabba Cash). The Weinstein Co. snapped up the pic, which also put director Daniel Espinoza (Safe House) on Hollywood's radar, and will debut it stateside this July... with the hefty endorsement of none other than Martin Scorsese. Finally (!) we have the first domestic trailer for Easy Money, in which Kinnaman's pretty-boy business major, craving the wealthy lifestyle he never had growing up, becomes entangled with warring crime lords in Stockholm and finds himself in way over his head.
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The promise of seeing Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, and their manscaped compatriots bare (almost) it all in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike has quickened the collective pulse of the film’s target audience in the weeks leading up to Friday’s release. But while ladies and many gents will get a titillating thrill from the scantily-clad dance numbers and cheesy-fantasy bumps ‘n’ grinds (and there are so, so many), what elevates the film beyond its “Showgirls-with-men” concept is the depth and naturalness in the story of 30-year-old star performer Mike (Tatum) and his pursuit of the American dream as one of the “Cock-rocking Kings of Tampa.”
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Writer-director David Fenster's PINCUS is earning raves at the LA Film Fest, where it debuted this weekend in narrative competition. Drawing acclaim for its naturalistic documentary-style storytelling, Pincus follows one man's spiritual search — part autobiographical film, part fiction, part slacker comedy — using footage of filmmaker Fenster's conversations with his real life father, who lives with Parkinson's disease.
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Some were skeptical that Woody Allen would make an appearance at the opening night of the LA Film Festival, even with his latest Euro-whimsy To Rome With Love premiering in the kick-off slot Thursday night. But show up Woody did, with five of his starlets in tow — including Alison Pill, Greta Gerwig, and a dazzling Penelope Cruz — to debut his 43rd feature film with a few charmingly self-deprecating zingers.
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With the world premiere of Woody Allen's latest under its belt, the Los Angeles Film Festival is now ready to get truly underway with its lineup of premieres, parties, panels and more celebrity guests. Movieline is doing its part to get audiences in the mood, giving sneaks on many of the titles appearing in the festival's Narrative and Documentary competitions with comments from the real stars at the ten day event - the filmmakers. Yesterday, ML published its first round of filmmaker interviews and trailers screening in the tests competition and several more are featured today.
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The Los Angeles Film Festival opens Thursday night with Woody Allen's To Rome with Love and the event even scored the presence of the director himself — at least, according to reports. But after the spectacle of opening night carries into the main core of the festival's selection, new and established filmmakers from around the world will be screening their latest in the festival's various sections. Movieline asked filmmakers in the LA Film Festival's Narrative and Documentary competitions to share some thoughts on their work. Also take a look at their trailers and be in the know…
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Also in Thursday's quick round up of film news, ARC Entertainment is bringing Fat Kid to the States, Meryl Streep gives her two cents on big studio flops, and audiences just are not heading to theaters frequently like they used to.
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Guys, forget Step Up 4 and Battlefield America and the ballet documentary and the new season of ABDC: Magic Mike is the dance event of the year. Need proof? Let Channing Tatum and his gang of manscaped stripper men (Alex Pettyfer, Joe Mangianello, Adam Rodriguez, and Matt Bomer) show you their sweet moves to the tune of "It's Raining Men" in a new trailer for the June 29 ladyboner fantasy. I mean movie.
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Benh Zeitlin's magical realist fable Beasts of the Southern Wild blazed a buzzy trail through Sundance '12, but the rest of the world has had to wait months to see with their own eyes what all that fuss was about. So without further ado, watch the film's fantastic first trailer, starring newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis in a tale of a six-year-old named Hushpuppy who becomes a hero when a storm approaches her bayou home.
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The Los Angeles Film Festival unveiled its lineup of nearly 200 features, shorts and more today. This year's event, which comprises work from 30 countries, will open with the North American premiere of Woody Allen's To Rome With Love (as previously announced), while the world premiere of Warner Bros.' Magic Mike by Steven Soderbergh will close out the festival, which runs June 14 - 24 at LA Live in downtown Los Angeles.
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Woody Allen continues his cinematic Eurotrip with To Rome With Love, which aims to repeat the formula of pitting navel-gazing privileged Americans against Old World locales with charming results. While it doesn't go for the transformative magic of Midnight in Paris, will Woody's Rome outing capture something special in Italy? Watch the first trailer below.
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"Sony Pictures Classics announced that on June 22 it will release Woody Allen’s latest film, the newly titled To Rome With Love. To Rome With Love was a name selected as an homage to the eternal city of Rome where the film was shot on location last summer. This will be used for its worldwide release. The film’s former title, Nero Fiddled, while an appropriate and humorous phrase in the U.S., is not a familiar expression overseas and many international territories preferred a more globally understood name." [SPC]
I'll admit it: I groaned a bit when word first broke that Steve Carell and Keira Knightley were set to play opposite each other in a romantic comedy set against the end of the world. Knightley, I dreaded, would be reduced to playing May-December arm candy to Carell in her first non-heavy project since Bend it Like Beckham. But as the first trailer for Lorene Scafaria's Seeking a Friend for the End of the World demonstrates, maybe I shouldn't have worried so much. Maybe.
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Actor Michael Rapaport was such a passionate fan of hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest, it's almost tragic what happened after he was granted permission to film the group, reunited after disbanding in 1998, for his directorial debut in the documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Having captured incredibly intimate footage of members Phife Dawg, Q-Tip, Jarobi White, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad -- along with a veritable oral history of the '90s-era Native Tongues hip-hop movement culled from musical luminaries of past and present -- Rapaport found himself on the outs with A Tribe Called Quest just as his passion project was on the brink of a distribution deal.
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Before Sunday night's L.A. Film Fest premiere of the August horror pic Don't Be Afraid of the Dark succumbed to an unfortunate series of annoyances -- a fire alarm temporarily evacuated the theater midway through, while chaos reigned at the post-screening cell phone check -- producer and co-writer Guillermo del Toro emphasized what, hopefully, will make Don't Be Afraid of the Dark memorable: Its "pervasive scariness," so terrifying that the MPAA deemed it too frightening for its intended rating.
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