The news that Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures are taking a chance on Safety Not Guaranteed director Colin Trevorrow for Jurassic Park 4 is good news indeed for moviegoers who need more than a bunch of computer-generated dinosaurs to hold their attention. more »
Aubrey Plaza is taking the summer off from the Pawnee Parks Department to go back in time. In the sci-fi dramedy Safety Not Guaranteed — expanding to new cities this weekend — she keeps her signature scowl (mostly) in check, playing the polar opposite of her Parks and Rec counterpart. As a Seattle Magazine intern, Darius Britt not only takes initiative, but also takes other people’s shit — with half the snark.
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Summer's gearing up (though it is still spring) with the latest blockbustery types hitting screens around the country. Madagascar 3 opens with everyone's favorite wild animals on another adventure, this time escaping the serene lands of Africa for a mis-adventure in Europe as they try and make their way back to their beloved - err - New York. Ridley Scott's crew leaves Earth altogether in Prometheus, which has already shown box office snuff overseas. Will it catch on here? And are you ready for some non-studio (or not so studio) entertainment?
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Aubrey Plaza might just be the anti-manic pixie dream girl, the gloriously glowering inverse of that giddy, whimsical creation who lives only in the movies, where she waits her whole life for a morose protagonist to charm and rescue. Plaza, with her indie rock Wednesday Addams vibe and remorseless deadpan, never seems like she's there to coax someone else into enjoying life. She's got her own things to worry about, and anyway, why does she need to do you that favor?
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I’m a sucker for a good time-travel story. I’m also a sucker for a mediocre time-travel story with a stylish veneer or a sense of humor, so I found myself surprisingly captivated by the latest, belated Men in Black sequel. It doesn’t really work, but it does make for a more interesting story than the tedious Exploits with Alien Goo that I remember from the first two Men in Black films. Fortunately, it looks like there might be even better time-travel movies on the horizon. I have high hopes for Looper, which looks somewhat Twelve Monkeys in its mood and time-travel philosophy, and Sundance favorite Safety Not Guaranteed appears to be taking the indie, Dana Scully approach to the conceit. For these and other future efforts, I’m offering four ingredients for a successful time-travel story.
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As the 2012 Sundance Film Festival drew to a close with a flurry of sales, Movieline posed THE question to a panel of critics and bloggers: What was the best film of this year’s festival? While many of Sundance’s high profile offerings came and went with a whimper, a few notable titles rose to the top of Movieline’s poll; fest darling and Grand Jury Prize winner Beasts of the Southern Wild earned wild praise among our pundits, for example, but so too did some of this year’s more controversial entries. Hit the jump to see which top films the critics picked.
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Park City did indeed turn out to be a robust marketplace this year, with buyers snapping up over two dozen features and docs out of Sundance 2012. Ranging from genre pleasers to indie charmers to potential future Oscar picks and beyond – and veering from critical fest duds to overwhelming crowd favorites – the class of Sundance ’12 is an intriguingly mixed-but-mostly-promising bag of films that will be dotting the cinematic landscape in the year or so to come. Here’s an updated comprehensive look at what sold and which films you should be looking forward to.
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Critic faves Beasts of the Southern Wild and The House I Live In took top Grand Jury Prize honors tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, where the John Hawkes Oscar hopeful The Surrogate and Kirby Dick's The Invisible War nabbed this year's audience awards. Also earning Sundance 2012 kudos were the music doc Searching for Sugar Man, Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk With Me, and the Aubrey Plaza starrer Safety Not Guaranteed.
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