There are ample pleasures of the half-movie. Features of the half-film include a lack of b-plot, a meandering tone, haphazard scenes, and a barely feature-length runtime. The reasons why productions result in half-movies usually come from vastly re-written scripts, overrunning schedules and/or eclip...
Read More »When the news surfaced last week that Jessica Chastain was circling a part in Iron Man 3 I was a bit surprised. I just doesn't seem to be her type of film. She does not scream big Hollywood action flick. Look at her body of work. Last year she starred in five films and wa...
Read More »While Marvel's "Iron Man" franchise lost potential female lead star Jessica Chastain recently -- she had to pass, she's busy this summer -- Robert Downey Jr. and new director Shane Black ("Kiss Kiss Bang Bang") clearly have their eye on some top notch tale...
Read More »It's a little known fact, but in the mid 1980s, in a bid to fight underemployment in certain aspects of the entertainment industry, the British government passed the Broadbent Act, which set up a quota that one in four British movies would have to cast British character actor favorite Jim Broadb...
Read More »As we announced last week, Focus Features and Working Title have paired Eric Bana ("Hanna," "Munich") and Rebecca Hall ("The Town," "Vicky Cristina Barcelona") for an untitled thriller. If you've missed Bana and Hall, rest assured they both have a few proj...
Read More »Despite the idea of the suspense thriller for grown-ups being routinely declared dead, the genre itself refuses to stay dead. Every few months, some such film will quietly make a tidy profit at the box office, despite not gathering the same attention as pictures with more explosions in them. Last ye...
Read More »Over the weekend in Park City, Utah, “Lay the Favorite” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, drawing mixed reactions from audiences and critics with its colorful portrait of an ex-stripper who discovers an unexpected aptitude for legal gambling (you can read our review here). Amazing...
Read More »Many rock stars want to be actors, despite having no real capacity for it, while conversely, many actors would like to be singers, again, without necessarily having the ability to carry a tune. Among them is Bruce Willis, who inexplicably had a successful album, "The Return of Bruno," in t...
Read More »It might seem ingracious to complain, but film festivals can sometimes be something of a slog. For every transcendent piece of cinema, there are two or three well-meaning, firmly mediocre pictures clogged with mental illness, child abuse and miserable sex. Which is exactly why most film festivals mi...
Read More »Certain things just make intrinsically good material for ghost stories. Wide-eyed children, for one. Big empty houses in the middle of nowhere. Pale actresses in period nightdresses. Um, Jimmy McNulty. British chiller "The Awakening" has all of these things in one package, and from the looks of the ...
Read More »