Article: 17 incredibly awesome movie prosthetics
Sometimes you need a little more than talent to bring a character to life.
“Arrested Development”‘s tear-jerking “Peanuts” song gag returns triumphantly in season 4
Bill Hader dishes on Justin Bieber to Stern
Ken Jeong talks stunts, breaking tropes and the evolution of Mr. Chow in “The Hangover 3″
David Cross and Portia de Rossi describe Lindsay and Tobias’s “trajectory of sadness” in “Arrested Development” season 4
Nicole Kidman
Article: “Anchorman 2″ gains Nicole Kidman, Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson
They’ll all play small roles in the upcoming sequel.
Article: The Batman is coming to IFC
Tonight at 7:15 p.m. ET we are lighting up the sky over Gotham with the Bat Signal, because the Dark Knight is coming to IFC. Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman” is the big-screen response to the serious (and seriously violent) revisionist comic book tales of the ’80s. The film reimagines Gotham as a foreboding industrial metropolis…
Article: Call-In Commentary: Watch the “Trespass” trailer with director Joel Schumacher
As famed director Joel Schumacher puts it, his new film “Trespass” is ostensibly about the “haves” versus the “have nots,” but only on its face. In the movie, Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman live a wealthy existence in an exclusive gated community. Everything is seemingly perfect: Cage is wrapped up in his business and Kidman…
Article: ‘To Die For’: Murder Is A Small Price For Fame
Gus Van Sant’s 1995 mockumentary “To Die For” examines America’s obsession with fame in a darkly comic fashion. The film is adapted from the true life and crimes of Pamela Smart, a school coordinator who was imprisoned for seducing a 16 year old student and convincing him to kill her husband. It stars Nicole Kidman…
Article: Toronto 2010: “Rabbit Hole,” Reviewed
Reviewed at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival. “Rabbit Hole” feels more like the adaptation of a really great play that hasn’t been botched as opposed to it feeling like a really great movie, but that isn’t to take away from what John Cameron Mitchell has achieved with his take on David Lindsay-Abaire’s drama about a…
Article: Hey, someone’s gotta come to the defense of M. Night Shyamalan.
Before we all had Lindsay Lohan to beat up on, there was M. Night Shyamalan, Hollywood’s very own prodigal son. Master of twist endings and cursed with less modesty about his directing gifts than even Quentin Tarantino, Shyamalan’s fall from grace was swift and almost karmically vengeful. At least — if you buy the overall…
Article: Where our greatest actresses fit in at the multiplex and at the arthouse.
Shortly after the Cannes awards were over, the London Times‘ Kate Muir sat down with Best Actress winner Juliette Binoche to conduct an interesting interview. Muir makes the observation that Binoche “is one of the few actors to cross, undamaged, from mainstream to arthouse and back.” That’s a select club — one whose female population…
Article: 13 On-Screen Couples That Were Also Off-Screen Couples
In the new film “Breaking Upwards,” struggling twentysomething couple Daryl and Zoe decide to address their relationship problems by planning and then executing their own breakup. Daryl is played by director/producer/editor/co-writer Daryl Wein, Zoe is played by producer/co-writer Zoe Lister-Jones, and the breakup in the film is based on the one the two went through…
Article: Better than a Poke in the Eye with a Stick
The Oscars may be just a horse-race between larcenous, ego-queen jockeys riding $100 million braindead nags, but even so, sometimes the right movie wins. Often the wrong movie wins, and other times we can be thankful a middling movie or actor wins by the grace of fate so that another movie, a real populist crater,…
Article: The U.N. wants to be in pictures.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is in Los Angeles this week, wooing Hollywood and trying to get creative types to, in his words, “have the U.N. message coursing continually, and spreading out continuously to the whole world.” To this end, he’s been meeting with some of the politically conscious luminaries of the film world (Demi…
Article: Something Borrowed, Something Blue
I can imagine Robert Zemeckis — whose botched motion-capture animated features “The Polar Express” and “A Christmas Carol” were full of rubbery, dead-eyed, freakish-looking human constructs — watching James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an expression on his face not unlike F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri listening to his first Mozart composition in “Amadeus.” From a technical standpoint,…
Article: Owen Pallett’s Final Fantasy, Rabbit Hole
You’re forgiven if you’ve ever been confused about Owen Pallet’s band Final Fantasy, the video game/anime/film series is crazy enough. Maybe you thought it was just another part of that media franchise. I did until I started reading about this Owen Pallet’s many musical collaborations. These include bands like Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Beirut, Mountain…
Article: The Naughts: The Actress of the ’00s
If time is an avenger, then the Naughts have had it both ways with Nicole Kidman. In the span of a decade, Kidman was transformed from arm candy into an artist — the rare movie star who made genuinely interesting choices — eclipsing her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who filed for divorce in 2000, with an…
Article: The Family That Slays Together: Ten Domestic Slashers
If you feel like you’ve seen this week’s new slasher flick “The Stepfather” before, you probably have, even if you’re not a fan of the 1987 original starring “Lost”‘s Terry O’Quinn. That’s because the family-bands-together-to-fend-off-the-one-member-who-turns-on-the-rest trope is at the heart of dozens of horror movies. Need proof? Here’s a list of ten different types of…
Article: The Wizard of Ozploitation
When “Kill Bill: Volume 1″ premiered in Australia, Quentin Tarantino dedicated the film to one of his favorite directors, Brian Trenchard-Smith, whose name may not register if you’re not already a fan of schlock classics like 1975′s “The Man From Hong Kong” (the first Australian martial-arts film!) and 1983′s “BMX Bandits” (starring a young Nicole…
Article: Australia!
Baz Luhrmann is vodcasting about the making of “Australia,” that Oz fuck explosion starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, thousands of cattle and World War II, as part of Apple’s “Set to Screen” series on iTunes. The film, Luhrmann’s first to follow the Red Curtain Trilogy, is in post-production now, and is due in theaters in…
