Article: Five of our favorite Michael Mann movies
“Last of the Mohicans” airs tonight at 8 and 10:30 p.m. ET
“The Dark Knight Rises” debuts more new character posters
Has the Sacha Baron Cohen shtick jumped the shark?
Tim Grierson on Will Smith, the Last Movie Star
Exclusive download: Corporal, featuring Michael Shannon, presents “Glory”
Russell Crowe
Article: Darren Aronofsky-helmed “Noah” setting sail with Russell Crowe
You’ve been hearing about it for almost a year now: Darren Aronofsky is planning on following up his 2010 hit, “Black Swan” with an adaptation of the biblical story of Noah. Now, the project is finally ready to begin filming this July, with none other than Russell Crowe stepping into the period sandals of the…
Article: “RoboCop” casting rumor targets Russell Crowe
Except it seems pretty unlikely.
Article: Russell Crowe as Superman’s father in “Man of Steel” behind-the-scenes photos hit the web
We’ve long known that Russell Crowe would be taking on the role of Superman‘s father in “Man of Steel,” but it’s been up in the air how close his portrayal would hew to that of Marlon Brando, who played Jor-El in the original 1978 “Superman.” Fortunately, we can finally quit speculating as photos of Crowe…
Article: What to Watch on IFC: February 28 – March 6
For being the shortest month, February sure drags on and on and on. Luckily good old in-like-a-lion out-like-a-lamb March starts tomorrow. We will refrain from admitting that we know songs from “Annie”, but we do have high hopes for March. Not only because we have great films coming up like Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” and…
Article: Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, collaborators in anger.
Some actor-director pairings are legendary: Anthony Mann and James Stewart, François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud, Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. To that illustrious list, we have lately been invited to add another pair: Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. At…
Article: Jake Gyllenhaal, the “smart-throb.”
In an intriguing and moody profile of Jake Gyllenhaal, The Independent‘s Lesley O’Toole introduces us to an unlikely new coinage along the lines of “bromance”: “smart-throb.” This neologism is new to me, but apparently it comes up every now and then: it apparently also applies to David Krumholtz on “Numb3rs” and, long ago, Jonathan Taylor…
Article: “Robin Hood” and “Looking For Eric”
There are two kinds of bad films: actively bad and passively bad. Actively bad movies are engaging. They’re technically competent but utterly nonsensical (and/or offensive), or else so astoundingly inept in every conceivable way that they’re mesmerizing. The greatest actively bad films think they’re masterpieces and carry themselves with an unearned aura of importance. But…
Article: 3D is not going to replace A-list actors.
When it comes to discussing 3D, there are three main talking points. There’s the ranting about the differences between cheap 3D/post-2D conversions (there’s more dissection of that aspect of “Clash of the Titans” than actual reviews of the film). Then there’s the discussions about how many 3D movies there are, how much money they’re making…
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: Seven actors who deserve better.
We’ve all had this experience before — you go to a movie and an actor you’ve never heard of totally blows you away. You expect to see more of him or her, then years go by and you see the movie again on TV and realize you have no idea what happened. (Like, say, almost…
Article: Back when British accents were evil.
As we all know, the ancient world was run by a bunch of officious people with British accents, because Americans never did learn much Latin, and nothing says “empire” quite like a British inflection. We all know what it meant, and it saved us a lot of time. What is the story of “Spartacus” if…
Article: Another retelling of Robin Hood, and another rock score.
My only real interest left in the Super Bowl (gone are the days of Packer Majik) are the high priced spots for the big studio movies due out in the coming months. There wasn’t much of interest, but being a sucker for medieval pictures and Ridley Scott I did get a bit antsy in my…
Article: “A Star Is Born,” again.
There are some properties destined to be eternally refilmed: certain Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen, Dickens, and so on. Then there are the less likely and yet equally persistent sources. One, oddly, is “A Star Is Born,” currently due for its fifth incarnation. The archetypal tale of a alcoholic star on his way down and the…
Article: A Galaxy of Stars Burning Out
As a country, our appetite for stars — for gossip and photos and red carpet footage — is greater than ever, but our willingness to shell out to see those stars in the movies for which they’re supposedly known seems to have faded a bit. Take “Tenderness,” a Russell Crowe thriller that got dumped into…
Article: Blowing the Whistle on Whistleblower Movies
The covert meetings in hallways and parking garages, the warning threats, the for-the-role weight gain, the righteous speechifying — Steven Soderbergh mocks all of these standbys of the whistleblower movie in his new comedy “The Informant!” Inspired, on this week’s IFC News podcast we take a closer look at some of those clichés and the…
Article: The “Marc Pease” predicament.
As someone who spends plenty of time trolling the coming soon calendar for our seasonal previews, I’ll see many films that look intriguing, but are pulled at the last minute by their distributor. Or worse — they end up like “The Marc Pease Experience,” a Ben Stiller-Jason Schwartzman comedy that has seen release dates come…
Article: State of Decline
It’s a measure of the smarts at work in “State of Play” that while none of the characters’ motives are clean, the movie never lapses into cynicism. This tense, cleanly made thriller, directed by Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”), plays off the faux scandals of the Clinton years (the Lewinsky affair) and the…
