If five Oscar nominees lose two young girls in the woods, will their wailing make a sound? That’s the key question of Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve’s prestigious puffery about a father (Hugh Jackman) and a cop (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to catch a kidnapper. Prisoners is a dog-whistle for Academy voters keyed…
Richard B. Riddick — Dick to his friends, if he had any — is an intergalactic meathead who’s glowered through three movies, two video games, and a cartoon. He’s both the luckiest and unluckiest man alive: lucky because he’s impossible to kill, unlucky because everyone keeps trying. In the opening,…
Brian De Palma had a good reason for remaking the erotic French thriller Love Crime: He could do it better. “I think it’s very dangerous to remake a classic,” says De Palma. “Leave it alone.” But the 2010 corporate catfight flick about two female frenemies had a framework he loved…
On September 17, 2011, 1,000 protesters set up tents in Manhattan’s financial district and dubbed themselves Occupy Wall Street. Four days later, Lionsgate purchased You’re Next — a home-invasion slasher that slices up a family of useless 1 percenters — and should have released it immediately. Instead, the studio sat…
Lake Bell can do incredible things with her tongue. She can touch her nose, twist it to both sides, and fold it backward as flat as an omelette. In a Silver Lake studio, recording vocal exercise warmups for an online campaign promoting her directorial debut, In a World . …
When David Gordon Green introduced Paul Rudd to Emile Hirsch, the two actors didn’t click. It was an awkward seafood dinner. “Emile just started talking about something — girls, maybe — and I was doing a piss-poor job of trying to follow along,” recalls Rudd. “And when Emile got up…
You can guess the plot of Disney’s Planes — it’s just Cars 2 with wings, an international romp that pits a humble country bumpkin against a fleet of literally jet-setting competitors in a race around the world. With pit stops in four continents, more cultural stereotypes than the Eurovision song…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were busy…
You’re either with Brit Marling or you’re against her. The 29-year-old filmmaker (who describes herself on Twitter as a tree climber/actor/writer/producer) catapulted out of obscurity in 2011 with two obfuscatory indies — Sound of My Voice and the mournful sci-fi drama Another Earth. Marling specializes in films about faith, loyalty,…
“Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
Steve Jobs will be directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jobs stars Ashton Kutcher. But this year’s third Steve Jobs biopic, Funny or Die’s iSteve, has its own advantage: It’s first. As of April 15, audiences were able to watch the hour-plus feature on Funny or Die’s website, while Sorkin continues to…
Tattoo Nation documentarian Eric Schwartz isn’t inked himself — “I’m nicknamed ‘The Virgin,’ ” he admits — but when he started photographing tattoo conventions, he stumbled across an untold, half-century history of color and style inextricably linked to California. Unlike the permanent art they’ve created, these tattoo artists and their clients…
