In two films together, writer-actress Brit Marling and writer-director Zal Batmanglij have explored issues of identity, and both spiritual and cultural alienation. Distinct and intelligent, both 2011’s Sound of My Voice, about a mysterious Los Angeles cult leader (the transfixing Marling) and their new…
Read MoreNow You See Him: As His Career Heats Up, Dave Franco on the Art of Throwing Cards and The Livelihood of Bananas
Dave Franco looks and sounds a bit like a certain older brother we all know and love. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the charming younger Franco—currently carving out an impressive movie career in big screen comedies like 21 Jump Street,…
Read MoreThe Entertainer, Mr. Maltin and Me: Hollywood Grand Dame Mitzi Gaynor on Classic South Pacific, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Crown Jewel and Unabashedly Romantic Social Critique
It’s not every day you find yourself chatting with the legendary Mitzi Gaynor, an entertainer bar none who, at 81, still has an ageless combination of wit, style, humor and, well, sizzle, that she had 55 years ago as kind-hearted romantic Ensign Nellie Forbush,…
Read MoreActor Chaske Spencer Uses Rising Twilight Star to Promote Change, Positive Images for Native Americans
As Sam Uley, the leader of The Twilight Saga’s feral—and uniformly handsome—wolf pack, actor Chaske Spencer has spent the better part of the last decade starring in one of the most popular film franchises of all time, a high-profile role requiring equal parts physique…
Read MoreWarm Bodies, Rest and Motion: Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer Fall in Love, Heal the World in Winning Comic Zombie Love Story
January isn’t known for good movies, but Warm Bodies, the immensely appealing romantic comedy about a post-apocalypse where a melancholy zombie named “R” falls in love with a human girl named Julie, both lonely and looking for connection in isolated worlds, is a real…
Read MoreFamily Achieves The Impossible in Director Juan Antonio Bayona’s Tsunami Survival Story
You’ve never quite seen anything like the tsunami in director Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible, the true story of the 2004 Thailand catastrophe and how one family’s will to survive became an elemental force. The film, featuring Naomi Watts in a performance for the…
Read MoreCharlie Bewley and Daniel Cudmore Travel Darker Road in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
I made it out of my chat with Charlie Bewley and Daniel Cudmore, veterans of The Twilight Saga pictures as members of the menacing Volturi vampire council, without being either, you know, decapitated or “changed.” They may be diabolically vicious onscreen but luckily neither…
Read MoreWhat Becomes An 80s Icon Most? Sybil Danning on Her Career as Model, Movie Star and My B-Movie Mentor
Three decades ago I spent many a late evening with Sybil Danning—the arresting Austrian model turned American movie star, she of the hourglass physique, disarming screen presence and tongue-meet-cheek relationship with her often outrageously entertaining movies—at the small-town Michigan drive-in where I was schooled…
Read MoreThe first time I met Joseph Gordon-Levitt was for a picture called Manic, about a young man in crisis, over his head with anger issues. I still recall the marked intensity of the then nineteen-year-old, clad in skinny corduroys and a CBGB tee, and…
Read MoreMalik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man Charts Extraordinary Life of Rodriguez, A Rock Legend Decades in the Making
Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary Searching for Sugar Man, which made a splash at Sundance earlier this year, charts the too-strange-to-be-fiction story of Rodriguez, a wunderkind Detroit folk guitarist who by all rights should have become a superstar with the release of his album, Cold Fact,…
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