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…
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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…
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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…
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The 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…
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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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Few films approach the ferocity of Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe, featuring Matthew McConaughey as a Texas sheriff and contract killer who agrees to knock off the matriarch of a (putting it nicely) working class family looking for a quick insurance payout. Loaded with scheming…
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In filmmaker Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy are skeptical scientists whose mission is to disprove paranormal phenomena, which leads them down a dark path once they set their sights on Robert De Niro, playing a renowned master of ESP who…
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Zoe Kazan’s screenplay for Ruby Sparks combines fantasy and reality in a novel way, exploring complex relationship dynamics in a story about a blocked writer who manifests his dream girl out of thin air, only to discover that he’s not ready to accept that…
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You have to hand it to Ruby Sparks’ directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, partners in life raising a family, working fourteen-hour days together on set and then going home to dinner and teenagers before going right back to work together—apparently their secret formula…
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When meeting actor Joe Manganiello, any reaction less than, say, awe would probably be insufficient. Unlike most celebrities, who in person do not often resemble their 40-foot visages, the 6’5” rugged former athlete and Carnegie Mellon-schooled drama grad is the personification of a god,…
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