Look! It’s Anakin Skywalker, Mace Windu, and Billy Elliot…together again for the first time! In a movie about the handsome, entitled Hayden Christensen who can teleport around the world, going on picnics, stealing cars, going to the fridge (jeez, how lazy do you have to be to teleport to the fridge?). And then he meets […]
Funny Games, a remake of the 1997 Michael Haneke movie that Haneke himself is re-directing. (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth star.) I liked Cache and loved, loved, loved The Piano Teacher, Haneke’s two other high-profile previous films; I haven’t seen the original Funny Games but I hear it’s intense. You figure this new one will […]
The geeks grokked out at Comic-Con when they saw this trailer (now finally up at Apple), and it’s easy to understand why. Sure, there’s the pleasure of seeing Robert Downey Jr. (pictured) playing a character tailored to his talents: glib arms merchant Tony Stark, who discovers his inner superhero more out of feelings of […]
No Country for Old Men, the new movie from the Coen Brothers. And, man, is it bloody! No Country is adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s brutal 2005 novel, and in the first scene of the trailer, Javier Bardem (pictured) takes out an old guy with a cattle gun to the forehead. Bardem’s character is an angel […]
Walk Hard (Dec. 21), a delicious-looking parody of recent musical biopics. Fictional star Dewey Cox (the reliably goofy John C. Reilly) interacts hilariously with some real-life stars (Elvis, the Beatles) played by some well-disguised comedy pros, and with some real-life celebs playing themselves — Eddie Vedder and (WTF?) Patrick Duffy. I wanted to see more […]
Poor Kal Penn, he keeps getting mistaken for a terrorist. First, there was 24, where — d’oh! — it turned out not to be a mistake, and he really was a terrorist. Then there’s this teaser trailer, below, for Harold and Kumar 2 (due in 2008), in which one-half of our favorite pair of New […]
The Science of Sleep was way underrated. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a masterwork. Michel Gondry’s a brilliant director and a real innovator. His new movie is called Be Kind Rewind (Dec. 21) and stars Jack Black and Mos Def as video store clerks who, after their entire inventory gets demagnetized, recreate their […]
Lars and the Real Girl (also due Oct. 12), looks to be a comedy with heart that gives Ryan Gosling a My-Name-is-Earl mustache and casts him as a singleton who falls in love with an inflatable doll. Looks kind of sweet, and not too goofy — encouraging signs, since it’s all too easy to imagine […]
Dan in Real Life (Oct. 12), the new dramedy from Peter Hedges (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Pieces of April). Steve Carell (pictured) plays a single father-of-three-girls who falls for the girlfriend (Juliette Binoche) of his brother (Dane Cook), and the whole thing appears to take place in a family-stuffed, catalog-ready autumn New England dreamscape. (Hopefully, […]
The Kite Runner (Nov. 2) Okay, so this adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller just has to be good, right? I mean, not even Hollywood execs could mess up a book this riveting, right? Relative unknown Khalid Abdalla takes the pivotal role of Amir, while Finding Neverland’s Marc Forster directs, and while I’m pre-programmed to love […]