Actress Shannon Richardson, best known as the pregnant Texas woman who allegedly tried to poison Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama and frame her third husband for doing so, has racked up a considerable resume in the entertainment industry.
The 5’9″ mother of five, according to her CV, attributes her numerous roles Read More
The new movie season begins with a bang. Gangster Squad is a period piece, set in 1949, about Jewish, Brooklyn-born thug Mickey Cohen, who moved to the West Coast to rule the underworld in Los Angeles, and the clandestine six-man squad of cops assigned to bring him down. It comes equipped with the disclaimer “Inspired by Read More
Seventeen years after his impressive 1995 debut film The Brothers McMullen, writer-director-actor and indie-prod summa cum laude Edward Burns returns to the working-class Long Island landscape of his first success with The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. You can’t go home again.
In this overly familiar and ultimately meandering exercise in tedium, Mr. Burns also plays the Read More
The versatile, underrated Scotsman Robert Carlyle finally gets a starring role in California Solo, an unusual character study about a retired Britpop guitarist from the 1990s who moved to America after his band broke up and has been living for the past 15 years or so as a reclusive, alcoholic laborer, haunted by private demons Read More
For a big star, Brad Pitt chooses to waste his talent in boneheaded ways that never cease to amaze me. For every single solid, carefully written, value-packed entry in his oddball career—like Se7en or Moneyball—you get two or three choices only a moron could make. To a growing list of dumbbell duds like Tree of Read More
It must be Oscar season, as the biggest and most traditional media outlets are suddenly devoting space to lengthy considerations of new movies. Read More
Earlier this morning, a tormented wail rose up from Magnolia Bakery and spread throughout the city, stopping at Manolo Blahnik’s Fifth Avenue flagship before seeping out to the rest of the country.
When authorities finally calmed down the hysterical populace, they were able to determine that the mass cry of despair was not over our national unemployment rate, or even the possibility of giving Ron Paul the keys to the economy. It wasn’t Libya, or the fact that the Fast & Furious franchise has just given up on trying to name its films.
No, it was much worse, for a major trade publication had announced that there might not be another Sex and the City movie. Read More
Bret Easton Ellis’s new film, The Canyons, may just provide a little something for everyone involved: a sidestep away from porn for soft-core superstar James Deen, a reinvention–and paying work–for Lindsay Lohan, and a platform for Mr. Ellis to promulgate his idea about “post-Empire” culture, famously put forth in a Newsweek article and his Twitter feed. Post-Empire culture, which Mr. Ellis once described in part as “pure transparency,” looks a lot like the sunlit California splatter films Quentin Tarantino lovingly lampoons! Perhaps it’ll catch on–certainly Lindsay Lohan, having recently asked Barack Obama to cut her taxes as she’s not a millionaire despite public perception, is an avatar of transparency. Read More
Anne Hathaway, who back in 2010 appeared in a romantic comedy and a romantic dramedy, is getting back in the game. She’s reportedly attached to a film written by Mindy Kaling, who has written for The New Yorker about her love for the genre before making it the organizing principle behind TV’s Mindy Project. Read More
David France has a lot of people rooting for him. Supporting his debut film, the powerful documentary How to Survive a Plague (set for a Sept. 21 release), a host of celebrities—like Alan Cumming, John Cameron Mitchell, Heather Matarazzo, Ingrid Sischy and Jay Manuel—came out to the Angelika Film Center downtown for the screening this Wednesday. The guests were tied by a common denominator: most of them are strong advocates for LGBT rights, one of the dominant themes of the documentary.
Mr. Mitchell had already watched the film before the screening, and seemed to be one of its biggest fans. “I predict an Oscar nomination,” said the writer/actor/director. “I was just so moved by it. It is so empowering too, it is not a depressing document of tragedy—it is about people who made the drugs happen and saved an estimated 6 million people.” Read More
