John Gray would be the first to acknowledge that the world of "White Irish Drinkers" — a coming-of-age drama set in a rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood, circa 1975, populated by drunks, hustlers and wannabe heavies — is not quite the Bay Ridge he knew growing up.But that didn't stop him from sinking $600,000 of the money he earned as creator of the long-running CBS drama "Ghost Whisperer" into a movie he calls "the ultimate passion project."
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It’s an idea so simple and so fitting at a time when art and commerce awkwardly commingle that it’s a wonder nobody came up with it before.
But it took professional provocateur Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”) to make a documentary entirely focused on — and funded by — product placement.
Opening Friday, “Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” is backed by an eclectic lineup of sponsors, such as JetBlue Airways, Mini Cooper, Ban deodorant and, of course, pomegranate juicers Pom Wonderful.
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What was Quentin Dupieux thinking? A French record producer, film director and techno DJ better known to fans as Mr. Oizo, he has crafted one of the more bizarre thrillers in recent years with “Rubber,” a tongue-in-cheek exercise about a killer car tire that finds its victims along a barren stretch of Mojave Desert highway.
Dupieux, 36, can’t explain his inspiration, but he’s happy to offer some clues. “I tried to make something half dumb and half smart,” he says. “When you are trying to achieve this strange mix, you come up with lots of ideas.
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Ten years have passed since the bloody havoc of the original “Scream,” and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the surviving heroine of three previous run-ins with the so-called Ghostface Killer, has returned home to promote her new self-help book. Can she avoid another bloodbath, or is she doomed to relive the nightmare?
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David Gordon Green — who directed “Your Highness” from a script co-written by Ben Best (“The Foot Fist Way”) and star Danny McBride — describes his new high-concept comedy as the story of a medieval prince who smokes weed and fights dragons.
Right he is. Whether a tale so slight will leave a lasting impression, especially in the perpetually impaired memories of the movie’s stoner demographic, seems unlikely.
But “Highness” lives and dies not by the sword, but by the charisma of the man so clumsily wielding it, the exquisitely coiffed McBride.
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Russell Brand doesn’t describe himself as a traditional method actor, but for “Arthur,” in which he reprises Dudley Moore’s career-defining performance as New York’s most lovable millionaire drunk, he admits to some fairly unconventional prep work.
“I’m such a thorough actor that I did two decades of research just to make sure I got the character 100 percent right,” says the spritely 35-year-old Brit, who opened up about his own alcoholism and addictions to sex and heroin in the 2007 autobiography “My Booky Wook.”
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You might wonder what inspired David Gordon Green — director of “George Washington,” about a homicide’s aftermath, and 2007’s gut-wrenching “Snow Angels” — to switch gears with consecutive stoner comedies, “Pineapple Express” and “Your Highness,” opening Friday.
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“Hanna” might seem like a dramatic departure for director Joe Wright and his favorite young star, Saoirse Ronan, who last collaborated on 2007’s period romance “Atonement” before reconnecting, at Ronan’s suggestion, on his new movie, which opens Friday. Yet Wright, 38, says his latest, a “Bourne”-inspired thriller about an Eastern European teen trained from her isolated childhood to kill — a task at which she is frighteningly adept — isn’t so different from “Atonement” once you delve beneath the surface.
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After “Moon,” his captivating 2009 debut, Duncan Jones triumphantly returns with “Source Code,” a mind-bending sci-fi thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Capt. Colter Stevens, a veteran Air Force pilot assigned to prevent a terrorist attack on Chicago.The catch, in this case, is that the attack has already happened. Stevens, an unwitting guinea pig in a government experiment, must go back in time to gather information about a plot still in the making.
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If James Wan and Leigh Whannell weren’t so exuberant about “Insidious,” their cheerfully twisted take on a traditional haunted-house chiller starring Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, you might expect them to be bitter.
It was seven years ago that the Australian filmmakers collaborated on a short film called “Saw,” the blueprint for the most successful horror franchise of the new millennium.
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Jake Gyllenhaal is no stranger to working with mad scientists — or at least mad science. A decade ago he played schizophrenic teen Donnie Darko in Richard Kelly’s memorably offbeat feature about wormholes, time travel, a diabolical rabbit and an impending apocalypse.
Now Gyllenhaal, 30, is back on semi-familiar ground, playing an Air Force colonel badly wounded in the Middle East but kept alive as the guinea pig in a top-secret government experiment.
Opening Friday, the movie is “Source Code,” the second offering (after 2009’s “Moon”) from sci-fi surrealist Duncan Jones.
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Having joined the ranks of today’s most promising young directors after first crafting videos for Morrissey and Dionne Farris, Zack Snyder has skillfully married his passion for music with his inclination to grandiose cinema.
Whether thrusting us into a world on the brink of apocalypse against Johnny Cash’s haunting “The Man Comes Around” in “Dawn of the Dead” (2004), or opening his adaptation of “Watchmen” (2009) with a digest of superhero history backed by Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Snyder has a Midas touch in the soundtrack department.
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When Emily Browning, the Australian-born fashion model and star of “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” (2004), auditioned for “Sucker Punch,” Zack Snyder’s hard-hitting tribute to girl power, the director made her an offer she certainly could have refused. But she didn’t.“Zack asked me to put myself on tape, singing, which I’d never done before,” says Browning, 22. “I was terrified, of course. But he liked it. I have no idea why, but he thought me capable of carrying a tune on the screen.”
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Hailed by MovieMaker magazine as one of America’s coolest celebrations of fearless (and often underfunded) filmmaking, the Disposable Film Festival returns to The City on Thursday for four days of screenings featuring video captured by cellphones, pocket cameras and other everyday devices that are significantly less expensive than James Cameron’s 3-D technology.
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Just because he’s on the road promoting his observant new comedy “Win Win” doesn’t mean Tom McCarthy — actor, director, screenwriter and sports fan — is going to miss out on his favorite season of temporary insanity.“My brother and I joke that March Madness is the time we talk the most,” says McCarthy, 45, who describes ESPN’s “SportsCenter” as his drug of choice during the national immersion in wall-to-wall college basketball.
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