Brie Larson won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a kidnapping and rape survivor in Room, a reward that came after many other harrowing dramatic roles like Short Term 12, Don Jon, The Spectacular Now and Rampart. This time, the conflict is external in Free Fire, an action movie from writer/director Ben Wheatley. Free […]
Ben Wheatley is known for his hard hitting films like Kill List and High-Rise. Even his comedy Sightseers is full of macabre violence. So when Ben Wheatley does an action movie, you should know what to expect. Free Fire is more than just a shootout. Wheatley, who cowrote Free Fire with his wife and partner Amy […]
I’ve been a big Luke Bracey fan since I saw him in The November Man, holding his own against Pierce Brosnan. I loved him so much in Point Break that I called him Luke Break because he’s Luke Bracey from Point Break. When we spoke for Point Break, he told me about Hacksaw Ridge. Hacksaw […]
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has only played one other real life character on film. That was Robert Lincoln in Lincoln, who was gone long before we had film and audio of him to compare to his performance. Edward Snowden has been public in our lifetime, and as recently as the present. Gordon-Levitt plays Edward Snowden in the […]
“Please say something strong,” Oliver Stone implored us at the end of a roundtable interview for his new movie Snowden. Stone has long been a political filmmaker with obvious examples like JFK, Nixon and W. but also in his approaches to he media in Natural Born Killers, finance in Wall Street and war stories like […]
Toby Kebbell and Pilou Asbaek play pivotal characters in Ben-Hur. Kebbell plays Messala Severus, the childhood friend of Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) who ultimately chooses Rome over Judah. Asbaek plays Roman leader Pontius Pilate. We sat in a roundtable with Kebbell and Asbaek to discuss the making of the film. Kebbell took us through the […]
Director Timur Bekmambetov has reinvented the biblical classic Ben-Hur for a new generation. Jack Huston stars as Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince who is betrayed and enslaved by his brotherly friend Messala Severus (Toby Kebbell). Judah escapes a slave ship and learns to race chariots, for a final race against Messala for his freedom. We […]
Equity premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. The film, written by, directed by, produced by and starring women made a big splash for its portrayal of women on Wall Street. Anna Gunn plays Naomi Bishop, a top executive trying to recover from one bad call. Sarah Megan Thomas, also a producer, plays […]
I was excited to see Scott Adkins show up in Criminal. I of course follow his work intimately from the Ninja, Undisputed and Universal Soldier films to the latest, Close Range. Criminal is Kevin Costner’s film, but they still need a tough guy to look good in a suit chasing him and that’s where Adkins […]
Bear With Us was one of the standout films at the FilmQuest film festival, a romantic comedy with the outlandish premise of a bear hunt in the woods. After I saw the film, I got ahold of director William J. Stribling for an interview about his film. Stribling told me he shot Bear With Us […]