In Atom Egoyan’s “Chloe,” frigid career woman Catherine (Julianne Moore) hires a beautiful young prostitute named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce her husband as a test of his commitment to their marriage. What ensues is a tale as old as time — or, at least as old as the trials of fidelity found in operas by Beethoven and Mozart and tragic dramas penned by Shakespeare and Cervantes — but given a modern feminine twist, courtesy of screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. Read the rest of this entry »

1. The Beaches of Agnes
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
3. Up
4. The Hurt Locker
5. Bronson
6. Where the Wild Things Are
7. The Messenger
8. An Education
9. District 9
10. (500) Days of Summer

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (the Pusher trilogy) is courting controversy with Bronson, a tour de force meditation on violence and celebrity about real-life British felon Michael Peterson. Over a period of three decades and through sheer determination and bare knuckled brawn, Peterson has earned the distinction of being Britain’s most violent criminal; in Refn’s gloriously macabre film, he’s also Britain’s most charismatic anti-hero since Alex DeLarge. But does Refn’s film recklessly perpetuate Michael Peterson’s self-made myth? And how much of himself does Refn see in his violent, controversial film, which he calls “autobiographical?” Read the rest of this entry »

When Oscar-nominated screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (“Babel,” “21 Grams,” “Amores Perros”) set out to make his directorial debut, he turned to the A-list actress he thought could best carry his film’s story about guilt, forgiveness, and searing love: Charlize Theron. The Oscar-winning actress jumped full-force into the role of Sylvia, a beautiful but distant woman hiding from her past who, years later, still suffers from an unknown trauma that leads her down a path of self-destructive behavior ranging from self-harm to sexual addiction. Read the rest of this entry »

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, Michael Sheen was a soccer-playing kid with dreams of becoming a professional footballer. Eventually he traded his cleats for the camera, earning kudos as Tony Blair in The Queen and amassing fans as the vampire Aro in this fall’s Twilight sequel New Moon. But in “The Damned United,” the Welsh actor returns to his first love to portray famed English football coach Brian Clough, a controversial figure in British sports history with whom Sheen was already quite familiar. Sheen recalls his childhood impressions of Clough and reveals the insecurities he discovered in the coaching legend during the course of filming. Read the rest of this entry »

Actress Audrey Tautou and designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel are both international symbols of modern French femininity – Chanel as the trend-setting couturier who liberated 20th century women with the simplicity and ease of her clothing, and Tautou as the single most recognizable French actress in the world, thanks to her captivating performances in films like 2001’s Oscar-nominated Amelie and a little 2006 thriller called “The Da Vinci Code.

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There’s definitely something of an old soul in Ben Whishaw, even if it’s hard to pin down. He had a breakout role as an obsessed killer in Perfume: The Story of A Murderer, played Keith Richards in the British music pic Stoned, and channeled two other poets at once – Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan – in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. He loves poetry and still writes letters, two lost arts that might just regain popularity thanks to his latest film, Bright Star, a lyrical biopic that chronicles the brief but passionate love affair between 19th century poet John Keats and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Read the rest of this entry »

Though he turned in memorable supporting roles in Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai and Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, Japanese actor Hiroshi Watanabe scored his biggest role to date thanks to a brief appearance in a little-seen independent film, Big Dreams Little Tokyo. Impressed by Watanabe’s comedic skills, that film’s director, Dave Boyle, wrote his next film specifically with the Japanese actor in mind. The result is this week’s White on Rice, an indie comedy that is steadily winning over audiences and earning Watanabe fervent kudos.

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