The Playlist

The obsessives' guide to contemporary cinema via film discussion, news, reviews, features, nostalgia, movie music, soundtracks, DVDs and more.

Interviews

Watch: Porn Isn't So Fun In Trailer For 'About Cherry' With James Franco, Heather Graham & Dev Patel

By Benjamin Wright
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July 26, 2012 12:17 PM
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4 Comments

News

When making a film about a seedier career path – for instance, stripping in Steven Soderbergh’s excellent summer fling “Magic Mike” – it’s important to approach the topic with a delicate and nuanced touch. Our writer on the scene at Berlinale 2012 didn’t exactly find that to be the case with porn career flick “About Cherry,” writing it off as a film that “tries hard to provoke us into reassessing the porn industry, but is so ham-fisted that the result is not a look on the bright side, but a whitewash.”

By The Playlist
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June 24, 2012 10:48 PM
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2 Comments

Television

The longer Aaron Sorkin’s deeply-nostalgic-for-the-golden-age-of-news show “The Newsroom” goes on for, the more improbable the workplace drama (and dramedy), set at a fictional cable-news show, becomes. A complacent and apathetic news anchor known as the MOR Jay Leno of news anchor suddenly explodes with outrage and opinion. An old school news division president orchestrates a brilliant subterfuge in order get back to “real” journalism and an executive news producer genuinely believes that if you build it will they will come -- that the American public is starved for authenticity and will tune in for honest to goodness reporting instead of sensational TV journalism.

By Charlie Schmidlin
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April 24, 2012 12:39 PM
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1 Comment

A new film based on true events, set in the world of “honor killings” in India, has picked up steam today as two talented actors have signed on for principal and supporting roles.

By Oliver Lyttelton
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June 29, 2011 2:14 AM
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0 Comments

As far as starts to careers go for young actors, having your first role in the first-line-up of hugely popular U.K. teen series "Skins," and then going on to the lead role in a global hit that swept the Oscars, namely "Slumdog Millionaire," isn't a bad one, and Dev Patel must consider himself fairly blessed. But things have been rockier since then for the 21-year-old British actor, with his follow-up to Danny Boyle's film being in M. Night Shyamalan's much-mocked "The Last Airbender," a film which no one came out of smelling of roses.

By Oliver Lyttelton
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May 19, 2011 2:10 AM
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6 Comments

Guessing James Franco's next step is an entirely foolhardy pastime. The absurdly busy polymath star jumps from project to project seemingly at random, with recent movements including playing a guy who chops his own arm off, a blockbuster about super-intelligent monkeys, a stint on a soap opera, making his directorial debut, teaching a college class about himself, a collection of short stories, a Julia Roberts vehicle adapting a self-help book, a stoner comedy parody of 1980s fantasy movies, a mega-budgeted Disney prequel to "The Wizard of Oz," and fucking up the Oscars.