The Playlist

Paramount Picks Up Jason Reitman's 'Labor Day' With Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin

By Gabe Toro
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September 9, 2011 5:15 AM
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0 Comments

It's official: movie number five for Jason Reitman will be "Labor Day," and it will be produced through Paramount Pictures. This romantic drama, which sounds like quite a departure, finds a single mother who takes in a mysterious drifter with a dangerous past. Things get heated, erupting in a passionate affair over the titular holiday. While this seems like the type of thing we'd love with Shelly Winters and Robert Mitchum from the pen of Tennessee Williams, instead this is from the book by Joyce Maynard, with Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin as the illicit couple. Eh, not a huge downgrade.

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Venice '11 Review: 'Contagion' Is A Propulsive, Terrifying Picture With A Top-Notch Cast

By Oliver Lyttelton
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September 3, 2011 1:46 AM
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5 Comments

Disaster -- an eternally popular obsession of film. Audiences have turned up in droves over the last century or so to watch mankind against their own extinction in the form of meteorites, earthquakes, alien invasions, exploding suns, planetary collisions, and whatever it was that was happening in "The Core." One of the more popular hypotheses is that when the end comes -- and it will -- it'll be not with a bang, but with a whimper. And that's what Steven Soderbergh has examined in "Contagion," his first studio film since 2007's "Ocean's Thirteen," that finds the spread of a deadly bird flu-type virus the source of man's demise.

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Venice '11 Review: 'Carnage' Is Fun While It Lasts, But Insubstantial & Anonymous

By Oliver Lyttelton
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September 1, 2011 12:22 PM
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6 Comments

Compared to his last film, Roman Polanski's "Carnage" must have been a breeze. Not that the shoot for "The Ghost Writer" was "Fitzcarraldo" or anything, but, famously, the project hit a major speed bump in September 2009, while the film was in post-production, when the helmer was arrested in Zurich, and deportation proceedings were begun against him for the statutory rape case that has overshadowed the last thirty-odd years of his career. The Swiss authorities decided not to hand Polanski over, but he still spent months in prison, and was forced to complete post on his Robert Harris adaptation from there.

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Macau, Hong Kong, London, Munich...The 'Contagion' Poster Goes Worldwide

By Oliver Lyttelton
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July 21, 2011 1:05 AM
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2 Comments

When you have big names like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, plus acclaimed figures like Emmy-winner Bryan Cranston and Oscar-nominee John Hawkes in your film, most studios would plaster their faces all over the one-sheet. Warner Bros has, as yet, not taken that approach with "Contagion" (though we're sure its coming), the latest film from Steven Soderbergh, a dark, realistic look at the global spread of a bird-flu-like virus.

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New Looks At The Leads Of Roman Polanski’s ‘Carnage’

By Sam Price
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July 12, 2011 1:40 AM
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1 Comment

Update: Another new "Carnage" pic has fluttered online over at Italian site ComingSoon. Check it below.Update #2: Fotogramas also has a new pic from "Carnage." Check it out below.

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Kate Winslet & Josh Brolin Join Jason Reitman's 'Labor Day'

By Kevin Jagernauth
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June 16, 2011 3:44 AM
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2 Comments

It seems that Jason Reitman is using every opportunity to strike while the iron is hot. Building his rep with "Thank You For Smoking," breaking out with "Juno" and courting Oscar with "Up In The Air" the young helmer shows no signs of slowing down. Later this year, he'll unveil his next effort "Young Adult," a wickedly dark, Diablo Cody penned film starring Charlize Theron, Patrick Wilson and Patton Oswalt and now he's lining up his followup. But if you've been paying attention, this one has been batted around as early as last year.

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Jim Cameron Honors Centenary Of Loss Of 1,517 Souls By Re-Releasing 'Titanic' In 3D On April 6, 2012

By Oliver Lyttelton
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May 19, 2011 1:23 AM
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11 Comments

After a dozen years as the top-grossing film of all time, a seemingly once-in-a-generation phenomenon, James Cameron's action-heavy period romance "Titanic" was finally unseated from its position as the biggest grossing film of all time by... James Cameron's action-heavy futuristic romance, "Avatar," which topped the earlier film's seemingly unbeatable $1,800,000,000 haul by nearly a billion dollars. But with "Avatar 2" not expected in theaters until 2015, the director has to find some way of keeping his coffers topped up (transplanting yourself into a Na'vi doesn't come cheap, you know), so he's going back to his number two film to give it the one thing it was missing before: a third dimension.

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Review: Todd Haynes' 'Mildred Pierce' A Mouth-Watering Melodrama On An Operatic Scale

By Kevin Jagernauth
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March 22, 2011 3:31 AM
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3 Comments

Yes, we already know that Hollywood studios are continuing to pull away from adult oriented dramas, while continuing to pour money into franchises, sequels and spinoffs. And we've certainly already sung the praises of HBO for setting the standard for their colleagues by being a welcoming home for auteurs to toil away on the kinds of projects that wouldn't get them through the front door anywhere else. However, it's one thing to logically pair Todd Haynes with the period melodrama "Mildred Pierce" but when you surround him with the talent he has here, giving him an almost absurdly generous amount of running time to tell the story his way, it's practically like the cable network is sticking a thumb in the eye of Hollywood.

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First Look At Roman Polanski's 'Carnage'

By Kevin Jagernauth
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March 22, 2011 2:34 AM
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7 Comments

To be certain, Roman Polanski's last effort, "The Ghost Writer," polarized The Playlist staff. While some found it be a pretty harmless, if not particularly memorable, political potboiler, others completely hated it (though we all agreed Kim Cattrall's accent was egregious). Even on the score, some of us loved Alexandre Desplat's whirring strings, while others found it be a weaker work from the accomplished and prolific composer (the Christmas party eventually turned ugly). But regardless of all that, Polanski's latest has us all pretty excited, bringing together a top notch cast for the film version of an acclaimed play.

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'Gnomeo & Julet' Director Kelly Asbury Talks the Narrative Quality of Elton John Songs

By Drew Taylor
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February 10, 2011 4:33 AM
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0 Comments

Plus: His Take on the Nearly Endless Development Process & Why Everyone Gets Uptight About the Movie's EnglishnessDisney and Rocket Films' "Gnomeo & Juliet," opening nationwide this Friday, has had a storied production history that could be its own compelling film. The story of star-crossed lawn ornaments was set up as a joint Disney/Rocket Films production in the first part of the aughts, under the supervision of "Beauty and the Beast" co-director Gary Trousdale, with Kate Winslet and Ewan McGregor attached (they're now replaced by Emily Blunt and James McAvoy). The project fell apart, only to regain steam and be cut down again when Pixar's John Lasseter was installed, as the head of Disney's animation division (this was around the time he axed Chris Sanders' "American Dog," before neutering it and turning it into the toneless "Bolt"). The project was finally rescued by executive Dick Cook, who set it up not at Disney Animation proper, but with Miramax instead. Of course, with Miramax since being sold, Walt Disney are now taking on distribution duties for the film. At the end of all the back and forth, this take on the Shakespearean classic, thankfully, did not end in tragedy.

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