RoseByrne Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Here's a quick look at what's opening in limited release this weekend. If they're not playing where you live, keep an eye out as they make the rounds. And if all else fails, there's always DVD.

Adam (pictured) is an unusual romantic comedy starring Hugh Dancy as a man with Asperger syndrome, a mild form of autism, who develops a relationship with his new neighbor (Rose Byrne). It has a 70% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, including my own Cinematical review from Sundance, where I wrote: "This isn't some cheesy TV movie about a wise "special needs" person who teaches life lessons to those around him.... It's a simple, light comedy with dramatic underpinnings, and a pleasant way to spend an evening." Now playing in New York and L.A.

The Cove, another Sundance alumnus, is already one of the year's most acclaimed documentaries, with a 94% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes. It's about a cove in Japan where thousands of dolphins are slaughtered every year for shady reasons, and it plays out like a thriller. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg called it "brutally honest and effortlessly fascinating" and "easily one of the most powerful, heartfelt, and ... important 'nature' documentaries I've ever seen." Playing in New York and L.A.

Three casting bites, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter:

She may have wowed us all with her kickass teen detective on Veronica Mars, but her big-screen work continues to lack the same verve. On the heels of When in Rome and Couples Retreat, Kristen Bell has signed on to Andy Fickman's You Again. She'll play a woman who finds out that her brother is gearing up to marry the evil girl who made her years in high school a living hell. Not happy with the idea, she tries to find a way to reveal the girl's true evilness to her brother. Aren't there any mysteries to solve? Joel Silver, let Rob Thomas make the film. Bell needs better!

Meanwhile, the wonderful Sally Hawkins, the woman behind Happy-Go-Lucky, has grabbed herself a sci-fi gig. Hawkins, along with Charlotte Rampling, Nathalie Richard, and Andrea Riseborough, have signed onto Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go. This is that sci-fi drama that Keira Knightley signed onto last month, which focuses on three boarding school friends who get a rather shocking surprise as young adults. Unfortunately, there's no word on who these newest cast members will play. Boarding school teachers? The people behind the sci-fi twist?

Lastly, Emily Blunt might not be signing on for a little Russell Brand and Jonah Hill, but Elisabeth Moss, Sean P Diddy Combs, and Rose Byrne sure are. They're the new castmembers added to Get Him to the Greek -- the flick where Hill has to get the wild rocker Brand from London to LA, "becoming introduced to an out-of-control life of hookers and blow along the way." Yay. More hookers. Hollywood definitely doesn't have enough of them. Moss will play Hill's repressed doctor girlfriend (not the kind with Calamitous Intent), Combs will be Hill's record company boss, and Byrne will be Brand's ex, "a Courtney Love-type rocker." Loved Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but this pic has yet to wow me.

Let's assume for the moment that there's such a thing as a hard line between "small, smart movies" and "big, dumb movies." Of course, we all know this isn't true -- just take a look at The Matrix (1999) for one example -- but this distinction will help me explain just how Alex Proyas's new Knowing doesn't work. It will also help simply because I don't want to give away the film's major plot turns and ending. (Although I'm afraid I may not have done such a good job of that; so if you're hoping to avoid spoilers -- even unintentionally implied ones -- please stop reading now.) OK, so let's assume that hardly anyone ever sets out to make a "big, dumb movie," except for maybe Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckhemier. Let's assume that Alex Proyas started out to make a small, smart movie, just like his great Dark City (1998).

Then let's assume that Nicolas Cage came on board, and since he was fresh from big, dumb hits like Ghost Rider and the National Treasure films, the producers begin to tailor it for him. It became bigger, with more plane crashes, car chases and explosions. But rather than becoming a comfortable hybrid between a small, smart movie and a big, dumb movie, Knowing became a horrible mutation, bulging out in all the wrong places, with unsightly scars where the butcher's knife had been. Now the movie's ideas no longer flow from one to the other; sometimes they make huge leaps and other times they just fizzle out. And the movie's big, dumb elements come in all the wrong places; they provide lots of anxiety but little relief.

Cinematical has received four brand new exclusive images from the film Knowing, which you can check out -- along with several previously-released images -- in the gallery below. Directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City) and starring Nicolas Cage, Knowing is an action-thriller about a professor who stumbles across terrifying predictions about the future inside a time capsule, and then sets out to prevent them from coming true. The very adorable Rose Byrne also stars, and Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) is credited as one of the film's screenwriters. I've been diggin' the creepy vibe in this one for awhile now, and I like Proyas as a director -- so I may take a chance right this second and predict that Knowing will be worth the watch when the film hits theaters on March 20.

Check out the new images in the gallery below, and the trailer after the jump.

If I told you that Adam was about a man with Asperger syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism, you would instantly lose all interest in seeing it, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. If Fox Searchlight's marketers are smart, they'll keep a lid on that aspect of the film, because it's actually a humorously bittersweet story buoyed by likable performances, and not an oh-geez-here-comes-another-film-about-a-saintly-disabled-person movie.

The Adam in question, played by Hugh Dancy, is an electronic engineer whose current job has him working on a toy company's new talking doll. Adam's father has just died, leaving him alone in the spacious Manhattan apartment they once shared, with Harlan (Frankie Faison), a family friend, to keep an eye on him

Adam can mostly take care of himself, though. People with Asperger -- Aspies, as Adam calls them -- take things literally and have trouble knowing what other people are thinking, and they tend to misread facial expressions. Aside from that, they do OK. Adam is happiest when following a routine, and he gets particularly excited by astronomy. He doesn't seem much different from your average nerd.

The new tenant in his building is Beth (Rose Byrne), an elementary school teacher who is immediately fascinated by Adam's quirky personality, not realizing it's an actual mental disorder -- and after all, where is the line between "interesting" and "diagnosable"? Adam and Beth begin a tentative friendship and eventually a romance, though both are aware that such an arrangement will be difficult at best. Beth's father (Peter Gallagher), a corporate accountant who's just been indicted for shady bookkeeping, is adamantly anti-Adam for that reason.

Back in July, Eugene brought up the initial teaser for Nicolas Cage's new thriller, Knowing, and as Cage struggled to crack a numerical pattern that has a nasty habit of correlating with major disasters past and future, it struck me as some sort of cross between The Mothman Prophecies (not bad) and his own Next (not good).

Now, this latest trailer comes across as more of a mix between Mothman and Dark City, which was also directed by Knowing helmer Alex Proyas, which gives me mild cause for concern. It's nothing against Dark City -- which is a fine film and all -- but I find the introduction of pale figures known only as "the whisper men" significantly less intriguing than the central doomsday concept. Whatever answer I had hoped might be behind the mystery at hand simply didn't involve creeps who often stand on the horizon and, well, whisper.

The train and plane crashes seem creep enough as it stands, and for all I know, those fellas on the outskirts could figure into the plot quite nicely. I, and we, won't know until March 20th if my skepticism is unfounded. At the moment, though, are any of you guys and girls sold on this?

Considering the amount of flack Nicolas Cage received over his last time-bending flick, I am a little surprised that he decided to come back for Alex Proyas', Knowing. Coming Soon is now hosting some on-set photos from the sci-fi thriller starring Cage and Rose Byrne. Sources managed to snap the pics on location in Geelong, Australia, and while there are no shots of Cage or Byrne, at least we get to see some stuff blowing up.

Knowing centers on a time capsule buried in 1958 that was chock full of doom and gloom prophecies. When the capsule is dug up 50 year later, it lands in the hands of a young boy and his professor father (Cage) who becomes obsessed with decoding the messages and preventing all-out destruction.

The production has had a long history in Hollywood, ever since the film was first set up over at Columbia. There have been a few directors attached over the years, notably Richard Kelly and Rod Lurie. Proyas came on board in 2005, and after a few rewrites, the film went into production in 2007. As if a long and troubled production history wasn't enough of an obstacle, it is no secret that Cage's 'shine' has been slowly diminishing over the years (thank you very much, Ghost Rider), so Knowing could be a hard sell to audiences who might still be ticked over shelling out their hard-earned dollars for Next.

Knowing is scheduled to arrive in theaters in 2009.

I need to come up with a new phrase for comedies like Just Buried. Something like "not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but certainly amiable, clever and diverting enough to warrant some attention." (But something shorter than that wordy mouthful.) Chaz Thorne's Just Buried offers a novel concept, several winning performances, and a few amusing surprises -- but I certainly wouldn't call it a fall-down-on-the-floor laugh riot. And that's OK with me. Sometimes a big batch of small chuckles, a few strong performances and a quietly amusing concept are enough to keep a comedy afloat, and that certainly seems to be the case here.

Jay Baruchel (best known for his hilarious lead performance in the awesome Undeclared) plays a nervous little twitcher of a nerd who inherits his estranged father's funeral home. Our jittery sorta-hero is completely unprepared for the gig: He can't stand to be around corpses, his professional demeanor is lacking at best, and he has this strange habit of bleeding from the nose whenever he gets nervous. But hey, Ollie's still willing to give the old funeral home a shot. (The presence of a lovely mortician called Roberta (Rose Byrne) definitely factors into his decision-making process.)

The sun is dying in Sunshine, but the familiarity of Trainspotting director Danny Boyle's latest makes one think an equally dire death is the sci-fi genre's aptitude for invention. A gorgeously crafted intergalactic saga sorely lacking in originality or profundity, Boyle's film marries 2001 aesthetics with an Alien narrative to create a rather straightforward – and superficially entertaining – adventure devoid of much meaning. Talk of God, humanity and morality abound but Alex Garland's screenplay only lightly grazes such heady philosophical issues, instead investing most of its time and energy on decently drawn characters, an authentic sense of setting, reasonably taut set pieces, and custom-built showcases for dazzling CG sunscapes, twinkling light flares, and immense cascades of roiling fire hungry to fill the void of space. On a purely visceral level, Sunshine is never less than engaging, and frequently gripping. Yet the general emptiness of its head is frustrating given its pretensions of high-minded deepness, and the commonplaceness of its plot is ultimately dispiriting for a movie seemingly so in awe of the beguiling, near-incomprehensible mysteriousness of the vast universe.

Boyle's film charts the mission of those aboard Icarus II, who have been charged with traveling to the perishing sun and reigniting it with a nuclear bomb (dubbed the "Payload") in a last ditch effort to save Earth from the grip of a solar winter. Icarus II is a marvelously envisioned vessel, its interiors full of high-tech doodad-ery made raggedy after 16 months of use by its human inhabitants, and its exterior marked by a giant, circular solar-paneled shield that protects the craft from the sun's lethal rays. Less impressive is the standard-issue motley crew, comprised of a stoically heroic captain (Hiroyuki Sanada), a sensitive girl (Rose Byrne), an arrogant coward (Troy Garity), a nondescript nobody (Michelle Yeoh), an out-there shrink (Cliff Curtis), a cold pragmatist (Chris Evans), and a sympathetic hero (Cillian Murphy). Save for Evans, who finds himself stuck with the most thanklessly schematic of roles, the cast admirably infuses their sketchily conceived astronauts with a dollop of relatable personality. Their hopes, dreams, and quasi-religious musings, however, are mere specks on the cosmic windshield of Sunshine, whose primary focus always remains on its computer-generated intergalactic wonders.

Well, even though the last "Australian" to attempt a boxing film wasn't exactly a raging success, you can't blame someone else for wanting to take a swing -- and yes, that pun was intended, I couldn't help myself. The Australian newspaper The Age posted a photograph from the Australian noir The Tender Hook. Written and directed by Jonathan Ogilvie, the film stars Rose Byrne, Matt Le Nevez (who made a name for himself as a serial killer in the Australian made-for-TV film The Society Murders) and Hugo Weaving. The story is less a sports tale and more of a "noir-ish" take on a love triangle between a young boxer, an aristocratic Englishman and Byrne's romantic opportunist. The film takes place in 1920s Redfern, Australia, and was expected to shoot on location. However, some local controversy sprung up when the production moved to Melbourne for the sake of some "incentives" to the filmmakers.

The photo is the first look at Le Nevez as the soulful boxer, with plenty of sepia tones to remind you that this is a period piece. Production started in February and Ogilvie is still filming, so a release date might still be a way off. Ogilvie has claimed that he has been trying to make this film for over ten years now, so I'm pretty sure that he's going to take his time to make sure he does it right.