She became a star thanks to the High School Musical series and then went onto break out of the Disney mold by taking on more serious roles in films like The Frozen Ground and Spring Breakers. However, nothing will prepare you for how far Vanessa Hudgens goes to portray Apple Bailey in Gimme Shelter.
Rosario Dawson gives one of her best performances to date as June Bailey in Gimme Shelter. Written and directed by Ronald Krauss, it tells the story of Apple Bailey (played by Vanessa Hudgens), a young girl who runs away from June, her abusive and drug addicted mother, to find her biological father and escape the hellish world she has been growing up in.
It’s been 12 years since we last saw Tom Clancy’s iconic CIA analyst Jack Ryan on the silver screen (The Sum of all Fears), but now he’s back in the all new adventure titled Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Unlike the other films in the franchise, this one is not based on any of Clancy’s novels and, like the last Jack Ryan adventure, it serves to reboot the popular character for a new generation of moviegoers.
You may know him best as Lex Luthor from the television series Smallville, but now actor Michael Rosenbaum is showing us what he can do on the big screen with Back In The Day. Not only did he star, write and produce the comedy, but he also made his directorial debut with it as well. One can only imagine how busy he was behind the camera as well as in front of it, and it makes you wonder if Robin Williams was right when he said at the Oscars that the writer, producer, director is one of the few people in the world who can “blow smoke up his own ass.”
With Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, the long running horror franchise succeeds in making a rebound after the disappointment that was Paranormal Activity 4. Not so much a sequel as it is a spin-off, it takes a different approach to the series by focusing on a working class Latino family that lives in an apartment complex when that haunting we’ve all become familiar with in these movies starts up again. It also has an ending which succeeds in putting the entire Paranormal Activity franchise on its head, and you have to see it to believe it.
It's time for another case of competing films, as Hollywood looks to Hercules for some box-office glory. Though Dwayne Johnson has his own take on the iconic character heading our way later this year, first up is Kellan Lutz's The Legend of Hercules, which offers up an origin story of the mythical Greek hero.
Writer/director Quentin Dupieux, the man behind Rubber, has given us his most absurdist film yet with Wrong Cops. It is not so much a movie as it is a collection of sketches about crooked cops who are involved in a number of illegal activities. There is a main through line, however, and it involves an innocent bystander who gets accidentally shot by one of the cops. When they try to figure out the best way to get rid of the body though, they find that the wounded man proves to be rather useful, even while he’s bleeding to death.
It’s time to head back to Middle Earth again as Peter Jackson brings us the second film in his Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. A darker and more action packed outing than An Unexpected Journey, the plot follows Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) traveling along with Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his twelve dwarves as they make their way to where the dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) dwells. During their journey, Bilbo’s relationship with the ring continues to grow, and Thorin wonders if he can ever be the leader many said he was destined to be.
Out Of The Furnace is the latest effort from Scott Cooper, the same man who directed Jeff Bridges to an Oscar winning performance in Crazy Heart. The film tells the story of two brothers, Russell (Christian Bale) and Rodney (Casey Affleck), who grew up in the Rust Belt town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. But while Russell is content to follow in his father's footsteps as a steel mill worker, Rodney is looking for something very different in life and ends up enlisting in the Army. After serving several tours of duty in Iraq, he comes home to find that his hometown has been hit hard by the recession, and his brother is serving time in jail.
Jason Statham returns to kick some more ass in his latest film, Homefront, where he stars as DEA agent Phil Broker who, after a drug bust gone bad, resigns and moves with his daughter (played by Izabela Vidovic) to a quiet town in Louisiana. But what looks on the surface to be a peaceful place soon turns out to be anything but that after Broker’s daughter beats up the school bully whose mother (played by Kate Bosworth) happens to be the sister of meth kingpin Gator Bodine (James Franco). A chain of events ends up forcing Broker to confront his past as Gator and his associates wreak havoc on his life and he is forced to protect his home in the only way he knows how.
