Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our Tribeca coverage, and as of today, the film is in limited release. In The English Teacher, star Julianne Moore plays an English teacher; I point that out, redundantly, because the character type is almost redundant. Everything that you would expect from a stereotypical high school purveyor of Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne is true about Moore’s Ms. Linda Sinclair. She’s introduced as the obvious loner, a shy woman in love with the classics. She goes on blind dates with terrible men, who she imaginatively grades in her head like a student’s paper. The script even goes so far as to make sure she’s buffeted by voiceover narration, in an inevitably British accent. Yet Moore, and to an extent director Craig Zisk, do an excellent job at keeping Ms. Sinclair away from the frustrating blandness of the stock character, at least for the first act of the film. There isn’t necessarily more to her than meets the eye, but the people around her allow her to grow into something more interesting. The English Teacher has quite the admirable start, winning the audience over in spite of all of our preconceived notions about this sort of self-consciously charming indie movie. That’s how it begins, anyway. Ms. Sinclair is a bored English teacher in a small Pennsylvania town, somewhere in the vicinity of Scranton. She bumps into a former student at the bank. Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano) is a playwright, or at least he went

Relativity Media has set a release date for their big pick-up from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, placing Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s directorial debut, Don Jon (previously known as Don Jon’s Addiction), in the somewhat surprisingly awards season-friendly spot of October 18th. Gordon-Levitt’s film stars him as a regressed, Jersey Shore-styled man-child who pulls a ton of ladies but can’t seem to get away from his crippling Internet porn addiction. Oh, also, it’s a comedy. The film will now open the same day as two other Julianne Moore-starrers, the Carrie remake and The Seventh Son, along with The Butler, none of which seem to threaten the film’s intended audience. Can’t wait until October? Well, you’re going to have to – but, until then, relive the magic with Allison’s Sundance review of the film.

It may only be Monday, but our feel-bad trailer of the week has already arrived (and with a bullet). In Scott McGehee and David Siegel‘s What Maisie Knew, an already-messy divorce takes on an extra cast of awful, thanks to some apparently shifting romantic entanglements. Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan star as hip New Yorkers in the middle of a particularly ugly divorce and custody battle that threatens the well-being of their only daughter, an eerily adult Onata Aprile (as Maisie). Things get still worse when Coogan takes up with the nanny, Moore takes up with Alexander Skarsgard, and — oops! — said nanny and said Skarsgard just might take up with each other. See? Messy. If you’re not interested in being in a good mood, check out the first trailer for What Maisie Knew after the break.

Co-directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein’s 6 Souls was filmed all the way back in 2009, so it’s been sitting on the shelf without U.S. distribution for quite a while now. It’s highly unlikely that’s a good sign as far as the film’s quality is concerned, and, in fact, seeing as it’s already been released in multiple markets all around the world, you can already go to its Rotten Tomatoes page and see that it has yet to earn anything other than a handful of negative reviews from UK outlets. Still though, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and the new trailer that’s been put together for the film’s upcoming US release promotes what looks to be a promising psychological thriller with horror movie overtones…so maybe you’ll find it interesting anyway?

Don Jon (Joesph Gordon-Levitt) is — as his name suggests — a modern-day “Don Juan.” He’s a ladies man the girls just can’t seem to say no to. Every weekend Jon stands in the middle of the club with his buddies, scans the room, sets his sights on whichever girl is closest to “dime” status, dances up on her, makes out with her, escorts her into a taxi, and then, well, you can imagine what happens next. At the beginning of Don Jon’s Addiction, Jon tells us there are only a handful of things that matter to him: his body, his pad, his car, his family, his boys, and his girls. But there is one thing that trumps them all: his porn. Jon explains that it’s something “all guys do,” and while he likes the real thing (and certainly has no trouble getting it), he always enjoys his porn more. After a while of running through the same routine, Jon finds himself bored and longing for something more. That “something more” seems to come in the dime sized package of Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a curvaceous blonde who fits all of Jon’s stereotypical requirements. Barbara is different, Barbara is special, Barbara is making Jon wait. Barbara wants a real relationship and Jon obliges because Barbara is the “most beautiful thing he has ever seen.” But after finally sealing the deal with Barbara, Jon still finds himself hitting the power button to lose himself in his laptop.

As we all know, any seventh son born of a seventh son is given incredible powers at birth, and it’s that concept that novelist Joseph Delaney culled for his fantasy series “The Wardstone Chronicles.” Warners is turning the first book in that series — “The Spook’s Apprentice” — into a feature film (with hopes to launch a new young adult hit), and they’ve released new images from the October-bound movie. That’s Jeff Bridges playing a Spook named Master Gregory who is teaching Thomas (Ben Barnes) how to battle evil, which is pictured below in the form of Julianne Moore as Mother Malkin. You think they’d want to avoid propagating vicious stereotypes against gingers, but apparently they’re comfortable with it.

Look – computers will never have souls. It’s disappointing to admit, but we all have to face facts at some point in our lives. Maybe one day they’ll manage to act alive, but they will never feel our love. They have no feelings. They are soulless, uncaring devices that we all too often assign our own humanity to – just like cats. But of course, in film, that would just be no fun. It’s better to have an A.I. that is dynamic and has some kind of personality, even if that personality is a lack of any kind of personality. The key is the voice, and here are some of the most unforgettable ones…

It was all the way back in June of last year that we first heard about Dan Fogelman’s Imagine, a movie he plans to tackle as both writer and director. Imagine was said to be a story about an aging rock star who gets inspired to reconnect with his estranged son after receiving a posthumous letter from John Lennon, and the rumor at the time was that Al Pacino was being courted to star. Well, here we are, a year and some change later, and not only has Pacino’s casting solidified, but it turns out he’s brought a couple of other big names along with him. And, in addition to that, new reports give us a little bit more of an idea what this story is all about. According to Deadline Hollywood, in addition to Pacino playing the aging rocker who’s still out there on the road playing all of his old songs, Fogelman has recruited Jeremy Renner to play the part of the adult son, as well as Julianne Moore to play the part of a hotel manager Pacino’s character befriends. Now, about that letter from John Lennon. The additional story bits here are that it was originally meant for a 19-year-old version of Pacino’s character, who had written to his music hero. Unfortunately, the letter was lost in the mail for decades, and delivered its words of wisdom quite a bit too late to get the guy’s life on the right track. All is not yet lost, however,

Carrie was the very first piece of Stephen King‘s writing to see a film adaptation way back in 1976, and Brian De Palma’s film remains one of the high points in King’s cinematic canon. The story follows a teenage girl whose blossoming into womanhood opens up a powerful psychic power within her, and while her rigidly religious mother sees it as the work of the devil her cruel classmates don’t see it at all. Well, not until prom night anyway. King’s fiction has been adapted for the screen over a hundred times including feature films, shorts, direct to DVD efforts and sequels, and starting with 1997′s mini-series of The Shining his previously adapted works also started getting the remake treatment. Interestingly, all of them ended up as TV films/mini-series (including a 2002 redo of Carrie that aired on NBC). That distinction is set to change early next year though when Screen Gems/MGM will release a new feature version of King’s first novel. Director Kimberly Peirce returns to the big screen for only the second time since she burst onto the scene with 1995′s Boys Don’t Cry, and she’s joined by Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore to tell a story about bullying, teen angst and the untimely arrival of Aunt Flo. Check out the brand new teaser below.

All right, all you great big, bright, shining stars out there. It’s time to hear what Paul Thomas Anderson has to say. With recent movies like There Will Be Blood and his latest, The Master, the director is smack in the middle of a stretch in his career in which he’s defining a new genre called Discomfort. Boogie Nights looks downright cheerful by comparison, so it’s nice to go back and listen to the writer/director discuss his great, early achievement. And here we have it, all 37 things we learned listening to PT Anderson talk about Boogie Nights. You got the touch…!

Entertainment Weekly has the first images from Kimberly Peirce‘s Carrie remake (as you can see below), and they’re exactly what you expect. Chloe Moretz is covered in blood, Julianne Moore is holding a knife in a matronly white night gown. Granted, they’re just pictures, and they’re picture specifically chosen for the general populace that is the EW readership, but there’s something chilling about placing the 1976 images next to the 2012 images and seeing virtually the same thing. Carbon copies are nothing to get excited about.

A quick hit of official business on a Friday afternoon, as Deadline Farmdale reports that MGM has made a formal offer to Julianne Moore for the role of the demented religious fanatic mother in Kimberly Peirce‘s take on Carrie. Moore had been in the running for the role since last month, and it appeared to be hers to lose earlier this month. Jody Foster was also rumored to be a possible pick by Peirce. Chloe Moretz is set to play the Carrie role that Sissy Spacek originated in Brian De Palma’s 1976 take on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. Piper Laurie played the mother role in that film, eventually getting an Oscar nomination for her work. With such a solid team behind this film, it looks like more awards glory might be in the cards for the film about a teen outcast, her psychic powers, and a town that just doesn’t understand.

Scientists still haven’t proven who the boss was, but Tony Danza is close to playing father to Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s “porn-addicted, modern day Don Juan from New Jersey who sets out to become a less selfish person.” Don Jon’s Addiction was written by Gordon-Levitt and will act as his directorial debut. It’s also the project that kept him (schedule-wise) from joining Django Unchained. As for Danza, why the hell not? He’s an underestimated acting force that has a broader range than his Who’s the Boss? and Taxi roots suggest. Plus, he’d be joining Julianne Moore and Scarlett Johansson, which means the redhead quotient needs to be equaled out considerably. And, honestly, it’s about time Danza got a John Travolta moment. Danza should be playing out his elder statesmen years playing badass roles and getting more movie projects. [Variety]

Back when it was announced that Chloe Moretz would be the new girl getting laughed at it Kimberly Peirce’s upcoming remake of the horror classic Carrie, it was also rumored that the director had a couple of names in mind for Carrie’s overbearing, fundamentalist mother. According to word on the street, either Jodie Foster or Julianne Moore were the top choices. Of course, word on the street isn’t always very reliable, so that was news to be taken with a grain of salt. In this case, however, the gossip-mongers seem to have been spot on. Bloody Disgusting is now reporting that things have progressed with Moore to the point where she’s in serious talks to take the role. If things work out and Moore comes on board, she’s going to have some pretty big shoes to fill. Piper Laurie already portrayed the mother character very memorably in the Brian De Palma-directed Carrie, to the point where she’s fondly thought of as one of the creepiest and most evil villains in horror history. Moore already has one strike against her as far as horror fans are concerned due to her involvement in Gus Van Sant’s absurd Psycho remake, so if this film turns out to be as unnecessary and awful as that one, she could be marked as a pariah for life.

The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained. The Film: Children of Men (2006) The Plot: In the near future global civilization is on the brink of total collapse as the human race approaches extinction via a long dry spell of human infertility. There hasn’t been a human child born in almost two decades and the answer for our sudden inability to bear children has been an elusive scientific mystery in all those years. In this world of societal discourse and upheaval Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is an everyman with ties to an underground group of revolutionaries through a past relationship with the group’s leader Julian (Julianne Moore). Kidnapped off the streets by the group Theo is asked by Julian to help attain transit papers for a young woman and help see that she crosses the British border to safety. Asking no questions of what the significance of that particular girl’s safety is Theo agrees and along the way to the first stop on their journey their vehicle gets ambushed. Following that event Theo’s initially loose involvement in the situation becomes more important when he takes

Back in the beginning of February we learned that actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt was planning on making the jump to becoming a writer/director with an untitled comedy starring himself and Scarlett Johansson. The story was said to be about a modern day Don Juan trying to reform himself of such salacious behavior, and Johansson was attached to play one of two big female roles. A new report from Variety indicates that progress must be being made on the project, because not only is it scheduled to go in front of the cameras next month, but Gordon-Levitt has also landed another huge name to fill that second female role. Fresh off of turning heads with her creepily spot-on portrayal of Sarah Palin in the recent HBO-produced Game Change, Julianne Moore is said to have joined the project. Reportedly, she will be playing a character that becomes an unlikely mentor to Gordon-Levitt’s ladies’ man. Whether that mentoring is in the art of picking up the ladies or the art of no longer picking up the ladies isn’t quite clear, but either possibility sounds intriguing. As of yet, the film is still untitled. With cast in place and shooting set to begin, probably it’s time they get on that.

The upcoming remake of Carrie is a continual tale of good news and bad news. The bad news is that they’re once again remaking a movie that still holds up perfectly well. But the good news is that they’ve hired director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) to take on the project, and if there’s anyone who can do something interesting with the material, it’s probably her. So far, this pattern holds true for the casting as well. The good news is that Megan Fox is not being mentioned as a possibility for taking on the title role. Carrie is supposed to be homely and awkward, and picturing Megan Fox trying to play the weird girl that everyone picks on was enough to make one lose their marbles. The bad news comes from a Vulture report that the casting of the role has come down to one of two names, and, once again, the actresses being looked at seem way too conventionally attractive and charming to be good choices. Their sources have the decision being made between either Let Me In star Chloë Moretz or Marley & Me actress Haley Bennett.

There are those on the right who have said that Game Change is a partisan smear. At the same time, some on the left may have gone into the program expecting a SNL-style “look-how-dumb-Palin-is” work of predictable affirmation. But while hit jobs and hagiographies might make for effective 30-second political ads, they can’t sustain a two-hour block of television. Game Change, by contrast, is a gripping (though by no means perfect) two-hour block of television. But the term “block of television” does not necessarily carry the same connotations as “TV movie.” The distinction here is important. Game Change’s central thesis is not a political point about either John McCain or Sarah Palin as candidates (what could a TV movie possibly say that’s new or urgent in this respect?), but is instead a lamentation about how our political landscape is determined (on all sides of the ideological spectrum) by the media cycles of Celebrity 2.0. HBO has been preoccupied for quite some time by the major chapters in American history, rolling out expensive and impressive miniseries detailing the canonical moments that Americans learned about during their primary education: whether it be The Revolutionary War and the stories of the Founding Fathers (John Adams (2008)), WWII (Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010)), or man’s journey to the moon (From the Earth to the Moon). However, HBO’s original programming has also taken microscopic examinations of recent, not-so-canonized history with smaller-scale projects like Recount (2008), Too Big to Fail (2011), and, of

Welcome to “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” or perhaps more appropriately, welcome to Being Flynn, complete with its own bullshit and own suckitude. Based on writer Nick Flynn‘s memoir (you know, the one called “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” as if you could forget such a title), Paul Weitz‘s film sets Paul Dano as Nick and Robert De Niro as his wayward papa, the irreverent and inappropriate Jonathan Flynn. Nick’s lived most of his life without his father, a man who has “manifested as an absence” for twentysomething years, and Nick’s been just fine with it. Relatively. Kind of. Fine – not really. But things are about to get much worse for Nick, because Jonathan is about to pop back into his life – and utterly ruin it in the process.

When HBO wanted to create an adaptation of the best-selling book “Game Change,” about the 2008 presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama, they picked up the phone and called Jay Roach – the director behind Austin Powers and The Fockers who also delivered them the television movie Recount. Now, Roach has covered, semi-fictionally, politics in 2000 and in 2008. Slog through the dialogue between Woody Harrelson as Steve Schmidt (the Republican strategist) and Ed Harris as McCain, and you’ll be rewarded briefly with who will inevitably be the real star of the show, Julianne Moore slingin’ a down home twang as Sarah Palin. The question is this: with so much going on socially and economically, are we really interested in going back in time to examine a reality television star?