Everybody keeps shooting at John Cusack. To get them to stop, he and Malin Ackerman are going to have to crack a long string of numbers because, as we all know, the left side of the brain is the sexiest. In The Numbers Station, Cusack plays a dishonored black ops agent who is biding time protecting Ackerman’s character as she works at a numbers station in the middle of nowhere. She’ll be glad to have him, though, when the station comes under attack and a plan to kill some important world figures gets set in motion. This action thriller has been a long time in the making (Ethan Hawke was first attached to it back in 2010), and it represents a test for some newcomers. The first is screenwriter F. Scott Frazier, who has nailed down some work since, but who will see his first script sale finally emerge on the big screen here. The second is director Kasper Barfoed, who is not at all well known beyond his native Denmark. The trailer looks pretty damned cool. Despite the generic gloss over everything, it has the promise of a deeper mystery looming in the numbers:

Update: Hotel Noir is now (as of 10/9) available on VOD. Sebastian Gutierrez is that rare director who can make a sleek-looking film while getting actors to say the strangest things in the most sincere ways. His work on Women in Trouble and Elektra Luxx proved as much, elevating B-movies into the A+ range, and now his ensemble sensibilities return with a 1958 detective story flair in Hotel Noir. In the film, the detective (Rufus Sewell) hides away in a hotel waiting for killers to find him, and it looks like he has plenty to hold his attention. Malin Ackerman is dancing and taking showers; Carla Gugino is speaking easy and being smokey; and Mandy Moore is…seducing Danny DeVito. Naturally. Plus, genre legend Robert Forster gets a nice T-bone steak of a role to chew on. Not bad at all. Check out the trailer for yourself:

UPDATED: Hello, musical theatrics! Director Adam Shankman‘s take on Broadway hit Rock of Ages will undoubtedly be slick, highly produced, loud, melodramatic, and positively crammed with toe-tapping song-and-dance numbers (did you see Hairspray?) – essentially, it’s a film that will likely upset fans of the stage musical while also becoming a big commercial hit with a bizarre kitsch sensibility. That’s not just me guessing – that’s information hardily reinforced by the film’s first trailer. The film stars Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Malin Ackerman, Mary J. Blige, Bryan Cranston (really?!), Alec Baldwin, and Tom Cruise as (very different) people who populate and influence Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip music scene in the 1980′s. Hough and Boneta are trying to make it, Cruise already has, Zeta-Jones scream-sings a lot, that old story. The film is set to a cadre of ’80s classic jams, including Def Leppard, Joan Jett, Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, Night Ranger, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison, and Whitesnake. If you’ve yet to grow out of your big-haired, leather-clad rocker glory days, this is the film for you. Weirdly enough, despite Cruise (and his hair and his hips) being the marquee name on this film, we don’t get a whole lot of him until the last half of the trailer. And then we don’t get so much of him and his character, Stacee Jaxx, as we get some random groupie and her boobs. Bravo to everyone. Get your hairspray ready and check out

When three girls as gorgeous as this have something to say, I listen, no matter what the topic of conversation is. This time what they’re discussing is the sequel to Sebastian Gutierrez’s Women in Trouble, which is titled Elektra Luxx in an interview over at Coming Soon. The film tells the continued story of the title character who. after becoming pregnant, leaves her life of being a porn actress and struggles with her place in the world and what it means to be a person of substance. Carla Gugino, who plays Luxx, says of the porn industry, “Porn is a… that profession obviously has a lot of different sides to it. And there was the version where we were to go so much sort of darker and where we were to go into the underbelly of that and the challenges of what it is to choose that as a profession. And then there was the lighter, more harkening to the 40s screwball, melodrama element. And that was more the direction obviously that we’ve gone in.”

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s newest late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this stuff late at night, what do you expect?

I know what you’re thinking: “That’s not what the regulation Sex Scouts uniform looks like! Couldn’t this production have done any research?!” And you’d be right, but you’d be missing the point. In Elektra Luxx, Carla Gugino reprises her role as the titular porn star who has given up the business for baby. And, yes, it’s hers. The funny, sexy, strange, soap-y comedy was written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez as the meat of a Women in Trouble and Women in Ecstasy trilogy. It’s got the same heart, ovaries and potty mouth as the first, and it now has more Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a sex blogger. Check out the surprisingly not-red-band trailer for yourself:

Women can be smart, strong and sexy all at the same time. It’s true. They can also add to that pile a bit of insecurity, sensitivity and compassion. And about two dozen other emotions and states of mind that men don’t even have words for yet. It is that dynamic nature of women that Carla Gugino and the rest of the cast of Women In Trouble and its sequel, Elektra Luxx, attempt to capture alongside a healthy bit of soap operatics and sexual comedy. Gugino plays a porn star who finds out that she’s pregnant and stands as the center piece of several other stories that intertwine directly and thematically. Both movies are great, and now Elektra Luxx is seeing the light of day and so are these images:

There is a fine line to walk as an indie dramedy, and HappyThankYouMorePlease seems to walk right up to the line and then raise its eyebrow. On the optimistic front, Neil really loved it when he saw it at Sundance last year and talked it up as the natural next step in the evolution of romantic comedies signified by 500 Days of Summer. The comparison seems obvious even from just the trailer, but Josh Radnor (of How I Met Your Mother) seems to want to juggle more than one relationship here with his writing/directing/starring debut. Check out the trailer for yourself:

Elektra Luxx picks up where Women in Trouble, the sensational first part of this trilogy to be, left off. We meet Elektra (Carla Gugino), a porn star whose career has just ended with her newfound pregnancy and the untimely death of her rock star lover, Nick Chapel (Josh Brolin).

It is not often that you have a chance to sit opposite of true beauty. Even when you have the chance, it is easy to clam up and lose your thoughts. So needless to say, I had to keep it cool while opposite Elektra Luxx director Sebastian Gutierrez. On a side note, I also interviewed Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman.

When director Sebastian Gutierrez woke up this morning, he probably saw it ending a little differently. Just a little, I’m sure. He was likely nervous. His film, Elektra Luxx — the much anticipated sequel to 2009′s Women in Trouble — was due to make its world premiere at the Paramount theater in Austin in the prime slot of SXSW 2010′s opening night. That is, until something unfortunate happened.

Future filmmakers, if there’s one thing that your quirky indie comedy will need to have any shot at success beyond the snowy streets of Sundance, it is charm.

From the long list of names on the posters and trailers, you’d think that this comedy would rise above the usual average drivel, but you’d be wrong.

We have watched Watchmen. Is the early negativity spot on? Is the counter-hype correct? Will fans come to praise Snyder or bury him? Find our thoughts within.

Where there are Watchmen, there are Rejects, so it should be no surprise that when the actors sat down to talk to the media, we ignored the restraining order and snuck in through the service elevator.

Intrepid FSR reader Jeff P. sent over a few cool new featurettes for Watchmen this afternoon. And since I’m feeling generous, I thought I might throw them up on the site for all to see.

Warner Bros. has released their final round of photos for the upcoming costumed hero flick Watchmen, and instead of just picking out the 30 or so new images from the bunch we’ve decided to just give you everything — all 58 officially released photos in glorious high resolution.

It seems as if every day brings us some sort of obligatory Watchmen update. And why not, it is one of the most anticipate fanboy movies… ever. Today we bring you two new TV spots and news of a Portrait Book and a cameo by director Zack Snyder.

You’ll probably want to get used to posts like this from now until March 6th when Watchmen hits theaters. The Warner Bros. marketing machine is working overtime to ensure that Zack Snyder’s love letter to fanboys will also appeal to guys that have girlfriends.

In a country that has replaced the motto of “land of the free, home of the brave” with “make sure you Tivo it,” it only makes sense to throw away last year’s actors like a DVD of an Ashton Kutcher film at Christmas. But worry not, we’ve got you covered on who everyone will be talking about in 2009.