'Villains' Trailer: Bill Skarsgard And Maika Monroe Pick The Wrong House To Invade

Stop me if you've heard this: a home invasion goes wrong when the perpetrators discover the home's occupants aren't what they seem. That's the basic idea behind Villains, a dark comedy in which Bill Skarsgard, who stalks kids as the terrifying Pennywise in It: Chapter Two, finds himself on the receiving end for once.

Villains also stars It Follows breakout Maika Monroe as Skarsgard's accomplice. Together, they make for a Bonnie & Clyde duo on the run who break into a home looking for a place to hide out. Sicario's Jeffrey Donovan, and The Closer's Kyra Sedgwick play the residents, and while they might appear to be normal wealthy homeowners, it quickly becomes apparent that's not the case when a young woman is found chained in the basement.

The tone is what catches you offguard here. While you expect something dark and twisted, it turns into a wacky comedy in which the creepy couple keeps the invaders around like houseguests. The film comes from writer/directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (The Stakelander), who clearly have a messed up sense of humor and a stylish way behind the camera.

Movies about bad people are my joint, so this has just leaped near the top of my must-see list.

Villains hits theaters on September 20th.

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Review: 'Submission' Starring Stanley Tucci And Addison Timlin

Submission debuted a year ago at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and if it had opened then we probably wouldn't have heard a word about it or cared that much. But to arrive now, after months that have brought us #MeToo, #TimesUp, and too many Harvey Weinstein-types to count, Submission's play on sexual power between a male professor and his talented, beautiful student/protégé couldn't come at a worse time.  With added eyes on the film, viewers will most likely overlook the strong performances by stars Stanley Tucci and Addison Timlin and instead focus on the wasted opportunity to say something important about this moment in our time.

That, and there are an entire library's worth of clichés to deal with. Tucci, sporting a rare head full of hair, plays Ted Swenson, that most frequent of cinematic creatures; the white, middle-aged author with one moderately successful novel, now a bored college professor struggling with his second book. >yawn<  Ted has a lovely, loyal wife (Kyra Sedgewick) and a comfortable life, but of course it isn't enough. He's bored, frustrated, and needs to feel special again. Perfect timing that he comes across Angela Argo (Timlin), one of his writing students who shows legitimate promise to be a real writer. Or maybe he only feels that way because she praises him constantly. She's a fan of his book...y'know, that one book he wrote, and wants desperately for his opinion on her work. Ted is only too happy to oblige because she stroked his ego. Angela keeps stringing the mouse along with new chapters from her book, which just so happens to be about a student in a passionate affair with her teacher. Hey, whaddaya know? What a coinkydink!

Seriously, are there men out there as dumb as Ted? Or do they exist only in Hollywood movies? Michael Douglas used to play guys this dumb all the time back in the '80s and '90s (Disclosure was a personal favorite). But all these years later it's dispiriting to see the same idiot intellectuals falling into traps of their own design. There's never a moment that we see anything other than a schemer in Angela, and never a moment when Ted doesn't look like a blind moron who is about to step on the wrong end of a rake.

Writer/director Richard Levine adapted Francine Prose's novel, Blue Angel, which was something of a firestarter back in the day. Now it reads as rote and overfamiliar, perhaps because it has been adapted so many times by others. His film relies on numerous tropes but the most problematic one for the time we live in is that of the young, man-eating vixen ensnaring innocent men and destroying their lives. While Angela is no saint, Ted doesn't have a halo over his head, either. Forgetting the inevitable, disgusting infidelity (which Levine shoots as grotesquely as possible to maximum effect), he's also a leech who sees Angela's success as his own, literally co-opting her work to cover for his failures. At this point. Submission is still a conversation-worthy piece with tremendous work by Tucci and Timlin. We expect that from Tucci, but Timlin has been on a career high and I'm afraid not enough people are noticing it. Here she strikes an alluring balance between Angela's innocence and deviousness. You want Ted to help her one minute but you're screaming for him to get away from her the next.

Submission's final act throws what little nuance there was out the window completely and concocts a nightmare scenario that turns Angela into a monster and Ted as the naïve deer in headlights. Those are the least interesting ways to portray either character, and feel like a way to avoid a more realistic outcome to a problem that couldn't be more timely. It's a shame because doubtful there will be many more films with this cast that will be willing to say anything at all.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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Review: 'The Edge of Seventeen' Starring Hailee Steinfeld And Woody Harrelson

Besides his incredible career producing some of the greatest sitcoms in the history of television, James L. Brooks is no slouch as a film director.  The man works in awkwardness and self-doubt the way other artists might work in oils or clay, and has movies like Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets to his credit.  The Edge of Seventeen would sit comfortably as one of his minor works, except for one thing: he only produced it.  The writer/director is newcomer Kelly Fremon Craig, who has clearly learned much from Brooks about how to make a comedy like this work instead of collapsing into a puddle of its own neuroses.

Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) has always felt awkward, but she's always been able to count on her best friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson).  Even when her father died and her mother, Mona (Kyra Sedgewick), began to offload more responsibility on to Nadine and her popular jock brother, Darian (Blake Jenner), Krista was there for her.

And then comes the night that Mona goes out of town.  Darian throws a party, while Nadine and Krista grab a bottle of liquor and hide upstairs.  Nadine drinks too much, and after she passes out Krista helps Darian clean up.  The morning finds Nadine's best friend in bed with her brother, their friendship on the rocks, and her life spiraling out of the bare semblance of control it had the night before.

Without Krista as a moderating influence, Nadine starts acting even more erratically than usual.  Her simmering attraction to a local bad-boy (Alexander Calvert) threatens to boil over into some very bad decisions.  She wears her welcome thin with her bemused but sympathetic social studies teacher, Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson).  She bumbles the awkward affections of her classmate, Erwin (Hayden Szeto).

Through it all, Steinfeld delivers her best performance since the breakout acclaim of True Grit.  Richardson shows off the same talents as a comedic foil that she displayed in last year's The Bronze, and Jenner has the same affable broish demeanor he used in Everybody Wants Some!! earlier this year.

But the real break with most comedies is the one that may have attracted Brooks to the script, if Fremon didn't learn it from him.  And that is not to fear real, human discomfort.  Not the discomfort of "this man -- or sometimes woman -- is acting like a complete idiot in contravention of all societal norms".  Instead it's the panic we all feel when we realize we have no idea what we're doing, followed by the odd relief of realizing that nobody else does either.  That's what takes a comedy from a collection of absurd situations and gags and turns it into something that really satisfies.

Rating: 4 out of 5

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Hailee Steinfeld Is A Drama Queen In 'The Edge Of Seventeen' Red Band Trailer

She's been a frontier girl on a dangerous mission, a trained teenage assassin, and a singer in an all-girl a capella group, but now Hailee Steinfeld is about to take on her toughest role yet: an ordinary teenaged girl. Steinfeld returns to high school in the new drama The Edge of Seventeen, and apparently her characters' problems warrant a trailer of the red band variety.

Surprisingly, the film co-stars Woody Harrelson and he's all over this trailer, perhaps to attract more than just an audience of teenaged girls. The film co-stars Haley Lu Richardson (The Bronze), Kyra Sedgewick, Hayden Szeto, and Blake Jenner (Everybody Wants Some!!!), with Steinfeld playing drama queen Nadine who finds out her bestie is dating her older brother. Since she hates him this means Nadine can no longer be friends with her former BFF. It's all enough to make a girl want to kill herself. DRAMA!

Written and directed by Kelly Fremon, The Edge of Seventeen opens September 30th.

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Homeless Richard Gere tries to Survive in Trailer for Oren Moverman's 'Time Out of Mind'

Richard Gere has always been an actor who goes the extra mile to inhabit the characters he plays, but for Oren Moverman's homelessness drama, Time Out of Mind, he went a bit further. Going incognito on the streets of New York City, Gere was so convincing as a homeless man that a family offered him some of their pizza. And it's that ultra-realism that is evident in the trailer for the film that earned rave reviews at TIFF last year.

Moverman, who directed The Messenger, Rampart, and wrote Love & Mercy, tells the story of a homeless man just trying to survive the Manhattan streets while coping with failing health, an alcohol habit, and an estranged daughter (Jena Malone). Here's the full synopsis:

George is a desperate man. With faltering health and nowhere to turn, he finds himself thrust onto New York City’s unforgiving streets. After exhausting all other avenues of temporary housing, he seeks refuge at Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan’s largest intake center for homeless men. It too proves a harsh and difficult-to-navigate environment, crowded as it is with similarly marginalized souls. But when George befriends a seasoned shelter-dweller named Dixon, he begins to harbor hope of repairing his relationship with his estranged daughter.

Moverman is a terrific, vastly underrated filmmaker but he has the tendency to get a little preachy. Whether that happens again with Time Out of Mind we'll have to wait until September 11th to find out.

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New Trailer for Ensemble Drama 'Reach Me' starring Sylvester Stallone, Thomas Jane, and Terry Crews

What you may not know about Sylvester Stallone is that he really has an artist's soul. Sure, in the movies he's either beating somebody's head in with his fists or blowing them to pieces with machine guns the size of small planets, but that's not who he is really. And in the upcoming inspirational drama Reach Me he gets to show that softer side we rarely get to see, for better or worse.

All the B-leaguers in Hollywood make up the Reach Me ensemble, which centers on a group of troubled people who are all helped by a mysterious self-help guru's book. Nobody seems to know who the author is, though, or that he has problems of his own. Tom Berenger, Kevin Connolly, Kyra Sedgwick, Nelly, Cary Elwes, Thomas Jane, Terry Crews, Danny Trejo, Kelsey Grammer, Lauren Cohan, Ryan Kwanten and Tom Sizemore star, with John Herzfield (15 Minutes) directing.

Reach Me hits VOD and gets a limited theatrical run beginning November 21st.

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Nicole Kidman is 'The Silent Wife'; Sophie Turner Joins 'Barely Lethal'; Bella Thorne Flies to 'Big Sky'

* Nicole Kidman has developed a very simple formula for staying on top, and that's to always have another prestige film right around the corner. Now that she's been pushed out of the Oscar race thanks to Grace of Monaco moving to next year, Kidman has begun to look forward to what comes next. She'll produce and star in The Silent Wife, based on the hit novel by A.S.A. Harrison. The psychological thriller is told from the alternating perspectives of a husband and wife whose troubled marriage is spiraling towards a murderous end. A director and screenwriter still need to be found so this one's a ways off. [Deadline]

* Sophie Turner is just the latest of many Game of Thrones stars to roll her success over to the big screen. She'll join Hailee Steinfeld, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jessica Alba in the action comedy Barely Lethal. Steinfeld plays a teen assassin who fakes her own death and tries to fit in at a normal school, only to run into an old enemy played by Alba. Turner is an undercover agent who enrolls in the school to try and capture Steinfeld. [Deadline]

* Another teen actress making the jump from the small screen is Bella Thorne, who just wrapped up the third and final season of Disney's Shake It Up. I caught it once on a flight and...well, it's not for me, but Thorne was the best thing about it. She'll now join Kyra Sedgewick in Big Sky, the English-language debut by Jorge Michel Grau, whose horror We Are What We Are was recently given an American remake. Big Sky centers on mother/duo duo Dee and Hazel who are  "on their way to a desert facility to help the teen deal with her paralyzing agoraphobia, [when] the two find themselves attacked by gunmen and Hazel has to fight her own demons for the duo to survive.”

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Trailer Time: 'The Possession', starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgewick

The Possession might seem like just another supernatural horror involving evil spirits and haunted houses, but the film has quite an interesting origin. Formerly titled Dibbuk Box, a "dybbuk" is an evil spirit from Jewish folklore. The title comes from a wine cabinet that has been haunted by the spirit of a dead immigrant, and was sold recently on Ebay. Every person who has own the box has experienced strange things and horrifying nightmares. It's story was chronicled an LA Times article titled 'Jinx in a Box'.

So now we have a film based on that story, with Sam Raimi on board as a producer and Ole Borndeal(Nightwatch) directing. Jeffrey Dean Morgan(Watchmen) plays the father of a young girl who buys a dybbuk box at a yard sale, only to awaken some sort of ancient evil. Doesn't sound all that novel, I know, but the actual trailer is pretty damn creepy, especially when they try to figure out what's going on with the girl through traditional means. The X-ray bit is something I've never seen before, and the last shot of the trailer might make this film worth checking out all by itself. The script comes from Stiles White and Juliet Snowden, who wrote the smart Nicolas Cage thriller(contradiction??), Knowing. 

The Possession opens on August 31st.....

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Michael C. Hall, Kyra Sedgewick, Ben Foster, and Jennifer Jason Leigh join 'Kill Your Darlings'

Ben Foster has proven himself to be a true chameleon of an actor, able to blend seamlessly into any role and genre, whether it's as the prickly toothed cowboy in 3:10 to Yuma, a hitman in The Mechanic, or a veteran military officer in The Messenger. Whatever film he shows up in, good things tend to happen, such as his co-starring role in the surprisingly good Mark Wahlberg actioner, Contraband. For his next role, he'll be tackling one of the most important figures in literary history, as he's set to play William S. Burroughs in the Beat Generation thriller, Kill Your Darlings.

Already packing a top notch, young cast including Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, Dane DeHaan(Chronicle) as Lucien Carr, Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac, and Elizabeth Olsen as Edie Parker, the film follows the legendary group of writers and poets detailing the 1944 murder of David Kammerer, a reported lover of Carr's. Joining Foster are a number of veterans who should make this a film to keep a close eye on during Oscar season: Michael C. Hall(Dexter) will play Kammerer, the victim and childhood friend to Burroughs. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kyra Sedgewick have also come aboard in two undisclosed roles.

Anything involving Kerouac and the Beat Generation continues to be a popular Hollywood subject. Their story will be told later this year in On the Road, directed by Walter Salles and starring Viggo Mortensen, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, and Kirsten Dunst. Filming on Kill Your Darlings begins on March 19th.

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