Nobody thought guys in turtle suits would be cool, but the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film kicked ass. After three films with animatronic turtle heads, producer Thom Gray wanted to take the property into the CGI realm. It took about 10 years for it to come together, but now Kevin Munroe is finishing the CGI TMNT film. If you’ve seen any of the early footage screened

Fans of Narc have been waiting five long years for another Joe Carnahan movie. Smoking Aces is finally here, but almost more interesting are the films he did not make in the years in between. A Walk Among Tombstones died by the wayside and Mission: Impossible III became J.J. Abrams’ feature debut after a mysterious abandonment by Carnahan. “Well, people in this town don’t like me,” Carnahan joked

Young actresses breaking into film often have to pay their dues in horror movies. The genre tends to provide the most fertile roles for young girls in danger. Sophia Bush doesn’t mind though, because they also allow her to get physical. Considering herself a tomboy, she took her licks on and off the set. In The Hitcher, Bush plays Grace, a completely new female lead in the movie

Ben Foster plays the antagonist of Alpha Dog. While Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) and his friends play gangster, Jake Mazursky (Foster) has real problems. Addicted to meth and unable to hold a job, he's living a dangerous life. So when Truelove's boys kidnap his brother, it's not just playing to Jake. Though the animosity gets heated in the film, the boys all got along swell

Nicolette Sheridan must have drawn the short straw in the Desperate Housewives movie offers. Felicity Huffman got an Oscar nomination, Eva Longoria got to play a kick-ass tough girl but Sheridan has to do a panty dance on Cedric the Entertainer. She plays a femme fatale in the spy spoof Code Name: The Cleaner, trying to extract information from his amnesiac janitor. Sheridan was a bit out of her Desperate comfort zone

Alfonso Cuaron has made a thing of taking genres and grounding them in reality. He put contemporary clothes on the Harry Potter kids and now he turns the future into the present with Children of Men. Set in the next generation when women have ceased conceiving, the film is really about our current issues with fertility, immigration and war.

When you think of labyrinth, it may be one of those hedge mazes, or that marble game with the tilty board, or the awesome Jim Henson movie. But Guillermo Del Toro has a much deeper interpretation of it. His film, Pan's Labyrinth does involve a backyard maze full of fantasy creatures, but the labyrinth he's thinking of is more internal.

Everyone had their fun when Sylvester Stallone announced he was writing Rocky VI, but now that the new training montages are playing on TV, who's laughing now? Stallone knows that Rocky is his most popular character and makes no bones about returning to the well. Throughout his career, he has faced adversity when he tried to stray too far from the underdog tale.

Eminem made 8 Mile and hasn't really tried to expand his acting horizons. Right after Get Rich or Die Tryin', 50 Cent took another acting gig. Home of the Brave lets him play a character with far fewer ties to his real life persona. Sure, it's a disaffected youth prone to violence, but this is an Iraqi war veteran in real trouble.

If you’ve gone to the movies this fall, you’ve seen a lot of Cate Blanchett. Between Babel, The Good German and Notes on a Scandal, she’s bound to at least have a trailer playing in your multiplex. But Blanchett only came out for interviews once, on behalf of The Good German, and explained how this crazy Cate Blanchett Film Festival came to be. With three films out in theaters and more in the can

Will Smith isn’t saving the world this time. He’s just trying to save his own family in The Pursuit of Happyness. He plays real life stock broker prodigy Chris Gardner, who struggled through homelessness while completing his internship at Dean Witter, caring for his son the whole time. Smith’s real son, Jaden, plays Gardner’s son in the film, and Smith determined to open himself up to a more intimate style of acting on the film

Kate Winslet may have crossed over into light, fluffy territory with the romantic comedy The Holiday, but she certainly hasn't sold out. Speaking with the eloquent Brit made it clear that just as much deep thought went into her portrayal of a lovelorn book editor as went into her most acclaimed work. "I think you know it’s just a whole new genre to me, you know romantic comedy," she says

Blood Diamond may look like just another epic adventure film with good looking guys running through deserts and jungles, dodging gunfire. It's got that, but it's about a real life issue. Corrupt governments and militaries of Africa have exploited their people, forcing them to mine for diamonds. There are now measures in place to prevent jewelers from selling these so-called conflict diamonds

Josh Duhamel is becoming quite an action hero. He's got the Transformers movie coming out next summer, and to tide us over he's on the run in Turistas. Duhamel plays the most cautious member of a group of kids traveling in Brazil. When their paradise becomes a deadly trap, he springs into action leading them out of the jungle hell. Running from evil Brazilian organ thieves is quite a workout

Catherine Hardwicke has done well with teenage stories like Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown. Those worlds may seem downright tame compared with the religious expectations of her latest, The Nativity Story. But the filmmaker just saw it as another relatable story of teenage angst, regardless of its influence on the world 2000 years later.

Back in the ‘80s, Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito might have played buddy cops in some Lethal Weapon knock-off. Now they're of the age for the generic family comedy. In Deck the Halls, Broderick plays a suburban Christmas junkie whose dominion is threatened by newcomer Buddy Hall (DeVito). The taller actor claims he is not obsessed with the holiday in real life

Hugh Jackman may have given the performance of his career in The Fountain, but he was kind of just following orders. The Darren Aronofsky film is even more impressionistic and nonlinear than his others, so an actor has to just go with it. Jackman only needed one thing to go on

Let's Go to Prison was not screened for critics, so we actually had to find out basic character details from the cast. The trailers show Chi McBride seducing poor, falsely accused Will Arnett in his prison cell. But McBride assured us there's more to his part than funny rape.

Kyle Gass is the other half of Tenacious D with Jack Black. When paired for an interview, he tends to let Black do most of the talking. Black is the movie star and the one most likely to be quoted anyway. But we like Kyle Gass too so we're giving him his props. The D's first film, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, was made on the cheap so the band could retain creative control

Emilio Estevez was only a child when Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador hotel. However, some of his earliest memories were of his parents’ sadness following that event. Nearly 40 years later, Estevez has crafted the film Bobby, centered on an ensemble of characters in the hotel on the fateful day. His hope is to create a portrait of an important era for this generation.