Anton Corbijn's stylish thriller The American (with George Clooney rocking the title role) hits screens tomorrow, which means film reveiws hit the newstands (virtual and analog alike) tonight. We are thrilled to see that one of our favorite critics, Roger Ebert, gave the film four stars. Read the review, but here is a taste from the first paragraph:

The American allows George Clooney to play a man as starkly defined as a samurai. His fatal flaw, as it must be for any samurai, is love. Other than that, the American is perfect: Sealed, impervious and expert, with a focus so narrow it is defined only by his skills and his master. Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in Le Samourai by Jean-Pierre Melville.

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HollywoodNews.com is getting ready for the upcoming Toronto Film Festival by profiling a few titles of note.  Sean O'Connell recently took at look at Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's It's Kind of a Funny Story with Keir Gilchrist, Zach Galifianakis, and Emma Roberts. At the end, they looked forward to the next awards season.

Awards Potential: The Academy could respond favorably to Galifianakis playing against type (his role, based on trailers, seems more serious that, say, Alan Garner from “Hangover”). We’ll know more about Roberts and Gilchrist’s chances at breaking into the supporting categories once we’ve seen the film. Of course, with a very strong performance, Funny Story could easily slip into the Adapted Screenplay (it’s based on Ned Vizzini’s novel of the same name) and/or the Best Director categories.

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As reported in the Wall Street Journal blog "SpeakEasy," the novel on which the new George Clooney film The American is based is being reissued.  Originally published in 1990, Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentelman became the basis for the film which is coming out at the start of September. The novel, retitled The American, is being reissued and is out from Picador press. SpeakEasy also has an excerpt here from the novel for your reading pleasure.

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It's Kind of a Funny Story star Zach Galifianakis got to read some funny stories the other day when he showed up at Wilkes Country Public Library in North Carolina, whcih is close to his home town, to read children's books. Of course, Galifianakis isn't just for kids. According to Winston-Salem Journal, "word quickly spread in the days leading up to the reading, and the crowd included a lot of people with driver's licenses, jobs and mortgages."  Although Galifinakis threaten to narrate a little story called "The Hangover," in the end he read three books: Who is the Beast, The Snowy Day, and Don't Forget the Bacon--the last one, the bacon book, was actually written by his father, Harry Galifianakis.  Dad was there with his wife (and Zach's mom) Mary Frances. His twin brohter Seth was no where to be seen.

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In the blog The Philly Post from Philadelphia Magazine, mom/writer Gail Shister recounts having seen Lisa Cholodenko's comedy The Kids Are All Right with her daugher. The daughter, as Shister tells us, "has two lesbian moms. She was conceived through artificial insemination by an anonymous donor"  But the big isues for the mom was how the daugher saw the film:

After the movie, we headed to her apartment nearby. I asked her if she liked the film. She said yes, as did I. “The family with lesbian moms was just a regular family,” she said. “And they didn’t kill off the lesbians or give them some horrible disease.”

I hesitated before asking her the most important (to me) question.

“Did it make you want to find your donor dad?”

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In Lisa Cholodenko's comedy The Kids Are All Right, Josh Hutcherson plays Laser, a LA teen more into skateboarding and goofing off than reading. Or so it would seem. Hutcherson, whose been acting since he was 9, brings that rare mix of smarts and style to his character. The New York Post asked him in their "In My Library: Josh Hutcherson," what his favorite books are. The list extends from Stephen Hawkings to Holden Caulfield, that later being, of  course, from J.D. Salinger's iconic novel Catcher in the Rye, a book that Hutcherson would love help bring to the screen.

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period. I want to play him so badly! I know Salinger didn’t want to make it into a movie unless he played Holden — that’s what I’ve been told. I was gonna put myself on tape playing Holden and try to get Salinger behind it – it was kind of ambitious and crazy, I know, but I love it so much!

Now that Salinger is dead, Josh may have a better shot.

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New York Magazine's Culture Vulture looked backed on the confusing weekend film business with a glowing report about Lisa Cholodenko's comedy THe Kids Are All Right:

Elsewhere, The Kids Are All Right proved it was ready for a big-boy bed: Strong reviews and word-of-mouth translated to $3.5 million on just 847 screens; that's an impressive feat considering studio comedy Ramona and Beezus could only do $3.6 million in 2,700 theaters.

Right on!

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