Barry Levinson

Rock The Kasbah - The Man And The Music Featurette

'Rock The Kasbah' screenwriter Mitch Glazer introduces himself as a reporter for Crawdaddy! magazine (which he ran in the late 1970s) as he prepares to interview Bill Murray in character on the movie's set in Kabul, Afghanistan. Murray hilariously embodies the spirit of the music industry's fictional top manager; an unstable character who finds himself going off the rails despite making some of music's most iconic decisions from Slash's top hat to Madonna's stage moniker.

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Rock The Kasbah Trailer

Sometimes, life can really take a turn when you least expect it. For one man, things about to go completely off the rails. Richie Lanz (Bill Murray) has been a tour manager for some of the greatest rock bands of all time, and his latest project is about to stir up something special. After becoming the tour manager for a young woman (Zooey Deschanel), he informs her that they are putting on a show in Afghanistan. Terrified, she runs away after they arrive, taking Lanz' wallet and passport with her. Now, stuck in Afghanistan, Lanz is forced to do what he can to find a way home, while doing what he can to enjoy the rocking lifestyle he has come to know and love along the way.

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First Look At Bill Murray & Zooey Deschanel In 'Rock The Kasbah' [Trailer]

By Ed Biggs in Movies / TV / Theatre on 16 June 2015

Bill Murray Zooey Deschanel Kate Hudson Bruce Willis Barry Levinson

Released in October, the film will see rock band manager Bill Murray get stranded in Kabul.

Rejoice, Bill Murray fans! We’ve just got the first glimpse at his new comedy Rock The Kasbah, in which he stars alongside Kate Hudson, Bruce Willis and Zooey Deschanel.

Directed by Barry Levinson (Sleepers, Bugsy, Good Morning Vietnam), it stars Murray, Hudson, Willis and Deschanel with a supporting cast of Danny McBride, Scott Caan, Leem Lubany, Fahim Fazli, Taylor Kinney, Beejan Land and Arian Moayed. It is scheduled to be released in US theaters on October 23rd.

Watch the trailer for Rock The Kasbah here:

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The Humbling Trailer

"All the world's a stage, and the men and women merely players". Or so thinks Simon Axler (Al Pacino), a washed up aged actor who struggles to distinguish real life from the stage. With no money and all but no dignity left, his agent is desperate to help him get a new job advertising. Then he meets Pegeen (Greta Gerwig), the daughter of a close friend. As his flirtation is returned, Simon is more than confused to discover that Pegeen is a lesbian. Through a web of hilarious deception, Simon is warned to stay away, yet his odd relationship with Pegeen blossoms into something both self-destructive and moving.

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Retire? No Way: Shia LaBeouf Is Rocking The Kasbah With Bill Murray And Bruce Willis

By Jack de Aguilar in Movies / TV / Theatre on 31 January 2014

Shia LaBeouf Barry Levinson Bill Murray

Seems like the actor's retirement threat was an empty one

Shia LaBeouf’s antics over the past year have been attributed to a wider ideal: a performance art piece produced with the help of several other artists. Whether that’s true or not, the mercurial actor claimed he was retiring ‘from public life’ – a claim that has just been confirmed as boohocky with the announcement of his role in Rock The Kasbah. (Casbah? Some say K, some say C)

Shia LaBeouf doing some sort of work - proper work

LaBeouf – who made his name as a child-star in Even Stevens, and enjoyed a successful turn in Holes - will star alongside Bill Murray in Barry Levinson's Rock the Kasbah. Bruce Willis, Kate Hudson, Danny McBride and Zooey Deschanel also share the screen. Brian Grazer and Tom Freston are stepping in to exec produce Kasbah, while QED International will be looking for buyers at Berlin's upcoming European Film Market.

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Johnny Depp To Star As Notorious Boston Gangster In 'Black Mass'

By Joe Wilde in Movies / TV / Theatre on 03 February 2013

Johnny Depp Armie Hammer Barry Levinson

Johnny Depp will take on the role of the notorious Boston-based gangster Whitey Bulger in the upcoming film Black Mass, it was announced yesterday by the film's producers.

The project, which will be directed by Barry Levinson (who won an Oscar for directing Rain Man), will follow the life of one of America's most infamous organised crime barons and will be adapted from the book on Whitey's life, also called Black Mass, by Boston journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. Whitey rose through the ranks of Boston's criminal underworld before becoming an informant for the FBI in a bid to get rid of a gangster rival. He was eventually arrested in 2011.

The film is being produced by Cross Creek and will be distributed by Universal Studios, the statement (from Cross Creek) also said, with filming for the project getting under way in May this year. Prior to this, Depp will next be seen in the upcoming Disney reboot of the family western The Lone Ranger, in which he will play the Ranger's (played by Armie Hammer) Native American sidekick Tonto. The Lone Ranger will be released 3 July 2013 in the US and 9 August in the UK.

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Envy (2004) Review

By David Thomas

Terrible

The last half hour of Saturday Night Live is inevitably a wasteland. Talented comedians are given Z grade material that goes nowhere. Imagine if the entire show were that dismal. That, in a nutshell, is Envy.

It begins with two working stiffs, Tim (Ben Stiller) and Nick (Jack Black) plodding their lives away at a 3M facility. By-the-book Tim is creeping into middle management while dreamer Nick wallows on the factory floor concocting wacky ideas for useless products. All of that changes when one of Nick's hare-brained schemes, a spray that dissolves dog excrement called Vapoorize (No. Stop. I think I'm gonna bust a gut.), pans out and makes millions.

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Sleepers Review

By Christopher Null

Excellent

How on earth did Kevin Bacon get top billing in a cast that includes Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, and Jason Patric -- just for starters? That's just one of the disturbing aspects of Sleepers (and I don't mean that in a bad way), Barry Levinson's new drama/thriller that finally redeems him for the idiocy of Disclosure and Toys.

Based on the extremely controversial novel, Sleepers tells what is purported to be a true story of revenge in Hell's Kitchen in New York City. Four early-teenaged friends (played as adults by Patric, Pitt, Ron Eldard, and Billy Crudup -- who I have to mention just because I like to say "Crudup") are sent to a juvenile center when a prank goes wrong and almost kills a bystander. The brutality that occurs in the center does not need to be expounded upon, but suffice it's very horrible, and that guard Sean Nokes (Bacon) is the baddest of the bad guys.

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Possession Review

By Jeremiah Kipp

Bad

A.S. Byatt's Booker Award-winning novel Possession might have provided some literary delight, following two academics who track the love letters of a Victorian poet and his free-spirited mistress. That doesn't translate well to cinema, though. Neil LaBute's film adaptation boils down to a buttoned-down Gwyneth Paltrow (sporting her Academy Award winning faux-Brit accent from Shakespeare in Love) and square-jawed Aaron Eckhart running from one Masterpiece Theater location to the next (the library, the moors, the waterfall, the gothic archway, the castle wall, and the moonlit graveyard) all the while reading aloud from the correspondence of dead Englishmen.

While it might make a charming book-on-tape for the Oprah crowd, this "love loves to love love" hokum masquerades as a real movie. The present day academics exist in counterpoint to the period movie flashbacks (basically Jeremy Northam donning his suit again and looking forlorn, intercut with shots of his beautiful mistress Jennifer Ehle looking voluptuous and forlorn). And they talk, talk, talk about subtext within the letters; but they're actually talking about each other. Yes, it's When Harry Met Sally in the Library. So help me God, Eckhart's emotional revelation is when he asks Paltrow, "Is there an Us in You and Me?" (If I were Paltrow, I'd say, "I'll call you.")

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