Shia LaBeouf

The new Transformers movie is all about buried secrets. Texan Bostonian inventor bro Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and brainy Oxford professor Vivian Frumplebumple (okay I admit it: I didn’t catch her last name so I made that up) discover a world they never knew: The hidden history of Transformers on Earth. It turns out the Transformers have played a role in every armed conflict throughout time. The Transformers helped King Arthur, and they threw an assist to the Allies during World War II. There’s more to meets the eye in those history books, doncha know.

Shia LaBeouf would not be my first choice to play tennis pro John McEnroe; but hey, I’m not the guy making a movie about the rivalry between him and Björn Borg. The movie, the appropriately titled Borg/McEnroe, is actually a Swedish production (Borg’s from Sweden), with Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason as Borg. And, yes, as you can see in the trailer above, that is Mr. LaBeouf as Mr. McEnroe.

While he‘s made more headlines recently as an avant-garde political performance artist — and even more headlines as a guy who gets arrested at political performance art installations — it falls to Shia LaBeouf to intermittently remind the people of America that he is an actor, first and foremost. He’ll win our love (tennis pun!) later this year as John McEnroe in the double biopic Borg vs. McEnroe, but presently, his war drama Man Down has tromped into theaters after its 2015 festival debut. The bad news for The Beef is that not a whole lot of people saw the critically derided, low-profile indie. And in Britain, they’re prepared to put a number on just how hard Man Down flopped. And that number is three.

Donald Trump is the President of the United States now. Wily performance-art prankster Shia LaBeouf does not intend on taking that sitting down. The daring mind behind #ALLMYMOVIES (that time the Beef watched every single one of his movies back-to-back in reverse order at New York’s Angelika Film Center) and I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE (that other time when he put a paper bag over his head before walking the red carpet at the Berlinale) has unveiled his latest work of highly conceptual living art. And if you live in the New York metropolitan area and are willing to go to Queens, you could be part of it.

It’s hardly a secret that the American military has no idea what to do with its veterans, often leaving the traumatized men to fall through the cracks due to a lack of support. As the newly released trailer for the upcoming action-drama Man Down amply shows, soldier Gabriel Drummer (Shia LaBeouf, mercifully free of his American Honey rat-tail) has more than his fair share of baggage when he returns home from an extended tour of duty in an unidentified conflict. But he’ll have to contend with more than poverty and the guilt over watching his brother-in-arms (Jai Courtney) die; turns out that while he was away fighting to protect it, America went right to hell anyway.

Imagine if Larry Clark was a woman, capable of depicting the inner lives of disenfranchised youth with all the psychic nuance and sensitivity estrogen could provide. Imagine a road trip through Middle America as presented by Claire Denis; now imagine that the brutal emotional intensity and distinct feeling of dread remain intact, while the threat of grotesque acts of violence lurk on the periphery, merely imagined and never realized. If you can imagine that, you might come close to approximating the experience of watching American Honey, the latest stumbling-of-age drama from Fish Tank director Andrea Arnold.

In a really fascinating profile published by Variety today, actor and occasional performance artist Shia LaBeouf addresses a few of the more controversial aspects of his career (his arrest, drinking problems, etc.) and discusses working with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood (Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg). But one of the most intriguing revelations from the article is that LaBeouf almost starred in Suicide Squad — until the studio (and some script changes) got in the way.

What’s it like to watch Shia Labeouf watch Shia LaBeouf movies in reverse chronological order for a three-day marathon? Really weird.

Shia LaBeouf is pulling his latest Marina Abramović rip-off right now, and you can watch him do it.

"He was just wasted." Shia LaBeouf's apology/explanation tour has rolled out during the past few weeks, but while the 'Fury' star has finally spoken out about his more, uh, wild times over the past year or so, there are other people involved who haven't been quite as chatty. Last night, 'Cabaret' star Alan Cumming finally righted that on 'Conan.'