Woody Harrelson

In this pitch-black comic thriller, Frances McDormand plays a woman who pushes her small-town sheriff to solve her daughter’s murder.

One of our most anticipated films of the fall is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the latest from In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths filmmaker Martin McDonagh. By now you’ve probably seen the first trailer, featuring an exceedingly (and delightfully) profane Frances McDormand. The first trailer was awfully hilarious for a premise that serious, and while the newest trailer delivers a bit more drama, it still hasn’t lost that dark sense of humor.

Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 was one of the best movies of 2013, and remains one of the most surprising indie dramas of the past several years. It’s the film that finally put Brie Larson on the film industry’s radar, charting a path towards an eventual Oscar win. One of the greatest strengths of that film is how delicately it unpacks the day-to-day trauma and struggle of neglected teens living at a group home. With that in mind, Cretton’s latest film The Glass Castle sounded especially promising – an adaptation about a dysfunctional family told through the eyes of a young girl. Unfortunately The Glass Castle is nothing like Short Term 12, trading in nuance for glib storytelling while giving Larson little to do.

In The Glass Castle, Woody Harrelson plays a man constantly living on the edge. His Rex Walls is an alcoholic father with good intentions but untraditional, even dangerous, parenting methods. In the film, Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Jeanette Walls’ New York Times best-selling memoir of the same name, Brie Larson portrays the adult version of the author as she reflects on her tumultuous childhood and complicated relationship with her father, Rex. It was only after Larson was trapped by a thunderstorm with Harrelson in real life, unsure if she was entirely safe or not, that the Oscar winner knew Harrelson was the right fit for the role.

If an esteemed actor gets big enough, you can place a pretty good bet that he’ll be cast as at least one American president in his lifetime. Everyone from Martin Sheen to Jon Voight has played George Washington, Daniel Day-Lewis got extremely in character as Abraham Lincoln, and Robin Williams’ Teddy Roosevelt is one of the joys of the Night at the Museum movies. Since Woody Harrelson is having a real moment these days, it comes as no surprise that he’s been tapped to play one of our most recognizable presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson, in LBJ.

Brie Larson’s The Glass Castle definitely looks like one of those awards-bait family drama movies that actors join up with when they really, really want to win an Oscar. But Larson has already won an Oscar, and keep in mind that this is from Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of Short Term 12, the movie that effectively launched Larson’s leap to stardom.

Woody Harrelson is a pretty chill dude, so when he was recently asked about Ron Howard replacing Phil Lord and Chris Miller on the Han Solo spinoff, his response wasn’t particularly surprising: “I wouldn’t worry.” Of course he wouldn’t worry; he’s Woody Harrelson, a man who wears flip flops to film premieres and calls fellow mellow dude Matthew McConaughey his BFF.

There is a sinister circular logic to the Planet of the Apes series. Characters journey to the stars and wind up … back on Earth. They travel back in time … and directly cause the events that lead to the rise of their dystopian future. Even as War for the Planet of the Apes concludes the story of the ape leader Caesar, it brings the franchise’s overarching narrative closer and closer to its origins on a desolate, sun-swept beach, one that looks a lot like the one Caesar and his monkey mates gallop across during their quest for revenge. That’s what makes these movies so troubling. It’s not the monkeys with machine guns or the gorillas with grenade launchers; it’s the sense that collapse is inevitable, that even when people (and apes) act with the best of intentions, they can’t escape the cruel hand (or paw) fate has dealt.

We haven’t seen too much of the Han Solo movie, except for all that hot goss about why Phil Lord and Chris Miller left the project, but the set photos have been trickling in. Yesterday, a couple pictures surfaced from the set of our young Han (Alden Ehrenreich), Chewbacca, and Woody Harrelson’s mysterious character together and in costume on set.

We don’t know a whole lot about the Han Solo movie aside from the fact that it’s about Han Solo and he’s a young lad in it, but we have had some descriptions of the other characters to fuel our speculation engines. Woody Harrelson, for example, is said to be playing a kind of “mentor” to young Solo, which those of us who’ve stayed up to date on the Expanded Universe through the years know to be Alezsandr Badure, Han Solo’s teacher at the Imperial Academy who taught him all his flying skills. But now Woody Harrelson is saying that his character, whose name is “Beckett,” isn’t exactly the Imperial officer type.