Julia Roberts

Oscar-winning actress Julia Roberts announced today that she’ll head out on a smurfin’ safari as a cast member in the upcoming feature Smurfs: The Lost Village.

TV seems to have stolen a bit more fire from Olympus, as Julia Roberts becomes the latest Hollywood A-lister making the leap to series TV. The Normal Heart star will lead an adaptation of Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different, as developed with Annapurna’s new TV venture.

Last month, the Los Angeles Times began a six-part story on Kelli Peters, a school volunteer and PTA member in the community of Irvine, California who became the unwitting subject of a bizarre conspiracy to ruin her family’s name. A few days later, Peters’ tell-all book, I’ll Get You! Drugs, Lies, and the Terrorizing of a PTA Mom, hit bookshelves across the country. It wasn’t long before the film rights to the book were shopped around in Hollywood, and now it appears a major star is interested in playing the role of Peters herself.

When it opens on Friday, Money Monster will be the most preposterous film currently in theaters. No easy feat at a time when multiplexes also feature a superhero saga about a genius in a suit of flying armor fighting a man who spent 75 years frozen in an iceberg and an adaptation of a cartoon about a boy who can talk to bears and snakes.

There’s no silence quieter than the one in a movie theater during an bad comedy. At times during Mother’s Day, director Garry Marshall’s newest debasement of a beloved holiday, a hush fell over the theater to rival the quietude at a Benedictine monastery. When the laughter finally came, it’s always at the movie’s expense. This disaster is less deliberately funny than the last movie titled Mother’s Day, and that was a violent horror film.

Having already planted his flag of squeaky-clean ethnically homogeneous courtship on New Year’s Eve with New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day with Valentine’s Day, and America’s most tragic hour with 9/11 Remembrance Day, Garry Marshall will expand his Holiday Cinematic Universe with Mother’s Day this spring...

The first trailer for Money Monster has arrived online, promising a tense thriller unfolding in real time starring George Clooney as a financial expert / TV personality who is taken hostage — live, on the air — by Jack O’Connell, while the whole world watches. The film definitely looks like a promising follow-up from director Jodie Foster, who previously helmed the Mel Gibson dramedy The Beaver and, more recently, episodes of Orange Is the New Black.

“He can change his name. He can dump his car. I will still find him.” Julia Roberts is not even close to messing around in the new trailer for Secret in Their Eyes, Billy Ray’s remake of Juan Jose Campanella’s gripping Spanish film that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009. Secret in Their Eyes looks similar in tone to Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, featuring plenty of gut-wrenching drama and a revenge-minded, grieving parent.

A couple of weeks ago, Forbes revealed its annual list of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, with Robert Downey Jr. effortlessly landing the top spot. This week, the publication has released the list of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, with Jennifer Lawrence taking the number one spot followed by Scarlett Johansson — hardly surprising, but what makes this list interesting is that many of the women on it earn far less than their male counterparts.

What is the worst franchise in Hollywood? Transformers? Alvin and the Chipmunks? Underworld? They’re all pretty crummy, but they pale before the abject awfulness of the unnamed franchise Garry Marshall’s been working on for the last couple years, where he takes a holiday everyone loves, cast a bunch of movie stars everyone loves, and puts them in a terrible, terrible movie that everyone hates (but which make a ton of money). First came Valentine’s Day featuring Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Biel, and Jamie Foxx, and it was bad. Then there was New Year’s Day, with Halle Berry, Katherine Heigl, Zac Efron, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, and Robert freaking De Niro and it was, somehow, much, much worse. Now Marshall’s reign of calendarian terror will continue with Mother’s Day.