Barry Levinson

It was only a matter of time before the found footage craze drew a bona-fide name-brand Hollywood filmmaker into its ongoing vortex. "The Bay" is directed by the Oscar-winning Barry Levinson, known for his longstanding connection to the city of Baltimore through such films as "Diner. " This time Levinson checks in on the small seaside town of Claridge, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay, with a story recounting an ecological horror show that (fictionally) occurred on July 4, 2009, and was subsequently covered up. As pieced together in a Wikileaks-style information dump, the local water, described as a "toxic soup" of radioactivity and growth hormones from chicken excrement, has become suddenly infested with rapidly growing isopods that take host inside people and work their way out. The story becomes more ridiculous as it escalates, the film's over-determined ecological focus undermining any real horror movie tension.

Johnny Depp will next be seen in Disney's "The Lone Ranger" this summer but after that it looks like he's giving popcorn flicks a rest. The Oscar-nominated actor, who became a giant movie star when he first stole the show as Jack Sparrow in 2003's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," announced Wednesday that he was committing to two new movies this year that are decidedly different than his most recent work. First up is Wally Phister's directorial debut "Transcendence," a hush-hush project being shuttled through Warner Bros.

The Toronto International Film Festival will debut genre movies from Barry Levinson, Rob Zombie and Martin McDonagh, among others, for the Midnight Madness portion of its festival, which runs from Sept. 6-16. Programmed by TIFF's resident genre expert Colin Geddes, the lineup features some of the most audacious material of the festival. “Expect everything from outrageous horror comedies to mock-doc eco-apocalypse thrillers, featuring trans-dimensional bugs, lewd Catholic priests, meat monsters and dog-napping psychopaths that will animate the Ryerson Theatre when the clock chimes 12,"  Geddes said in a statement.

It was only a matter of time before the found footage craze drew a bona-fide name-brand Hollywood filmmaker into its ongoing vortex. "The Bay" is directed by the Oscar-winning Barry Levinson, known for his longstanding connection to the city of Baltimore through such films as "Diner. " This time Levinson checks in on the small seaside town of Claridge, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay, with a story recounting an ecological horror show that (fictionally) occurred on July 4, 2009, and was subsequently covered up. As pieced together in a Wikileaks-style information dump, the local water, described as a "toxic soup" of radioactivity and growth hormones from chicken excrement, has become suddenly infested with rapidly growing isopods that take host inside people and work their way out. The story becomes more ridiculous as it escalates, the film's over-determined ecological focus undermining any real horror movie tension.

In a bygone age, there were movie palaces. They were ornate and grand. And as you sat in your seat, you looked to a large, red velvet curtain. Behind it, hidden from view, the silver screen. And they made you wait to see it. It was that special. Then suddenly there were images that you could see through the curtain. And there it was, the glorious movie screen. But that's gone. That was another time. Today, the screen can be big or small. We can watch a film on IMAX, we can watch on our iPhone.

Oscar-winner Barry Levinson ("Rain Man") will direct and executive produce a TV movie for HBO called "Path to War," a look at U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Barry Levinson, director of the hit autism drama "Rain Man," was named Saturday as best director of a feature film for 1988 by the Directors Guild of America, which honored its own at banquets in Beverly Hills and New York.

Ralph Tabakin, an unlikely character actor who became a favorite of director Barry Levinson, appearing in 15 of his movies and as the gleefully morbid coroner Dr. Scheiner in the television series "Homicide," has died. He was 79. Tabakin died Sunday in Silver Spring, Md., of heart disease. He was absent from Levinson's most recent release, "An Everlasting Piece," only because he was suffering from pneumonia during the 1999 filming.

Stu Linder, an Academy Award-winning film editor who worked almost exclusively for Barry Levinson since cutting the director's 1982 debut movie, "Diner," has died. He was 74. Linder died of a heart attack Jan. 12 while on location in Ridgefield, Conn., editing Levinson's film "Man of the Year," said his wife, Cathy Fitzpatrick Linder. "Personally and professionally, we had a great relationship. It was just a perfect fit," Levinson told The Times on Wednesday. "He shared a similar sensitivity.

They found the body in a recycling plant, sprawled in a pit filled with thousands of empty soda cans. He was a young black male dressed in a blue jacket and pants, with large wounds visible on his forehead and chest. Homicide detectives Stanley Bolander and John Munch arrived on the crime scene shortly after it had been closed to the public.

In a bygone age, there were movie palaces. They were ornate and grand. And as you sat in your seat, you looked to a large, red velvet curtain. Behind it, hidden from view, the silver screen. And they made you wait to see it. It was that special. Then suddenly there were images that you could see through the curtain. And there it was, the glorious movie screen. But that's gone. That was another time. Today, the screen can be big or small. We can watch a film on IMAX, we can watch on our iPhone.

The new musical "Diner" could have one less stop on its way to Broadway. Producers have postponed a four-week tryout in San Francisco set to start Oct. 23 at the Curran Theatre. But the show, written by Barry Levinson with a score by Sheryl Crow, is still on track for a spring 2013 Broadway debut, Variety reports . It's unclear whether a new premiere will be planned for San Francisco or another city ahead of the musical's Broadway opening. As previously announced, the show will be directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, who won Tonys for her choreography of "Anything Goes," "The Pajama Game" and "Wonderful Town.

The Toronto International Film Festival will debut genre movies from Barry Levinson, Rob Zombie and Martin McDonagh, among others, for the Midnight Madness portion of its festival, which runs from Sept. 6-16. Programmed by TIFF's resident genre expert Colin Geddes, the lineup features some of the most audacious material of the festival. “Expect everything from outrageous horror comedies to mock-doc eco-apocalypse thrillers, featuring trans-dimensional bugs, lewd Catholic priests, meat monsters and dog-napping psychopaths that will animate the Ryerson Theatre when the clock chimes 12,"  Geddes said in a statement.

For a few weeks now, we've been looking for the most emblematic Los Angeles movies ever and counting on crowd-sourcing to build a big list, then separate the wheat from the cinematic chaff. Now that we've got some serious chaff on our hands, it's time to start whacking. Thanks to suggestions from dozens of readers, we've added more than 30 names to our original list of more than 100 movies set in Los Angeles. We've also put the list in alphabetical order, by title, below. (So don't be alarmed.

After years writing television shows such as "Starsky and Hutch," "Vegas" and "Crime Story" and producing the series "Miami Vice," Michael Mann left television for film with little intention of returning. The director of such movies such as "The Insider, "The Last of the Mohicans" and most recently "Public Enemies," Mann had fully embraced the world of film: Its long shooting schedules, big budgets and creative autonomy were a perfect fit for his exacting personality. Then a new HBO script, set in the world of horse racing and penned by David Milch ("Deadwood," "NYPD Blue")

At the crux of the lingering debate over Dr. Jack Kevorkian is an unresolved question of character: What kind of guy would devote his life to helping other people die? Was he a compassionate visionary, fighting to end the suffering of the ill, or was there something darkly twisted about a man who defied the law and risked years in prison as he pushed the death toll well beyond 100? That sort of inscrutable extremism proved irresistible to Al Pacino and Barry Levinson. "We had talked about doing this kind of story, this kind of person ?

Only a few weeks ago, the question was whether Barry Levinson's "Homicide" would find a spot as a mid-season replacement on NBC's prime-time schedule. Now the question is how fast Levinson can get more episodes of the series about Baltimore homicide detectives to the network. "Homicide" has not only been guaranteed an airdate in mid-January, but the network recently increased its initial order of six episodes by three more episodes and four additional scripts, Levinson said.

Barry Levinson is a born storyteller. Perched in the back of a van packed with his production crew, the Baltimore-born director is riding around town, scouting locations for "Bugsy," his upcoming film starring Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel, the gangster who ruled 1940s L.A. Heading for Union Station, the van cruises through a particularly beat-up section of Hollywood, near the Hollywood Bowl. "You know, when I first moved to L.A.

There are three intertwining streams of interest in the unfortunately, if aptly, titled "You Don't Know Jack," a new HBO TV film about Jack Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide man. There is Kevorkian himself, played by Al Pacino, and the imagined private life of a figure known mostly in news bites, all around the single issue of euthanasia and his hands-on crusade to gain it legitimacy — the man behind the myth, the usual draw of the biopic....