Movies

Often film sequels are slam dunks at the box office, a seamless continuation from where a previous hit left off. But as the new installment of the 15-year-old franchise "Men in Black" proves, getting to the big screen isn't always a cakewalk. One of the most troubled productions in recent Hollywood memory, Sony Pictures' latest movie in the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones sci-fi-comedy franchise encountered multiple script rewrites, a discontented star and a three-month production shutdown as writers and studio executives scrambled to fix a project that nearly fell apart . By the time it was over, the studio had run up a tab of nearly $250 million - making "Men in Black 3" one of the most expensive releases of the summer.

CANNES, France - Walter Salles carefully raises the fingers of his right hand and gently strokes the back of his left. "These are characters," he says, explaining the gesture, "who experience things not vicariously but on the flesh. Men and women in a quest for something they couldn't define yet, who are trying to amplify their knowledge of the world. " More than half a century after "On the Road" was published, 30-plus years since Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights in 1978, and nearly a decade after Salles began working on the film, Jack Kerouac's peerless anthem to the romance of youthful freedom and experience has finally made it to the screen with its virtues and spirit intact.

"Battleship"is not the first major motion picture to be based on a board game - who could forget 1985's benighted "Clue"? - but it is surely the most expensive. With every superhero more celebrated than Amazing-Man or the Chameleon already spoken for (ditto for hot toys like Transformers), Hollywood has fallen back on popular games as likely fodder for action epics. If "Scrabble: The Movie" or "Qwirkle or Death" appears on a future marquee, don't say you weren't warned. As its north-of-$200-million budget indicates, "Battleship" has been expanded considerably from its origins as a pre-World War I pencil and paper game to include a major alien invasion that puts the very fate of the human race at stake.

Robert Redford Before his superstar days, Redford appear in the Oct. 20, 1961, episode, "First-Class Mouliak," directed by William Conrad of "Cannon" fame Sam Peckinpah "The Wild Bunch" director cut his teeth in TV. He directed the "Mon Petit Chou" episode that aired Nov. 24, 1961, with guest Lee Marvin Boris Karloff Karloff joined fellow movie monsters Lon Chaney Jr. and Peter Lorre in the "Lizard's Leg and Owlet's...

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Hard-core Harry Potter fans who devoured the books, camped out for the movies and trekked through the theme park now have a new way to relive the boy wizard's adventures. PHOTOS: Making of Harry Potter studio tour Debuting Saturday, the Making of Harry Potter behind-the-scenes tour at theWarner Bros.studios in England will let wizards, mudbloods and muggles pull back the curtain on the movie-making secrets of the most successful film series of all time. Located 20 miles outside of London, the three-hour self-guided tour will take visitors past sets, props, costumes, models and special effects exhibits from the eight "Harry Potter" movies.

Los Angeles will gay anybody up. In the two months since I moved here, I've bought a yellow convertible Mini Cooper, a pair of Guess jeans and started using one of those fitness balls as my desk chair. This is a town so gay that Republicans don't even run for mayor. So when ABC Entertainment President Steve McPherson told Time magazine, in a story about the preponderance of gay TV show creators, that "if being gay makes you that talented, I'm going gay," I had to give it some serious thought.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

Like its creator and star Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedy of "The Dictator" is mercurial to the extreme and as crude as the massive oil reserves of Wadiya, the fictional North African nation where his latest movie prank begins. By turns hysterical, heretical, guilty, innocent, silly, sophisticated, teasing and tedious, the film follows the power-mad leader Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen as he loses his bearings, his beard and his heart in New York City. "The Dictator" underscores both Baron Cohen's genius and his folly, and delivers the actor's signature blend of scatological outrage, sagacity and at least one full-frontal assault with a flaccid unmentionable.

The 25 best L.A. films of the last 25 years "Los ANGELES isn't a real city," people have said, "it just plays one on camera." It was a clever line once upon a time, but all that has changed. Los Angeles is the most complicated community in America -- make no mistake, it is a community -- and over the last 25 years, it has been both celebrated and savaged on the big screen with amazing efficacy. Damaged souls and flawless weather, canyon love and beach city menace, homeboys and credit card girls, freeways and fedoras, power lines and palm trees . . . again and again, moviegoers all over the world have sat in the dark and stared up at our Los Angeles, even if it was one populated by corrupt cops or a jabbering cartoon rabbit.

MGM had great success with several movie franchises in the 1930s and '40s, including "The Thin Man" with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the Andy Hardy family comedies with Mickey Rooney and the Dr. Kildare medical dramas with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore. The studio hit pay dirt again in 1939, when blond, brassy and endearing Ann Sothern was cast as a good-hearted honky tonk singer named Maisie Ravier. The first in the series, "Maisie" found her in the Wild West and falling in love with Robert Young.

Most writers can only daydream about meeting - in the flesh - the characters they've imagined. But for Ernest Hemingway, one afternoon in Key West, Fla., it came close to actually happening. One day when the writer was in his mid-30s, hanging out at a local fisherman's bar, he spotted a woman uncannily similar to the strong-willed, sexually liberated heartbreaker from his first novel. "It's as if, borne on the sea foam, she emerged - out of his own mind," says director Phil Kaufman.

Upcoming films produced by Megan Ellison "Lawless" A Prohibition-era bootlegging drama based on the novel "The Wettest County in the World. " Director: John Hillcoat ("The Road") Stars: Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBoeuf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Mia Wasikowska Debuts: May 19 (Cannes Film Festival); Aug. 31 (in U.S.) "Killing Them Softly" Gritty drama about a mob enforcer. Based on the novel "Cogan's Trade. " Director: Andrew Dominik ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford")

'Battleship' MPAA rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, action and destruction, and for language Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes Playing: In general release

It takes a while for first-time writer-director Brian Crano to show the caring storyteller behind the glib jokester in "A Bag of Hammers. " At first his thin, neatly folded, paper-airplane of a movie threatens to nose dive into tweeville as it depicts the carefree lives of best-bud scam artists Alan (Jake Sandvig, who co-wrote the screenplay) and Ben (Jason Ritter), who steal cars at funerals by operating as fake valets. The forced charm grates - cutesy valet outfits, jerky banter, teasing Alan's waitress sister (Rebecca Hall)

The allure of stardom brings model-handsome wannabe Adam (Matthew Ludwinski) to Hollywood - and down some dubious moneymaking side roads into gay pornography and escorting - in writer-director Casper Andreas' cautionary showbiz tale "Going Down in La-La Land," which is based on a novel by Andy Zeffer. But its Andreas' own attraction to the easy spotlight of warmed-over bitchy humor (courtesy Adam's gal pal roomie, played by Allison Lane), familiar plotting and by-the-numbers characterization that sinks this earnest, gay-contoured take on the evergreen making-it-big melodrama.

There's an unflashy clarity to the documentary "Bill W. " that suits its subject. William G. Wilson, the "stinking rotten drunk" who had an epiphany and co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, was a Vermont Yankee whose life's work was predicated on humility and service. Today's celebrity rehab news cycle would likely displease him; a true believer in the value of anonymity, he turned down an honorary degree from Yale and a cover story in Time (which later placed him in the top 20 "Heroes and Icons" of the 20th century)

She's a 26-year-old former party girl with social anxiety issues, a motorcycle-riding iconoclast who dropped out of USC and attends meetings in Led Zeppelin T-shirts. Megan Ellison is also the most powerful new producer in Hollywood, running a burgeoning movie company from her $33-million compound in the hills above the Sunset Strip - and giving a critical boost to the kinds of adult dramas the major studios have all but abandoned. Hollywood has long attracted wealthy, star-struck investors who don't appreciate the difficulty (or "complexity")

The misbegotten "Virginia" wants to be many things: small-town satire, coming-of-age story, teen romance, portrait of an eccentric and damaged soul, with dabs of crime caper and road trip for good measure. Nothing adds up, though, in this directorial effort from screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ("Milk"). Set among the hangdog hicks and arcade attractions of a fictional Southern beach town, the loosely autobiographical movie aims for roller-coaster passion but only flatlines. In a committed performance that can't overcome the material's shortcomings, Jennifer Connelly plays the title character, an unreliable bottle blond with a history of schizophrenia who's meant to have the poignancy of Blanche DuBois.

Samuel L. Jacksonbrings a welcome world-weariness to his character in "The Samaritan," a man named Foley just released from prison after having served 25 years for killing his best friend in a con job gone wrong. But soon, Foley's found himself sucked back into a life on the grift, and Jackson launches into one of his many patented bellows and things take a turn for the predictable. (There's even an obvious twist lifted straight from a recent Asian crime film; to identify the movie would give it away.)