When Michael Bay wants to play with toys, Brian Goldner brings the toy box. The 47-year-old CEO of Hasbro Inc. has taken his intel on the kiddie consumer market to Hollywood with explosive results: the Transformers franchise--directed by action-film titan Bay and based on the Hasbro line of warring alien robots--has generated more than $1.5 billion at the box office and more than $1 billion in toy sales; a third Transformers movie, Dark of the Moon, is stomping through theaters ...

A flamboyant populist and founder of a virulently anti-immigrant political party, Geert Wilders sees himself as a champion of free speech in the Netherlands. Others would disagree. Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament, is in court this week to face five counts of inciting hatred and discrimination for describing Islam as a fascist religion and Moroccan youths as violent and for calling for the banning of the Koran. The trial, which resumed Wednesday, Feb. 3, after a two-week break, is seen as ...

It's good news for solar advocates and bad news for competitors: General Electric is breaking into the solar business in a major way. In April, GE announced it had built a solar module with the highest publicly reported efficiency rate for cadmium telluride thin film — the most popular low-cost solar technology. The commercial module topped out at 12.8%, according to independent testers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — nearly 3 percentage points higher than the industry average.

In August 1973, a quiet young courier took a print of Terrence Malick's debut feature Badlands from Los Angeles to Manhattan for submission to the New York Film Festival. After the screening, festival chief Richard Roud said to the messenger, "Would you please tell Mr. Malick that we loved Badlands and want it as our closing-night film?" The unassuming fellow replied, "I'm Mr. Malick." After that, he was harder to find. In his fulfilling but furtive 38 years since Badlands, ...

The sex scene in the documentary Zoo, which premiered at the 2007 Sundance film festival, lasts less than 10 seconds. The grainy footage follows lush shots of nature set to moody music and a thoughtful voiceover discussion of the nature of love. Drinks are mixed. Stories are shared. Both parties appear to consent. The fleeting seconds would seem unlikely to raise an eyebrow among the liberal audience of film lovers who rush to Sundance each year in search of edgy, independent fare. The ...

Thunder of the low, distant variety shook movie theaters, and lightning bolts pulsed out from 3-D screens, as Thor earned $66 million at North American theaters to win the year's first full May weekend, according to early studio estimates. The latest in Marvel Studios' master plan to make a blockbuster film out of every character who has appeared in the company's comic books over the past 50 years, Thor easily trounced the weekend's two romantic comedies, Jumping ...

Were you disappointed that your Civil War movie didn't have any battle scenes?No, I wasn't, because it's been done so much. There have been some wonderful films with beautifully done battles and gore and all that. But I was more interested in what the vibe was following the war. You portray Lincoln's assassination, but you choose not to show his face. Why?If you try to authenticate his face, you're just never going to win. There's no face like it except ...

In the 76-year history of the New York Film Critics, only two moviemakers have been honored with life achievement awards: Jean-Luc Godard and Sidney Lumet. The French director is of course the prickly master of movie modernism, but Lumet was something Gotham critics could appreciate: the primary apostle of streetwise cinema, the torch-bearer of ground-glass realism and, for a half-century, the ultimate chronicler of New York City in all its agita and chutzpah. Though he shot films ...

The kid who's wimpy whupped the teen girls whose couture is skimpy. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, second in the film adaptations of Jeff Kinney's stick-drawn book characters, earned $24.1 million, according to early studio estimates. That made it a winner over Zack Snyder's comix-style adventure Sucker Punch, with $19 million, at the shrimpy, limpy, anything-but-blimpy North American box office. For the 17th time in the past 18 weeks, theatrical revenue was down from the ...

Sucker punch: In theaters where this movie is playing, it's a beverage sold at the concession stand. Critics have descended upon the new film from director Zack Snyder