In early March, Elizabeth Heil, an arts-administration graduate student at Columbia University, was watching previews in a movie theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side when she cracked up inappropriately. The trailer was for the movie The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and scheduled to open May 19, and it featured a grim-faced fellow uttering Christ's name repeatedly and then--wham!--whaling away at his already bloodied back with an Inquisition-issue cat-o'-nine-tails. It was not an intentionally funny scene. But Heil, ...

After torturous deliberations, a jury acquits John Hinckley "As to the first count, not guilty, by reason of insanity." There was a gasp in the courtroom. John Hinckley Jr., who had fired a revolver full of explosive bullets at President Ronald Reagan to prove his love for Movie Actress Jodie Foster, had been acquitted of attempted assassination. The young drifter who shot his way onto history's center stage stood silently at the defense table, closed his vacuous eyes, and tilted ...

If it's the first weekend in May, it must be Marvel superhero time. Spider-Man and its two sequels, plus both Iron Man movies and the Wolverine prequel, have all kick-started the summer movie season in burly style. Now it's Thor's turn. The Norse god — first Marvelized in a 1962 comic book — introduces what is conceived as a zillion-part movie series about the Avengers team of Marvel stalwarts. Captain America, impersonated by Chris Evans, gets his ...

The seagulls begin squawking at 6 in the morning and the cigarettes cost too much, but Lars, 41, knows there are worse places to call home. On Bastoy, an island 46 miles south of Oslo, he and 124 other residents live in brightly colored wooden chalets, spread over one square mile of forest and gently sloping hills. Besides enjoying views of the surrounding fjord, they go horseback riding and throw barbecues, and have access to a movie theater, tanning ...

Two girls, watching a slasher movie about a psycho in an Edvard Munch "Scream" mask who calls girls at home and them stabs them to death, get a call from a psycho who shows up in a "Scream" mask and stabs them to death. But that was a scene from a movie, Stab 6, which two other girls are watching when their phone rings, a gravelly voice threatens them and — surprise! — one girl kills the ...

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 ...

Because the early screening of Precious came with a warning from the publicist to bring tissues, I fully expected to be a goner. Yet there I sat dry-eyed through all of Lee Daniels' screen adaptation of Sapphire's celebrated 1997 novel Push. The movie has the kind of authenticity and ugly immediacy that make the tears of a viewer sitting in the dark safety of a movie theater seem a little silly — indulgent even. That's not to say ...

"Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" had few fans upon its release in 2002. The $70 million movie, starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu, was a box office failure, making just $14.3 million domestically and less than $6 million overseas. And critics were scathing. "A career low for both Liu and Banderas," said Empire magazine. "Ecks this one off your must-see list," wrote the New York Post's Lou Lumenick. But, seven years after its release, "Ecks" can now claim one ...

A hoax video purporting to show Michael Jackson hopping out of a coroner's van alive was produced by a German television station as an experiment, the broadcaster told CNN Monday. It was made to show how easy it is to spread rumors online, said Heike Schultz, a spokeswoman for RTL, the leading private broadcaster in Germany. "We sent out a press release before we did the video to alert everyone that it was fake, but once posted it spread really ...

When David Whitney traveled to Pakistan to shoot his film about a man forced to flee Afghanistan after falling foul of the Taliban he didn't expect fiction to turn into reality. But that's exactly what happened three weeks into shooting political thriller "Kandahar Break" in late 2008. Gunmen attacked the first-time director and his crew near the Afghan border. Four Pakistani crew members were shot and wounded in the incident and the entire crew was forced to flee the ...