Director David Frankel first gained attention as a filmmaker for his 1995 movie Miami Rhapsody starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Antonio Banderas, but it was the 1996 short film Dear Diary that won the filmmaker his Academy Award. And Frankel would also go on to earn an Emmy Award for directing the pilot episode of HBO’s Entourage. He eventually returned to making feature films in 2006 with the Academy Award nominated movie The Devil Wears Prada starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. The director followed that up in 2008 with the extremely popular Marley & Me starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. Both films became cultural icons and earned $326 million and $242 million, respectively, at the box office.

Last fall, Frankel released the ensemble comedy The Big Year, which will be available on Blu-ray and DVD January 31^st. The film follows a group of bird enthusiasts set on a “Big Year,” a quest to outdo each other by finding the most species of birds in North America. However, their competition becomes an allegory for the challenges that they all face in their own lives. The film features and impressive cast of comedic and dramatic actors including Steve Martin (The Jerk), Jack Black (School of Rock), Owen Wilson (Wedding Crashers), Rashida Jones (The Muppets), Rosamund Pike (Barney’s Version), JoBeth Williams (Fever Pitch), Jim Parsons (TV’s The Big Bang Theory), Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother Where Art Thou?), Joel McHale (TV’s Community), Kevin Pollak (The Usual Suspects), Anthony Anderson (The Departed), Corbin Bernsen (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), Brian Dennehy (Tommy Boy), and Academy Award winners Dianne Wiest (The Birdcage), and Anjelica Huston (The Royal Tenenbaums).

I recently had a chance to speak with director David Frankel about The Big Year, as well as a few of his upcoming projects. The director spoke candidly with me about his most resent film, birding, working with three comedic geniuses, the rest of the film’s outstanding cast, Jack Black’s surprising dramatic skills, Frankel’s upcoming film Great Hope Springs, and his proposed adaptation of the popular fantasy book series Septimus Heap.

Strictly speaking, Universal Pictures' new The Thing isn't a remake of John Carpenter's 1982 classic (itself a remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World), but since it was confusingly given the exact same title and repeats each and every beat of its predecessor, its prequel status is basically a technicality.  Over the weekend, The Thing joined Paramount's Footloose, a remake of the 1984 dance-a-thon, in an attempt to bring the eighties back to multiplexes everywhere.  While Footloose fared quite well, in the case of The Thing, this attempt was largely a failure.  And despite their recognizable titles, neither film was able to usurp last week's number one film, Real Steel, as the robot-boxing family movie once again held the top spot.  Oh, and bird-watching comedy The Big Year barely registered.

Synopsis: Three men, all with varying levels of dissatisfaction in their daily lives, engage in an annual competition amongst bird-watching enthusiasts to spot the very rarest birds in North America.

Want to feel old?  Zoolander hit theaters a decade ago.  Actually, just a hair over a decade.  That's how long it's been since the comedy on which Ben Stiller served as star, co-writer, and director, took audiences into the cameo-filled world of male modeling and a The Manchurian Candidate-style assassination scheme.  While it's been ten years since we saw the last new signature Zoolander look, Stiller took to Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update to give our first taste of Derek in years and debut a new look, "Cold Coffee."  And the best part is, he was joining Bill Hader as Stefon, an inexhaustible source of absurd comedic non-sequiturs.  Watch one to discover just what a "human fire extinguisher" is.

Summer is, of course, the season for cinematic slugfests centered around robots incomprehensibly beating the robo-piss out of each other, but this year one of the most phenomenal success stories was Midnight in Paris, the latest film from writer-director Woody Allen.  Of the more than forty movies that Allen has created, it is now officially his highest grossing film, having spent the summer consistently on the weekly top ten chart.  Since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, it has also earned rapturous praise from both critics and audiences, even those inexplicable folks who aren't fans of Allen's work.  This Friday, August 26th, it will again expand to even more theaters; if you have yet to do so, see it immediately.  Then come back to read our exclusive interview with actor Corey Stoll.

The story follows Owen Wilson as Gil, a successful screenwriter visiting Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.  In a wonderful twist of magical realism, Gil, a romantic who is completely taken with city, finds himself nightly visiting the city in the 1920's, where he commiserates with literary and artistic titans of the early 20th Century.

While several Oscar caliber actors portray these familiar figures, Corey Stoll makes the most of his time onscreen and upstages all the rest.  The acclaimed stage actor, who starred on Law and Order: Los Angeles and appeared in Salt and Push, plays modern literary icon Ernest Hemingway.  To act as such a well-known figure is no doubt a daunting task, but Stoll creates onscreen the Hemingway who exists in every reader's imagination, and the result is thrillingly funny and perfectly realized.  It's even surprisingly resonant, as when Stoll owns the movie during a monologue that incorporates seemingly all of the author's favorite themes in hard, spare, perfectly delivered prose.  Corey Stoll was kind enough to talk to IAR in a exclusive interview, discussing the film, it's famous director, his Hemingway research, comedy, and even superheroes.

Last weekend the number one film in the country was Cars 2, the sequel to Pixar’s 2006 computer-animated automotive-themed smash hit. The movie has made $133 million worldwide to date and is about to take “the other automotive-themed summer film” head-on at the box office this holiday weekend. One of the many people responsible for the film’s success is producer Denise Ream, who also worked on Pixar’s award winning film Up. Ream began her impressive career working in the visual effects department on feature films and collaborated on such high profile projects as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and Mission: Impossible III, before joining the team at Pixar.

Since dropping the first-ever digitally animated feature film with Toy Story in 1995, Pixar Animation Studios has become a reliable purveyor of blockbusters that have been, until now, critically lauded without exception.  This weekend's Cars 2 is the first exception, and the critical pummeling it received last week was at least a partial contributor to low projections for the automotive sequel's opening weekend box office.  Despite the critical walloping, though, Cars 2 managed to outperform some lowered expectations, pulling in an estimated $68 million since Friday.  More surprisingly, the R rated comedy Bad Teacher also exceeded expectations in second place.

Opening in theaters everywhere today is Cars 2, which of course is the long awaited sequel to one of Pixar Animation’s most popular films, ‘2006s Cars. The new film was directed by the chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios John Lasseter, and features a much different tone and storyline than then in the first movie.

This time around the film centers on Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) rather than Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and is packaged as an action genre-type spy thriller. When racecar Lightening McQueen is challenged to compete in the World Grand Pix by Italian car Francesco Bernouilli (John Turturro), he and his faithful sidekick Mater are off on a worldwide adventure. But when Mater is mistaken for an American spy by British super-spies Finn McMissile (Michael Cain) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), he must choose between assisting his best friend McQueen win the race, and helping his new friends save the world.

It's probably a good thing that Disney and Pixar's Cars 2 is set to hit theaters in just over a week, because between months of posters, clips, trailers, and character reveals, pretty much every automotive pun has been exhausted.  I said "pretty much" because the first of two videos that Disney has provided today parodies popular television series and does so with even more punnery.  The second video is a clip, with Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen and Larry the Cable Guy's Mater checking out a Tokyo nightclub and running into some fellow race cars with familiar voices.  Watch away, Cars enthusiasts.

Writer-director Woody Allen memorably played what would become known as 'The Woody Allen Character' – an intelligent, verbose, and unshakeably self-conscious protagonist – in earlier films like Manahattan or Annie Hall, as well as more recent efforts like Deconstructing Harry and Mighty Aphrodite.  More often as of late, though, he has cast other actors to play the obvious Allen-surrogate, and John Noble over at FilmDrunk created a lovely little mashup video compiling such recognizable actors engaging in onscreen Allen-isms.  The short video, done in the style of Allen himself, showcases the likes of Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Rebecca Hall, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Biggs, Larry David, and John Cusack.