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When "The Full Monty" came out in the UK in 1997, it surprised just about everybody. There wasn't much buzz around my way, and most people seemed to think it was some kind of raunchy comedy for women. In those less enlightened times, I fielded several questions regarding my sexual orientation when I told friends I was going to see it. Some just couldn't understand why a straight guy wanted to watch a film about blokes getting their kit off.

Word-of-mouth built quickly and the screening I attended was packed. The crowd was roughly 70 women and the atmosphere was raucous, like a hen party getting revved up for the night. They were restless at first, probably because the film isn't a joke-a-minute comedy and it takes a while to get into the stripping action. Then the gang started their bumbling rehearsals and the tunes started, and the women were absolutely howling.

A rain-drenched summer evening turns into a deadly cat-and-mouse game for a devoted wife and mother when an escaped killer finds his way into her home in No Good Deed, a classic film noir thriller starring Oscar-nominee Taraji P. Henson and Golden Globe-winner Idris Elba.

Terry (Taraji P. Henson) left a high-level career as an assistant D.A. to become a stay-at-home mother of two, living a quiet suburban life in an upscale Atlanta community. One stormy night when her husband is out of town, Colin (Idris Elba), appears at Terry’s door claiming car trouble and asking to use her phone. Charmed by the charismatic stranger, she leaves him outside while she goes to get him a phone, but soon learns that no good deed goes unpunished.

The next thing she knows, Terry is being terrorized inside her home by a vicious sociopath. What Colin doesn’t realize, is...

Idris Elba’s film career is going great guns at the moment, with a heartily varied range of roles. Now he wants to try his hand at being truly menacing. He’s signed on to co-star with Taraji P Henson in the thriller No Good Deed.The act of charity in question involves Henson as a former District Attorney who has opted to become a stay-at-home-mom to her two children. Their lives take a turn for the scary when they offer a ride to a compelling stranger whose car runs off the road in front of them. Cue kidnapping, terror and, we’d expect, Henson getting the chance to be tough.Clearly, there is a lesson to be learned from all of this: do not ever give strangers a ride from the side of the road even if they are as seemingly charming and handsome as Idris Elba.Among Giants director Sam Miller,...

Just a couple more months lie between us and the theatrical release of the highly anticipated big screen adaptation of The Hunger Games from director Gary Ross and starring Jennifer Lawrence, but Lionsgate is already moving full steam ahead to get the sequel off the ground. Towards the end of last year, Oscar nominated writer Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) was being courted to write the sequel Catching Fire, based on the second novel in Suzanne Collins' best-selling series, and now the news is official with The Wrap confirming the news along with director Gary Ross supervising the script again. Simon Beaufoy is the Oscar winning English screenwriter behind Among Giants, The Full Monty, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, and also wrote the Salmon Fishing in the Yemen adaptation. It's great to have such high caliber writing talent on an expected blockbuster franchise like...

Raindance Film Festival, London

Indie cinema means so many different things to so many different people, it's barely a useful category any more, but the sheer breadth of movies made under the studio radar here (nearly 100 features) can only be encouraging. At the opening end you get a resourceful Us sci-fi drama (the self-explanatory Another Earth, pictured); at the close, an offbeat Chilean slacker romance (Bonsai). And in between, everything from Balkan youth movies (Tilva Rosh is described as "Jackass meets Stand By Me") to gamblers for Jesus (documentary Holy Rollers) to top-notch Japanese ghost stories (Kaidan Horror Classics). There's a healthy British contingent, too, with 10 premieres including Simon Callow and Harry Enfield talking in rhyming couplets (Acts Of Godfrey) and black comedy Black Pond, starring Simon Amstell and Chris Langham.

Apollo Piccadilly, SW1, Wed to 9 Oct

Contrast/brilliance – North Yorkshire On Film, North Yorkshire

This is the sort of...

If I can sit through the Saw movies or The Human Centipede without my pulse missing a beat, it just means the tipping points have shifted

Back in 1976, when Taxi Driver first opened, I trotted off to see it with no idea what I was in for. Imagine that. I'd never heard of Martin Scorsese or Robert de Niro, and I hadn't read the reviews. It was my date's choice of movie; I was more of a Night of the Living Dead kind of girl. So I sat in the front row of the Leicester Square theatre, feeling slightly underwhelmed by the absence of zombies, until near the end. And then, suddenly, everything turned yellow, Bernard Herrmann's music was drilling into my skull, blood was dripping off De Niro's finger and I had to lean forward to stop myself fainting.

Incredibly, my date didn't notice anything amiss and I...

Chicago – In our latest comedy edition of HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film, we have 15 admit-two passes up for grabs to the Chicago screening of “The Invention of Lying”!

“The Invention of Lying” stars Jennifer Garner, Ricky Gervais, Jonah Hill, Louis C.K., Rob Lowe, Tina Fey, Jeffrey Tambor, Fionnula Flanagan, Martin Starr, Jimmi Simpson and Nathan Corddry from writers and directors Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson. Ricky Gervais is the award-winning creator and star of the original BBC series “The Office”.

To win your free pass to the Chicago screening of “The Invention of Lying” courtesy of HollywoodChicago.com, all you need to do is answer our trivia question below. That’s it! This screening will be held on Monday, Sept. 28, 2009 at 7 p.m. in downtown Chicago. Directions to enter this Hookup and immediately win can be found beneath the graphic below.

“The Invention of Lying” stars Jennifer Garner, Ricky Gervais, Jonah Hill,...

Simon Beaufoy, who won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, is moving to the world of animation. The scribe has signed on to write Truckers, a project set up at DreamWorks Animation. The project is in the early development stages, and nothing is known about the story line. DreamWorks’ latest animated feature, Monsters vs. Aliens, hits theaters today. As the trades say, Beaufoy isn't the first scribe to take the gold and dive right into animation: Michael Arndt, who won the original screenplay Oscar for 2006's Little Miss Sunshine, signed with Pixar to work on the script for the forthcoming Toy Story 3 after winning his statuette. Earlier this week Beaufoy had been rumored to be scripting a sequel to the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Fox says the rumors are false, but the trades have confirmed that Beaufoy had a meeting Wolverine producer Lauren Shuler Donner about the potential project.

This Side of the Truth, a new comedy by Ricky Gervais who is making his feature film helming debut, gets an original score by Tim Atack, a British composer who has written music for television (including Krakatoa: Volcano of Destruction and The Quatermass Experiment) and a handful of features (Among Giants and Elephant Juice). This Side of the Truth features a strong cast (Jonah Hill, Jennifer Garner, Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Ricky Gervais, Patrick Stewart, Rob Lowe, Christopher Guest...) and an original story about a world where no one has ever lied - until one day, when a writer seizes the opportunity for personal gain.