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That Kurt Russell is one of our finest actors should go without saying, but it's almost more important to applaud him specifically because his career began in a place that hasn't always fostered long-term success for young actors: Disney. Although the House of Mouse and its related studios often feature plenty of opportunities for young and talented actors (think Lindsay Lohan or Shia Labeouf), those same actors can struggle professionally and personally when they try to grow beyond their Disney years. The same is absolutely untrue for Russell, who became one of the most reliable and enjoyably sly action stars of the 1980s and 1990s, serving as a welcome on-screen presence in everything from "The Thing" to "Big Trouble in Little China" to "Breakdown." But Russell has also appeared in a jaw-dropping number of Disney productions; when you count titles from both Disney proper and studios like Marvel and Touchstone,...

If you are of voting age in the United States today, you know that stranger things have happened than someone like Tim Heidecker getting elected to public office. But in a world where Americans are getting punked on an almost daily basis by their TV-famous cretin in chief, do we really need a smug fake-news “documentary” making a mockery of the political system?

Maybe that’s too literal an assessment of “Mister America,” the latest oddball installment in the long-running performance-art curiosity that is “On Cinema at the Cinema,” in which a character named Tim Heidecker (played by absurdist comedian/outsider artist Tim Heidecker) pretends to run for district attorney of San Bernardino, Calif. Will he win? That is so not the point in this consistently obnoxious, #onlyfans offering () whose very existence seems to be the punchline to a joke that goes, “Just how far are they going to take this?...

Maya Rudolph and Martin Short came in like a wrecking ball on Tuesday with the debut of their new variety show Maya & Marty on NBC. Was it the best time ever or the biggest loser?

RelatedThe Voice: 8 Easy Fixes to Stop the NBC Juggernaut’s Ratings Slide

The new variety hour (whose title fails to mention third cast member Kenan Thompson) featured special guests Bernie Sanders Larry David, Tom Hanks, Miley Cyrus, Kate McKinnon, Steve Martin, Jimmy Fallon and the cast of Broadway’s Shuffle Along for a debut episode that felt an awful lot like Saturday Night Live...

English actor and martial artist Darren Shahlavi, whose screen credits include Donnie Yen’s Ip Man 2, Machinima’s Mortal Kombat: Legacy, and the upcoming Jean-Claude Van Damme film Pound Of Flesh, has died. He was 42. Shahlavi was found unresponsive at his La home on January 14, according to La County coroner’s office spokesman Ed Winter. The death was reported as a possible accident and the cause is pending the results of toxicological tests, said Winter.

The lifelong martial arts fan had trained since childhood in multiple disciplines before moving to Hong Kong in the 1990s to do film stuntwork, where legendary director and fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping gave him his big break in 1996’s Tai Chi 2. Shahlavi segued into a Hollywood career as both stuntman and actor with the Eddie Murphy-Owen Wilson action-comedy I, Spy and followed with roles in a range of films from The Final Cut...

Actor Peter Breck (right, in Shock Corridor), best known for his role as the short-tempered Nick Barkley in the 1960s television series The Big Valley, died Monday, Feb. 6, in Vancouver. Breck, who had been suffering from dementia, was 82. Though mostly a TV actor (Black Saddle, Maverick, The Fall Guy), Breck also appeared in about 20 movies. The most notable among those was probably Samuel Fuller's thriller Shock Corridor (1963), in which he plays a journalist who commits himself to a mental institution in order to solve a murder. Additionally, Breck was featured in Joe Camp's blockbuster Benji (1974), about a stray dog who rescues two kidnapped children. Breck's other features were minor fare. Those included Herbert L. Strock's The Crawling Hand (1963), about the hand of a dead astronaut that spends its time strangling the living, plus Highway 61 (1991), Decoy (1995), Lulu (1996), and Jiminy Glick in Lalawood (2004). Breck is the third The Big Valley...

Peter Breck, known for his roles in "The Big Valley" and "Maverick" has passed away at the age of 82. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Breck's wife made the announcement at "The Big Valley" fan fiction forum, The Big Valley Writing Desk.

Throughout "The Big Valley's" four seasons -- from 1965 to 1969 -- Breck played Nick Barkley, the son of Victoria Barkley, Barbara Stanwyck's character.

Breck's other TV roles include multiple TV Westerns. He appeared on several episodes of "Maverick" as Doc Holliday, "Lawman" and "Black Saddle." Following "The Big Valley," Breck made guest appearances on several shows including "General Hospital," "Fantasy Island" and "The Incredible Hulk." His last credited role is the 2004 film "Jiminy Glick in Lalawood."

According to THR, Breck had been suffering from dementia and had been hospitalized since early January.

Many of the notable deaths from 2011:...

Peter Breck, known for his roles in "The Big Valley" and "Maverick" has passed away at the age of 82. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Breck's wife made the announcement at "The Big Valley" fan fiction forum, The Big Valley Writing Desk.

Throughout "The Big Valley's" four seasons -- from 1965 to 1969 -- Breck played Nick Barkley, the son of Victoria Barkley, Barbara Stanwyck's character.

Breck's other TV roles include multiple TV Westerns. He appeared on several episodes of "Maverick" as Doc Holliday, "Lawman" and "Black Saddle." Following "The Big Valley," Breck made guest appearances on several shows including "General Hospital," "Fantasy Island" and "The Incredible Hulk." His last credited role is the 2004 film "Jiminy Glick in Lalawood."

According to THR, Breck had been suffering from dementia and had been hospitalized since early January.

Many of the notable deaths from 2011:...

They’re just hanging around. The Weinstein Co. released the official one-sheet for the upcoming animation sequel “Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil in 3D.” The film stars Hayden Panettiere (“Alpha and Omega”), Glenn Close (“Dangerous Liaisons”), Joan Cusack (“Say Anything”), Bill Hader(“Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”), Amy Poehler (“Parks and Recreation”), David Alan Grier (“In Living Color”), Andy Dick (“News Radio”), Brad Garrett (“Everybody Loves Raymond”), Martin Short (“Jiminy Glick in Lalawood”), Patrick Warburton (“Rules of Engagement”), Cheech Marin (“Up in Smoke”) and Tommy Chong (“Up in Smoke”). Here is the official synopsis: “The sequel finds our heroine, Red (Panettiere), training with a mysterious covert group called the Sisters of the Hood. But Red is forced to cut her training short when she gets an urgent call from Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers), who returns as head of the super-secret Happily Ever After Agency, aka the Hea. A...

Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO -- It's not every year that the Toronto International Film Festival finds a closer as ideally suited as Martin Short's Jiminy Glick in LalaWood.

Not only is the comedy crammed with celebrity appearances (just like the festival itself), but a number of them were captured on camera doing the red-carpet thing at last year's event.

While giving Short's fawning, Skip E. Lowe-inspired interviewer the feature-length treatment comes with the hit-and-miss baggage often associated with big-screen extensions of small-screen concepts, whenever the heavily improvised picture hits its mark, it often does so with potent comic accuracy.

The whole package may not be as tidy as Christopher Guest's satiric gems, but Short, drawing heavily on the spirit of his SCTV/Saturday Night Live past, keeps the chuckles coming.

After a brief prologue introduci ng unofficial narrator David Lynch (at least, Short doing a savagely dead-on impersonation), Glick leaves his Butte, Mont., base for the glitzy Toronto festival, accompanied by his wife, Dixie (Jan Hooks), and equally rotund twin sons Modine and Matthew. He and Dixie were big fans of Birdy.

Although the festival's got more celebs than you can shake a microphone at, including Sharon Stone, Whoopi Goldberg, Kevin Kline and Kiefer Sutherland, Jiminy ends up in the company of the sexy but alcoholic movie star Miranda Coolidge (Elizabeth Perkins) and her Eurotrash boyfriend, the language-mangling Andre Devine (Guest regular John Michael Higgins).

But things quickly turn positively Lynchian as Glick finds himself traveling down his very own Lost Highway, waking up in bed (or does he?) beside a dead Coolidge (or is she?) after spending a drunken night rapping in a Canadian hip-hop club called Pimps and Hosers.

Using an outline of a script as their jump-off point, Short and longtime collaborators Michael Short and Paul Flaherty, along with director Vadim Jean, deliberately keep everything loose and flexible, allowing the extensive improv to take it from there.

Of course, it's not all comic gold -- things have a habit of drifting too easily into bodily function territory -- but when Jiminy actually gets around to going one-on-one with his interview subjects, including Kurt Russell and specifically Steve Martin, the movie hits pay dirt.

And while it packs plenty of universal appeal, Jiminy Glick in Lalawood remains the quintessential Toronto movie. As personified by Glick and Lynch, the festival has earned a reputation for its enviable ability to seamlessly blend blatant star worship with artier cinematic aspirations.

Gold Circle Films has courted The New Girl, picking up the Alan Shapiro-scripted project for an undisclosed sum with Shapiro on board to direct. The project is described as a thriller about a teenage girl who is transformed from an ugly duckling to a swan only to encounter a nightmarish underside to her dream. The timely project comes to Gold Circle following the success of a string of high-profile television shows that showcase plastic surgery and the people who elect to go under the knife. Those shows include the reality series Extreme Makeover, The Swan and Dr. 90210 as well as the scripted Nip/Tuck at the FX Network. Girl was brought to Gold Circle topper Paul Brooks by former vp creative affairs Paramount Pictures executive Brad Kessell, who will produce along with Brooks. The company's Wendy Rhoads will oversee for her firm. Shapiro wrote and directed the Alicia Silverstone thriller The Crush. He is repped by the Gersh Agency. Gold Circle's upcoming films include Something Borrowed starring Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney, White Noise, a supernatural thriller starring Michael Keaton, and Jiminy Glick in LaLaWood, starring Martin Short as the title character.

TORONTO -- Guaranteeing strong star wattage this year, the Toronto International Film Festival said Tuesday that the festival will feature world premieres for David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees, Bill Condon's Kinsey, Dan Harris' Imaginary Heroes and Vadim Jean's Jiminy Glick in Lalawood, which was chosen for the closing-night gala. The 29th Toronto International Film Festival is set to run Sept. 9-18. Other Hollywood draws this year include world premieres for Paul Haggis' Crash, John Duigan's Head in the Clouds, Frank Flowers' Haven, Alexander Payne's Sideways and James Toback's When Will I Be Loved, as well as a North American premiere for Niels Mueller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon, which bowed at the Festival de Cannes.