Blog Posts by Jonathan Crow

Photo: Sony Pictures

If you saw "Looper" this past weekend, you're probably still thinking about it. Rian Johnson's surprisingly dense dystopic time-travel movie is, like "The Master," one of those movies that just engenders conversation. Johnson so thoroughly thought out the paradoxical weirdness of time travel along with the grubby, dysfunctional world of middle America in 2044 that the movie not only holds up with multiple viewers, it gets richer.

The movie is about Joe, an assassin -- or looper -- living in the near future. His job is to whack mob victims sent illicitly back in time. The gig might not be the most demanding, but it pays well. Joe has enough money for a sweet vintage Miata, a vault filled with silver bars, and enough drugs to keep him flying high every night. Meanwhile, citizens not involved with some form of organized crime live either in soulless tenements or out on the street. It's the sort of blandly grim future that makes "Blade Runner" look like a utopia. No flying cars or sexy androids here. When Joe is confronted with the task of killing the middle-aged version of himself, he chokes. The older Joe (Bruce Willis) cold-cocks him and flees. While Joe the younger desperately searches for his lost target, the older one has a brutally simple plan to return back to the good life he had taken from him.

Yahoo! Movies sat down with 'Looper' director Rian Johnson on Friday. (Photo: Jonathan Crow/ Yahoo! Movies)

Toronto International Film Festival, Day-One Screenings:

Rian Johnson's sci-fi thriller "Looper" launched this year's Toronto film festival and it was a great choice. The movie has the singularity of vision and the integrity of an indie or art house movie but it's on an epic scale with Hollywood actors; exactly the sort of movies that Toronto loves to showcase. It's also just about impossible to talk about without spoiling it. So if you're remotely concerned about learning too much about this flick, do yourself a favor and skip down to "Thale."

Andy and Lana Wachowski are some of the most reclusive filmmakers working in Hollywood. In the past, they've refused to do press events for any of their movies, from their hugely influential "Matrix" trilogy to "V for Vendetta," which they produced, to "Speed Racer." But for their upcoming staggeringly ambitious movie, "Cloud Atlas," which premieres this week at the Toronto Film Festival, they've decided to talk with the New Yorker's Aleksandar Hemon in a lengthy profile.

While the article devotes pages to their new movie's long and difficult production -- it's fascinating, if you have a few minutes to spare, read it -- the piece also offers a few rare insights into the famously private filmmaking siblings. Until 2002, Lana was known as Larry. In the profile, Lana opens up about her long and painful transition.

Photo: Samuel Goldwyn PicturesThe billing of the new movie "Robot & Frank" is all wrong. It should have been called "Frank & Robot," as it's really a one-human show.

The Frank in the title is the veteran actor Frank Langella. He's won piles of prizes for his stage work and he garnered an Oscar nomination for his turn as Richard M. Nixon in "Frost/Nixon." In this movie, Langella plays another kind of crook — an irascible, retired cat burglar who lives up in a quaint house in the countryside at some time in the "near future."

Photo by Getty Images/Everett collection

Days before his cinematic head-trip, "Cosmopolis," is slated for limited release, Robert Pattinson announced that he is going to play none other than British Army officer T.E. Lawrence in the upcoming indie flick "Queen of the Desert." The movie will also star Naomi Watts and will be directed by art house icon Werner Herzog.

Photo by Fox Searchlight PicturesThis has been one hell of a year for Benh Zeitlin, director of "Beasts of the Southern Wild."

The first-time director finished his movie a mere two days before its Sundance premiere, where it was immediately met with rhapsodic reviews. Critics hailed it as one of the most audacious movies to play at the festival in years. It went on to win the fest's top prize, and then a few months later it won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival. And today, the movie scored four, count 'em, four Oscar nominations including one for best director and another for best picture.

Photo by Columbia Pictures

Aside from his serendipitous surname, Webb wasn't an obvious choice to reboot the franchise, but he proved to be an inspired one. Prior to directing "The Amazing Spider-Man," Marc Webb's only other claim to fame was helming the surprise indie hit "500 Days of Summer." That movie connected with its audience because he worked with the actors to make the characters' love affair feel fresh and real. For "Spider-Man," Webb managed to keep that same light touch with the actors while still making a CG-heavy action spectacular -- no mean feat.

A mere five years since Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man 3" was released, a new version of Peter Parker's journey from awkward high school student to crime fighter is hitting the silver screen next week. So why is the Webbed One getting the reboot treatment?

I posed that question to the cast of "The Amazing Spider-Man." Check out what they say below: