If you didn’t know Imogen Poots was British, it is understandable. Few young actors transform so chameleon-like, role-to-role, applying accents so skillfully. I was first wowed by her in Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way and then I actually didn’t even know it was her in Green Room until I saw the credits. She floored me again in Frank and Lola opposite Michael Shannon, in an entirely different kind of role. Now she plays a drifter with questionable parenting skills, who steers into escalating trouble in Mobile Homes, and by the end of the movie her performance wrecked me. In […]

Kentucky-born Michael Shannon has been appearing regularly in television, independent film and studio pictures since the mid-’90s, but it was his Oscar-nominated turn as a bracingly honest, if perhaps mentally unstable, mathematician in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road that made directors see him as a potential leading man. In the years since, Shannon has fulfilled that promise, most notably as another unbalanced seer in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter. But it’s in the next 12 months that Shannon will truly explode onscreen in a succession of notable lead and supporting parts. First up is his turn in theaters as a rapacious repo […]