amanda bynes.........

Actress Amanda Bynes was dragged into a shoplifting case after she left a luxury department store wearing a hat she hadn't paid for. The actress says it was just a misunderstanding.

Police were called to Barneys New York Wednesday afternoon when Bynes left the store wearing the hat.

"Police responded to a petit larceny," NYPD spokesperson was quoted by people.com as saying.

"Amanda Bynes placed a hat on her head and left the store. Security brought her back in and called the police, but the security decided to release her. She was gone when the NYPD arrived on the scene," added the spokesperson.

According to police, Amanda signed a no-trespass affidavit, banning her from the high-end department store. No charges were filed.

Amanda says it was just a misunderstanding.

"I was walking out of the store to get my handbag out of the car," said the 28-year-old.

"I had been harassed by a man - a man and this woman were basically trying to take my picture inside the store, and so I asked them to stop taking it, but they wouldn't. They were like paparazzi but undercover," she added.

Amanda says one of the security guards knew she was leaving and would be back but that there was a miscommunication with another guard.

"I walked out of the store, and the sensor went off. I didn't realise I was wearing my cap. And the cap - I was purchasing it, and I was actually still shopping," she said.

Amanda also said the store asked her not to return.

new still saif ali khan

                 Actor Saif Ali Khan gets ready to end November on a happy note with Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK's Happy Ending, which is set for a November release.

The first poster of the film features an enthusiastic Saif, who plays Hollywood writer Yudi, sitting on a chair and picking the right frame from the point of view of a director.

The actor totally defies his age with his casual yet trendy look in the poster, donning vibrant hues and a pair of rugged blue jeans, with high-rise buildings set in the backdrop of the poster.

Actress Ileana D'cruz will be seen sharing screen-space with Saif as his leading lady in the film which also stars actors Govinda, Ranvir Shorey, Kalki Koechlin in pivotal roles.

Saif's actress-wife Kareena Kapoor will be seen in a cameo role as will actor Preity Zinta.

JAMES BOND VILLAIN GEOFFERY HOLDER DIES AT 84.

                                           Geoffrey Holder, the actor who played top-hatted voodoo villain Baron Samedi in James Bond movie Live And Let Die, has died of pneumonia complication.

He was 84.

The actor breathed his last on September 6 in Mount Sinai St Luke's Hospital in New York, according to producer and family friend Anna Glass, reported Ace Showbiz.

Geoffrey, who was also dancer, choreographer, composer, designer and painter, started his movie career in 1962's British movie All Night Long.

He later appeared in 1967's Doctor Dolittle along with Rex Harrison, 1982's Annie and 1992's Boomerang with Eddie Murphy.

Geoffrey won two Tony Awards for Best Costume Design and Best Direction of a Musical in The Wiz, an all-black version of The Wizard of Oz, in 1975.

He also appeared in all-black version of Waiting For Godot.

Most recently, Geoffrey provided narration for Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

He is survived by his wife, Carmen de Lavallade, and their son, Leo

WHY RANVEER SINGH IS MOVING OUT OF HIS HOUSE

                                     Actor Ranveer Singh will be taking a drastic step for the sake of his next project with filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali Bajirao Mastani. The actor will soon enter a life of seclusion to get into the skin of his character.

The Ram Leela star, who is one the most outgoing actors in the film industry, will be living a very low key life in order to prepare for his role in the historic drama where he plays the great Maratha leader Bajirao.

The role requires Ranveer to learn the importance of isolation because of which the actor will soon be moving out of his house in order to lead a life cut off from his friends and family.

In a magazine interview Ranveer said, "The film requires me to cut off from television, (have) no phone, no internet and I honestly need to get in a certain zone." He also said in the same interview, "At home I have my mother, sister and father; I need to just cut off and get into this (completely). I can't even tell you the demands of this character. It's scary." Ranveer Singh will also go bald for the role.

It is not the first time an actor has taken such a drastic measure to get into the skin of a character he is supposed to play. Actor Sushant Singh Rajput had recently gone into isolation while filming for Dibaker Banerjee's sleuth drama film Detectibe Byomkesh Bakshi. The actor, who wanted to get a firsthand experience of the fictional detective's private and self-reliant modalities, reportedly also stayed away from the rest of the film's crew when not shooting.

THE PRINCE MOVIE REVIEW

                                      Director Brian A. Miller's latest action-thriller The Prince fails to rise in stature beyond the first frame.

With an A-list star cast and an intriguing montage that rolls in the beginning of the film, which promises to deliver something exciting and unusual, the film ends on a disappointing note.

The premise of the film is similar to the 2009 released, Lian Neeson-starrer film, Taken.

Unspooling a revenge drama, The Prince is the story of a reformed hit-man's search for his missing daughter.

Based in Mississippi, the long-distant single parent, Paul (Jason Patric) discovers that something is amiss with his daughter Beth (Gia Mategna), who is studying in college in New Orleans, after he fails to connect with her on her phone.

So after landing at her place and breaking into her apartment, he seeks assistance from one of her school friends Angela (Jessica Lowndes) to help him track her down.

Paul's trail leads him to a drug dealer known as 'The Pharmacy' (Curtis Jackson), who has been supplying heroin to his daughter. He soon realises that his daughter is not an addict out of choice, but is held hostage under the instructions of another vicious crime-lord, Omar (Bruce Willis), who is seeking revenge for an act Paul did twenty years ago.

With a wafer thin plot-line and an equally slim instigating moment, the narration lacks depth. The characters are sketchily etched and the film is laden with plot-holes. The script, by Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore, hardly has any surprise elements and often resorts to repeating scenes.

The film belongs to Jason Patric, who, with his rugged appearance and steely determination, offers an intense act. Bruce Willis as Omar, is stoic, mechanical and offers a half-hearted performance.

Curtis Jackson hardly has any meaningful moment on screen. Jung Ji-Hoon, the popular Korean pop star plays the cold calculating henchman to Omar. He displays some of his martial arts expertise and is the surprise package in the film. John Cusack as Paul's former colleague Sam, who runs a luxury hotel offers some intriguing moments, but unfortunately his character is not written well enough to support his talent.

With tight frames oscillating between mid-shots and wide, the film has traits of a home-video-film. The production quality too, is of an average tight budget film, with no frills. The only extravaganza noticed is the splurge on ammunition during the shootout scenes.

The action scenes; be it the shootouts, exchange of blows during the scuffle or the car chase, are mechanical and obviously imbalanced and unrealistic. This is very obvious in the scene where Paul carries his drugged daughter out of the drug lord's lair.

Overall, the film falls short on the directorial front and what adds to the disappointing fare is the bleeping of the cuss words in the dialogues owning to the censor board's diktat.

Watch it only if you have nothing better to do.

THE MAZE RUNNER MOVIE REVIEW

                               If you see one film about walled-in males this fall, it should be the savage and powerful British prison drama Starred Up, a superlatively acted father-son story played out behind bars and starring up-and-coming Jack O'Connell.

Not many are likely to make that choice, though, as The Maze Runner, based on the James Dashner 2009 fantasy novel, will surely multiply the business of Starred Up many times over with a far more tame film barely distinct from the hordes of young-adult sci-fi adaptations sprinting through movie theaters.

Has a cottage industry ever sprung up as fast as the YA land rush brought on by Twilight and The Hunger Games? I'd like to use a mortal instrument to put an ender to this game. Please, give me a break.

But to be fair, there isn't anything inherently wrong with The Maze Runner, directed by special effects-veteran Wes Ball. It's just that it does so little to find its own path separate from its dystopia brethren. All of the recent young-adult formulas are adhered to here: the teenage rebellion against tradition, the coming-of-age metaphors, the heavy sequel-baiting.

Dylan O'Brien, best known as one of the stars of MTV's Teen Wolf, stars as Thomas, a newbie to a strange prison called "The Glade" — a pastoral park surrounded by a monolith concrete maze. The movie, with a neat lack of exposition, starts with Thomas being elevated into this world and dropped there without any memory of life outside or his identity.

He's quickly indoctrinated to the ways and order of the Glade, where several dozen other boys have also been plunked down like lab rats for the last three years. Under the leadership of the calm Alby (Ami Ameen) and the more questionable rigidity of Gally (Will Poulter), they make exploratory runs into the maze each day before the gate closes at sundown.

The Maze Runner succeeds most in its Lord of the Flies-like collection of teenagers. (Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Blake Cooper are among the distinct faces in the crowd.) When a lone girl (Kaya Scodelario) is surprisingly elevated into the Glade, they, like proper adolescents, blink with astonishment: "It's a girl."

There's a pleasantly low-fi, bare-bones kind of storytelling here, at least before the movie's mysteries are boringly explained — another apocalypse to parse.

Thomas, curious and daring, quickly upends the routines of the Glade and manages to discover more about the concrete labyrinth, which is patrolled by weird, giant, half-robot scorpions dubbed "Grievers." (That the only monsters The Maze Runner can summon are "weird, giant, half-robot scorpions" is surely a hint to its lack of imagination.)

The maze, too, is a letdown. Given that it's the central conceit of the film, one expects more than domino rows of big cinderblocks. Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance, who so memorably stalked the snowy hedge maze of The Shining, wouldn't bat an eye at these drab corridors.

The Maze Runner a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "thematic elements and intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, including some disturbing images." 

A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES MOVIE REVIEW

                                   It's not for nothing that the names of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are reverentially referenced in writer-director Scott Frank's adaptation of the 10th novel in Lawrence Block's long-running, best-selling series featuring unlicensed private eye Matthew Scudder. Distinctly and proudly old-fashioned in its retro, film noir vibe, A Walk Among the Tombstones is notable for its dark atmospherics and strong performance by Liam Neeson in the latest example of his unlikely late career transformation into an action hero.

Scudder is a terrific character, whose casting choice its creator heartily approved, expertly embodies with his usual physically commanding presence and world-weary gravitas. The film's tense 1991-set opening scene efficiently provides the character's backstory as an alcoholic NYC cop who gave up the booze and the badge when his shootout with some bad guys on the streets of New York City went tragically awry. Cut to 1999, when he's working as unlicensed private investigator who explains that "I do favors for people. In return they give me gifts."

Enlisted by fellow AA meeting attendee and drug addict Peter (Boyd Holbrook), Scudder reluctantly takes a case involving Peter's prosperous drug-dealing brother Kenny (Dan Stevens, in a sharp departure from his heartthrob role in Downton Abbey), whose wife was kidnapped and returned dead despite his having paid a $400,000 ransom. Kenny demands that Scudder find the culprits and bring them to him for retribution that clearly doesn't involve the legal system.

After the discovery of another female victim, this time left in pieces in trash bags in a park in Brooklyn's historic Greenwood Cemetery, the trail eventually leads to a pair of serial killers (David Harbour, Adam David Thompson) who target criminals so as to avoid their getting the authorities involved. After discovering their identity from the cemetery's groundskeeper (a very creepy Olafur Darri Olafsson), Scudder pursues the sociopathic duo with the unlikely help of TJ (Brian "Astro" Bradley), a homeless black teenager who aspires to being a gumshoe himself.

Things come to a head after the kidnapping of the young daughter of a Russian drug dealer (Sebastian Roche), with Scudder getting directly involved in the ensuing negotiations. The film's final act, featuring violent set pieces in a basement and the spooky nighttime environs of the cemetery, ratchets up the action considerably.

At one point Scudder explains to his young apprentice that the main attribute a private eye must possess is a "strong bladder." Viewers may need one as well to get through the film's dull middle section, filled with long, talky patches in which nothing much really happens. The compensation is that Neeson's emotionally reticent hero is consistently engaging and refreshingly vulnerable, preferring to talk his way out of tense situations.

Director Frank clearly has an affinity for the material, investing the proceedings with a darkly compelling atmosphere that recalls the best noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. The film benefits greatly from having been shot in various seedy NYC neighborhoods — not to mention the spooky gothic cemetery that inspires the title — with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. (The Master) delivering a desaturated color palette accentuating the overall gloominess.

At times the convoluted plotting proves too baroque for its own good, and the subplot involving Scudder's mentoring of the sassy teen, who we eventually learn suffers from sickle-cell anemia, is both silly and distracting. The climactic shootout is marred by a too-fussy staging employing freeze frames and a juxtaposition of the tenants of the 12-Step program.

A Walk Among the Tombstones, a Universal release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "strong violence, disturbing images, language and brief nudity.