The action thriller co-starring Abbie Cornish and Robert De Niro is based on the 2001 novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn and is directed by Neil Burger (The Illusionist).

Specs have yet to be revealed, but the release will include an unrated extended cut of the film as well as the following supplements: A Man Without Limits, Taking It to the Limit: The Making of Limitless, Audio Commentary with director Neil Burger, Alternate Ending; Theatrical Trailer, and a Digital Copy.

Suggested list price for the Blu-ray is $39.99.

Source: High-def Digest

Warner Home Video has announced a June 28 release date for Sucker Punch on Blu-ray and DVD combo format, packing a new 127-minute R-rated director’s cut that adds almost 18 additional minutes to the theatrical cut (also included). Both versions will be presented in 1080p video and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio.

A partial list of supplemental features include Maximum Mode Mode with Snyder and the Sucker Punch animated prequel stories shorts, and more. Additional features will be passed along when they’re revealed.

Click here to pre-order Sucker Punch on Blu-ray for $24.99 at Amazon.com, 31% off the $35.99 list price.

Source: The HD Room

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans: Esquire (UK) – May 2011
- Magazine Scans: Los Angeles Confidential (US) – Spring 2011

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans: InStyle (US) – April 2011

“One night I was having dinner with Bradley Cooper and he was like, ‘If [the cast of the A-Team] had played paintball with [the cast of Sucker Punch] you would have kicked our butts.” It’s like, “Yeah, we know.” – Abbie Cornish

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Nylon
- Magazine Scans: Nylon (US) – April 2011

• InStyle (US) – April 2011 with a several paged editorial
• Nylon (US) – April 2011 with a Sucker Punch cover story

We will try our best to bring you scans as soon as possible!

Meanwhile, if you’re able to contribute scans from these or any of Abbie’s other recent magazine features, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

“I’m a vegetarian – I’m not the type to want to go shoot a gun – then I actually got to the range and totally fell in love with an M4. It was kind of amazing.”

On top of the Marie Claire cover story, which we’ve reported about previously, Abbie is also featured in another American magazine in April; she has a gorgeous pin-up snap and a short article inside the pages of GQ. Photoshoots from both magazines are now available in the gallery and the articles may be read in the press section.

The Limitless film page has also been updated with some critics’ quotes regarding Abbie’s performance. Pretty much all reviews that I’ve come across so far agree that Abbie is heavily underused in the movie but that she does well with the given material. Sad to hear that she doesn’t have all that much to do in the movie, really. She is so talented and truly deserves to be front and center in films. You’d think this would have happened especially following her spectacular turn in Bright Star.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: GQ
- Photoshoots: Marie Claire

Remember to follow us on Twitter for instant updates!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans: Marie Claire (US) – April 2011
- Magazine Scans: Harper’s Bazaar (Australia) – April 2011

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans: Empire (UK) – March 2011

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazines: Total Film (UK) – October 2010

Abbie who delighted critics with her performance in Bright Star is being honored with several young female ingenues like Carey Mulligan, Gabby Sidibe, Emily Blunt and more.

The Cupid’s-bow lips, the downy-soft cheeks, the button nose: 27-year-old Abbie Cornish has those Ivory-soap-girl features we’re so familiar with, and yet hers is a face it’s hard to stop staring at—testament to the intelligence, vulnerability, and sensuality she brings to her characters. Her breakthrough for American audiences came with fellow Australian Heath Ledger, as a junkie in 2006’s Candy, free-falling from invincible heroin highs to soul-seizing anguish. Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss saw her fleeing the law with Ryan Phillippe’s character. (Enter some real-life drama: Phillippe, then the husband of Reese Witherspoon, would soon become her boyfriend.) She may have been her loveliest in Jane Campion’s Bright Star, playing John Keats’s muse, the flirty and forthright Fanny Brawne.

Check out this sneak peek below.

DVD Features include:
- 1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
- English DD5.1
- English subtitles
- Deleted Scene
- An Inspiring Romance Featurette
- Becoming Keats and Fanny Featurette
- Setting the Scene Featurette

First she steals your eyes, then she steals the movie. And not to be too graphic, she works her tail off.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Esquire (2009)

She steps out into the brilliant blue light of a Malibu afternoon wearing flip-flops and a diaphanous little black sundress, a look suggestive of a young woman on holiday, a role she loves to play above all else, to hear her tell it. Like so many of her fellow Australians, her wanderlust seems almost genetic, an inbred need to see something more of the world, someplace else, as if to confirm its true existence. She leans against the railing and searches the horizon, the array of lean-muscled surfers in the middle distance, her honey-colored eyes behind green-tinted aviators, the breeze touching her golden, flyaway hair. She talks about soaking up sun in San Sebastián, on the Basque coast of Spain; of Morocco’s sensual dichotomy between light and dark; of living in an empty house in a village in Brazil with two male friends, sleeping in hammocks, studying the martial art capoeira. She drinks Asian “bubble tea” from a plastic cup, compliments of her publicist. There are tapioca pearls at the bottom; they rise in single file through an overlarge straw, her lips the naked pink of an ingenue.

At twenty-seven, Cornish is perhaps most widely known for contributing to the breakup of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, with whom she costarred in (and from whom she stole the last third of) Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce’s Iraq war tale. One of five children raised on a 170-acre farm in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, the former Aussie TV star has been praised as an actress since the morning after her first public performance, at age fifteen, a guest turn as a paraplegic on the down-under series Children’s Hospital. Like generations of precocious actresses before her, she never looked back.

Often touted as the next Nicole Kidman or Naomi Watts, often described by directors and producers as “luminescent,” she is a naturalistic indie actress wrapped inside the skin of a sex kitten, Chloë Sevigny meets Scarlett Johansson. Playing Heidi in 2004′s Somersault, she is unnervingly convincing as a young runaway, trading her innocence for necessity and love. In Candy, as a heroin addict, she holds her own against a powerful performance some critics have called one of Heath Ledger’s finest. Even opposite fellow Aussie Cate Blanchett’s Oscar-nominated turn in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Cornish manages to steal your eyes at times. Playing Bess Throckmorton, the angelic lady-in-waiting who falls for the charms of Clive Owen’s lusty Sir Walter Raleigh, she is light and radiant against the dim gloom of the Virgin Queen’s castle.

Next for Cornish is Jane Campion’s latest, Bright Star. With her hair dyed brown, her charms swaddled in an entertaining assortment of oddly whimsical period costumes as befits her fashion-obsessed character, Cornish portrays Fanny Brawne, the eighteen-year-old muse to the young poet John Keats. While living next door to her family between 1819 and 1820, the ill-fated, tubercular Romantic master produced his most beautiful and enduring works, including “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

Cornish has just flown in from Vancouver, where she has begun three months of training for her next movie, Sucker Punch. Cowritten and directed by Watchmen‘s Zack Snyder, the film costars Vanessa Hudgens and is listed as an adventure fantasy. After two period pieces, Cornish says she’d been hoping to do something physically demanding, something for which she had to train, “something really trippy like a concept film, where I’d have to really use my imagination and do crazy things.”

Now she’s busting her butt five days a week, five to six hours a day. “Mixed martial arts, fighting, swords, weapons, choreography, personal trainers,” she enumerates proudly, the beguiling accent of a proper sheila. “We add gun stuff at the end of the day.”

Moving a bit stiffly, she takes a seat at a patio table, in the shade beneath an umbrella. There are bruises visible up and down her (luminous) arms and legs. She reaches again for her Moroccan-mint-blended green-tea boba, from a little café she loves. When she arrived at the interview, she’d found it waiting. “It was funny to want to do that kind of movie and then it just comes along,” she says brightly, and then she takes a lingering sip. The beads of tapioca flow in single file. It makes her smile.

Source: Esquire

If home is where the heart is, as the saying goes, then for the past year, Australian­-born actress Abbie Cornish’s home has been in Los Angeles, where she shares a house with Ryan Phillippe not far from where she’s sitting at the Chateau Marmont on a recent summer afternoon.

“I guess I was lucky because it was love that brought me here, not work,” says the 27-year-old Cornish, the star of Jane Campion’s new movie, Bright Star, as she unexpectedly allows a bland question about residency to steer the talk from professional accomplishments to personal attachments. “I think the city feels and looks a little bit different because of that.”

Why she broaches the subject of romance is inexplicable, since Cornish stiffens when asked directly about her boyfriend. As any celebrity junkie knows, the couple met two years ago on the set of Stop-Loss, the first movie Cornish shot in America after having worked abroad alongside Heath Ledger in Candy, in 2006, and with Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year. At the time, Phillippe was married to Reese Witherspoon, and when word of the golden couple’s separation leaked to the front pages, Cornish was cast as the culprit, an alluring other woman who tempted Phillippe away from the best-paid and possibly best-loved actress of her generation.

“It was a really difficult time for me,” admits Cornish, who is polite and guarded in demeanor but nonetheless exudes a kind of earthy, unkempt sensuality. “It was just this world of tabloid magazines that I’d never been exposed to. In a normal successful career, someone usually learns these things bit by bit. For me, it was like night and day. I woke up one day and there was this whole new thing I had to process and deal with.”

Cornish seems aware that she’ll have to “deal with” at least some additional measure of personal scrutiny during this interview, and her body language shows that she doesn’t enjoy the prospect. She untucks her legs from beneath her to place her feet more firmly on the ground and raises a hand to cover a pale mole on her left cheek as if it were a secret part of her.

“Have you spent time with Ryan and Reese’s two kids?”

“Of course, yeah.”

Cornish glances to the wicker table beside her, perhaps hoping to find distraction in the plate of berries, glass of rosé and packet of cigarettes there.

“Are you and Ryan engaged?”

“No.”

“Do you have plans in that direction?”

“I don’t know,” she says, adding with a tense laugh, “I think I’m nearly ready to go on to another part of the conversation.”

Unsanctioned love, albeit a wholly chaste one, also lies at the heart of Cornish’s performance as Fanny Brawne in the historical romance Bright Star, which is based on the life of Romantic poet John Keats. With its visual splendor and sense of suspended time, the film will evoke for many The Piano, Campion’s Oscar winner, while mesmerizing performances by Cornish and Ben Whishaw, as the scissors-thin Keats, will kick off this year’s race for the Oscars.

But Cornish may not be able to continue vacationing so avidly now that her star is on the rise. Her next screen appearance will be in Sucker Punch from Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), which, based on her description, sounds like Charlie’s Angels meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rolled into The Matrix. The six-month big-budget shoot will be the long­est of her career to date.

“It’s a little bit scary,” Cornish admits, the glass of wine beside her now empty. “But the intensity and focus of it is what I enjoy. It’s not like you put your toe in the water and wade around a little. You just dive in the deep end, swim around and then come out the other side. I like that feeling.”

For Cornish, Bright Star was a chance to work with a woman who is both a hero down under and one of the most acclaimed directors in film. “Jane has this amazing ability to create a world,” says Cornish, who had met her only once briefly before auditioning for the role of Fanny. “It’s almost like you can feel the breeze. You can smell the flowers. You can sense the cold.”

Bright Star recounts the story of Keats and the young woman he was smitten with until his death, in 1821, of tuberculosis, and its intellectual sensibility makes even relatively highbrow movies like 2007’s Atonement seem made for the masses. Campion depicts daily life in Georgian England with a scholarly attention to detail, and the literary script, which she wrote herself, may appeal to the most persnickety English professor. And as for the public’s interest in such refinements? The film’s premiere in Cannes was a highlight of the festival. “People seemed to love it,” says Cornish. “They seemed to absorb what you hoped they would absorb.”

Campion first stumbled onto the love story by chance while she was researching a different film about a writing teacher and happened to pick up a biography of Keats. The dusty history leapt to life with Fanny’s entrance, and Campion admits to sobbing when she got to Keats’s death. She went on to read the poet’s letters to Fanny and realized they were an “incredibly detailed portrait of a love affair” that could be told onscreen.

“Keats had laughed at romance as a distraction from the things that mattered, like poetry,” Campion says during a phone call from her home in Australia. “But then he fell in love. He wrote Fanny the most beautiful love letters that exist in the English language. They naturally record an excessive outpouring of emotions, but Keats had the skills as a writer to describe them.”

Cornish recalls that she was equally swept away when she read Campion’s script. “It was just beautiful,” she says. “You melted away into that world. The love story, the loss, Fanny’s character, that all felt very real to me and very alive.”

As a consummate Romantic heroine, Fanny may seem to be a role custom-made for an English rose like Keira Knightley. Campion acknowledges that a big star would have made finding financing easier, but she decided that a less famous presence might suit the story better. (“I love Keira Knightley,” says Campion, “but she’s done so much that she seems to our collective knowledge much older than she is.”) What’s more, Campion notes with delight, a New Zealand–born director working with an Australian actress to tell this particular tale is actually the epitome of historical accuracy.

“These were not wealthy people,” she says of the characters. The Brawne family scrimped to maintain appearances, while Keats and his best friend, Charles Armitage Brown, lived in penury. “These were the class of people who emigrated from Georgian England. Keats’s brother went to America. Brown actually went to New Zealand. So I’m exactly the class of Keats, or my ancestors were. It’s very English to leave England.”

Cornish plays Fanny as a proper if strong-headed girl—Campion was surprised to see the degree to which the actress, whom she describes as rather shy, made Brawne “funny and bold.” Fanny finds her creative outlet in sewing, so Cornish learned to sew for the part in addition to studying with a dialogue coach. Still, she says getting into character was easy after three intense weeks of rehearsal with Campion and Whishaw.

“We had all this time,” recalls Cornish, noting that the unhurried rehearsals matched the deliberate preindustrial pace of the finished film, which was shot outside London. “If there was a scene where the characters are out walking, then we’d go to a park and run it while walking. Things started to come alive.”

What won’t make sense to most viewers is how—or even why—Keats and Brawne never consummated their love. “Keats had had sexual experiences before,” says Cornish, “but he decided not to do that with Fanny because he knew he was going to die. He had this whole precious idea of her.”

The bucolic world of Bright Star is not entirely unfamiliar to Cornish. She and her four siblings, who range in age from 14 to 28, grew up on a 170-acre family farm north of Sydney, where her childhood chores included hanging laundry to dry and feeding the horses. At 15, she won a modeling competition in Sydney, and her agency sent her to an acting audition. Cornish nailed it and got her first role, as a quadriplegic on a hospital drama.

“When I got on the set, it was like I’d stepped into the television box,” says Cornish, recalling her wonder at learning how a show was put together. “I was like, ‘Oh gosh, this is how it works.’ It was like a puzzle that I didn’t even know existed.”

Despite a zest for travel that kept her away from home for long stretches, Cornish managed to land heavy-duty roles in Australia as a teenage sexual adventuress in 2004’s Somersault and a heroin addict in Candy. Those performances opened the way to such prestige fare as A Good Year and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, in which she played lady-in-waiting Bess Throckmorton to Cate Blanchett’s monarch. Neither film, though, had the box office draw or critical appeal to make Cornish a household name—that didn’t happen until she met Phillippe on Stop-Loss. These days she still travels regularly for pleasure, to favorite locales including Spain, Italy and Brazil.

But Cornish may not be able to continue vacationing so avidly now that her star is on the rise. Her next screen appearance will be in Sucker Punch from Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), which, based on her description, sounds like Charlie’s Angels meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rolled into The Matrix. The six-month big-budget shoot will be the long­est of her career to date.

“It’s a little bit scary,” Cornish admits, the glass of wine beside her now empty. “But the intensity and focus of it is what I enjoy. It’s not like you put your toe in the water and wade around a little. You just dive in the deep end, swim around and then come out the other side. I like that feeling.”

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Harper’s Bazaar (2009)