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Exclusive: Under the radar rom-com 40 Dates and 40 Nights has wrapped production in Houston, with cast including Bailee Madison (Pretty Little Liars), Joel Courtney (The Kissing Booth), Annie Potts (Ghostbusters), Jai Rodriguez (Bros) and Luxy Banner (The Get Together).

The story revolves around Leah Jones (Madison), who is navigating the challenges of dating. Gigi (Potts), her grandmother, bets her a full year’s rent if she can prove love isn’t out there after 40 consecutive dates.

Andy Delaney directs from a script inspired by true events from Sarah “Howie” Howard. Vance Howard is executive producer for Lucky Number 8 Productions. The film is a co-production between Lucky Number 8 and Rebellium Films (Cottonmouth), produced by Randy Wayne and Madison, with co-producers Sandler Weinberg and Sarah Howard.

Supporting cast includes Jack Schumacher, Eric Nelsen, Bethany Geaber, Mia Challis, Sterling Knight, Mark Hapka, Jeremy Culhan and Randy McDowell.

Vance Howard stated: “When I read the script for 40 Dates,...

What would you do if faced with a fast-approaching death sentence? Start cooking meth? Jump into a volcano? Drink yourself silly? A new dry comedy from acclaimed filmmaker Bob Byington (Infinity Baby) explores said notion with hilariously cringe effect. Collaborating once again with beloved character actor David Krumholtz (Oppenheimer) after their work on Frances Ferguson (2019), Byington is an auteur who cannot be stopped. And don't let the tight 80-minute duration (including end credits) of Lousy Carter fool you into thinking this is any sort of throwaway comedy effort.

In addition to Krumholtz sinking his teeth into a deadpan, thought-provoking role he was born to play, other fan-favorite performers like Martin Starr (Party Down) and Stephen Root (Barry) also grace the screen here. But it's perhaps the women who reign superior here, thanks to standout turns by Olivia Thirlby (The Wackness) and newcomer Luxy Banner. The grim and non-commercial subject matter...

Ever since his high school golf teammates realized he couldn’t hit a straight tee shot, Carter (David Krumholtz) has been saddled with a nickname that doesn’t allow much room for charitable interpretations. His days of athletic mediocrity are now far behind him, but the “Lousy Carter” moniker has followed him throughout his adult life — and frankly, it’s hard to argue he doesn’t deserve it. The question of whether his high school bullies were abnormally clairvoyant or he simply lived down to their insults is a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but the middle-aged iteration of Carter that we meet in Bob Byington’s latest film is an undeniably lousy man.

The literature professor has spent the bulk of his adult life coasting on the glimmer of promise that he showed as an animator when he released his first film 13 years ago. He parlayed those 15 seconds of fame into a...

Death is inherently depressing but it needn’t be as Lousy Carter explores mortality in its own whimsical way.

Starring David Krumholtz in the title role this comedy follows failing animator turned college professor struggling with where he is in life and his own mortality after being told he only has six months to live.

Ahead of its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival we sit down with director & writer, Bob Byington, and co-star Luxy Banner to discuss improv scenes, unusual hobbies and more!

You can watch the full interview below:

Written & directed by Bob Byington, the film stars David Krumholtz, Luxy Banner, Martin Starr, Olivia Thirlby, Jocelyn DeBoer and Stephen Root.

Man-baby Lousy Carter struggles to complete his animated Nabokov adaptation, teaches a graduate seminar on The Great Gatsby, and sleeps with his best friend’s wife. He has six months to live.

Lousy Carter screens at Glasgow...

If you haven’t been following him on Twitter, David Krumholtz has been one of the very few reasons to stay up to date on the happenings of that godforsaken site, sharing gloriously told tales of his time in Hollywood. The Oppenheimer actor’s next feature, Bob Byington’s comedy Lousy Carter, will now arrive this March, which finds him leading an ensemble also including Martin Starr, Olivia Thirlby, Jocelyn DeBoer, Luxy Banner, and Stephen Root. Ahead of the March 29 release, Magnolia Pictures have now released the first trailer and poster.

Here’s the synopsis: “In Lousy Carter, David Krumholtz (Oppenheimer) stars as a ne’er-do-well literature professor adrift on a soulless college campus who learns he only has six months to live. With the clock ticking, will he change his ways? Probably not. Auteur writer/director Bob Byington’s slyly subversive comedy also features comedy all-stars Martin Starr, Olivia Thirlby,...

What a year it’s been for David Krumholtz. In 2023, the actor has added a Tony-winning play (Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt) and a box-office sensation (you know which one) to his resumé. In both cases that affable face, so often in the margins, nudged toward center stage. Krumholtz goes one further with deadbeat comedy Lousy Carter, a premiere last week in competition at the Locarno Film Festival wherein the actor plays a graduate lecturer who learns he has six months to live and decides to try seducing a student. It’s less creepy than it sounds and, at its best, it’s all his.

Lousy Carter is directed by Bob Byington, returning to the Swiss festival for the first time since 2012, when his Nick Offerman starring Somebody Up There Likes Me took home the Special Jury Prize. Byington’s script plants the nominatively determined character in a community college in Austin,...

Nestled in the verdant Swiss Alps, on the shore of Lake Maggiore near the Italian border, Locarno is a beautiful setting for one of Europe’s preeminent summer film festivals. While most screenings take place in the sleek, modernist cinemas that are dotted around the small town, each evening also has at least one open-air projection in the central square, bolstering the impact of the festival’s more high-profile titles by presenting them amid rustic cobbles, gorgeous mountain scenery, and several centuries of history.

Holding an international showcase like this in such a breathtaking place also serves to underline some of the interesting contradictions and alternately jarring and fruitful clashes that a legacy film festival can create, which were never more apparent than at this year’s edition. Case in point, the Monday-night screening of Luc Jacquet’s Antarctica Calling, which was prefaced by a pre-screening award presentation that was interrupted by environmental activists.

This year marks 30 years since Bob Byington’s first feature, though it’s only during the last 15 of those — since SXSW midnight-movie breakout “Rso: Registered Sex Offender” — that the Austin-based director has enjoyed “indie darling” status. During that same stretch, the cultural discourse has changed a great deal, while Byington’s voice remains remarkably (if somewhat frustratingly) consistent, churning out self-deprecating feature-length sitcoms about flaccid man-babies. Those aren’t the kind of movies American festivals are looking for so much anymore, which could explain why his latest, “Lousy Carter,” wound up premiering abroad, at the Locarno Film Festival.

Locarno’s programmers typically gravitate toward austere, experimental and/or formally audacious works of cinema. “Lousy Carter” is none of these things, but neither is it lousy. That unfortunate moniker belongs to the film’s lead character, a lumpy failed animator turned tenured literature professor, who’s rendered all the more pathetic...

Directed by Will Bakke, The Get Together is a comedy about a friday night party from the perspective of four individuals; a young college graduate struggling to find a ‘real job’ so is consequently an Uber driver, her slacker passenger with a band that is falling apart, his long lost love who moved away to the big city and her new boyfriend, who struggles to find the perfect way to propose. The film is divided into three parts, one for each perspective. Each person or ‘perspective’ has their own short story to tell that intertwines with the others at the party, as well as with each other.

August’s up first. Played very well by the incredible Courtney Parchman, she’s seen as ‘the loner’, the one who doesn’t go out much and with no friends except her college roommate McCall (Luxy Banner). I find Parchman’s acting very...