Posts

I have a bad feeling about this… Lucasfilm It’s rarely a great sign when movies or shows go out of their way to retroactively make previous installments mean more than they actually did at the time. As much of a thrill as it was to see Hayden Christensen once again as the young Padawan in flashbacks last week, it felt immediately clear that this episode of “Obi-Wan Kenobi” was trying to make up for the inherent flaws of the prequels in a pretty major way....

Only Murders In The Building Season 2 Trailer: Same Building, New Murders Hulu By Valerie Ettenhofer/June 14, 2022 1:54 pm EST Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” is back, and it looks like our amateur podcast hosts-slash-detectives have been framed. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez return for more hijinks in the Upper West Side apartment-set crime comedy, which just dropped its full trailer ahead of its late June return....

Exclusive Death on the Nile behind-the-scenes clip Bonus features for the new release of “Death on the Nile” include: Featurettes • Death on the Nile: Novel to Film – Explore the new vision for Agatha Christie’s classic novel “Death on the Nile,” and how Kenneth Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green collaborated with Christie’s estate to bring a new twist to this story of love and murder. • Agatha Christie: Travel Can Be Murder – The story behind the book connects with Christie’s own love of travel, and especially Egypt and its secrets....

Robert Pattinson’s Most Pattinsoniest Performances A24 By Danielle Ryan/March 2, 2022 12:00 pm EST We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Following his time as vampire teen heartthrob Edward Cullen in the “Twilight” movies, English actor Robert Pattinson has purposely gone on a wild career trajectory to try and distance himself as much as possible from the franchise. He’s starred in a wide variety of independent films, taking on intense and bizarre characters at nearly every turn....

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Early Buzz: An Overlong, But Harmlessly Fun Sequel Paramount Pictures By Jeremy Mathai/March 28, 2022 1:58 pm EST I’ll probably never forget going to the theater a few weeks back and watching the “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” trailer play in front of the movie. After the trailer ended, some poor child cried out plaintively, “I thought Knuckles was good. Why isn’t he good???” Assuming the dramatic and apparently slightly too-intense trailers didn’t turn him off completely from eventually watching the sequel, that kid would probably be thrilled to know that the review embargo for “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” has lifted and the critical response to the film is actually … quite positive!...

Spider-Man: No Way Home Closes In On Avatar’s Domestic Box Office Record Marvel Studios By Joshua Meyer/Jan. 31, 2022 8:28 am EST “Spider-Man: No Way Home” is web-slinging its way ever closer to the domestic box office record held by James Cameron’s “Avatar.” It seemed unthinkable that any movie would gross this much during the pandemic but spiders have legs, as they say, and so does “No Way Home” in theaters....

High Tor Everett Collection/Shutterstock As chronicled in “Finishing the Hat,” Stephen Sondheim’s mentor and “artistic father” figure, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, assigned Sondheim’s four writing exercises. The first exercise: Take a play you like and turn it into a musical. The result was “All That Glitters,” based on George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s “Beggar on Horseback,” which was staged at Williams College with Kaufman’s permission. Then the second exercise: musicalize a play he liked but thought had flaws....

The Best Scene In The Jurassic Franchise Doesn’t Even Have Dinosaurs In It Universal Pictures By Jeremy Mathai/June 9, 2022 9:00 am EST 1993 was a very different time, to say the least. For all the (well-deserved) accolades foisted upon the Steven Spielberg classic “Jurassic Park,” praising its practically seamless visual effects and quintessential sense of awe while recreating long-lost creatures in a way we’d never seen them before, newcomers to the film might be surprised by how little screen time the dinosaurs actually receive....

‘One of the biggest scams in American history’ This guy had three investigations set on him at the same time. He was sort of a local celebrity in Appalachia where he worked, with posters of himself all over town. He did all sorts of stunts, including opening a Halloween-themed brothel, according to one person interviewed. He even walked across the border through Mexico to Guatemala with a dog named Curley. It all sounds funny, until you remember how much he hurt people who lived in a poor part of the country....

The Boys Could End Up With More Spin-Offs Prime Video By Jeremy Mathai/May 24, 2022 11:30 am EST There’s just no getting around certain inevitabilities in Hollywood. When a certain type of franchise finds itself becoming a little “too” popular, logic dictates that more satirical and hard-hitting stories will follow in its wake, providing a crucial sense of counterprogramming for those who’ve become somewhat disenchanted by the accepted flavor du jour....

The Daily Stream: Good Girls Shows What People Will Do For Family NBC Universal By Jenna Busch/May 1, 2022 3:00 pm EST (Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching, why it’s worth checking out, and where you can stream it.) The Series: “Good Girls” Where You Can Stream It: Netflix The Pitch: Imagine this scenario: You had a kid in your teens, and his father is married to someone else....

Two high-powered supes with conflicting goals Prime Studios Hughie discovered Neuman’s secret supe status in the first episode of “The Boys” season 3, when he followed her into an alleyway and witnessed as she popped an old friend who stopped by for a chat like a human balloon. We know that Victoria is capable of murdering just about anyone who gets in her way, which is the same kind of evil behavior you might expect from Homelander....

Why Shang-Chi’s Big Bad Was So Difficult To Get Right Marvel Studios By Fatemeh Mirjalili/Jan. 12, 2022 9:27 am EST Easily one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s best standalone films of all time, Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” introduced Xu Wenwu AKA The Mandarin, a character who has been a long towering figure in Marvel comics. Only this time, it was the real Mandarin....

20th Century Studios Commits To 10 Hulu Films A Year 20th Century Studios By BJ Colangelo/March 4, 2022 9:20 am EST “In relation to the other brands — Marvel, ‘Star Wars,’ Pixar, Disney Animation — we are closer to what you call ‘general entertainment’ on the TV side,” he said. “Some films will be more Disney-adjacent — ‘Avatar,’ ‘Free Guy,’ ‘Planet of the Apes’ — and some films will be edgier....

Almost Every Line In The Lord Of The Rings Had To Be Painstakingly Re-Recorded New Line Cinema By Andrew Housman/June 13, 2022 4:00 pm EST “The Lord of the Rings” is one of the most ambitious filmmaking projects of all time, a technical achievement whose attention to detail mirrors the grand literary world-building of J.R.R. Tolkien himself. The scrupulous process to bring Middle-earth to life required a massive team of artists, all making sure that each individual piece of the film fit neatly as a part of a whole....

A costume fit for a Sorceress Supreme Sneaky peaky BTS pic.twitter.com/w252Cx6w7U— Charlize Theron (@CharlizeAfrica) May 13, 2022 Two immediate observations come to mind when looking at Clea’s costume from all angles. For one, her makeup is incredibly striking. She wears bright purple eyeshadow above and below her eyes that points out in a look that’s confident and just a little edgy. Two, her outfit appears almost armor-like, more akin to the intricate chestpieces worn by the Eternals than anything in Doctor Strange’s wardrobe....

Head of the Class Release Date and Where You Can Watch It Sony Pictures Television HBO Max is set to premiere the “Head of the Class” reboot in November, but a specific date has not yet been made available. However, production was allegedly scheduled to start in Los Angeles earlier this summer, so a fall 2021 release seems out of the realm of possibility. Then again, weirder things have happened....

Hollywood Tried To Erase Lawrence Of Arabia’s Writer From History Columbia Pictures By Andrew Housman/March 23, 2022 3:03 pm EST “Lawrence of Arabia” defined what an epic looked like on the big screen. Its exploration of how historical figures and events can become cultural myths — as well as its huge-scale, immersive Panavision 70 mm color cinematography — influenced filmmakers from George Lucas to Denis Villeneuve. That’s why Hollywood’s decades-long neglect of screenwriter Michael Wilson is an uncomfortable stain on the film’s prestigious status in the annals of cinema....

How Birds Of Prey Evolved Harley Quinn’s Original Suicide Squad Style Warner Bros. Pictures By Lyvie Scott/June 16, 2022 5:48 pm EST No one is the same after a break-up. Though this can feel like a scary revelation for some, it can be a real chance for others to discover who they are, maybe even who they want to be. That sentiment is the catalyst for Harley Quinn’s transformation in “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn),” where the titular anti-hero is unceremoniously liberated from the freakiest (and simultaneously, the least interesting) version of the Joker, and forced to reckon with her newfound independence in a pretty major way....

How Buzz Lightyear Evolved From Pixar Short Character To Toy Story Hero Disney/Pixar By Jenna Busch/June 13, 2022 8:10 pm EST The film “Lightyear” tells the story of Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger in a film that is the inspiration for the toy Buzz in the “Toy Story” franchise from Disney/Pixar. It’s a little complicated, but you get the idea. Buzz didn’t just start as a character in the 1995 animated film though....