Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Jake Gyllenhaal in The Guilty Southpaw collaborators Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal reteam for The Guilty, an English-language remake of a Danish thriller about a cop who sucks at his job spending a shift at work, sucking at his job. The fact that the film was shot during the pandemic in 2020 is fairly cleverly By Sarah • Sep 15, 2021 04:05 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Olivia Munn in Violet Justine Bateman makes her feature directorial debut with Violet, a psychological pressure cooker of a character study centered on the titular Violet (Olivia Munn). A successful film executive, Violet tolerates the disrespect of her colleagues, harassment of her boss, and abusive guilt trips of her estranged family. When she is By Sarah • Sep 15, 2021 01:31 pm
TIFF 2021 Coverage TIFF Review: Jessica Chastain & Andrew Garfield in The Eyes of Tammy Faye The Eyes of Tammy Faye wants to be a sympathetic portrait of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, but it succeeds more in cementing Tammy Faye’s place in the 20th century camp canon than it does reframing her as a victim of her husband’s By Sarah • Sep 15, 2021 10:47 am
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman Celine Sciamma follows her 2019 breakout arthouse hit, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with Petite Maman, a contemporary tale of parents and children, mothers and daughters. Written and directed by Sciamma, Petite Maman fits the recent fad for time travel/loop films as a young girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) By Sarah • Sep 13, 2021 03:07 pm
TV Updates Where has THIS Hawkeye been? One of my eternal disappointments with the MCU is how Clint Barton turned out. I am a HUGE fan of Hawkeye in the comics, and despite a pitch-perfect appearance in Thor way back in 2011, the Clint we ended up with in the movies is the most boring, least fun By Sarah • Sep 13, 2021 02:03 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog That Benedict Cumberbatch is capable of great performances is not a surprise at this point, but still there is something astonishing about his performance in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. Adapted by Campion from Thomas Savage’s novel of the same name, Cumberbatch plays Phil Burbank, an By Sarah • Sep 13, 2021 11:25 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Kenneth Branagh’s Roma The hit of the Telluride Film Festival last weekend was Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s new film inspired by his own childhood growing up in Belfast, Ireland during The Troubles. The film is due to premiere at TIFF this weekend, and it will be interesting to see how it does with By Sarah • Sep 10, 2021 02:45 pm
TV Updates The Wheel of Time doesn’t have dragons Even though the last seasons and finale disappointed pretty much everyone, Game of Thrones was a HUGE success, so huge that, naturally, everyone raced to copy it. Netflix was first out of the gate with an expensive fantasy series touted as “the next Game of Thrones” with The Witcher, which By Sarah • Sep 10, 2021 01:21 pm
TV Updates Only Murders in the Building is not cozy Only Murders in the Building, the true crime parody cum actual murder mystery show co-created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, opens with a Charles-Haden Savage (Martin) voiceover about living in the city. “As any true crime aficionado will tell you,” he says, “it’s the boondocks you need to By Sarah • Sep 10, 2021 12:53 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Math-Man Returns While we wait for Bennifer’s big premiere in Venice, let’s kill time with some non-Bennifer related Ben Affleck news… One of my favorite dumb-fun movies in recent memory is The Accountant, aka Math-Man Begins, in which Ben Affleck plays a neurodiverse CPA with a secret double life as By Sarah • Sep 10, 2021 10:47 am
TV Updates Phoebe Waller-Bridge dumps Mr. Smith Solo co-stars and founding members of a mutual admiration society Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Donald Glover were supposed to reunite for a television remake of Mr. & Mrs. Smith which is, of course, a gossip hall of fame film as it brought us Brangelina. Glover had the idea of reimagining the By Sarah • Sep 09, 2021 02:04 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Plugged back into The Matrix Despite a summer box office surge—it’s still lower than usual, but people ARE going back to the movies—Warner Brothers is keeping with their “everything on HBO Max, too” plan, even for their biggest titles of the year, including The Matrix Resurrections. With the first trailer just released By Sarah • Sep 09, 2021 12:39 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Don’t Look Up and Jennifer Lawrence’s big news The never-ending deluge of trailers continues with Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, another Netflix movie we won’t remember in six months. This is the fancier version of Moonfall, about a comet headed for Earth and, I guess, the political maneuvering that goes on around an end-of-the-world scenario. By Sarah • Sep 09, 2021 11:45 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Moonfall: The dumbest movie of 2022 When Moonfall was first announced, I hoped that the movie about the moon crashing into Earth would be the dumbest movie of 2021. Thanks to COVID delays, though, it won’t be coming out until 2022, so now I hope it’s the dumbest movie of 2022. The teaser dropped By Sarah • Sep 09, 2021 11:03 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Will you remember Dwayne Johnson + Ryan Reynolds? Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds have, respectively, had a relatively good 2021 thanks to the pandemic success of their films Jungle Cruise and Free Guy. Now, they’re closing out their year together, in a new Netflix action comedy, Red Notice, also starring Gal Gadot (who has kept a low By Sarah • Sep 08, 2021 01:18 pm
Baby and Bump Obsession The Munn Mulaney Maybe Baby: confirmed Yesterday, I wrote about photos from the weekend of an obviously pregnant Olivia Munn. Then, last night on Late Night with Seth Meyers, John Mulaney appeared and confirmed it: he’s having a child with Olivia Munn. Not only that, he timelined his breakup with Anna Marie Tendler amidst relapses By Sarah • Sep 08, 2021 09:16 am
