Movie Reviews and Previews Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman Promising Young Woman is a gleaming, glittering cinematic candy hiding a poisonous center, something sweet on the surface with a vicious sting that will ruin your night for sure. Emerald Fennell, in her feature directorial debut, has lovingly crafted a delicious cinematic treat meant to make your stomach turn. The By Sarah • Dec 15, 2020 11:44 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Small Axe: Alex Wheatle Alex Wheatle, the fourth installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, is, like Red, White and Blue before it, a biopic focused on the origin story of an accomplished Black man descended from Caribbean immigrants to the UK. In this case, the story centers on Alex Wheatle, an award-winning By Sarah • Dec 14, 2020 03:04 pm
TV Updates The Road to Bridgerton The full trailer for Bridgerton, Netflix’s big-budget adaptation of Julia Quinn’s popular series of romance novels, has dropped and it is the lavish, candy-coated confection we need at the end of this horrible year. I am unabashedly enthusiastic about Bridgerton—look at it! JUST LOOK AT IT!—and By Sarah • Dec 14, 2020 12:45 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Famous People in The Prom Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation of the Broadway musical The Prom is a strange artifact from another time. Though it debuted in 2016 and hit Broadway in 2018, it feels like flotsam from the Obama-era, something from a less contentious, less overtly divisive time when “NYC Broadway liberals” versus “small-town By Sarah • Dec 11, 2020 02:13 pm
Maple Leaf Rachel McAdams returns to Marvel and Tatiana Maslany is IN I’ve been covering the info dump from yesterday Disney Investor Day, where they bragged about topping 86 million subscribers in 13 months, and announced a bunch of new theatrical and streaming stuff to roll out over the next few years. As you’ve seen already today there’s so By Sarah • Dec 11, 2020 01:04 pm
EVEN MORE MARVEL It will NEVER stop coming! Marvel will keep making sh-t until they are the ONLY people left in Hollywood to make ANYTHING, EVER! It does kind of feel like that, doesn’t it? All that will survive at the end of the world are cockroaches and Marvel movies. Feast your By Sarah • Dec 11, 2020 11:23 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Ms. Marvel is sunny and cute Among the never-ending Marvel news from yesterday is a teaser for Ms. Marvel, the Disney+ series featuring Kamala Khan. We learned a couple months ago that newcomer Iman Vellani will play Kamala, and now we can see snippets of her in action. It isn’t enough to judge the whole By Sarah • Dec 11, 2020 10:09 am
Business of Hollywood Patty Jenkins gets a Star War Among all the news coming out of the Disney investor day, one big hit is that Patty Jenkins will be directing a Star Wars spin-off titled Rogue Squadron for Lucasfilm, making her the first woman to head up a Star Wars film. She shot an introduction video for it, explaining By Sarah • Dec 11, 2020 09:45 am
TV Updates My Favorite Things of 2020: Television I listened to a lot of podcasts in 2020, but I DID watch a bunch of TV, too. Obviously, we all Tiger King’d in the spring, when quarantining was new, but that’s not a show I revisited, or one that was at all comforting. I will even go By Sarah • Dec 10, 2020 04:29 pm
Amazingness Nicolas Cage swears Yesterday a trailer dropped so unexpected and random that the comedy continuum skipped a beat. The History of Swear Words is a new comedy series coming to Netflix on January 5, which features Nicolas Cage as the host, walking us through the history of half a dozen swears including “sh-t” By Sarah • Dec 10, 2020 12:04 pm
Best Of 2020 My Favorite Things of 2020: Podcasts Usually at this time of year, I’m working on my top 10 films for the year, but this year we’ve decided to follow the time-shifted schedule of awards season, which means my top 10 won’t be out until February, congruent with the eligibility cut-off for the 2020 By Sarah • Dec 09, 2020 03:00 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Kirsten Dunst, Emma Stone, and Alfred Molina return to Spider-Man Spider-Man 3 (version 2) is filming now, and the multiverse cast for the movie continues to grow. Joining Jamie Foxx in reprising a villain role is Alfred Molina, who played Doctor Octopus waaaaay back in 2004 in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (aka still the best live-action Spider-Man movie, and By Sarah • Dec 09, 2020 11:06 am
Business of Hollywood The Soderbergh Oscars Yesterday, the producers of the 93rd Academy Awards were announced: Jesse Collins, Stacey Sher, and Steven Soderbergh, who, yes, dressed like a member of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for his press release photo. Welcome to the team, @JesseCollinsEnt, @StaceySher and Steven Soderbergh! Meet the 93rd #Oscars producers. By Sarah • Dec 09, 2020 09:39 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Small Axe: Red, White and Blue asks a haunting question In Red, White and Blue, the latest installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series (Mangrove was the first and Lovers Rock is the second), John Boyega plays Leroy Logan, the son of Caribbean immigrants living in London. His father, Kenneth (Steve Toussaint), is a sort of call-and-response to Mangrove’ By Sarah • Dec 08, 2020 02:54 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried in Mank David Fincher is too technically proficient as a director to make a really bad movie. Even his less interesting efforts will have something worth looking at, and Mank is certainly one such case. A biopic of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, Mank is an odd Fincher misfire. It’s based on a By Sarah • Dec 08, 2020 02:29 pm
Business of Hollywood Warner Brothers’ inevitable HBO Max fall out Last week, Warner Brothers announced they will releasing their entire 2021 slate of films simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max (in America, the only country with HBO Max). This was obviously huge, unprecedented news, and in my original write up, I said, “it is crushing to production partners like By Sarah • Dec 08, 2020 09:58 am
