Movie Reviews and Previews Intro for December 12, 2024 Dear Gossips, During the summer, critics heaped praise on JT Mollner’s serial killer horror flick Strange Darling, but that did not translate into box office, as the film made only $3.7 million, slightly less than its reported budget of $4 million. Films fail to find their audience all By Sarah • Dec 12, 2024 09:17 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Intro for December 11, 2024 Dear Gossips, On the heels of the Critics Choice Awards kinda-sorta accidentally excluding Last Week Tonight from the talk show category, we have another awards show “controversy”, this time involving Dune: Part II and the Golden Globes. The “controversy” is that Dune 2 was not nominated for the Cinematic and By Sarah • Dec 11, 2024 09:43 am
Award Season Campaigning The farcical Golden Globes Awards season is in full swing with the Golden Globes nominations just announced, but before we dive into these nominations, there are two points of order to address. Point the first – why are we still doing this? The Golden Globes and their voting body, once called the Hollywood Foreign Press By Sarah • Dec 09, 2024 10:47 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Moana + the Witches = Big Holiday Box Office Hello, it is I, the box office doom fairy, back once again to talk about The State Of Things! Which right now is Not Terrible, thanks to the double whammy of family-friendly fare playing during the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend—and perhaps a desire to escape the house and unpleasant By Sarah • Dec 02, 2024 09:38 am
Business of Hollywood Intro for November 22, 2024 Dear Gossips, Back in 2021, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, host of the Golden Globes, was rocked by controversy, which very nearly was the end of the Globes. But while the HFPA was ultimately dissolved, the Golden Globes bounced back as a for-profit organization owned by billionaire Todd Boehly, who By Sarah • Nov 22, 2024 09:28 am
Business of Hollywood Intro for November 15, 2024 Dear Gossips, At the end of October, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences laid off 16 employees, all from the AMPAS archive and the Margaret Herrick Library, which houses millions of film artifacts. Now, filmmakers from the indie space are sounding the alarm about the potential harm to By Sarah • Nov 15, 2024 09:36 am
Style Intro for November 13, 2024 Dear Gossips, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were in New York City last night continuing to promote Wicked. The day before, Monday, it was Mexico City, with both wearing their best red carpet outfits so far (in my opinion) on the press tour. Cynthia was in Thom Browne, the detailing By Lainey • Nov 13, 2024 10:07 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Intro for November 8, 2024 Dear Gossips, It’s time again for the semi-annual conversation about whether or not an animated film will be taken seriously as a Best Picture contender. The short answer: no. The longer answer: still no, because of deep-seated genre bias and a tendency to see animated films as “kid stuff” By Sarah • Nov 08, 2024 08:57 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Intro for November 7, 2024 Dear Gossips, As we learned last month, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi will star in a new adaptation of Wuthering Heights from Emerald Fennell. A new report from Variety states the film prompted a bidding war, with Netflix offering $150 million for it, but Robbie, who is producing the film By Sarah • Nov 07, 2024 09:20 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Christohper Nolan is bullying David Zaslav Speaking of Warner Bros. Discovery and their spiky relationships with filmmakers, over the last year, I’ve been keeping an eye on Christopher Nolan’s next film, chiefly because even after Universal met every one of his demands to release Oppenheimer—including releasing the film in his favored late July By Sarah • Oct 22, 2024 01:35 pm
Douchebags Intro for October 22, 2024 Dear Gossips, Sometimes my folks ask me about movies to decide if they want to bother finding and watching them, such as asking if I’ve heard of “Concave”, aka papal thriller Conclave. So when they asked me about a new Clint Eastwood movie, for which they had seen a By Sarah • Oct 22, 2024 08:35 am
Business of Hollywood Intro for October 18, 2024 Dear Gossips, Once again I wanted to make dumb jokes about something stupid—specifically, the Hallmark cruise, which is a compendium of personal nightmares, from cruises to hyper-formulaic films—but once again, we have to talk about f-cking TikTok! This time it’s The Wrap publishing a feature titled “Who By Sarah • Oct 18, 2024 08:19 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Joker’s pratfall The writing was on the wall as the box office tracking went into freefall a couple weeks before the film even opened, but Joker: Folie à Deux tanked over the weekend, opening with just $40 million. For comparison, The Marvels, last year’s widely derided superhero bomb, opened with $46 By Sarah • Oct 07, 2024 11:07 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Stephen King saved Salem’s Lot Spooky season, pumpkin spice season, sweater weather time, autumn, fall, whatever your preferred terminology, we’re almost there, and that means it’s time to start looking at trailers for all the scary movies coming in October. Salem’s Lot would be notable at any time, as it is one By Sarah • Sep 13, 2024 11:07 am
Douchebags Joaquin is asked The press conference for Joker: Folie à Deux happened today in Venice ahead of its world premiere with director Todd Phillips, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix in attendance. This is the role for which Joaquin won his Best Actor Oscar and anticipation is high for the sequel, especially with Gaga’ By Lainey • Sep 04, 2024 12:30 pm
Business of Hollywood Sebastian Stan’s Trump movie got a deal Over the weekend, The Apprentice, Ali Abassi’s Donald Trump biopic starring Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, had its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. Reviews for the film are (so far) mixed-positive, with many noting its reception depends on one’s personal tolerance for Trump, and whether By Sarah • Sep 03, 2024 10:45 am
