Eight years ago, Google’s founders split the company up into separate entities and named the collection Alphabet. The idea was to separate the core business — the company’s giant advertising machine that made it one of the most powerful corporations in the world — from the side projects that needed time to develop but could one day become Google’s next big moneymaker.
And even the most advanced of its side projects — self-driving car lab Waymo and health-care tech start-up Verily — are now confined by the limits of regular businesses. On Wednesday, Waymo laid off 8 percent of its workforce, adding to a previous round of cuts in January.
The Waymo layoffs are just the latest example of a new reality that has settled over Big Tech: The age of the moonshots is over.
As the decade-long bull market came stuttering to an end and tech stock prices fell throughout last year, pressure to cut costs from Wall Street built and in the past few months a deluge of layoffs and cost-cutting has flooded Silicon Valley. The big-idea side projects that were supposed to become the revenue-drivers of the future have been particularly hard hit, with some of them being completely dismantled, and others facing deep cuts.
“They’ve assumed that everything that they touch is going to work. And in reality, it’s not,” said Roger McNamee, a veteran venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook before becoming a high-profile critic of social media’s impact on society.
Higher interest rates means the investment needed to keep spending on money-losing projects is getting harder to find, he said. Big Tech is “retrenching to protect their core business. And so I think you’re going to see them offloading one thing after another.”
Google and Meta did not have immediate comment.
Giving up the moonshot dream marks another stage in the companies’ march into middle age. Google, Facebook and Amazon all grew rapidly from start-ups to tech giants through the first two decades of the millennium by upsetting the balance forged by companies that came before them.
The ethos of “move fast and break things” and billions in venture capital funding from Silicon Valley investors helped them become goliaths in their own right. But for founders who began their businesses in dorm rooms and garages, the threat of the next nimble start-up coming to disrupt them too was ever-present.
Making a space for risky, bizarre and overly ambitious ideas was their solution to avoid the stasis that had hit bigger companies from previous generations.
When Google went public in 2004, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote a letter to potential investors, warning them not to expect the quarter-by-quarter financial focus that most public companies are forced to heed. They set up Google X, a research lab focused on only the weirdest and riskiest ideas, and told their employees they should spend part of their time on projects completely unrelated to their day jobs.
“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one,” they wrote. Page repeated the line in the 2015 announcement about the creation of the Alphabet holding company.
The biggest tech companies have indeed managed to stave off disrupters. But it wasn’t always through reinventing themselves with internally created big ideas. Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook made hundreds of acquisitions over the past two decades, buying both sizable up-and-coming competitors and tiny start-ups. Google’s Android operating system, Facebook’s mobile advertising business and Amazon’s audiobooks empire all initially came through acquisition. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
In October, a month before announcing widespread layoffs, Amazon began winding down its exploratory internal incubator, Grand Challenge. The team — at one point so secretive employees weren’t supposed to utter its name — worked on projects like Echo Frames, Amazon’s stab at smart glasses, and even cancer research, CNBC first reported in 2018.
Team leader Babak Parviz, who came from Google X in 2014, left Amazon in October. His departure was followed by news that most of the group’s projects would be shut down, including Amazon Glow, a projector device for kids, and Amazon Explore, a virtual tourism product.
Amazon Care, a major telehealth player the company shut down in August, was also a product of Grand Challenge. Rather than continue to support that project, Amazon acquired start-up One Medical.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy replaced founder Bezos in the role in 2020. Where Bezos was known as a visionary risk-taker, Jassy — best-known for running Web Services, Amazon’s successful cloud computing arm — has a reputation as a pragmatic businessperson.
Bezos made experimentation and bravery, or what he famously called a “Day One” mentality, a core part of the company’s culture. But a former Amazon employee who worked on Grand Challenge and spoke on the condition of anonymity due to a nondisclosure agreement said that culture has changed in recent years.
Is Amazon “not just growing up, but getting old?” the former employee asked. “It does feel like Day 2.”
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in an email that Amazon will “continue to invest” in Grand Challenge and “continues to pursue bold bets in myriad areas, including bringing broadband to millions of people around the world through Kuiper, building the world’s most useful personal AI, reimagining healthcare, and getting the first driverless taxis on the road, to name a few.”
“We have a long track record of turning bold bets into meaningful businesses and are optimistic about all of these areas” he said.
Despite major investment, some of Amazon’s most ambitious projects have failed to get off the ground. In 2013, Bezos made headlines when he announced on “60 Minutes” that Amazon was already testing delivery by drone. But 10 years later, Bezos has moved on, and Amazon’s drone operation, tied up in regulatory red tape, has made few real-world deliveries.
Economic pressures do have an impact on funding for moonshot labs, but that doesn’t mean the spark of innovation will die inside the companies, said Peter Diamandis, a tech entrepreneur and investor. He, in the mid-1990s, founded the X Prize competition to encourage private companies to develop spacecraft, something that at the time was still mostly the realm of the world’s richest governments.
“We’re going to see these moonshot labs ebb and flow depending on corporate profitability, but that culture is never going away — it’s how these companies were born,” he said.
Google’s Waymo wasn’t the only one of the company’s side projects hit by recent cuts. Verily, which is one of a handful of health-care-related projects the company launched over the years, worked on a range of topics including breeding sterile mosquitoes to lower the spread of insect-borne diseases and helping run coronavirus-testing centers during the beginning of the pandemic. When Google announced its layoffs on Jan. 20, Verily was disproportionately hit, cutting 15 percent of its staff.
Area 120, a part of Google that served as an internal start-up “incubator,” lost most of its employees and will soon be completely shut down. The department represented one of Google’s defining quirks — letting some employees spend time on projects outside of their regular jobs, and even stay at the company sometimes to launch start-ups rather than leave and do it on their own. Those days seem to be over now.
Bigger, more mature companies have bigger legal liabilities, making it harder to push out new products and keep up with start-ups, Diamandis said.
“That’s a really big dilemma for big companies,” he said. “It becomes harder to innovate and take real chances and risk.”
A similar dynamic has been playing out over the past year when it comes to new generative artificial intelligence tools that can produce text, images, sounds and videos that look and feel like they were created by humans. Start-ups like OpenAI and Stability AI pushed their products out to the public, capturing a wave of marketing attention and wonder at the new tools, even though much of the technology was based on ideas developed earlier by the Big Tech companies.
Microsoft spent billions of dollars on a deal with OpenAI to use the company’s technology in its new Bing search chatbot, and Google and Facebook are rushing to produce their own versions of the tech, pushing past guardrails they had instituted in the past to ensure the powerful tech was safe to use before getting it in the public’s hands.
Facebook parent Meta is still investing billions into its long-term gamble to build out immersive digital realms known as the metaverse, despite the slow traction among users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions that virtual and augmented-reality-powered service will become the next great computing platform, as people work, play and shop through their own avatars in the metaverse.
But even Zuckerberg has been forced to trim costs and refocus his existing employees on the company’s top business objectives in the face of falling revenue and an uncertain economic future. Over the past year, Meta has cut its investment in or halted the development of several products and services such as the Facebook News tab, its newsletter product, Bulletin, and its video-calling device line, Portal.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg proclaimed that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency” and pledged to trim management layers and speed up the company’s decision-making.
The shift is a major change for the tech industry’s culture, where employees would jump from well-paying jobs at Big Tech companies to risky start-ups, comfortable in the assumption that they could return if the smaller company didn’t work out.
“I think that’s being tested right now,” McNamee said. “If people working in Silicon Valley become more risk averse, the implications are profound.”
Editor’s note:Deadline presents the 52nd episode of its video series Take Two, in which Pete Hammond and Todd McCarthy tackle the artistry of films just opening in theaters every weekend. Each has reviewed and written about the craft for decades and built a remarkable breadth of knowledge of films past and present. What we hoped for when we asked them to do this was a concise, mature and thoughtful conversation comparable to what we saw from Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.
AMPAS
Take Two continues taking on the Oscars for the next couple of weeks as we look back in Oscar history, suggest that maybe the Academy didn’t always get it right, give our predictions for this year and then offer a wrap-up of how the Big Show turned out.
This week we offer some alternate Oscar winners over the years, the nominees for Best Actor and Actress that the Academy didn’t choose but that we, with 20/20 hindsight, believe would have been the better choice or, as in the case of stars like Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor or James Stewart, who we think might have won for the wrong role, in many instances perhaps as a make-up award after losing for a more deserving performance.
We explore some of the reasons actors win in any given year, even if historically it seems like Oscar just didn’t get it right, something about standing “the test of time.” Of course, each Oscar year is just a snapshot in time, not meant to be a lifetime achievement award but rather one for that specific role, and it isn’t always fair as you can tell by reeling off names of those who never won a competitive Oscar — Cary Grant, Peter O’Toole, Barbara Stanwyck, Deborah Kerr — and those still trying like Glenn Close, with eight nominations and eight losses to date. Maybe you will agree, or have ideas of your own, but that is what makes it all fun. It is a lively conversation.
Click above to watch our discussion. And join us next week as we give our 100% correct predictions as to who is going to take home Oscar gold on March 12.
Hammond has been Deadline’s Awards Columnist for the past decade, covering what now seemingly is the year-round Oscar and Emmy seasons. He is also Deadline’s Chief Film Critic, having previously reviewed films for MovieLine, Boxoffice magazine, Backstage, Hollywood.com and Maxim, as well as Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, for which he was a contributing editor. In addition to writing, Hammond also hosts KCET Cinema Series and the station’s weekly series Must See Movies.
McCarthy is a veteran trade publication film critic, columnist and reporter who has also written several acclaimed books and documentary films. He served two stints on the staffs of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and extensively covered film festivals internationally for both publications. His film Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography won the best documentary prizes from the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics associations, and he won an Emmy for writing the documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer. He also directed the documentaries Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient and Forever Hollywood.
There is perhaps no city as dazzling and full of life. Experience Rio’s irrepressible energy at a street samba party, or take it all in from a soaring mountain peak.
In Mrs Serial Killer, Shirish Kunder has tried to blend horror and comedy, and has an actor like Manoj Bajpayee at his disposal, but the end result is as good as Joker or Jaan-E-Mann. Now, when I am writing this with Justin Bieber songs playing in the background, trust me, none of this is making any sense to me.
Maybe, Kunder is a misunderstood genius whose work will pique interest 100 years later, but even then at least this generation wouldn’t need to suffer again and regret our choices.
It’s someplace in Uttarakhand where Sona Mukherjee (Jacqueline Fernandez) lives with her husband Mrityunjoy Mukherjee (Manoj Bajpayee). Some unwed but pregnant ladies are murdered, and the circumstantial evidences point towards Mrityunjoy. A vengeful inspector Imran Shahid (Mohit Raina) is handling the case, and it seems he wouldn’t stop chasing the truth easily.
Before we proceed, guess why the film is called Mrs Serial Killer? Because after the arrest of the husband, somebody writes these words on the boundary wall of the Mukherjees. It’s that literal. That young boy writing on Kabir Khan’s wall in Chak De India was ten times smarter than these people!
Then there is unprovoked taekwondo lessons served with unsolicited advice on how an ideal film should be. Had it not been for the respect of Bajpayee’s talent, it was a good enough reason to file a directorial license seizure case against Kunder. It would have been an easy case to win as the authorities would have to watch Kunder’s films to understand his true potential!
Sometimes critics do take a bullet to save others. First 20 minutes of the film look like a total assault on the senses, but what do you do? You can only wait for little joys of life. In a 105-minute film, that comes pretty late, some 15 minutes before the end. By then, you’re brain-dead and need some Bieber to recover: Is it silly to not say sorry?
Even if it was planned as a satire, it needed more intelligence and not just CID 2.0: Oh, my god, laash! It’s a convoluted script which demanded fine tuning by many drafts, or inspector Daya would say: Darwaaza band hai, matlab andar koi nahi hai (door is closed, which means nobody is inside).
Using Psycho-inspired background score might not suffice for lower IQ.
Work from home is anyway tough. I don’t understand why Shirish Kunder has to make it even more difficult?
A former film student himself, Rohit ‘Vats’ feels that a good film is made with a zealous heart rather than brilliant technique. He thinks that films …Read More
The core of Feedly for Threat Intelligence is an AI engine, that automatically gathers, analyzes, and prioritizes intelligence from millions of sources in real-time.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use AI Models to:
Monitor critical vulnerabilities and zero-days
Research the behavior of specific threat actors and malware families
Understand the threat landscape around your industry
Track niche cybersecurity topics
Before we look at those four use cases, let’s start with a short overview of how Feedly AI works.
Meet Feedly AI
Feedly AI reads millions of articles, reports, and social media posts every day and automatically tags key threat intelligence concepts: critical vulnerabilities, malware families, threat actors, indicators of compromise, ATT&CK techniques, companies, vendors, industries, etc.
Feedly AI automatically tags key threat intelligence concepts
All this information is at your fingertips in near real-time via a powerful and intuitive search and tracking interface called (Feedly) AI Feeds.
Curious how it works? Let’s take a look at an AI Feed designed to track critical vulnerabilities and zero-days related to Cisco Systems:
AI Feeds: A powerful and intuitive search and tracking interface
Creating an AI Feed is a three-step process:
Use AI Models to define the intelligence you want to gather. In our example, we use the ‘High Vulnerability’ and ‘Cisco Systems’ AI Models to discover new critical vulnerabilities related to Cisco Systems.
Use AND, OR, NOT operators to combine multiple AI Models and refine your focus. In our example, we use AND to track articles and reports that reference both ‘High Vulnerabilities’ and ‘Cisco Systems’.
If needed, refine sources with your own trusted sources. By default, (Feedly) AI Feeds will search across the Cybersecurity Bundle (a collection of 50,000+ security news sources, threat research blogs, newsletters, vendor advisories, government agencies, vulnerability databases, CISO magazines, and Reddit communities curated collectively by 200,000 cyber professionals using Feedly and partitioned by Feedly AI into three tiers based on popularity and authority).
With AI Feeds, you can add to a team or personal folder. New articles, reports, or social media posts matching the specified AI Models will appear in the AI Feeds.
AI Models are easier to use, more comprehensive and less noisy than traditional keyword searches
The power of AI Feeds is that ‘High Vulnerability’ and ‘Cisco Systems’ are not simple keyword matches. These AI Models are machine learning models that encapsulate a broader understanding of each concept:
‘High Vulnerability’ is an AI Model that tracks vulnerabilities with a CVSS score above 8 or a CVSS score above 5 that includes a known exploit. If the vulnerability does not have a CVSS score yet, a machine learning model is used to forecast the CVSS score based on the descriptions of the vulnerability.Learn more
‘Cisco Systems’ is a ‘Company’ AI Model that tracks for mentions of Cisco by its name or any known aliases. When the company name is ambiguous, a disambiguation model is used to remove false positives.
Without AI Models, gathering intelligence would require a tedious effort of trying to find a long list of the right keywords, leaving room for blind spots and lots of irrelevant results.
Feedly for Threat Intelligence comes with a wide range of pre-trained AI Models so that you can easily translate your intelligence needs into AI Feeds.
Feedly includes key threat intelligence models
Let’s see how we can combine these AI Models to proactively track specific threats and stay one step ahead of your adversaries.
Research the behavior of specific threat actors and malware families
Tracking the behavior of threat actors and malware families can be tedious and overwhelming, taking up valuable time that could be spent hunting for malicious activity in your environment.
That’s why Feedly has created a set of AI Models that automatically tag threat actors, malware families, TTPs, and IoCs.
Let’s take a look at an AI Feed designed to track the latest IoCs and TTPs related to Lazarus Group across threat intelligence reports published on the web:
Gather IoCs and TTPs related to Lazarus Groups from intelligence reports
‘Lazarus Group’ is a ‘Threat Actor’ AI Model powered by Malpedia that tracks mentions of the threat actor by name or its many aliases. Learn more
‘Indicators of Compromise’ is an AI Model that tracks malicious URLs, IPs, email addresses, domains, and hashes. Learn more
‘Tactics & Techniques’ is an AI Model powered by the Mitre ATT&CK v10 framework that tracks tactics, techniques, and sub-techniques and their relationships. Learn more
‘Threat Intelligence Report’ is an AI Model that flags intel reports containing in-depth technical details about IoCs, TTPs, threat actors, and malware. Learn more
Here are some additional AI Models you can use to broaden or narrow your threat profiling:
Popular threat profiling AI Models
Understand the threat landscape around your industry
Staying up to date with the latest attacks against your industry can help you be better prepared when putting defenses in place, as well as help you learn about which threat actors to look out for so you can be more targeted when gathering intelligence.
Let’s take a look at an AI Feed designed to gather intelligence about cyber attacks in the finance industry:
Track cyber attacks around the finance industry
‘Cyber Attacks’ is an AI Model that tracks instances of cyber attacks and tries to determine who or what the target of the attack is. Learn more
‘Finance Industry’ is an ‘Industry’ AI Model that classifies articles related to the finance industry based on company mentions and terminology. Learn more
You can also easily narrow your focus on a specific type of attack:
Track credit card data breaches
Monitor critical vulnerabilities and zero-days
Manually keeping ahead of new vulnerabilities and zero-days is an impossible task, but you can set up AI Feeds to help you stay up to date on new vulnerabilities that come across the radar of the global cybersecurity community.
Feedly aggregates vulnerability information from NVD and over 20 vendor advisory sites — as well as monitoring many sources to find exploits for each CVE — in near real-time.
Let’s take a look at an AI Feed designed to surface critical vulnerabilities and zero-days related to a vendor deployed in your environment:
Track high vulnerabilities related to Zoom
When you discover a new CVE, you can use the CVE insights card to get a 360 degree view of that vulnerability and decide if you should create a ticket for your response team.
A CVE insights card – a 360 degree view of CVE-2021-44228
Track niche cybersecurity topics
You can also use AI Feeds to track niche cybersecurity topics.
Let’s take a look at an AI Feed designed to gather intelligence about malicious, compromised, or hijacked packages:
Here are some additional AI Models you can use to track niche cybersecurity topics:
Popular cybersecurity AI Models
Getting smarter every day
The world’s leading cybersecurity teams use Feedly for their OSINT, so the product constantly improves based on their feedback.
Here is a roadmap of some of the new AI Models we are researching:
2022 AI Models Roadmap – Threat Intelligence
Feedly for Threat Intelligence customers can reach out to us at enterprise@feedly.com to give feedback on improving existing AI Models or creating new ones to ensure that Feedly is working at full capacity to serve your Threat Intelligence needs.
Try Feedly for Threat Intelligence
All of these features, plus many more, are available as a part of Feedly for Threat Intelligence. To learn more about any of these features, or start a free 30-day trial, click the link below.
Stranger Things actor Jamie Campbell Bower wants to take a stab at another villain role, this time in the DCU.
Actor Jamie Campbell Bower has clearly been listening in on the latest surrounding the DCU’s recent overhaul and James Gunn’s huge slate of newly announced projects, all of which has kept the news circuits constantly abuzz. Per a report from CBR, Bower enthusiastically remarked in a recent interview with Geek House Show at Comfest 2023 that he wants to join the ranks of the DCU as Scarecrow, a terrific villain who is plenty popular in the comics but has seldom gotten a spotlight on the big screen aside from Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Dark Knight trilogy.
Bower made a name for himself almost overnight in the latest season of Netflix’s science fiction phenomenon Stranger Things, where he played two very different looking villain characters that turned out to be two sides of the same coin: Eleven’s predecessor One and the Mindflayer’s “general” Vecna. One was originally born as Henry Creel, a human with psionic abilities that ends up murdering his entire family before being found and raised by Dr. Brenner. Season 4’s climax revealed that Eleven sent One to the Upside Down when she was only nine. There, painfully disfigured by the dimension’s deadly elements, he transformed into the version of himself he desired to be since childhood: Vecna. Of course Bower was unrecognizable in Vecna’s prosthetic bodysuit, but he awed audiences worldwide as both villains, and evidently he wants to stay on that villain train, this time as DC’s Scarecrow. When asked on Geek House Show about the prospect, Bower emphatically said he’d be totally on board.
“There’s been a lot of chatter about Scarecrow recently, that would be cool. To do that, that would be fun. Very spooky, that would be great!”
Scarecrow Will Finally Get Big Screen Justice, Be It Gunn or Reeves
Picturing Bower as Scarecrow would certainly not be difficult, given his well-proven acting chops. However, the classic Batman villain has yet to be confirmed for Gunn’s new film The Brave and the Bold, which has kept much of its plans underwraps and has only confirmed Damian Wayne, the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul, on its roster so far. In the DCU’s new sub-universe Elseworlds, however, Scarecrow has since been greenlit as a prominent villain who will likely get their own solo project alongside HBO Max’s original series The Penguin, which has Colin Farrell reprising his role as the eccentric, Scarface-esque mobster who made his debut in Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022).
While Scarecrow is confirmed for a prominent role in Elseworlds, Reeves is currently working on both The Batman: Part IIand The Penguin series in tandem, meaning that Scarecrow’s debut will not come for awhile yet. Whether it’s Gunn or Reeves that brings him to the big screen first, it’s certain that Bower will be one of the first in line for the role.
Ed Sheeran is set to release his 6th new album ‘-‘ (Subtract) – the last in his decade-spanning mathematical album era – on 5 May 2023 through Asylum/Atlantic. An album that revisits Ed’s singer/songwriter roots, and one that was written against a backdrop of personal grief and hope, ‘-’ (Subtract) presents one of the biggest stars on the planet at his most vulnerable and honest.
In Ed’s own words – “I had been working on Subtract for a decade, trying to sculpt the perfect acoustic album, writing and recording hundreds of songs with a clear vision of what I thought it should be. Then at the start of 2022, a series of events changed my life, my mental health, and ultimately the way I viewed music and art.”
Courtesy of Warner Music
“Writing songs is my therapy. It helps me make sense of my feelings. I wrote without thought of what the songs would be, I just wrote whatever tumbled out. And in just over a week, I replaced a decade’s worth of work with my deepest darkest thoughts” Says Sheeran.
He continues to take us through the worst things that have happened to him “Within the space of a month, my pregnant wife got told she had a tumour, with no route to treatment until after the birth. My best friend Jamal, a brother to me, died suddenly and I found myself standing in court defending my integrity and career as a songwriter. I was spiralling through fear, depression and anxiety. I felt like I was drowning, head below the surface, looking up but not being able to break through for air.”
“As an artist I didn’t feel like I could credibly put a body of work into the world that didn’t accurately represent where I am and how I need to express myself at this point in my life. This album is purely that. It’s opening the trapdoor into my soul.”
This album will be a pure and raw look into Ed Sheeran as he bares his heart and soul into his music, laying it all on the table.
“For the first time I’m not trying to craft an album people will like, I’m merely putting something out that’s honest and true to where I am in my adult life.”
“This is last February’s diary entry and my way of making sense of it. This is Subtract.”
Since he first learnt ‘Layla’ by Eric Clapton on guitar at the age of 12-years-old, Sheeran’s love of the singer/songwriter began. Growing up with the likes of Damian Rice, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan playing on repeat in his parents’ house – artists that his dad, John, introduced him to – ‘-‘was always on Ed’s horizon. Yet as the songs and writing process took on a whole new meaning and direction after a series of hard-hitting events impacted Ed’s world in 2022, one thing that remained untouched was his strong desire to make a record anchored in his love of singer/songwriter compositions. And now, as he gears-up for the release of his most soul-baring work to date, ‘-‘ serves as a timely reminder for why Sheeran remains one of the most gifted lyricists of his generation; an artist who breaks down his own experiences for fans to seek comfort and belonging.
‘-‘ is the result of Sheeran pushing the boundaries of his songcraft, as he delivers the most profound songwriting of his career. Teaming-up with Aaron Dessner (The National) on writing and production after the pair joined forces following an introduction from mutual friend Taylor Swift, Ed and Aaron began crafting the album in February last year. Writing over 30 songs during their month-long studio stint, the album’s fourteen tracks are seamlessly tied together by exquisite production from paired back, folk-leaning textures to bolder, full-band/orchestral arrangements.
Ed Sheeran burst onto the UK music scene in 2011 with his debut album ‘+’. Rapidly establishing himself as a history-making artist, he followed with ‘x’, ‘÷’, ‘No.6 Collaborations Project’ and ‘=’ – a catalogue that has seen Sheeran become one of the world’s biggest musical success stories of the 21st century.
Prima Games has undergone a lot of iteration over the years, and our YouTube channel is no different. In the pursuit of bringing this brand’s mission of delivering high-quality guides, reviews, news, and everything you would expect from the name and legacy of Prima, YouTube is a big part of that.
Our YouTube channel has seen many talented folks come through it over the years, and it’s been through as many changes as the website itself. However, despite the changes, it’s always been a place where we provide you with the best content and help we can.
Prima Games’ YouTube Channel Is Back, Baby
So why is the YouTube channel back now? Well, we’re at a point where we can provide video guides to accompany our writing and vice versa. Not everyone absorbs information in the same way, and oftentimes many of us need the visual to really drive home how to do that sick trick or difficult jump.
You might remember our old streams on Twitch and the variety of content we’ve produced in the past. While we’re not ready to talk about the future of the channel, we are currently committed to bringing you video guides. You can expect to see many more of them embedded in our articles to ensure everyone can get the help they need on various games.
We’re excited about the channel’s revival and the places we can take it as a team. If you haven’t noticed the YouTube channel’s recent upload of videos, then you should check them out here, courtesy of our fantastic and incredibly talented video team, who is equally as passionate about blowing this thing up.
Also, since we’re YouTubers now, we are legally obligated to say the term “like and subscribe, and don’t forget to hit the bell, so you don’t miss a video.”
We hope you’re as excited as we are to continue bringing you the best we can offer. It’s an exciting time – and much more from us on the channel in the future!
We’re on a roll with Destiny 2: Lightfall content right now.
Prime Video Celebrates “Daisy Jones & The Six” Premiere
On February 23rd, Prime Video celebrated the “Daisy Jones & The Six” premiere on Hollywood Boulevard. Stars Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Camila Morrone, Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Sebastian Chacon, Nabiyah Be, Tom Wright and Timothy Olyphant were joined by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Reese Witherspoon, Lauren Neustadter, Brad Mendelsohn, Scott Neustadter, Will Graham and more on the Prime Video 70’s inspired red carpet and after-party.
Based on the best-selling novel and Reese’s Book Club Pick by Taylor Jenkins Reid, the musical-drama series from Amazon Studios and Hello Sunshine premieres March 3 on Prime Video with new episodes every Friday.
Prime Video held a red carpet premiere celebrating the highly anticipated series, Daisy Jones & The Six at the iconic TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood, CA. The evening began with The Daisy Jones & The Six cast, creatives, Prime Video executives and other notable guests walking the red carpet, which included photo opportunities, multiple press stops and a 70’s style photo booth.
Sam Claflin and Riley Keough — Courtesy of Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
At the reception, cast and attendees were transported back in time as they entered the venue that was outfitted with 1970’s disco and Laurel Canyon inspired decor.
The series stars Riley Keough as Daisy Jones, Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne, Camila Morrone as Camila Alvarez Dunne, Will Harrison as Graham Dunne, Suki Waterhouse as Karen Sirko, Josh Whitehouse as Eddie Roundtree, Sebastian Chacon as Warren Rojas, Nabiyah Be as Simone Jackson, and Tom Wright as Teddy Price, with a special guest appearance by Timothy Olyphant as Rod Reyes.
Riley Keough —
Courtesy of Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Reese Witherspoon —
Courtesy of Vivien Killilea/Getty Images
Based on the best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six is a musical-drama series detailing the rise and precipitous fall of a renowned rock band. The highly-anticipated limited series premieres March 3, with new episodes released every Friday through March 24, exclusively on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide.
About the Prime Video Limited Series
In 1977, Daisy Jones & The Six were on top of the world. Fronted by two charismatic lead singers—Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) and Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin)—the band had risen from obscurity to fame. And then, after a sold-out show at Chicago’s Soldier Field, they called it quits. Now, decades later, the band members finally agree to reveal the truth. This is the story of how an iconic band imploded at the height of its powers.
From Amazon Studios and Hello Sunshine, Daisy Jones & The Six is executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter for Hello Sunshine and Brad Mendelsohn for Circle of Confusion. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber created the series based on the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, who also produces. Scott Neustadter is executive producing and co-showrunning with Will Graham, who also serves as an executive producer. James Ponsoldt directed the first five episodes and serves as an executive producer, Nzingha Stewart directed four of the remaining episodes, and Graham directed one. The series will feature all original songs written and produced by Grammy Nominated producer Blake Mills and a number of other talented co-writers.
FOLLOW DAISY JONES & THE SIX: OFFICIAL PRIME VIDEO SOCIAL
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How many times have you seen a movie or show that mashes up two different genres or characters, and lets their differences play out in strange and unusual ways?
Well, that very idea was coined as a “wunza” movie or TV show.
Wunza movies, also known as “wunza films” or “wunza pictures,” are a type of Hollywood film that combines two or more familiar genres or elements to create a unique and often entertaining hybrid.
In this article, we will explore the history and evolution of wunza movies, examine some of the most successful examples from different eras, and discuss their impact on the film industry and popular culture.
Let’s get started.
‘Zombieland’Credit: Sony Pictures Releasing
What’s a “Wunza” Movie or TV Show?
Wunza movies are a fascinating genre of film that blends two or more seemingly incompatible genres or elements to create a unique and often surprising viewing experience.
Let’s start with a strict definition and then have some fun.
Wunza Movie and TV Show Definition
A wunza movie or TV show is a term used to describe a film or TV show that combines two or more familiar genres or elements to create a unique and often entertaining hybrid. The term “wunza” comes from the phrase “one’s a,” and is a playful way to describe a movie or TV show that is a mix of different genres or characters from very different backgrounds.
Wunza movies and TV shows often blend disparate genres, such as horror and comedy, action and romance, or science fiction and westerns. By combining these genres, wunza movies and TV shows create a unique tone or atmosphere that sets them apart from other movies or TV shows.
Roger Ebert writer Gerardo Valero used the term “wunza movie” (sometimes spelled “wunza” or “wunza movie”) to refer to a type of formulaic Hollywood film that combines two or more familiar genres or elements. For example, a wunza movie might be described as “a wunza romantic comedy and action movie” or “a wunza horror and sci-fi movie.”
In his review of the movie Rush Hour, Ebert writes, “Rush Hour is our reliable friend, the Wunza Movie, pairing two opposites: Wunza legendary detective from Hong Kong, and wunza Los Angeles cop. And wunza Chinese guy, and wunza black guy. And wunza martial arts expert and wunza wisecracking showboat. Neither wunza’s original casting idea, but together, they make an entertaining team.”
Ebert used the term in his reviews to describe movies that he felt were unoriginal or uninspired, and that relied too heavily on tried-and-true formulas rather than taking risks or breaking new ground. He coined the term as a playful way to criticize these types of movies, and it became a part of his signature style of film criticism.
But he also always left room for these movies to surprise and entertain him.
‘Roger Ebert’Credit: Chicago Sun Times
What Makes Wunza Movies and TV Shows Fun?
As a writer, I have to admit I’m drawn to these sorts of films. Not only do they present interesting and divergent characters to write, but they allow you to play in two different genres, which can boost creativity and allow you to think outside the box.
Wunza movies and TV shows can be fun for several reasons:
They offer a fresh take on familiar genres: By combining different genres or elements, wunza movies and TV shows can create a unique and often unexpected blend of storylines, characters, and settings. This can be a refreshing change from more predictable movies and TV shows that stick to a single genre.
They appeal to a wider audience: Since wunza movies and TV shows combine different genres, they can appeal to a wider range of viewers who may not typically enjoy a particular genre on its own. For example, a horror-comedy film may appeal to both horror fans and comedy fans.
They can be humorous: Many wunza movies and TV shows incorporate humor into their storylines, which can make them entertaining and enjoyable to watch. The mix of genres can also create comedic situations, as characters from different worlds or genres interact with one another.
They can be action-packed: Wunza movies and TV shows often combine action and adventure with other genres, such as science fiction or fantasy. This can make for exciting and dynamic viewing experiences that keep audiences engaged.
‘Dog’Credit: United Artists Releasing
Exploring Wunza Characters in Movies and TV
Wunza characters in movies and TV shows are typically designed to embody and interact with the different genres or elements that are being blended. These characters can be complex and multifaceted, but they often have certain characteristics that are associated with the genres they represent. Here are some examples:
Action heroes with comedic personalities: Wunza movies and TV shows that blend action and comedy often feature characters who are skilled fighters or action heroes but who also have humorous personalities. These characters may crack jokes during fights or use sarcasm to defuse tense situations.
Horror movie characters who are aware of horror movie tropes: Some wunza horror movies and TV shows feature characters who are aware of the conventions and tropes of horror movies. These characters may be self-aware and able to comment on the horror movie genre itself, which can add an extra layer of humor or satire to the story.
Western characters in modern-day settings: Wunza movies and TV shows that blend western and modern-day elements often feature characters who embody the classic western archetype, such as the lone gunslinger or the lawman, but who exist in a modern-day setting. These characters may have old-fashioned attitudes or values that clash with modern sensibilities, which can create tension and conflict.
Science fiction characters with human emotions: Wunza science fiction movies and TV shows often feature characters who are from other worlds or who have advanced technology, but who also exhibit human emotions and characteristics. These characters may struggle with human relationships or have relatable fears and desires, despite their otherworldly abilities.
Wunza characters are designed to embody and interact with the different genres or elements that are being blended together. By combining different character archetypes and traits, wunza movies and TV shows can create unique and entertaining storylines and interactions.
‘Sharknado’Credit: The Asylum
Wunza Movie Examples
Here are a few examples of movies that could be considered “wunza movies” based on their genre combinations:
Cowboys & Aliens (2011) – A wunza western and sci-fi movie
Sharknado (2013) – A wunza disaster and creature feature movie
Snakes on a Plane(2006) – A wunza action and horror movie
Zombieland (2009) – A wunza horror and comedy movie
The Mummy(1999) – A wunza action and adventure movie with horror elements
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) – A wunza historical drama and horror movie
These movies combine genres in unique ways to create a distinct tone or atmosphere, but some critics argue that they can be formulaic and predictable.
However, it’s important to note that not all movies that mix genres should be considered “wunza movies” and that the term itself is subjective and can be used differently by different critics and audiences.
‘The Mummy’Credit: Universal Pictures
Rush Hour as a Wunza Movie
Rush Hour (1998) is an action-comedy film that could be considered a “wunza movie” because it combines elements from two familiar genres – action movies and buddy comedies. The film stars Jackie Chan as a Hong Kong detective and Chris Tucker as a fast-talking LAPD detective who are forced to work together to solve a kidnapping case in Los Angeles.
The movie features the fast-paced action and fight scenes that are common in action movies, but also includes a lot of comedic banter between the two lead characters. The humor in the movie often comes from the cultural differences between Chan’s character, who speaks limited English, and Tucker’s character, who is more brash and outspoken.
By combining these two genres, Rush Hour creates a unique tone that sets it apart from other action movies or buddy comedies. While some critics may argue that the film relies too heavily on formulaic elements from both genres, its success at the box office and its popularity with audiences suggest that it struck a chord with viewers who were looking for a fun and entertaining movie that freshly blended action and comedy.
‘Rush Hour’Credit: New Line Cinema
Wunza TV Show Examples
Of course, the wunza phenomenon doesn’t just delegate to movies, we see it in television as well. It’s a great way to have an ongoing series about an odd couple that has to learn to live or work with each other.
Here are a few examples of TV shows that could be considered “wunza TV shows” based on their genre combinations:
The Odd Couple (1970 / 2015) – A wunza neat freak, wunza slob comedy series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) – A wunza horror and teen drama series
Lost in Space(2018-) – A wunza science fiction and family drama series
Wynonna Earp (2016-2021) – A wunza western and supernatural series
The Good Place (2016-2020) – A wunza comedy and philosophical series
Stranger Things (2016-) – A wunza science fiction and horror series
Ash vs Evil Dead(2015-2018) – A wunza horror and comedy series
These TV shows combine genres in unique ways to create a distinct tone or atmosphere that sets them apart from other shows. While some critics may argue that they can be formulaic and predictable at times, they also have the potential to break new ground and push the boundaries of traditional genre conventions, just like wunza movies.
I love all these shows and think the genre-blending opened them up to new stories and stakes we usually don’t see on TV.
‘Buffy: The Vampire Slayer’Credit: 20th Television
Summing Up The Wunza Movie and TV Show Definition and Examples
Wunza movies and TV shows are an interesting and innovative genre of film that offer a fresh and exciting take on familiar genres. Their ability to blend two or more seemingly incompatible genres or elements creates unexpected and engaging storylines and characters that can be both entertaining and emotionally impactful.
They push the boundaries of traditional genre conventions, resulting in innovative approaches to filmmaking that can influence the future of cinema and TV. Their appeal to a wide range of audiences also makes them accessible and appealing to many viewers. With their unique blend of genres and unexpected twists, wunza movies will continue to captivate audiences and push the boundaries of filmmaking for years to come.
However, that didn’t stop Gomez from making another comment that supports the feud rumors. On February 23, she replied to post that described Taylor Swift as a “mean girl” and a “bully.”
The post in question featured a resurfaced video from 2017, in which Bieber made a gagging motion when Taylor Swift was mentioned during the televised rap battle Drop the Mic. Gomez defended Swift, replying to the post: “So sorry, my best friend is and continues to be one of the best in the game.”
After fans took note of her comments, Selena then announced her decision to quit TikTok altogether. “I’m going to be taking a second from social media because this is a little silly,” she said in a TikTok Live, per People. “I’m 30 and am too old for this. But I love you so much and I’ll see you guys sooner than later. I’m just gonna take a break from everything.”
February 27, 2023: Fans accuse Beiber of shading Gomez again by using the song “Calm Down” by Rema in an Instagram story. Fans feel she purposefully chose the song because it featured Selena Gomez, even though Hailey Beiber did not include Gomez’s vocals. However, as Buzzfeed points out, Beiber was sharing a story from the account of her skin care brand, Rhode, and may not have chosen the song at all.
March 1, 2022: Hailey’s birthday tribute to Justin Beiber is flooded with negative comments by Gomez fans. As one user replied, “I’m surprised she didn’t turn the comments off.”
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[This story contains spoilers to the penultimate episode of season one of Poker Face, “Escape From Shit Mountain.”]
By the time Poker Face viewers hit play on “Escape From Shit Mountain,” the audience for the Natasha Lyonne-starring murder mystery series knows what to expect: There will be a murder, and Charlie Cale (Lyonne) needs to solve it.
But, what happens when the target is Charlie Cale?
The ninth and penultimate episode in the first season of the hit Peacock series created by Rian Johnson plays with the show’s howcatchem format, bending its own rules the most yet. There have been surprises in previous episodes (“The Future of the Sport” saw zero deaths, while last week’s installment, “The Orpheus Syndrome,” claimed three fatalities). But none have put the show’s protagonist closer to death’s door than “Escape From Shit Mountain.”
“We have always endeavored to stay true to our structure and to our formula, but find new ways to tell a story in there,” Lilla Zuckerman, who co-wrote the episode with her sister and fellow showrunner Nora Zuckerman, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And having Charlie as the victim was this really kind of jaw-dropping realization that we could do something like that within the structures of this show.”
The episode introduces Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the weekly villain, with the Johnson favorite playing a white collar criminal on house arrest for insider trading. When a winter blizzard blows out the power — and his GPS ankle monitor — Trey (Gordon-Levitt) goes on a wild drive through the storm and hits a woman, who is later revealed to be Charlie. The episode pulls off a bait-and-switch, after first suggesting Charlie’s on-the-road companion, Morty (played by Everything Everywhere All at Oncestar Stephanie Hsu), as the possible victim.
When it’s revealed that Charlie is in fact the injured party, the two women end up stranded in a motel lodge with Trey and his friend Jimmy (played by David Castañeda). As Charlie puts her human lie detector skill to work, she realizes that Trey has killed in the past, and that both Trey and Jimmy covered up the dead body. To cover his tracks, Trey kills both Jimmy and Morty, and leaves Charlie for dead in a tree where he previously dumped the other body. He nearly gets away with it, if his ankle bracelet hadn’t been swiped by Charlie — who is last seen clutching it and still-breathing in the final moment.
What’s most surprising, in chatting with the Zuckermans, is to hear that the episode was actually the first one they filmed of the 10-episode season. And how bringing Charlie to the brink of death helped shape Lyonne’s approach to the character as they continued to shoot the rest of the show. “Because she had gone to that extreme, she could know that character in a way that she didn’t before,” Nora tells THR.
Below, in a chat together with THR, the showrunners go inside the filming of the episode that was also directed by Johnson, share his reaction when they first pitched the idea, discuss its overarching impact on Charlie (whose fate will be revealed in next week’s season finale), and share just how invincible Charlie Cale is now thatPoker Face is getting a second season.
I can’t believe this was the first episode that you shot.
Lilla Zuckerman: Yes. It was the first episode that we shot and the reason it got ordered that way is because it takes place in winter. When we were shooting in the Hudson Valley [in New York] and all those exteriors, we needed to make sure that there were no leaves on the trees, even though we didn’t really have snow up there and we had to manufacture all this fake snow. So that was the first episode that we shot, and then we shot the pilot, which was great because Rian [Johnson] was the director of both of those episodes. So, it fit together.
When watching this episode as a viewer, the penultimate one in the season, you are thinking, “They really have this show down by now.” What were some of the challenges of starting with such an intense episode?
Nora Zuckerman: I think the biggest challenge was with Charlie because she’s in such a dire place. You’re basically starting her at a 10. We were all kind of worried about that. But Rian was really conscious of it and, as we worked through the performance with Natasha, he felt like it actually unlocked Charlie in a good way. Because we started in such an emotional, intense place and because she had gone to that extreme, when it came to next playing Charlie in the pilot, Natasha could kind of know that character in a way that she didn’t before. It really worked out, and she gives an amazing performance in this. But yeah, the first few times you saw Charlie on screen, she’s a mess! She’s covered in mud. She’s been dragging herself through the woods. So when we all got to see sort of OG Charlie [with the pilot], we were relieved, like, “Oh, that’s Charlie. There we go.”
Lilla: It’s certainly her most physical performance and also, it’s emotionally gut-wrenching. And what I think it did, though, is it grounded Charlie in a human way for the rest of the season.
Why was this the episode of the season that you two wrote and, since this started off your filming relationship, what was it like to collaborate with Rian Johnson as director?
Lilla: This is actually one of the episodes that we pitched early on in the writers room; we didn’t come up with it near the end of the season. As soon as we started breaking it, we realized that it belonged as the penultimate episode. And what I love about it is that it really is an exploration of Charlie’s character, and she’s very much in the center of this episode, as opposed to on the fringes, and you’re not even sure why. Also, I’m so proud of the switcheroo that we pull in this episode. We have always endeavored to stay true to our structure and to our formula, but find new ways to tell a story in there. And having Charlie as the victim was this really kind of jaw-dropping realization that we could do something like that within the structures of this show.
I’ll never forget the day that we came into the room with this pitch. I was like, “Either people are going to love this or people are going to hate this.” Or, maybe people will say, “You can’t do that.” But we pitched the episode to Rian, from the ankle monitor to the car crash to the reveal that it was Charlie, and he said, “Holy shit!” He was so surprised. And that’s when I knew, “Ok, we’re really onto something with this one.”
Jimmy (David Castañeda) and Trey (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) when Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) shows up, seemingly back from the dead, on the doorstep of the motel.
Phillip Caruso/Peacock
When she was lying in the road after Trey hit her and I saw her shoes, I thought, “Hm. Is that Charlie?” And then I thought, “No, they wouldn’t do it.” Did you have conversations about how invincible Charlie is: “Can we actually kill Charlie? No, of course we can’t kill Charlie”?
Nora: I don’t think we were ever like, “OK, we’re going to kill Charlie.” But through the season, you’ve seen her in various states of danger. Sometimes it’s confronting a killer or being nearly run off the road. But this is a danger that you don’t quite see coming. And then to have her in this terrible physical state while still solving a murder and knowing how vulnerable she is became such a cool, fun challenge for Charlie to have. You go from this big, spectacular accident to this almost small play with these four characters in this little motel. And we thought it was just such a cool way to put Charlie through the paces in a way that she hadn’t been previous, and it really sets her up for the finale in such a great way. It’s sort of like when you’re in that state, looking at the year you’ve just had and going, “Well, what’s next?” And then, you’ll see… I guess!
You do put her in the danger zone many times, and she’s slick with escaping. If there is no Poker Face without Charlie Cale, does that put you in a box? Bad things can happen to her, but she also has this superpower skill, so what are you playing with when it comes to her mortality?
Lilla: This show was always designed to run multiple seasons with Charlie Cale at the heart of the show. But that doesn’t mean that she’s superhuman. She’s not infallible. She will get herself into dangerous situations and I think we play with that reality more in this episode. But throughout the season, or, as we were breaking the season, we talked about a lot of ideas of putting her in a lot of peril. This just happens to be the ultimate one. But, moving forward? Yeah. She’s going to be in dangerous situations and she’s going to be confronting wicked people, and people are coming after her. It was fun to really play the stark reality of that in this episode.
I also want to ask about casting Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a big role here, since Rian Johnson fans love to see how he will show up in a Johnson project. (Since starring in Johnson’s directorial debut Brick, he has had roles or hidden cameos in every Johnson movie.)
Nora: He’s somebody who we knew would probably show up in the show at some point, kind of like how we know Noah Segen [who plays a sheriff in the Poker Face premiere] is always going to show up in the show at some point. It’s almost like the Rian Johnson players, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is such a big part of that. We were like, “He’s kind of like Rian’s good-luck charm, so you can’t not have him in the season at some point.”
When we started talking about Trey and Joseph’s name came up, we all got really excited that he could be in what was the first episode we shot. Because a lot of people on the crew had also worked with Rian and Joseph before, it sort of immediately gelled everybody together; everybody felt really safe. And it became just really fun to see all these old friends connect. For us, we’re new to the group. But it was just a really warm, welcoming set having him there. Joseph is an amazing actor, and also I think more of a physical actor than we knew. The physical stuff he put himself through for this episode was just incredible to watch. But I guess I should have known from his musicals that he is such a talented physical actor as well.
Lilla: It was like being invited to a family reunion, doing this episode.
Nora: That’s a good way to put it.
Lilla: And it really did set the tone moving forward in terms of how we’re going to make this show and cultivate all of those relationships. It was such a gift.
Stephanie Hsu as Morty in “Escape From Shit Mountain,” which was written by the Zuckermans and directed by Rian Johnson.
Peacock
Any Easter eggs or fun facts to share from “Shit Mountain”?
Nora: Lil, maybe you should talk about Stephanie Hsu, because we all grew up in the same town.
Lilla: Now-Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu came to set and we were getting to know each other. And we discovered that not only did she grow up in our hometown, but that Stephanie and I had the same high school drama teacher: Jim Bell from Palos Verdes High School, the man who is responsible for turning me into a theater geek and sending me off on this path. Obviously, Stephanie is a superstar now. And we both grew up doing musical theater with the same drama teacher at our high school.
Nora: We had all just gone and seen Everything Everywhere, days before she showed up to set. It was one of the first movies we had seen in theaters since the pandemic, and a bunch of us including Rian had gone to a theater in Poughkeepsie, New York, to see it. So when Stephanie showed up on set, we were just starstruck. We were like, “I think this [EEAAO] is going to be really big for you.” She was like, “I don’t know, maybe!” So hopefully all the fans will come watch her in this episode, because her performance is just great and she’s hilarious.
Poker Face is now streaming its first season on Peacock. This interview was edited for clarity.
Brendan Fraser’s massive popularity has helped play a role in the revitalization of the 54-year-old actor’s career. That includes Fraser’s first-ever Oscar nomination for best actor, via his towering performance in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale.”
For this week’s video episode of the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast, we sat down with Brendan Fraser to discuss “The Brenaissance” and what this past year has meant to him. We also play a game called “Whose Babe Is It Anyway?” — where Fraser guesses which of his former co-stars said a particular line.
Watch the full video above. The podcast, including an interview with Oscar-nominated “Tár” star Cate Blanchett, will be released on Friday.
“The Whale” is a stark, dour examination of regret and addiction, wrapped into the script written by Samuel D. Hunter, who adapted his play of the same name. Distributed by A24, “The Whale” tells the story of Charlie, an obese gay man who reconnects with his estranged 17-year-old daughter Ellie (played by Sadie Sink) after leaving her and her mother for his younger male lover. In addition to Fraser’s nod for best actor, Hong Chau is nominated for best supporting actress.
Some of the star’s most memorable movies and roles have included the ’90s comedy “Encino Man” (1992), coming-of-age drama “School Ties” (1992) and infectious rom-coms like “Blast From the Past” (1998) and “Bedazzled” (2000). And then there was his adventurer Rick O’Connell of “The Mummy” franchise. “I love those movies,” he says. Fraser is even open to doing more. “I love popcorn movies. I’m not ruling anything out.”
Next up, Fraser will star alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Jesse Plemons and Lily Gladstone in “The Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese, which will premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
He is also set to star opposite Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage in “Brothers” from Max Barbakow (“Palm Springs”). The plot has been kept under wraps, but Fraser reveals exclusively to Variety that it’s a “heist movie,” in which he plays a jailer. “There are jewels at stake, which have been mysteriously buried, possibly inside a cadaver. And fraternal twins Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage are very funny together.”
Even though Warner Bros. yanked “Batgirl” from release, Fraser is not necessarily done with the DCEU. He says he’s open to coming back for more projects if asked by DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Sarfan. “I’m an actor,” says Fraser. “I want to work.”
Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast, produced by Michael Schneider, who also co-hosts with Clayton Davis, is your one-stop listen for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each week “Awards Circuit” features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives; discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines; and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts. New episodes post weekly.
Over the years Montreal producer Jacques Greene has gently folded elements of acid, breakbeat, and Tri-Angle Records-style drag into his music, but the core of his sound has remained simple and constant: Chopped vocal samples glide around hypnotic dance grooves, the music adopting a contemplative, almost melancholy undercurrent in understanding of how sweating it out on the dancefloor can lead to emotional catharsis. On “Believe,” Greene’s latest single, his trademark tension is still present: Drones warble in and out of tune; a filtered break flutters around the downbeats of the tech house pattern; resonance and white noise create anticipation for the drops. But the pitched-up vocal sample that anchors the track feels triumphant and encouraging, making an earnest appeal as the syncopated bassline propels forward: “Now you have to believe.” Through its delicate construction, “Believe” introduces a new, unabashed joy to Greene’s sound, eliciting the close-eyed, hands-up transcendence only a good DJ can supply.
About: In Eastern Ukraine, follow the daily life of children and staff in a special kind of home: an institution for children who have been removed from their homes while awaiting court custody decisions.
About: The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would arise from the interconnected metaverse of today’s world.
“Is she pregnant,” a follower wrote via Instagram on Thursday, March 2, while commenting on Kardashian’s new behind-the-scenes snaps from her Lemme Purr vaginal health gummies.
Kardashian noted: “I only acknowledge this comment bc I do think it’s important to know how IVF affects women’s bodies and it’s not spoken about much.” She then quipped, “Also are we still asking women if they’re pregnant? ?.”
In the pictures, the Kardashians star wore yellow spandex pants, a cropped yellow sweater and matching neon heels. One of the photos showed the University of Arizona alum’s exposed stomach, which seemingly prompted a few people to speculate about a possible pregnancy.
“Guys I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” the initial social media user replied. “I would love it if Kourtney Kardashian were pregnant everybody is beautiful! Love you, Kourtney.”
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians alum’s explanation of her latest photo shoot came five months after she revealed that she and husband Travis Barker had stopped her IVF (in vitro fertilization) journey treatments after not getting pregnant.
Throughout their IVF process, the musician had his partner’s back. “Travis is fully supporting her every step of the way,” a source exclusively told Us Weekly in April 2022, before the duo shared publicly that they had pressed pause on treatment. “The journey just affirmed their bond and love for each other.”
The twosome previously documented their fertility ups and downs on season 1 of The Kardashians. “Our egg retrieval didn’t go the way we would have hoped. He was able to retrieve the egg but it didn’t make it to an embryo stage,” Kardashian said during a May 2022 episode of the Hulu series. “We start back again.”
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AMC Networks’ Sentai Filmworks unit reached an agreement with Japan’s Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) that provides exclusive rights for AMC’s anime-focused HIDIVE streaming service to distribute part of MBS’s future programming lineup in all global markets outside of Asia.
The pact is Sentai’s biggest-ever deal for anime content, according to the company. The output deal encompasses MBS’s programming slate based on a collection of popular manga and light novel titles. All of the shows will be available exclusively on HIDIVE outside of Asia.
Among the shows covered in the Sentai-MBS output is “The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen: From Villainess to Savior” (pictured above). The new show, scheduled to premiere in July 2023, is a 12-episode series based on hit fantasy light novel by Tenichi and published by Ichijinsha. The series is being directed by Norio Nitta and written by Deko Akao with animation by OLM.
MBS’s slate of shows also includes the winter 2023 simulcast series “Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte,” which HIDIVE announced it would stream at the Anime NYC convention in November. Additional titles covered under the pact will be announced in the future.
AMC Networks announced the acquisition of Sentai and its HIDIVE service in January 2022. HIDIVE, whose main competitor is Sony’s Crunchyroll, costs $4.99 per month or $47.99 per year. HIDIVE is available via a direct paid subscription as well as Amazon’s Prime Video Channels and the Roku Channel; the company says it the service offers more than 500 titles.
“This is a truly historic agreement for HIDIVE and is the culmination of our partnership with MBS,” said John Ledford, president of Sentai Filmworks and HIDIVE, in a statement. “‘The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen: From Villainess to Savior’ and the other series will significantly elevate HIDIVE’s reputation with fans as not only the new go-to anime streaming platform but also as the pipeline to some of Japan’s most highly anticipated titles.”
Shinji Nakano, director of Mainichi Broadcasting System, added, “In recent years, anime has become a solid representative of Japanese culture and has gained fans all over the world. We are pleased to partner with Sentai Filmworks, HIDIVE and AMC Networks, a group that plays a huge part in this effort to further expand anime culture.”
Osaka-based MBS has been co-producing and broadcasting anime for more than half a century. The broadcaster is the TV home to numerous global hit anime franchises like “Attack on Titan,” “Full Metal Alchemist” and “Jujutsu Kaisen.” In addition to co-producing those and many other series, MBS was a co-producer of “Akira,” seen as one of the most influential anime films of all time.
Finding a good movie to watch on Amazon Prime Video can be difficult to say the least. While Amazon’s robust library of titles is available to every Amazon Prime subscriber, they don’t exactly make it easy to find what you’re looking for. That’s where we come in. Below, we’ve assembled a growing list of the best movies on Amazon Prime right now. Our carefully curated selection runs the gamut from crowd-pleasing blockbusters to Oscar-winning dramas to delightful rom-coms and beyond. There’s a little something for everyone, so stop the endless scrolling and simply choose one of these great movies to watch.
Check out our list of the best movies on Amazon Prime video below. The list will be updated weekly with new titles.
Shrek and Shrek 2
DreamWorks Animation
OK yes the “Shrek” memes are everywhere, but those first two movies are genuinely good. The 2001 original served as something of an “anti-Pixar” movie with its crude jokes and adult humor, and while the CG animation leaves something to be desired, this funny twist on the traditional fairy tale holds up thanks to its terrific voice cast. “Shrek 2” is even better – a more refined, more ambitious story in which Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz’s ogre couple must win over the hearts of Fiona’s parents, all while an evil fairy godmother (Julie Andrews) plots their downfall. Good songs!
A Simple Favor
Lionsgate
Few films are as surprising moment to moment as “A Simple Favor.” Truly, at any given turn, anything could happen in this candy-coated thriller/dark comedy. Anna Kendrick plays a vlogging single mother who suddenly finds the opportunity to step into the spotlight when her friend, a PR director for a fashion company (played by Blake Lively) goes missing. Henry Golding and Andrew Rannells co-star in this Hitchcock-inspired delight that you might be shocked to find hails from “Bridesmaids” and “Spy” filmmaker Paul Feig.
Never Been Kissed
20th Century Fox
OK yes, there are some questionable decisions made in the 1999 rom-com “Never Been Kissed” concerning teachers dating students, but it remains an ultimately winning charmer. Drew Barrymore plays an insecure Chicago Sun-Times copy editor who is sent undercover at a high school for a story. While there, she gets to live out an alternate high school life – one in which she’s popular and well-liked. Complications ensue when she falls for an English teacher (played by Michael Vartan), and the feelings are mutual. Ick but also sweet? I don’t know, this is a weird one, but it works! – Adam Chitwood
Almost Famous
Columbia Pictures
One of the best films ever made about music, Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” is a timeless classic. Inspired by Crowe’s earlier career as a music journalist, the film follows a teen named William (played by Patrick Fugit) who scores an assignment from Rolling Stone to write a story on an up-and-coming band named Stillwater. Embedded with the band on the road, William learns about life, love and friendship – although through Crowe’s unabashedly earnest prism, it never comes off as trite or rote. Crowe won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Kate Hudson was rightfully nominated for Best Supporting Actress. The impeccable ensemble also includes Frances McDormand, Billy Crudup, Jason Lee, Fairuza Balk, Anna Paquin and Philip Seymour Hoffman. – Adam Chitwood
Inside Man
Universal Pictures
Spike Lee’s 2006 thriller “Inside Man” is one of the director’s best and most entertaining films. The story opens in the aftermath of a bank heist, with those taken hostage giving their interviews to police about what happened. The film then flashes back to portray the events as they unfold, with Denzel Washington playing the detective trying to talk down the robber and kidnapper (played by Clive Owen) who seems to be harboring some kind of secret. Mind games ensue, and this one keeps you guessing all the way up through the end. – Adam Chitwood
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Paramount Pictures
One of Matt Damon’s best performances and one of the best films of the 1990s, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” is a chilling dramatic thriller that gets under your skin in the best way. Set in the 1950s, Damon plays a young man named Tom Ripley who is mistaken for somebody else and tasked with persuading a rich young man (played by Jude Law) to return to the United States from Italy. Once Ripley gets to Italy, however, he becomes infatuated with Law’s character and the life he’s living (complete with kind girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow), and grows increasingly close to the couple in uncomfortable ways. Anthony Minghella directs this beautifully haunting story of identity, jealousy and self-loathing that takes a number of shocking twists and turns. Oh, and Philip Seymour Hoffman delivers a phenomenal supporting performance. – Adam Chitwood
Mission: Impossible 1-4
Paramount Pictures
Quite simply one of the best and most consistently good franchises around, you can stream the first four “Mission: Impossible” movies for free on Prime Video right now (and “Rogue Nation” and “Fallout” with a Paramount+ free trial). Each film has its own unique flavor — “M:I 1” is very much a Brian De Palma thriller; “M:I 2” is an over-the-top John Woo actioner; “M:I 3” reveals what Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is like as a human being (and lover); and “M:I 4” is a global epic. Thrills, spills and chills abound, and while “Mission: Impossible 2” is the only underwhelming entry in the series, Cruise’s commitment to the bit (and the stunts) makes this thing supremely satisfying as a whole. – Adam Chitwood
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Warner Bros.
If it’s been awhile since you saw Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” it’s well worth giving another shot – especially in the wake of the revelations within his deeply personal 2022 drama “The Fabelmans”. Originally conceived by Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg revived the project after Kubrick’s death and wrote and directed this tale of a young boy A.I. who is programmed to love and then abandoned by his adopted family. One part fairy tale and one part nightmare, this is one of Spielberg’s darkest films, with the director maintaining a heartbreaking emotional core throughout the young boy’s journey. Fair warning: If you’re a parent, have tissues at the ready. – Adam Chitwood
Tangerine
Magnolia
Before “The Florida Project” or “Red Rocket,” filmmaker Sean Baker burst onto the scene with his 2015 comedy “Tangerine” – shot entirely on an iPhone. Kitana Kiki Rodriguez stars as a trans sex worker living in Los Angeles who finds out that her boyfriend and pimp has been cheating on her. While it looks like an indie and tackles some heavy material at times, the film has the tone and pacing of a raucous comedy, and is all the better for it. – Adam Chitwood
The Indiana Jones Franchise
Ke Huy Quan and Harrison Ford in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (Paramount)
With “Indiana Jones 5” on tap for release this summer, there’s never been a better time to binge-watch the entire “Indy” franchise so far. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is one of the best films ever made; “Temple of Doom” is an underrated gem that also happens to be one of the darkest films of Steven Spielberg’s career; and “Last Crusade” is a rip-roaring delight. “Crystal Skull,” well, we won’t blame you if you skip that one. – Adam Chitwood
Superbad
Sony Pictures Releasing
“Superbad” was pivotal to the comedy boom of the 2000s, and still largely holds up thanks to a terrific pair of performances from Jonah Hill and Michael Cera and an emotional undercurrent that grounds this raunchy coming-of-age tale. Hill and Cera play high school seniors looking to score some booze for a cool kids party, all the while struggling through the tension that Cera’s character is planning to go to a different (and more prestigious) college than Hill’s, threatening their lifelong bond. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote the screenplay based on their own friendship, and Emma Stone co-stars alongside Bill Hader, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Rogen himself. – Adam Chitwood
La La Land
Lionsgate
Damien Chazelle’s Oscar-winning (but not Best Picture-winning) “La La Land” is at once a joyful Hollywood musical and a somber story of what we sacrifice to make our dreams come true. Ryan Gosling is an aspiring jazz musician and Emma Stone is an aspiring actress, both just trying to make it big in Los Angeles. Their paths cross, stars align, and a head-over-heels romance ensues. But Chazelle manages to combine the fantastical with the grounded, allowing us to feel deeply for what these individuals are going through (and root for them hard). And the songs are fantastic to boot. – Adam Chitwood
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Sadie Frost in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Columbia Pictures)
Legendary “Godfather” filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola reimagines one of horror’s greatest tales in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula;” a sumptuous visual feast of a film that embraces and expands Stoker’s lore with visual splendor and erotically amped-up Gothic romance. Gary Oldman stars as the iconic blood-sucker, convincingly seductive or grotesque as the moment calls for it in his violent, tragic pursuit of Mina (Winona Ryder) — here endowed with a lyrical, melancholic love story of reincarnated soul mates. Stunning to look at, technically astounding and overflowing with A-list talent. – Haleigh Foutch
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
New Line Cinema
Peter Jackson’s stunning “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is pretty much a home run. Beginning with 2001’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” and culminating in 2003’s 11-time Oscar-winner “The Return of the King,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s celebrated and beloved fantasy saga received on of the all-time great cinematic adaptations, which have aged with the grace and enduring entertainment value of a true classic. And if you’ve seen the “Lord of the Rings” movies one too many times, Amazon also has their newly debuted mega-budget series epic “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” which unfolds the saga of Middle Earth thousands of years before the events of “Lord of the Rings.” – Haleigh Foutch
The Hunger Games
Lionsgate
If you’re in the mood to relive Jennifer Lawrence’s rise to superstardom, there’s perhaps no better way to do it than revisiting the “Hunger Games” saga, which made Lawrence a household name through the best-selling tale of Katniss Everdeen and her fight against the regime of totalitarian dystopia. All four films are currently streaming on Amazon and well worth a revisit (or a first-watch if you missed the initial craze), not just for Lawrence’s star-making performance, but for author Suzanne Collins’ gripping world-building and enduring characters, which are brought to life by some of the best in the biz, from Effie’s unforgettable looks to an ensemble that includes Woody Harrelson, Julianne Moore and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. – Haleigh Foutch
I Want You Back
Amazon Studios
A clever rom-com with a heck of a charming duo, Amazon’s “I Want You Back” stars Charlie Day and Jenny Slate as two strangers who bond after being dumped by their respective partners at the same time. Determined to get them back, they conspire together to sabotage their ex’s new relationships, building a complicated web of friendships, feelings and — of course — accidentally falling for each other. Day and Slate make for a fantastic pair of lovable wrecks at their worst, sparking believable chemistry while delivering the laughs. – Haleigh Foutch
Face/Off
Paramount Pictures
Hong Kong action legend John Woo delivered one of his best American studio films with the 1997 favorite “Face/Off.” Starring John Travolta as family man FBI agent Sean Archer and Nicolas Cage as his criminal, identity-thieving arch-enemy Castor Troy, who takes over Archer’s life with the help of a plastic surgeon and a revolutionary face-swapping procedure. It’s a completely bonkers blast of a film, with two old-school movie star performances from Travolta and Cage, both of whom fully embrace Woo’s wild over-the-top vision of a cat-and-mouse crime thriller that never stops escalating the action. – Haleigh Foutch
Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut)
20th Century Fox
If you’ve never seen the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s 2005 historical epic “Kingdom of Heaven,” make this one a priority. The film is Scott’s chronicle of the Crusades through the eyes of a French blacksmith played by Orlando Bloom, but the director’s cut of the film – which is nearly an hour longer – paints a more complete picture of the conflict and the characters involved, particularly Edward Norton’s masked King Baldwin. This is one of Scott’s best films, hands down. – Adam Chitwood
The Cabin in the Woods
Lionsgate
If you’re looking for a movie that upends the horror genre while still delivering thrills, “Cabin in the Woods” is just for you. This 2011 film is directed by Drew Goddard, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joss Whedon about a group of young people (including a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth and Jesse Williams) who go to a remote cabin in the woods. All is not what it appears to be, however, as they’re hounded by haunted delights that seem like tropes straight out of a bad horror movie. That’s the point of this meta story, which takes a number of twists and turns before arriving at its bold, unforgettable ending. – Adam Chitwood
The Northman
Focus Features
How does a violent, Viking epic from the visionary director behind “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” sound? The answer is “very cool,” and that’s exactly what you get with “The Northman.” The 2022 film stars Alexander Skarsgard as a Viking warrior prince seeking to avenge the murder of his father (played by Ethan Hawke). The film follows his quest with breathtaking vistas and a killer cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe and Bjork (yes, that Bjork). – Adam Chitwood
Edward Scissorhands
20th Century Fox
Nothing bridges the gap between summer and fall quite like “Edward Scissorhands.” Director Tim Burton’s 1990 film stars Johnny Depp as the unfinished creation of a reclusive old inventor, with scissors for hands and a yet-to-be-completed brain. When he’s discovered in the mansion by the suburbanites down below, he becomes enmeshed in modern culture but finds it difficult to fit in. This is a classic outsider story told like a fairy tale, with a twinge of darkness and hint of magic throughout. Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest and Anthony Michael Hall co-star. – Adam Chitwood
Jennifer’s Body
20th Century Fox
If underrated and/or misunderstood gems are more your speed, check out “Jennifer’s Body.” This darkly comic 2009 film hails from Oscar-winning “Juno” writer Diablo Cody and “The Invitation” director Karyn Kusama, and tells the story of a popular high school girl who is abducted and ritualistically sacrificed which turns her into a demonic force that feeds on young teenaged boys. While marketed as a teen horror film, “Jennifer’s Body” is actually a smart take on the male gaze and sexuality through the lens of two talented female filmmakers. Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, and J.K. Simmons star. – Adam Chitwood
Heartburn
Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in “Heartburn” (Paramount Pictures)
Director Mike Nichols and writer Nora Ephron are a match made in heaven in the 1986 romantic comedy/drama “Heartburn,” which stars Meryl Streep as a version of Ephron as the story offers a semi-autobiographical version of the famous author/screenwriter’s challenging relationship with journalist Carl Bernstein. Jack Nicholson plays the Bernstein role in the film, as it charts his infidelity and its impact on the duo’s marriage and children. Streep is spectacular in this harshly realistic portrait of a marriage that’s infused with Ephron’s biting wit. – Adam Chitwood
The Silence of the Lambs
Orion Pictures
Still the only horror film to win Best Picture, “The Silence of the Lambs” is a classic for a reason. Director Jonathan Demme’s adaptation stars Jodie Foster as a young FBI trainee who is tasked with enlisting imprisoned serial killer/cannibal Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) for help in tracking down a serial killer of women who goes by the name Buffalo Bill. Demme’s direction is the secret weapon here, preventing the film from becoming gross or exploitative and submerging the viewer into the point of view of Foster’s character. The film won Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay. – Adam Chitwood
Skyfall
EON/MGM/Sony
The highest-grossing James Bond movie of all time, 2012’s “Skyfall” officially set the franchise up to compete with the superhero movies that were dominating the box office. In many ways this is the ultimate James Bond film, as Daniel Craig’s character is put through the wringer with a battle against a figure from his (and M’s) past. Director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins bring a refined sophistication to the aesthetics, and the story doubles down on the emotional and raw nature of Craig’s 007. – Adam Chitwood
The Outfit
Mark Rylance stars as “Leonard” in director Graham Moore’s THE OUTFIT, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Nick Wall / Focus Features
A contained spy thriller with a heck of a lead performance, “The Outfit” hails from Oscar-winning “The Imitation Game” writer Graham Moore who serves as writer and director on the story of an English tailor (played by Mark Rylance) who gets caught up in a mob war one night while working late in his shop on Saints Row. Zoey Deutch, Dylan O’Brien and Johnny Flynn co-star in the film which largely takes place in the same location, but is dripping with tension and packed with reveals. – Adam Chitwood
Licorice Pizza
MGM
Every new Paul Thomas Anderson movie is reason to celebrate, but his 2021 film “Licorice Pizza” is truly one from the heart. The coming-of-age dramedy takes place in 1973 in the San Fernando Valley and follows a cocksure 15-year-old actor (Cooper Hoffman) who strikes up a friendship with a girl in her 20s (Alana Haim). The film navigates their nebulous relationship as well as the anxieties felt by each as they stare down young adulthood, and it’s all wrapped up in PTA’s hilarious and heartbreaking chronicle of life as a kid in 1970s Los Angeles. Come for the time capsule, stay for Bradley Cooper’s hilariously unhinged performance as producer Jon Peters. – Adam Chitwood
No Time to Die
“No Time to Die” / MGM
Daniel Craig’s final Bond film is at once epic and intimate. “No Time to Die” puts an emotional button on what’s been an emotional ride, as Craig finally infused 007 with a license to feel through his largely acclaimed series of films. In his final go-around, we begin with an extended prologue that puts a button (for now) on his relationship with Dr. Madeleine Swan (played by Lea Seydoux) following her debut in “Spectre.” But when a figure from Swan’s past resurfaces (played by Rami Malek), Bond gets swept back into a game of cat-and-mouse with the highest stakes he’s ever faced before. Swell supporting turns by Lashana Lynch and Ana de Armas as well as a refreshing visual palate from director Cary Joji Fukunaga ensure that with “No Time to Die,” Bond goes out on a high note. – Adam Chitwood
What If
Entertainment One
If you can look past the forgettable title, “What If” is actually a wonderfully charming romantic comedy gem that flew entirely under the radar. Daniel Radcliffe stars as a medical school dropout who meets a young woman (played by Zoe Kazan) during his first night out in a year. At the end of the night, he finds out the woman is in a relationship, and the two subsequently become best friends as the story charts their close relationship and whether Radcliffe’s character will summon the courage to tell her how he really feels. While the premise feels familiar, the 2014 film is executed in a sweet, hilarious and charming manner (it was originally titled “The F Word”) and boasts a pair of supporting performances by then up-and-comers Adam Driver and Mackenzie Davis that are delightful. – Adam Chitwood
The Lost City of Z
Amazon Studios
A Tom Holland adventure movie of a very different sort, “The Lost City of Z” is based on the David Grann book of the same name and follows a British explorer in the early 1900s who is sent to Brazil to search for a supposed lost city in the Amazon. Charlie Hunnam plays the explorer Percy Fawcett, Robert Pattinson plays fellow explorer Henry Costin and Tom Holland plays Percy’s son Jack. As directed and written by James Gray, “The Lost City of Z” is an enthralling story about colonialism and the relationship between a father and a son. – Adam Chitwood
Lucy and Desi
Amazon Studios
If you’ve already seen Aaron Sorkin’s fictional account of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in “Being the Ricardos,” check out the Amy Poehler-directed documentary “Lucy and Desi.” The film explores the partnership between the “I Love Lucy” stars, offering an insightful and candid look at the relationship between the two buoyed by interviews with Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, Norman Lear, Desi Arnaz Jr, Carol Burnett and Bette Midler. – Adam Chitwood
Paper Moon
Paramount Pictures
If you’re in the mood for a classic, 1973’s road trip comedy “Paper Moon” holds up tremendously well. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, the film takes place during the Great Depression and stars real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O’Neal as a con man and orphan who team up when the con man agrees to take the young girl from Gotham, Kansas to St. Joseph, Missouri. Heartwarming, hilarious and rich in character, “Paper Moon” is a classic for a reason. – Adam Chitwood
The Courier
Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions
“The Courier” is a great “dad movie,” and that’s pejorative. This Cold War thriller is based on a true story and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne, a British businessman who was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service to serve as a messenger between a Russian spy source and the British government in the 1960s. What begins as an exciting romp turns deadly serious, and Cumberbatch commands the screen in the lead role (flanked by Rachel Brosnahan as his wife and Jessie Buckley as his handler). This one’s taut, compelling and surprisingly emotional. – Adam Chitwood
Brittany Runs a Marathon
Amazon Studios
The 2019 comedy “Brittany Runs a Marathon” manages to be both hilarious and inspiring at the same time, as Jillian Bell stars as a twentysomething woman living in New York City named Brittany who decides to try and get her life together – and to start, she’s going to train to run the New York Marathon. But as Brittany gets deeper and deeper into running, making new friends along the way, she discovers that a change on the inside may be what’s most prudent to pointing her life in the right direction. Bell is fantastic in the lead role, and writer/director Paul Downs Colaizzo’s script is pleasantly surprising in where it takes Brittany’s story. – Adam Chitwood
Suspiria
Amazon Studios
After he made the Oscar-winning romance “Call Me by Your Name,” filmmaker Luca Guadagnino took on a horror classic with 2018’s “Suspiria.” Set in 1988 Berlin, the film stars Dakota Johnson as a young woman leaving her Mennonite family in Ohio to audition for and train as a dancer at an esteemed academy. But as her training continues, it becomes clear that perhaps this dance troupe has something more sinister, more witchy going on. The brilliance of Guadagnino’s take on the story is how it uses the supernatural horror to tell a real-life horror story about fascism, and the festering wound of evil. Tilda Swinton is mesmerizing pulling double duty here as the dance troupe’s leader and a male doctor curious about the goings-on at the school. – Adam Chitwood
The Report
Amazon Studios
If a real-life investigative thriller in the vein of “All the President’s Men” is more your speed, check out “The Report.” Released in 2019, the true-story drama stars Adam Driver as Daniel Jones, a staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein (played by Annette Bening) who is tasked with investigating the CIA’s use of torture following the 9/11 attacks. Writer/director Scott Z. Burns crafts a film that is taught with tension, but also powerful in its pursuit of the truth. The ensemble includes Jon Hamm, Michael C. Hall, Corey Stoll, Ted Levine and Maura Tierney. – Adam Chitwood
Late Night
Amazon Studios
Screenwriter Mindy Kaling pulled from the world of late night television for her 2019 comedy “Late Night,” which stars Emma Thompson as a veteran late night TV personality who is in danger of being pushed out by the network, and enlists the help of a new (and inexperienced) writer (played by Kaling) to bring some diversity to her all-male writing staff. The comedy has shades of a mismatched buddy film, behind-the-scenes Hollywood tale and middle-aged drama, and it’s anchored by a terrific performance from Thompson as a woman struggling to keep up with the times. – Adam Chitwood
It’s a Wonderful Life
Liberty Films
If you’re looking to get into the holiday spirit, you can’t go wrong with Frank Capra’s 1946 classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man extremely down on his luck who, after attempting to take his own life, is shown what life in his small town would look like had he never existed. While the film is ultimately uplifting, it’s far darker than many remember, and is a brilliant tale about life and the relationships we make (and take for granted) along the way. – Adam Chitwood
Cold War
Amazon Studios
If you’re into period dramas, the 2018 film “Cold War” is a must-see. Directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish-language drama takes place in Poland and France and begins in the 1940s before ending in the 1960s as it follows the relationship between a musical director and a young singer he discovers. Against the backdrop of their love affair, the war rages on. – Adam Chitwood
The Big Sick
Amazon Studios/Lionsgate
A romantic comedy straight from the heart, the based-on-a-true-story “The Big Sick” is delightful and emotional all at once. Written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, the film is based on the origins of their relationship as Gordon slipped into a coma soon after they started dating, and Nanjiani was forced to confront his own fears and contend with Gordon’s parents all with the uncertainty of her condition looming large. Zoe Kazan portrays Gordon in the film with a hearty dose of moxie, and Nanjiani delivers a complex performance that clearly pulls from the depths of his personal life – not just his relationship with Kazan’s character, but his own relationship to his family. – Adam Chitwood
The Handmaiden
CJ Entertainment
“Oldboy” filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s 2016 epic erotic drama “The Handmaiden” is absolutely one of his best films, and is a blast from start to finish. The psychological thriller plays out in three parts chock full of twists and turns, but begins as the story of a con man who conspires with a pickpocket to hatch a plan that would involve marrying a Japanese heiress and committing her to an asylum, thus stealing her wealth. But the film takes a number of turns as various romantic and sexual entanglements ensue. This one’s for adults only. – Adam Chitwood
Manchester by the Sea
Amazon Studios
“Manchester by the Sea” is a brilliant film, but fair warning it’s also a significant bummer. This 2016 film won Oscars for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay and stars Casey Affleck as a janitor living in Massachusetts who is suddenly tasked with caring for his nephew following his brother’s abrupt death. The event triggers substantial trauma that Affleck’s character has yet to process, and what follows is a somber, sometimes darkly funny and ultimately touching meditation on grief and guilt. – Adam Chitwood
One Night in Miami
Amazon Studios
Regina King’s 2020 drama “One Night in Miami” is an excellent snapshot of a moment in time, and how four of the most famous African-Americans in history each approached the changing societal landscape of the 1960s. Set over the course of one night in 1964, the story follows four friends – Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) – as a night of celebrating soon turns into a night of lively conversation about their roles and responsibilities to the African-American community. The film is cleverly drawn and tremendously compelling, and provides much food for thought as it connects the struggles of the 1960s to today. – Adam Chitwood
The Vast of Night
Amazon Studios
If you like hidden gems, 2020’s “The Vast of Night” is one of the most exciting indies of the last few years. Set in 1950s New Mexico, the story takes place over the course of one evening where a young switchboard operator and a radio DJ pick up a mysterious audio frequency that may or may not be inhuman in nature. This small-scale sci-fi mystery is light on effects but heavy on evocative filmmaking, intrigue and dimensional characters. It’s so good, a scene with a man talking about his experience with aliens over the radio will have you on the edge of your seat. – Adam Chitwood
Amazon Studios
2019’s “Sound of Metal” is an indie with a heart of gold – and an Oscar-winning one at that. The film stars Riz Ahmed as a metal drummer named Ruben who begins to lose his hearing. He leaves his bandmate to go to a facility for Deaf recovering addicts, where he begins to learn how to live his life differently but also struggles with his own demons. Ahmed gives a powerhouse performance, and the film’s sound design puts you right in Ruben’s headspace. – Adam Chitwood
Love and Friendship
Amazon Studios
If it’s a lovely costume dramedy you’re in the mood for, 2016’s “Love and Friendship” is an absolute delight. Based on the Jane Austen novel “Lady Susan,” the film is written and directed by Whit Stillman and stars Kate Beckinsale as a recently widowed woman who sets out to secure wealthy husbands for herself and her daughter. A comedy of errors ensues, with Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny sharply leading an ensemble that also includes Stephen Fry, Tom Bennett and Xavier Samuel. – Adam Chitwood
The Mandalorian is finally back on Disney+ with a brand new season and it’s… fine? Okay, yeah, maybe the Season 3 premiere wasn’t exactly a solid outing for a show that truly set the bar so high with Season 2. But even a mediocre episode of The Mandalorian still has stunning visuals and an overabundance of cute critters. Did the plot call for Grogu to play with a Babu Frik like a toy? Probably not, but I’m really glad that the show went ahead and did it anyway. When all else fails, give Grogu something to do and we will be happy. And not to give anything away, but, next week’s episode of The Mandalorian kicks Season 3 into gear.
The Weeknd takes a jibe at Rolling Stones in new video.
In a new video posted on Canadian rapper and singer The Weeknd’s official Twitter handle, the Starboy singer is seen mocking Rolling Stone, after they published an article on his show ‘The Idol.’
Musician The Weeknd has taken a dig at Rolling Stone after the publication shared a report disclosing alleged toxicity and creative clashes on the sets of his upcoming series The Idol. The HBO series that marks the acting debut of The Hills hit-maker embroiled in a controversy after Rolling Stone suggested that a drastic plot change occurred after Sam Levinson replaced the former director Amy Semietz. While HBO has already released a statement defending the upcoming show, The Weeknd also mocked the publication by sharing unseen footage from The Idol.
The clip was shared alongside a sarcastic caption that read, “Rolling Stone did we upset you?” What garnered the fans’ attention is that The Weeknd can also be seen poking fun at them in the scene. The Weeknd as a self-help guru Tedros can be seen seated beside Lily-Rose Depp’s Jocelyn when their manager seemingly asks the pop star to appear on their cover. “Rolling Stone, aren’t they a little irrelevant?” says The Weeknd. Meanwhile, Lily adds, “I don’t know, I think it’s maybe past its prime.” The duo then sits to decide who has got more followers than Lily’s character. The unseen footage was shared on Wednesday, March 2 via social media.
Take a look at it here:
Soon after the video was shared, scores of netizens took to the comments section to criticise The Weekend’s comeback. One of the social media suser commented,” This was bad idea,” another added, ” dont do it weeknd, shut up!!” A third fan commented, ” Overcompensating much?” Another fan added,” WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO US.”
In their previous report, the music publication alleged that 13 anonymous members from the cast of the show alleged that The Idol features disturbing sexual and physically violent scenes between the lead characters. “It was like any r**e fantasy that any toxic man would have in the show’ and then the woman comes back for more because it makes her music better,” reportedly said one of the crew members.
Seemingly, the creative vision was changed in April when Sam Levinson donned the hat of a director. The HBO series features Lily-Rose Depp as a rising pop star who suffers a massive breakdown leading to the cancellation of her tour. On her quest to reclaim herself as the sexiest pop idol in America, she indulges in a complicated relationship with The Weeknd’s self-help guru. A report by People suggests that the music publication had no clue about the unseen footage before it was shared on social media. The Idol aims to premiere this year, however, the release date is not confirmed as of yet.
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The new trailer for Disney’s “Peter Pan & Wendy” has drawn criticism for its depictions of Tinker Bell and Captain Hook.
On Tuesday, the first look at the studio’s live-action adaptation of “Peter Pan” introduced Alexander Molony as Peter, Ever Anderson as Wendy, Alyssa Wapanatâhk as Tiger Lily, Yara Shahidi as Tinker Bell and Jude Law as Captain Hook. The preview sees Peter and Wendy embark on an adventurous journey to Neverland, where they meet various mythical friends and foes.
Twitter users immediately took issue with how Law was styled as Hook, lamenting that Disney somehow managed to make a character who is canonically hot (according to some), played by an actor who is famously good-looking, decidedly unappealing. In the trailer, Law sports a long, frizzy gray wig and a furry mustache while wielding the villain’s signature sickle.
“The audacity of casting Jude Law as Captain Hook and making him look like that,” tweeted @bensolohope. “This is a criminal offense.”
“I thought it was impossible to uglify Jude Law and illegal to make an un hot Captain Hook but Disney has proved me wrong yet again,” @neon_heartbeat tweeted.
“I already have very little faith in Peter Pan & Wendy because they were cowards and made the Hook played by Jude Law unattractive,” @plandefeld410 tweeted.
There has also been a racist backlash to Disney casting “black-ish” and “Grown-ish” star Shahidi as Tinker Bell. Others insisted that regardless of how a character has been depicted in the past, getting upset over the race of an actor playing a magical fairy — or a mermaid, for that matter — is absurd.
“Dear white people, Tinkerbell nor Ariel are white women … one is a fairy and the other is a fictional fish,” @itsKenBarbie tweeted. “Stop masking your racism behind the faux protection of CHARACTERS from your childhood.”
“‘Tinkerbell isnt black’ and fairies aren’t f— real so now what,” @STALLlONAIRE tweeted.
“Go cry somewhere else with the fake outrage,” @DaddyMando_ tweeted. “‘Tinker bell is white’ SHES A F— FAIRY??????????????”
Many also complained about the trailer’s dim lighting after struggling to make out the images on the screen. And a number of people were disappointed by what they saw as a lack of effort to make Tinker Bell glow.
Representatives for Law, Shahidi and Disney did not immediately respond Thursday to The Times’ requests for comment. Directed by David Lowery, “Peter Pan & Wendy” premieres April 28 on Disney+.
July 8th is the first time we’ll be able to see one of the original Avengers in the Phase 4 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) timeline. Often referred to as the Prince of Asgard, the son of Odin, the God of Thunder, or even Point Break, you know him, you love him, Thor Odinson! Picking up from Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Love and Thunder will explore Thor’s transformation and search for inner peace and even potential “Avenger” retirement. There’s no way Marvel would let Thor do this without facing some challenges. From the Olympians to Gorr the God Butcher, and even Jane Foster as Mighty Thor, Love and Thunder is going to explore a lot of new aspects of the MCU. Here’s everything you need to know before watching Thor: Love and Thunder:
Jane Foster
First introduced as an astrophysicist in Thor, Jane Foster helped Thor return to Asgard after he was banished to Earth by Odin. Jane and Thor’s rocky and unpredictable relationship lasted until some times before Avengers: Age of Ultron, and was confirmed to be over when Thor said “She didn’t dump me. I dumped her. It was a mutual dumping…” in Thor: Ragnarok. Avengers: Endgame addressed how Jane had been blipped by Thanos, adding at least another five years to this pair’s separation.
So far having only seen their relationship from Thor’s perspective, it’ll be refreshing to see Jane’s thoughts on both their relationship and the current condition of the MCU timeline, including the events from Thor:Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame! Given her prominent role in Thor: Love and Thunder, I think it’s safe to say that Thor and Jane’s relationship might not be over just yet.
Ragnarok’s Destruction
The destruction of Asgard by the Goddess of Death, Hela, was only a part of what Thor would lose in Thor: Ragnarok. Not only did Hela destroy Asgard, but she also shattered Thor’s “hammer like a piece of glass,” as Loki so sympathetically put it. Mjolnir, Thor’s symbol of worthiness was gone. Though Thor didn’t have Mjolnir, in Avengers: Infinity War, he was able to wield Stormbreaker, his new weapon that he nearly died forging.
All of this loss set up the basis for Thor’s story in Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and now, Thor: Love and Thunder. So far, only Captain America has been “worthy” enough to hold Mjolnir, however, now it seems that Jane Foster is also worthy. This emphasizes the significant amount of power Jane holds, and even allows us to ponder the question of whether she was worthy of Mjolnir in the first two Thor movies.
The Death of Loki
The opening of Avengers: Infinity War starts out with Thanos trying to obtain the power stone from Thor and Loki. Because of Thanos, their decade long mischievous and fun love-hate relationship was unfortunately put to an end. After trying to trick Thanos, Loki dies and his lifeless body thrown at Thor’s feet, leaving him with no one.
It isn’t until Avengers: Endgame that we see Loki again; well, kind of. When the Avengers go back in time, we see the Avengers version of Loki hold the Tesseract and disappear. As we all know, this was the basis for the Disney+ series Loki. Since this variant of Loki is running around in the multiverse, though it’s not expected, it’s possible we might see him in Thor: Love and Thunder.
God Without A Cause
At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, Thor was completely alone. All of this continued loss caused him to become depressed as we see in Avengers: Endgame. As a result, Thor lost his “god-like” physique and drive to fight for things. Additionally, Thor no longer wanted to rule the people of Asgard, and spent most of his time drinking beer and playing Fortnite, leaving Valkyrie to be de facto king
Now looking at the trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder, we’re able to see how Thor transforms back into his recognizable physique. Hopefully now his heroic drive has returned as well!
The Guardians of the Galaxy
At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Thor ends up joining the Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m excited to see Thor and Starlord’s continued competitive, but light-hearted, relationship, which I’m sure will make for some laughs in the opening scenes of the movie.
Queen Valkyrie
Valkyrie, who was an enemy turned friend to Thor in Thor: Ragnarok, helped Thor, Loki, and Bruce Banner escape Sacaar and fight Hela in Asgard. After beating Hela, Valkyrie joined Thor and helped him to lead the people of Asgard.
In the conclusion of Avengers: Endgame, Thor, who didn’t want to be King of Asgard, told Valkyrie that she was now the new ruler. Valkyrie, surprised at first, accepted and has been leading Asgard ever since. Before Thor left, Valkyrie said that she would be making some changes to “New Asgard,” something that will be interesting to see in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Thor returning to the big screen is exactly what I need to spice up my summer. From the vivid colors, the soundtrack, and the characters, it looks like this movie is about to be Marvel’s next big hit! I can’t wait to see what Thor: Love and Thunder will bring to Marvel’s Phase Four!
Set images even teased that Zegler’s character will have an unexpected romance with Jack Dylan Grazer’s Freddy Freeman, giving her character a complicated nature as the actress takes her place in the DCU.
While Zegler’s role in the sequel will certainly be an exciting one, she previously had the opportunity to audition for another highly coveted part debuting in one of DC’s other big 2023 movies.
Rachel Zegler Turned Down for DC Role
DC
Speaking with SlashFilm, Shazam! Fury of the Gods star Rachel Zegler revealed that DC rejected her for a different role in the DC Universe before she took on the character Anthea.
When asked about her audition process, she looked back to her time trying out for West Side Story, for which she had to go in for nine separate auditions for 20th Century Studios:
“Oh gosh, it was so fast. I auditioned for ‘West Side Story’ for a year. They really kept me on the edge of my seat for a year. I sweat out my entire junior year, so it was horrible. Borderline abuse, at that point, for actors, that anybody who has done it knows, having you go in nine times for something is torture.”
DC
Zegler then revealed that she had auditioned for the role of Supergirl in The Flash, which eventually went to Sasha Calle, although, after she didn’t get the part, casting director Rich Delia let her know about a chance for a role in Shazam 2:
“So then with this one, I booked them a month and a half, and I was like, ‘Is this what it’s like? Is it supposed to be like this?’ And my agents were like, ‘Yeah.’ But no, I read for Rich [Delia], who was our casting director, and he originally had come to me with Supergirl for ‘[The] Flash,’ and I was not right for it. He was like, ‘You know what, I’ve got a character in mind for you for ‘Shazam.’ They’re looking at X, Y, Z. We would love it if you came in and read.'”
Later, she had a readthrough on Zoom with director David Sandberg before doing a chemistry read with Freddie Freeman star Jack Dylan Grazer, who reportedly was the one that picked Zegler for the role after chatting with producer Peter Safran:
“So I read on Zoom. Obviously, the era of Zoom is isolation, pandemic era. Then I went back in, and I read for David Sandberg, and then for the last time, I had a chemistry read with Jack Dylan Grazer. The story goes that Jack picked me. That Peter Safran, our producer, turned to him and was like, ‘Which one did you like the best, Jack?’ and he said, ‘Well, she’s Maria in ‘West Side Story,’ so we got to have her.’ Because Jack is a very big ‘West Side Story’ fan. Jack loves ‘West Side Story.’ So I have him to thank, really.”
Zegler Still Shining in DC Universe
After rising to superstardom in West Side Story, Rachel Zegler seems to be on her way to a number of huge roles in some of the biggest projects in the industry. This has already come to fruition with a leading role in Disney’s reboot of Snow White, although Shazam 2 is just as high-profile being in the superhero movie universe.
It’s no surprise that Zegler was in the running for Supergirl, even though Sasha Calle will end up playing the role in The Flash, as the West Side Story star has shown off plenty of talent and drive in the last couple of years.
Now, Zegler will have her chance for DC glory in Shazam 2, delivering a seemingly complicated character that will have an interesting relationship with the Shazam family. And with the entire DCU going through major changes under new DC Studios co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran, fans will be anxious to see if she has a chance to move forward to new places with this role.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is set to release in theaters on Friday, March 17.
A new Steam sale has discounted one of the most iconic series in gaming, and in the process made some of the most iconic games as cheap as $1. It’s not often you can get any game for $1, let alone some of the greatest games of all time. Unless you’re on Steam. Compared to the PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, and Xbox Store, Steam is unrivaled when it comes to deep discounts, though the digital console storefronts are closing the gap. For now, though, there’s only one place you can get classic Tomb Rader games for the price of an Arizona Iced Tea.
The special promotional sale is only live until February 27, so if you’re reading this after and wondering why the games are no longer 70, 80, and 90 percent off, this is why. All of the classic Tomb Raider games, which are undeniably the more iconic ones, are all less than $1, while the new installments range from $3 to $12. For example, the original six Tomb Raider games are $0.97 or $0.98. Meanwhile, the two latest mainline installments in the series, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Definitive Edition only), are $5.99 and $12.52, respectively.
The 15 games featured are as follows: Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, Lara Croft GO, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, Tomb Raider (2013), Tomb Raider VI: The Angel of Darkness, Tomb Raider V: Chronicles, Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider III, Tomb Raider II, Tomb Raider I, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Tomb Raider: Underworld, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and Tomb Raider Legend.
For more coverage on all things gaming — including all of the latest news, rumors, leaks, speculation, and deals as it pertains to both Steam and PC gaming in general — click here. Meanwhile, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think or, alternatively, hit me up on Twitter @Tyler_Fischer_ and let me know over there.
The 73rd Berlin International Film Festival came to a successful close with the Publikumstag on February 26. At the festive awards ceremony on Saturday evening, Sur L’Adamant by Nicolas Philibert was awarded with the Golden Bear.
Following the slogan “Let’s get together”, the Berlinale started its first fully in-person event after two unusual years due to the pandemic – and the audience as well as the industry certainly complied:
The interest was overwhelming with around 20,000 accredited professionals from 132 countries, including 2,800 media representatives coming to Berlin. In total, 320,000 tickets were sold to the public, close to the Berlinale’s pre-pandemic audience figures.
“Full cinemas, moving moments, many prominent guests and a curious audience characterised the Berlinale 2023. We see this as living cinema culture in all its diversity. The focus was on enjoyment and shared experiences. We hope that this enthusiasm for cinema will continue after the festival,” comment the Berlinale director-duo Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian.
Festival of Solidarity
In view of the ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine and the courageous struggles for liberation in Iran, the Berlinale expressed its solidarity and remembered the worldwide victims of war and oppression.
At the festive opening on February 16, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an emotional appeal to film and cultural professionals in a live video broadcast.
An additional focus was on the victims and survivors of the earthquake in Syria and Turkey as well as the situation in Iran. The Berlinale expressed its support through the film selection and events, as well as with offers for filmmakers at the EFM. Other significant actions were the expressions of solidarity on the Red Carpet on February 18 for the protest movement in Iran and on February 24 for Ukraine.
Audience Enthusiasm for Diverse Programme / Offers for the Film Industry
The various sections of the festival – Competition, Encounters, Berlinale Special & Berlinale Series, Berlinale Shorts, Panorama, Forum & Forum Expanded, Generation, Perspektive Deutsches Kino, Retrospective and Homage – offered viewers a diverse film programme and numerous audience discussions with the film teams. The films encountered audiences who showed enthusiasm for the works’ political relevance, their specific aesthetics and their emotional power, and the many prominent guests. One highlight was the awarding of the Honorary Golden Bear to Steven Spielberg, to whom the Homage was dedicated. A novelty in 2023 was the Berlinale Series Award, which was presented for the first time this year.
The numerous sales and the record number of trade visitors at the European Film Market (EFM) testify to a particularly successful edition. The Berlinale Co-Production Market, which organised 1,500 meetings matched this success. With the Silver Bear for Best Acting Performance in a Leading Role for Sofía Otero in 20,000 Species of Bees, a former project of the Berlinale Co-Production Market was also honoured by the Competition jury this year.
At Berlinale Talents, this year’s motto “You Must be Joking – Humour in Serious Times” proved a perfect door opener for the creation of stable alliances in the crisis-ridden present. The six-day summit with 66 talks, workshops, script labs, a new three-day think tank, and public events with Kristen Stewart, Ruben Östlund, Euzhan Palcy and Cate Blanchett, among others, offered visitors and the 203 talents from 68 countries an important discursive platform within the festival. Indeed, Berlinale Talents impressively demonstrated its position as one of the most important film communities with almost 10,000 alumni worldwide.
The World Cinema Fund dedicated its WCF Day 2023 to the issue of supporting cinema and culture in times of growing crises and wars, and in particular to the challenges faced by Iranian filmmakers inside and outside their own country. The participation of two WCF-supported films in the programme was also successful: Adentro mío estoy bailando by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann won the GWFF prize for Best First Feature, which is awarded across sections. Sira by Apolline Traoré was presented with the Panorama Audience Award for feature film.
The 74th Berlin International Film Festival will take place from February 15 to 25, 2024.
When it comes to creating movie sound, it’s all about world-building, says Julian Howarth, sound mixer on Avatar: The Way of Water. “And then it’s to make something believable, emotional and to tell a story,” he adds. “In any film, that’s what we’re here to do.”
For Howarth’s team, that was about telling an immersive story on the fictional moon of Pandora. But the other Oscar nominees for best sound also placed viewers on a World War I battlefield for All Quiet on the Western Front, in Gotham City for The Batman, in the front row for Elvis Presley’s most memorable performances for Elvis and in the cockpits of naval fighter jets for Top Gun: Maverick.
Work on The Way of Water involved creating underwater species such as the whale-like tulkun, whose vocalizations were carefully crafted with a variety of sounds — among them, those made by whales, coyotes, owls and dolphins. Supervising sound editor Gwendolyn Yates Whittle says that in cases where the Na’vi interact with the tulkun, “Our job was to protect the emotional validity of the human performances and then have those creatures also be able to interact with those performances in a real way.”
Howarth says that capturing production sound involved modifying microphones to enable them to be used underwater, even at a 30-foot depth. And with water a character unto itself, “every bubble and every lap has been carefully curated and put into that film.”
Adds Yates, “We had to make the water feel believable, like real water, even though it’s zeros and ones. So, there’s reverb. The deeper into the water you go, the lower the pitch. You can feel the depth, depending on where you are in the story.”
For All Quiet, filming outside Prague during COVID posed plenty of challenges. “There wasn’t even the slightest chance for us to go on set and grab extra sounds as we normally do,” says supervising sound editor Frank Kruse. The on-set sound team, therefore, aimed to “grab as many wild tracks and extra sounds that are unique to the location as you can.” While the team had to also capture clean dialogue on location, Kruse describes the scene on set as a rush. “[They] brought in extra microphones and additional helping hands who would, in between takes, grab a bunch of the extras and ask them to run through the mud or roll around in the dirt,” he remembers.
But in approaching the mix, Kruse says the goal was not to “re-create a scientifically correct soundscape,” but rather to focus on the emotional perspective of the film’s protagonist, the young German soldier Paul.
Much of the sound work for Elvis was dedicated to Presley’s vocals. For the singing, the team blended the performances by star Austin Butler with those of Presley. This involved a combination of playback and live recording, while restored vintage microphones from each era in the film captured Butler’s voice. In the end, Butler performed the Presley songs from the 1950s; a mix of the original recordings with Butler’s was used for the ’60s and ’70s sequences (decades in which the quality of the original recordings improved).
Austin Butler in Warner Bros.’ Elvis.
Courtesy of Warner Bros
Crowd scenes combined archival material with new recordings. “Thematically, [the crowds were] an enormous part of the story,” says Wayne Pashley, supervising sound editor, designer and rerecording mixer. “I went through [performance archives] and pulled out the original crowd material and where they happened within the song infrastructures.” He says extras were recorded — even directed by Baz Luhrmann — “because we knew that when we came to postproduction, pulling 500 people together during COVID was going to be near impossible.” They recorded loop group as needed for each scene, working with performers of varied ages, genders and accents.
Will Files, supervising sound editor/designer on The Batman, wanted the Batmobile to feel almost like a banshee or an animal. “It had to be scary enough to make everyone stop [by signaling a threat] but plausible enough to still be a machine,” he says. It started with a shrieky bottle rocket sound. “It had this really crazy, distorted sound to it, but it was a second long,” he explains. While thinking about how to resynthesize that sound and make it longer, he recalled a YouTube video he saw. “Someone had taken a Justin Bieber song and run it through software that slowed it down by 800 percent, and it turned this pop song into what sounded like this crazy, ambient soundscape,” he recalls. He tried this approach, and it worked to create a new, longer version of the original source but still kept “that sort of shrieky, rippy sound.”
For Gotham’s soundscape, says Files, the team wanted to show “a densely populated place that hasn’t been very well taken care of.” They leaned into elements of cities like New York and Chicago, incorporating the sound of elevated trains and taking inspiration from The Godfather and The French Connection.
Robert Pattinson in Warner Bros.’ The Batman.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
For Top Gun: Maverick, the aim was to create the feeling of flying with the pilots. Supervising sound editor Al Nelson notes this involved recording in multiple locations, including a naval base in Fallon, Nevada, and spending a week on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic. “We recorded aircraft carrier launches and landings and what they call touch-and-gos. We had F-18s flying directly in front of us and touching and landing,” he says. “We tried to get as much proximal material as we could to get the impact and the low end and the thrust of these machines. And then we recorded discrete engines in hangers.” Additionally, actors were mic’d when they took to the skies. “Those jets are surprisingly quiet inside, so even though they’re crazy loud on the outside, we got a lot of performances,” Nelson adds. “One would suspect it’s 100 percent ADR, and that’s not the case.”
This story first appeared in a Feb. stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
EXCLUSIVE: The hit CW seriesAll American has added Darone Okolie (Winning Time) and Tre Hale (Platonic) to its Season 5 cast in recurring roles. The series airs Monday nights at 8 p.m.
Okolie will portray Sal Dominguez, a former high school linebacker with a past. He is a personal trainer at a gym who becomes important to Spencer James (Daniel Ezra) and Jordan Baker (Michael Evans Behling). Hale will portray Kai, a potential GAU recruit chasing an old dream.
All American follows Spencer James, a young football player from Crenshaw who is recruited to play for Beverly High School and must navigate his two vastly different worlds as they begin to collide. Season 5 finds Spencer in his second semester of college trying to help rebuild the school’s football program after their head coach is exposed for purposefully injuring opposing players.
The series also stars Bre-Z, Monet Mazur, Samantha Logan, Cody Christian, Hunter Clowdus, Michael Evans Behling, and Greta Onieogou. Taye Diggs, who starred as Billy Baker for 5 seasons, shocked fans in episode 11 by exiting the drama.
All American is executive produced by Nkechi Okoro Carroll (who serves as showrunner), Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, John A. Norris, Jameal Turner, Mike Herro, and David Strauss. The series is produced by Berlanti Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television and CBS Studios.
Okolie can currently be seen recurring as Larry Johnson in HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which recently wrapped shooting its second season. He will next be seen in the Disney+ series The Crossover. Additional credits include Bob Hearts Abishola and NCIS: Los Angeles for CBS, Own‘s Queen Sugar, and the CW’s Black Lightning. Okolie is repped by Defining Artists and Stride Management.
Hale can next be seen starring in the Apple TV+ series, Platonic from Nick Stoller, alongside Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. Platonic is set to premiere in late spring/early summer 2023. His credits also include National Champions (STX/Thunder Road) and Love and Monsters (Paramount) for the big screen and Magnum P.I. (CBS/NBC) for TV. Hale is repped by Clear Talent Group, Industry Entertainment, and Hansen Jacobson, et al.
Another busy day of new releases on Netflix US with another 15 new titles added to the collection including the arrival of Netflix’s first major English-language Netflix Original series of March 2023, Sex/Life. Here’s your roundup of what’s new and trending on Netflix for March 2nd.
Best New Movies and Series on Netflix for March 2nd, 2023
Sex/Life (Season 2)
Number of episodes: 6 Rating: TV-MA Language: English Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance Cast: Sarah Shahi, Mike Vogel, Adam Demos Writer: Stacy Rukeyser Runtime: 46 mins
Sex/Life is back after nearly a 2-year hiatus after its initial debut in June 2021. The steamy drama is back with only a slightly reduced episode count from 8 down to 6, and reviews suggest it’s just as controversial as the first.
“In the middle of starting over, Billie steps out of her comfort zone for a night of fun. Sasha rekindles an old flame, and Cooper ignites a new passion.”
This Is Where I Leave You (2014)
Rating: R Language: English Genre: Comedy, Drama Director: Shawn Levy Cast: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda Writer: Jonathan Tropper Runtime: 103 min / 1h 43m
Shawn Levy, currently working exclusively with Netflix on a heap of projects, 2014 released the big ensemble comedy; This Is Where I Leave You.
Sadly, reviews weren’t particularly strong for the movie when it debuted nine years ago in theaters. The Wrap’s review of the movie was particularly scathing, concluding:
“Occasionally, Hollywood will step forward with a family drama that actually manages to tinker with actual pain… “This Is Where I Leave You” has no edge, no darkness, no texture, no character to speak of.”
Karate Sheep (Season 1)
Number of episodes: 13 Rating: TV-Y7 Language: English Genre: Animation, Kids Director: Cédric Dietsch, Renaud Martin Runtime: 22 mins
Coming out of France today and Xilam Animation is Karate Sheep, a no-dialogue animated series that has gone viral on TikTok recently.
The show follows a sheep called Trico who causes mayhem in his new flock by sharing ideas and hoping to lure in a wolf.
Full List of New Movies & Series on Netflix for March 2nd, 2023
10 New Movies Added Today
Agneepath (1990) – TV-14 – Hindi – A boy grows up to become a gangster in pursuit of the mobster who killed his innocent father, but revenge and reparation may come at great costs.
Biking Borders (2021) – TV-14 – German – Best friends Max and Nono bike from Berlin to Beijing, collecting donations to build a school for a unique fundraising adventure in this documentary.
Dostana (1980) – TV-14 – Hindi
Duniya (1984) – TV-14 – Hindi
Duplicate (1998) – TV-14 – Hindi
Gumrah (1993) – TV-MA – Hindi
Kaal (2005) – TV-MA – Hindi
Muqaddar ka Faisla (1987) – TV-14 – Hindi
This Is Where I Leave You (2014) – R – English – When their father dies, four siblings return home for a week, but mourning quickly takes a back seat to bickering and opportunistic backstabbing.
Tom Papa Live in New York City (2011) – TV-14 – English – Comedian Tom Papa riffs on the trials of married life, fatherhood in the 21st century, domestic pets and more in his stand-up show.
5 New TV Series Added Today
Framed! A Sicilian Murder Mystery (Season 2) Netflix Original – TV-MA – Italian – After two hapless TV technicians stumble upon a murder scene, every step they take to avoid becoming suspects lands them in deeper trouble.
Karate Sheep (Season 1) Netflix Original – TV-Y7 – English – Two clever sheep use karate and high-tech gadgets to protect their flock from a hungry wolf who’s determined to make them all his dinner.
Masameer County (Season 2) Netflix Original – TV-MA – Arabic – Offering a humorous view of a changing Saudi, this show chronicles the rip-roaring shenanigans and adventures of Masameer County’s quirkiest residents.
Monique Olivier: Accessory to Evil (Limited Series) Netflix Original – TV-MA – French – From 1987 to 2003, Michel Fourniret cemented his legacy as France’s most infamous murderer. But his wife was an enigma: Was she a pawn or a participant?
Sex/Life (Season 2) Netflix Original – TV-MA – English – A woman’s daring sexual past collides with her married-with-kids present when the bad-boy ex she can’t stop fantasizing about crashes back into her life.
Netflix Top 10 Movies, Series, and Kids Titles for March 2nd, 2023
#
TV Shows
Movies
Kids
1
Outer Banks
We Have a Ghost
Minions: The Rise of Gru
2
Perfect Match
The Hangover Part III
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
3
Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal
The Hangover Part II
Little Angel
4
Triada
R.I.P.D.
That Girl Lay Lay
5
Married at First Sight
The Strays
Cocomelon
6
Wrong Side of the Tracks
Minions: The Rise of Gru
Sing 2
7
Formula 1: Drive to Survive
The Hunger Games
Trolls
8
Pasión de gavilanes
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
Pokémon
9
New Amsterdam
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2
My Dad the Bounty Hunter
10
You
The Woman King
Bebefinn
What are you watching on Netflix today? Let us know in the comments down below.
The Best Director Oscar race between the Daniels and Steven Spielberg continues, after the DGA Awards and a surprise at the BAFTAs.
We will update these predictions throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2023 Oscar picks. Final voting is March 2 through 7, 2023. The 95th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 12 and air live on ABC at 8:00 p.m. ET/ 5:00 p.m. PT.
Our Awards Editor, TV & Film Marcus Jones joins Editor at Large Anne Thompson on the latest Oscars Predictions updates. See their previous thoughts on what to expect at the 95th Academy Awardshere.
The State of the Race
Being an Oscar frontrunner is not all that it’s cracked up to be. While Steven Spielberg has already won two Best Director Oscars (“Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan”), his work on the deeply personal “The Fabelmans” felt like a significant enough benchmark in an unprecedented filmmaking career to allow him to collect trophies throughout awards season. So far though, he has only won big at the Golden Globes.
Related
Related
At the 2023 Directors Guild of America Awards, after all the fellow nominees had sung Spielberg’s praises in their medallion acceptance speeches, the eventual winners for Outstanding Directing of a Theatrical Feature Film were Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
Though they had bested “The Fabelmans” director in the same category at this year’s Critics Choice Awards, the DGA Award win is more significant to the Oscar race, as the DGA and Academy Award voting bodies have some overlap.
There’s no question that with PGA and four SAG Awards wins in their sails, the Daniels are looking strong. But “Everything Everywhere All at Once” did not score at the BAFTAs, where another supposed frontrunner, homegrown Martin McDonagh’s “Banshees of Inisherin,” was expected to take home more than Best British Film, Original Screenplay, and two acting prizes. The film lost Best Director and Film to German Oscar entry “All Quiet on the Western Front,” whose director Edward Berger did not score a directing Oscar nomination.
This means that the Best Director race is still between éminence grise Spielberg, who commands respect with the older Academy for his body of work and for making himself vulnerable with “The Fabelmans,” and rising stars the Daniels, for throwing caution to the winds and reinventing cinema.
Nominees are listed below in order of likelihood they will win.
Contenders: Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) Steven Spielberg (“The Fabelmans”) Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) Todd Field (“TÁR”) Ruben Östlund (“Triangle of Sadness”)
Wayne Shorter, the pioneering saxophonist whose forward momentum helped chart the course of jazz, died in Los Angeles this morning (March 2), The New York Times reports, citing the musician’s publicist. Shorter was 89.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Shorter was a teen aficionado of comics, movies, and bebop. He was also a prodigy of the tenor sax, with a music degree from New York University. He rose to international prominence as a player and composer in the 1960s, working with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet while firing out landmark LPs for Blue Note as a bandleader, with now-standards like “Footprints” and “Black Nile” among the tracklists.
In the late ’60s, he added the soprano sax to his arsenal and, with Davis, led jazz toward the avant-garde, eventually midwifing the fusion subgenre. As styles evolved in the ’70s and ’80s, Shorter’s own group the Weather Report steered and pursued various iterations of jazz. His work with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan, meanwhile, helped masters outside the jazz world expand into new, harmonically nuanced styles untethered from rock and folk orthodoxy.
His work over several decades with the Wayne Shorter Quartet continued to explore and extend jazz’s outer reaches. He earned a bevy of Grammys, adding to a collection that got started in 1980, when he won Best Jazz Fusion Performance for “8:30.” His life’s work was recognized across the music establishment, with honors including a lifetime achievement Grammy, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2017 Polar Music Prize, and, the following year, a Kennedy Center Honors Award.
Last year, 144 documentary features were eligible for an Academy Award, but in reality, less than a third of those docs had a chance of making the 15-film shortlist. That, in part, is because garnering a spot on that competitive list requires not only a beautifully crafted film constructed by a talented director and crew, but also money.
In the past decade, platforms with deep pockets — Amazon, Apple TV+, Disney +, Netflix — began to spend on documentary award campaigns in ways that, prior to 2010, were unfathomable to the nonfiction film community. Before streamers came onto the scene, lobbying and marketing a doc during award season meant, if you were lucky, that a distributor took out a few “For Your Consideration” ads and hosted a handful of screenings.
Now, depending on who the distributor is, FYC ads are plentiful, and small screenings have been transformed into events at New York’s Crosby and Whitby hotels, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Further adding to campaign costs are billboards meant to woo Los Angeles Academy voters; e-blasts from prestigious nonfiction organizations including DOC NYC and the IDA (one blast from either org costs between $4,500 and $5,500); and employing top Oscar consultants to, hopefully, elevate a film’s chances. (Not only do publicity consultants receive tens of thousands for their awards-whispering efforts, but they also collect bonuses if films make Oscar shortlists, score nominations and go on to win the gold.)
But perhaps the most spent is on shipping doc directors and their respective studio publicists all over the world to hobnob with as many voters as possible. Sources who wished to remain anonymous say that the cost for such elaborate campaigns is in the low seven figures.
“If you are a guy with a tin cup and a documentary, you are really working hard because you don’t have the cash,” says Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard. “You’re up against a place like Discovery, which buys [a doc] for somewhere between $5 [million] and $7 million and all of a sudden, they are doing everything that could possibly be done for somebody who’s going for best picture. So you’re at an incredible disadvantage. And then, you look at the other streamers and they put together a package where they travel people around the world so people can do these rehearsed presentations for their films. The whole table is tilted towards the people with the money.”
Bernard would know. Over the years Sony Pictures Classics has taken home 37 Academy Awards, five of which were in the documentary feature category.
This year SPC qualified five docs, including “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey” and “The Return of Tanya Tucker — Featuring Brandi Carlile.”
In addition to a theatrical release, Bernard says that SPC spent $100,000 ($20,000 each) to make all five films available to the entire Academy on the Oscar screening room portal, as opposed to just making each doc available to the 651 members of the documentary branch. While only the doc branch votes on the shortlist, the hope was that by making each doc accessible to all Oscar voters it would lead to a commodity more precious than advertising: word of mouth.
In the end, only “Hallelujah” was shortlisted but was not nominated. Instead, three HBO Max films, “All That Breathes,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” and “Navalny” garnered noms along with National Geographic’s “Fire of Love” and POV’s “A House Made of Splinters.” (Warner Bros. Discovery owns HBO Max while Disney owns Nat Geo. PBS is behind POV.)
For streaming services such as HBO Max and Disney+, it makes sense to mount a costly documentary awards campaign. Not only does awards recognition lead to more subscribers, Oscar hardware also helps attract more A-list filmmakers.
National Geographic Documentary Films has the means to spend big on its slate of films, and it has paid off. Nat Geo’s “Free Solo” won the 2019 Oscar for feature doc. In subsequent years, Nat Geo’s “The Cave” received a nomination, while its features “The Rescue,” “The First Wave,” “The Territory” and “Retrograde” made the Oscar doc shortlist. This year Nat Geo’s “Fire of Love” has been nominated for an Academy Award.
Carolyn Bernstein, National Geographic’s exec VP of global scripted content and documentary films, admits that “awareness drives viewing, which drives voting.” But she’s quick to add that exceptional storytelling and craft are what really dictates voting.
“At the end of the day, it is about storytelling,” Bernstein says. “It is about how a voter feels when he or she watches the film.”
Making sure that voters see excellent works with little marketing budgets is a struggle for Lois Vossen, executive producer of PBS’ Independent Lens.
“It’s almost impossible for small films to compete,” says Vossen. “I wouldn’t even use the word compete — to just be in the conversation — because it’s so much about spending and being in front of people and that visibility, whether it’s getting on the shortlist or getting the nomination or ultimately winning.”
Since the inception of Independent Lens in 1999, the PBS television distributor has received 10 Oscar nods for docs, including “Writing With Fire,” “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and “I Am Not Your Negro.” In December, the Independent Lens doc “Hidden Letters” made the shortlist but did not get nominated.
Vossen says that Independent Lens has never four-walled a film, which in New York City costs approximately $17,000. Instead, either the doc finds a theatrical distributor or the filmmaker fundraises to cover the cost.
“We count on festival recognition and other filmmakers recognizing the quality of the work and truly wanting to honor one of their peers who they think has done an exceptional job,” says Vossen. “That may sound like what everybody wants, but that is what we really rely on because we just don’t have those resources to compete [financially].”
Despite the lack of funds, a PBS doc usually manages to sneak into the race. Last year it was “Writing With Fire,” and this year, it’s “A House Made of Splinters,” which PBS’s POV acquired last month, days before the film was nominated. (On Feb. 14, Giant Pictures announced the acquisition of U.S. theatrical and VOD rights to the doc.) After debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, “A House Made of Splinters” went on to screen at over 20 film festivals around the world. But director Simon Lereng Wilmont says that it has been difficult to find a U.S. audience.
“We don’t have any marketing budget, and we didn’t have an [American] distributor until (January and February 2023),” he says. A Denmark/Finland/Sweden/Ukrainian production, the film’s Oscar nom is a testament to the growing influence European doc branch members have over the category.
Bernard and Vossen agree that something needs to change when it comes to the Oscar doc feature. Bernard believes that the feature doc shortlist and the five nominees should be determined by Academy members who are not necessarily in the doc branch. He would like the category to operate like the international feature category, where Academy members from all branches are invited to participate in the shortlist and nomination voting.
“You’ve got this branch of 600-plus people that don’t have enough time to see all the movies, and then you’ve got these people who are spending a fortune to get people to vote for their docs,” says Bernard. “It’s become an out-of-control situation. The Academy needs to step up and open up the documentary viewing for (the shortlist and nominations) to all Academy members who are certainly qualified to judge a documentary film.”
Vossen is hoping that consolidation will eventually help even out the playing field.
“There will be some natural shift that will happen now because of the contraction happening at a lot of the platforms,” she says. “With the staff layoffs and shrinking budgets, I would think that they are also going to shrink their awards budgets.”
Kyiv has said Moscow’s claims of a Ukrainian attack inside Russia’s borders on Thursday are ‘a deliberate provocation’, accusing the Kremlin of a false flag plot.
Putin called the incident a ‘terrorist act’ and said ‘fire was directed at civilians’ in the region, after Russian news agencies earlier reported the country’s forces were fighting to ‘eliminate’ a Ukrainian sabotage group in the Bryansk region – which borders Ukraine – after the group allegedly took hostages in a shop.
But a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky quickly responded to the reports, saying that Russia is looking to justify an attack on another country.
‘The story about (a) Ukrainian sabotage group in RF is a classic deliberate provocation,’ Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter. ‘RF wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country & the growing poverty after the year of war.’
There was no immediate proof or confirmation of the alleged Ukrainian incursion – which the FSB later said was ‘under control’ – outside of the Russian reports.
Kyiv has said Moscow’s claims of a Ukrainian attack within Russia’s borders on Thursday are ‘a deliberate provocation’, amid accusations of a false flag plot. Pictured: A Ukrainian border guard is seen in November
Russian news agencies said Vladimir Putin’s forces were fighting to ‘eliminate’ a Ukrainian sabotage group in the Bryansk region which borders Ukraine after the group allegedly took hostages in a shop in the village of Lubechanye, 200 meters from the Ukrainian border
Ukraine and its western allies have warned about false flag attacks in the past, fearing Moscow could use manufactured provocations to justify further escalations in the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine.
Initial reports in Russia claimed that ‘a group of Ukrainian saboteurs infiltrated two villages, taking local residents hostage in one of them.’
TASS – a Russian news agency – quoted an unnamed source in Russia’s security services as saying: ‘Soldiers from Rosgvardia clashed with the militants.’
Quoting local emergency services, Russia’s RIA news agency said several people had been taken hostage in a store in the village of Lubechanye, less than one mile from Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov later called the reported events in the region a ‘terrorist attack,’ and said that Putin’s top officials were being sent updates from security agencies and Russia’s defence minister on the situation.
However, he denied earlier reports that suggested Putin planned to hold an emergency meeting of the Security Council on Thursday, but said he would hold a meeting of the Council on Friday when it convenes regularly.
Putin did cancel a planned visit to Stavropol, southwestern Russia, amid the on-going reports.
The FSB security service said in a statement to Russian news agencies on Thursday that its own forces and the army were trying to liquidate what it described as ‘an armed group of Ukrainian nationalists’ who had crossed the border.
‘A reconnaissance and sabotage group penetrated from Ukraine to the Klimovsky district in the village of Lyubechane… The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are taking all the necessary measures to eliminate the sabotage group,’ the Bryansk regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said in a statement online.
Earlier, Bogomaz had said that the supposed Ukrainian ‘sabotage group’ had shot and killed one person after crossing into Russia from Ukraine.
‘Today, a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group penetrated the Klimovsky district in the village of Lubechanye. Saboteurs fired on a moving car,’ he said. ‘As a result of the attack, one resident was killed and a ten-year-old child was wounded,’ Bogomaz wrote on his Telegram channel.
He said Ukrainian armed forces had also launched a drone attack and fired artillery shells at other areas near the border.
Meanwhile, footage surfaced online purporting to show pro-Ukrainian fighters waving the flag of the Russian Volunteer Corps – a unit of the Territorial Defence of Ukraine formed in August 2022 from Russian neo-Nazi volunteers.
The men, decked out in combat gear and wrapped in several pieces of yellow tape (often used by Ukrainian soldiers to distinguish themselves from the Russian invaders), said they were in Russia and took responsibility for the reported clashes.
However, there was not official confirmation from Ukraine it had authorised any sort of incursion.
The men in the video said they were at the Lyuban medical and obstetric centre in the village of Lyubchany. Like the Russian reports, the legitimacy of the videos has also been questioned by commentators online, although some suggested the group could have entered Russia on their own accord.
Ukrainian colonel Anatoly Shtefan – known as Shtyrlitz – joined Podolyak in accusing the Russians of a provocation.
‘The Russian mass media are once again trying to discredit the Armed Forces of Ukraine and accuse them of provocations on the territory of the aggressor state,’ posted the Kyiv war blogger.
‘But they do not take into account the fact that soldiers of the Defence Forces of Ukraine have never resorted to provocations, are not resorting to them now – and will not resort to provocations.’ Ukrainian troops are ‘protectors’ – who ‘defend their right to freedom and a free life on their own land,’ he wrote.
Russia’s border regions have been increasingly volatile since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine a year ago in what it called its ‘special military operation’ with reports of shelling and sporadic sabotage inside Russia.
Ukraine is suspected to have been behind an attack on a major Russian air base in Yeysk on Wednesday, after massive explosions at the site.
Russian war channel Rybar admitted a hit on Telegram, claiming it was by a Ukrainian long range Tu-141 Strizh drone.
Ukrainian sources also claimed the strike at the military airfield in Krasnodar region, and a picture appeared to show an explosion. ‘Residents assume that it could even be missiles hitting the airfield,’ said one account.
Russian officials have denied a strike but locals reported two loud explosions.
Nothing was found but there were also attacks reported on Belgorod, Tuapse, and the Republic of Adygea.
Another came within 60 miles of Moscow, signalling breaches in Russian defenses, as President Putin ordered stepped-up protection at the border.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately take responsibility for the drone attacks, but they similarly have avoided directly acknowledging responsibility for past strikes and sabotage while emphasising Ukraine’s right to hit any target in Russia.
Meanwhile, British military intelligence said on Wednesday that Russia was launching drone attacks against Ukraine from the Bryansk region, which lies to the north of Ukraine and is closer to the capital Kyiv than other launch sites.
Russia’s border regions have been increasingly volatile since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine a year ago in what it called its ‘special military operation’ with reports of shelling and sporadic sabotage
Footage surfaced online (pictured) purporting to show pro-Ukrainian fighters waving the flag of the Russian Volunteer Corps – a unit of the Territorial Defence of Ukraine formed in August 2022 from Russian right-wing volunteers. Doubts were raised over the authenticity of the clips, and whether the men shown in the footage were actually fighting for Ukraine
The men, decked out in combat gear and wrapped in several pieces of yellow tape (often used by Ukrainian soldiers to distinguish themselves from the Russian invaders), said they were in Russia and took responsibility for the reported clashes. Their claims could not be verified
Russia has accused Ukrainian saboteurs of infiltrating Bryansk before.
In December, the FSB security service said a four-person Ukrainian ‘sabotage group’ had been ‘liquidated’ while trying to enter Bryansk.
Putin told the FSB this week that it needed to step up its guard against espionage and what he called terrorist threats emanating from Ukraine and the West.
‘Your task is to put a barrier in the way of sabotage groups, to stop attempts to illegally transport weapons and ammunition into Russia,’ he said in a speech on Tuesday.
A bloody battle into Norse mythology and a cat’s adventure through a cyberpunk world are the two most nominated games for this year’s BAFTA Games Awards. Announced Thursday, Sony’s God of War Ragnarök — the sequel to God of War, which won the top BAFTA Game of the Year award in 2019 — leads the race, with 14 […]
EXCLUSIVE: Last year, doc streamer MagellanTV struck a deal with veteran conservationist and presenter Nigel Marven and the pair are today unveiling their first project. Wild El Salvador – In the Shadow of the Volcano has gone live on the service and you can watch a trailer here.
The global streamer’s doc follows former BBC and Shark Week presenter Marven as he travels to volcanic El Salvador and encounters the creatures that live in the shadows of the infernos.
The doc launches ahead of World Wildlife Day tomorrow (March 3) and will be free globally to all until March 16, at which point it goes behind the paywall.
“My year filming in El Salvador was brilliant,” said Marven. “The smallest nation in Central America has rich wildlife and culture. I’ll never forget visiting Puma country, finding a rare El Pital salamander, wrestling a Black Sea turtle and the fusillade of flaming balls of cloth in the Festival of Fire.”
Marven filmed and produced the doc. He is known for his no-fear approach to presenting shows such as the BBC’s Chased By Dinosaurs during a quarter-century on-screen career and also fronted Shark Week for Discovery between 2000 and 2003.
MagellanTV, billed by some news outlets as a ‘Netflix for documentaries,’ is an SVoD service that Greg Diefenbach and Thomas Lucas co-founded. It has been ramping up its original programming output in recent years.
MGM’s Creed IIIwill have no trouble knocking out the competition in its box office opening.
The latest installment in the Rocky spinoff series is expected to start off domestically with a pleasing $38 million to $40 million, easily enough to win this weekend’s match.
In addition to returning as the title character Adonis Creed, Jordan also helmed Creed III in his feature directorial debut.
The first Creed, directed by Ryan Coogler, powered its way to a $42.1 million opening over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday in 2015, including $29 million for the three-day weekend, not adjusted for inflation. The Steven Caple Jr.-directed sequel opened over the Thanksgiving corridor in 2018, grossing $56 million for the five days and $35.5 million for the three.
Creed III, which was filmed with Imax digital cameras, will bump Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania off of many premium screens, including Imax locations.
The pic follows Jordan’s character as he comes out of retirement to face off with an old friend, played by Jonathan Majors (who is also garnering notice for his villainous role in Quantumania). Tessa Thompson, Mila Davis-Kent and Wood Harris co-star, among others.
Also debuting this weekend are the anime franchise installment Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – To the Swordsmith Village (Crunchyroll) and Guy Ritchie’s action pic Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (Lionsgate, Miramax). The two films are expected to open in the single digits.
Holdovers to watch include Marvel and Disney’s Quantumania and Universal’s high-profile genre pic Cocaine Bear.
So what the heck is in the shiny alligator briefcase?
That essential question lingers over much — too much — of the running time of “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” Guy Ritchie’s stylish but ultimately frustratingly half-baked spy caper. Everyone wants the $10 billion contents of the briefcase, but we don’t know exactly who’s selling, who’s buying and most importantly, what’s in there.
Not to stretch a metaphor, but this shiny case rather ends up becoming one for the movie itself: made of the finest materials — for example, crowd-pleasing cast members Aubrey Plaza and Hugh Grant — and hinting at sophistication and panache, while ending up as something of a head-scratcher.
Of course, for some, especially fans of Jason Statham, it will likely be enough just watching this Ritchie favorite practice his well-honed talent for hand-to-hand combat, casually dispatching a cascade of bad guys in leather jackets as the titular Orson Fortune, a perpetually annoyed, phobia-plagued, expensive wine-loving private contractor.
But it seems that Ritchie, who both co-wrote and directed, is going for something more sophisticated here. The first hint: That title. Perhaps you weren’t familiar with the French term “ruse de guerre”? Well, it signifies a ruse of war, or stratagem of war, or plan or scheme … exactly what Fortune and his team need to counter the shady arms dealers, tech moguls and familiar rivals all seeking to recover The Handle, which is what they call that elusive thing everyone’s fighting over.
We begin with Nathan (Cary Elwes), posh and pretty annoyed himself. The head of a covert spy agency, Nathan has been summoned by the government in London (why the graphics team felt it was necessary to specify “London, ENGLAND“ is not clear) to head up a team. Why, he asks, is official intelligence not handling this? “Ah, ruse de guerre, Nathan” he’s told — meaning this job needs an extra je-ne-sais-quoi.
Enter Fortune (Statham), who’s vacationing in Morocco when he’s told he has about two minutes to accept his new mission.
He’s given two helpers, or “footmen”: Sarah (Plaza) and J.J. (Bugzy Malone). The latter is good with weapons, and Sarah is a tech whiz, seemingly able to hack into anything. The ever watchable Plaza, with her trademark flat delivery and expertly doled out sass, is a highlight of this cast, in the only substantial female role. Like most of the characters, though, hers is barely fleshed out. It’s also unfortunate that she’s called upon to be sexy and seductive, as if this is simply the lot of any woman in an action thriller. Can’t we just have a talented female tech wizard?
In any case, the team’s initial target is billionaire arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Grant, reuniting with Ritchie from “The Gentlemen“), who is brokering the deal. Before they show up at his glittering charity event in Cannes, though, their luxury jet makes a detour to Hollywood, to pick up their “invitation”: Danny Francesco, an action movie star that Simmonds is obsessed with.
Danny is a willing accomplice — well, not really, but he’s blackmailed with compromising information about his sex life. His job is to “play” himself and befriend Simmonds so the team can get to the dealer’s phone. Orson will play Danny’s manager, and Sarah the girlfriend — a convenient reason to get Plaza dolled up in a series of slinky outfits with up-to-there slits. “You’re an actor. Act!” she orders Danny (a sweetly amusing Josh Hartnett).
Grant is, as usual, a lively presence, especially as a villain — a role he’s come to relish in recent years. Alas, though the actor is obviously having loads of fun, he’s been given funnier and/or more villainous material in other roles (he’s nowhere near as menacing as he was, for example, as the doctor in “The Undoing”). His cockney arms dealer is yet another half-realized character, but Grant in any character role is still a winning proposition.
It’s an odd paradox that this movie feels both high-minded and also at times frustratingly pedestrian. Speaking of paradoxes, Plaza’s Sarah has a funny moment where she soulfully tells a minion of Simmonds, admiring the art collection he’s curated, that “I’m interested in the paradox of dualistic motivation.” She’s just making it up, killing time, but the line, like that sleek briefcase, seems emblematic of a movie that aspires to sophistication yet in the end, doesn’t yield too much substance.
“Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” a Lionsgate release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America “for language and violence.“ Running time: 114 minutes. Two stars out of four.
___
MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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Life in the the-a-ter is coming to a close for the company of “Funny Girl.” The Broadway revival has extended its run, but the show will play its final performance on Sunday, Sept. 3, 2023.
Its closing date is almost exactly one year after Michele joined the cast, though the revival of “Funny Girl” first opened in April 2022 led by Beanie Feldstein as Fanny Brice. But she and Jane Lynch, who was replaced by Tovah Feldshuh as Fanny’s mother, departed the production in August after the production was plagued with poor reviews and lackluster turnout.
“Funny Girl” might have closed sooner without the casting changes. But box office fortunes have been on the upswing since last September and seats at the August Wilson Theater have remained well-stocked, even setting multiple house records. By the time the cast, including Ramin Karimloo as Nicky Arnstein and Jared Grimes as Eddie Ryan, takes its final bow, the Broadway revival will have played 599 performances and 30 previews.
As previously announced, “Funny Girl” will embark on tour in September, starting Providence, R.I., before continuing to more than 30 North American cities.
“Funny Girl” follows Brice on her improbable rise to fame and her stormy relationship with gambler Nicky Arnstein. The musical features theater classics like “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “I’m the Greatest Star” and “People.” In a unique arrangement, Julie Benko, who has become a fan favorite at the August Wilson Theater, performs the role of Fanny Brice every Thursday and while Michele is out.
The musical debuted on Broadway in 1964, starring Barbra Streisand, and received several Tony nominations. The revival marks the first time “Funny Girl” has returned to the Great White Way in 58 years.
Michele certainly had tough shoes to fill, but critics have favorably compared her performance to Streisand’s star-making turn. In Variety’s review, Frank Rizzo wrote, “Michele is able to distance herself enough from Streisand’s phrasing to take ownership — or at least to become a savvy caretaker — of the material.”
One of my favorite kinds of pins that Disney has released lately revolves around Marvel. As opposed to just creating merchandise based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney has really embraced the storied history of Marvel’s most popular characters and made pins based on past television shows and comics.
Earlier this month, we saw a set of pins based on Iron Man: The Animated Series. Now, Disney is going back even further, and has created a line of pins based on famous superheroes’ “first appearance” in comic books!
When visiting the Pin Traders – Camera Center at EPCOT today, we noticed that the store got four new “first appearance” pins based on Iron Man and Spider-Man. Here is what we found!
Iron Man’s First Appearance
First up, we have this first appearance of Iron Man pin.
The front of the pin is based on Iron Man’s debut in Marvel’s Tales of Suspense comic series.
Photo: MDS Collectables
This early version of Iron Man had no bells and whistles and looks awfully heavy
The pin is a faithful recreation of Iron Man’s first comic cover, showing the moment that Tony Stark became Iron Man.
Photo: MDS Collectables
If you open this you can see a frame that reads “Iron Man is Born!” The inside cover also gives the issue number and date of the comic book on the front! How cool!
Thanos’ First Appearance
The next first appearance pin features an issue of the Invincible Iron Man. If you just looked at the front cover, you would probably be confused about what you are looking at. Little-known Marvel characters the Blood Brothers appear here.
Photo: MDS Collectables
When the pin is opened up, however, all things become clear. This 1973 comic was actually the world’s introduction to Thanos the Mad Titan!
Spider-Man’s First Appearance
The third new arrival to come into EPCOT features everyone’s favorite friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
The front of the pin features Spider-Man’s debut in the Amazing Fantasy comic book series.
Inside the pin, Spider-Man warns the world that they “better hang onto their hat.”
For those who don’t know, Spider-Man made his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962.
Green Goblin’s First Appearance
Last but not least, we have a pin from the Amazing Spider-Man series.
This comic featured the first ever battle between Spider-Man and his arch nemesis the Green Goblin. Inside the pin, Spider-Man seems to have defeated the Goblin.
The Green Goblin made his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #14 in 1964. Here is a fun fact, this comic also featured a special appearance by the Hulk!
Where To Get Them
If you want to get your hands on any of these Marvel “first appearance” pins, be sure to visit Pin Traders – Camera Center on your next trip to EPCOT. The pins are limited edition, and only 2,000 of each were released. So, if you want to get one, act quickly!
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When it comes to movie franchises, trilogies are a beloved favorite. The setup is modeled after the classic three-act structure and gives a series of films an arc to appear as one bigger story. They also make for great box sets for home video releases. Superhero films are some of the most popular stories in the 21st century, there are plenty of superhero films and trilogies. Some even extended farther beyond trilogies into quadrilogies. Yet one interesting thing to note is how few directors actually get to complete their superhero trilogies.
There are numerous stories of filmmakers directing two superhero films before departing ahead of the third film which includes Richard Donner on Superman, Tim Burton on Batman, Bryan Singer on X-Men, and Joss Whedon on The Avengers. There are times when a third film never materializes due to underperformance at the box office and a trilogy remains unfinished as was the case with Guillermo del Toro on Hellboy or Marc Webb on The Amazing Spider-Man series.
Even recently, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 3 was scrapped by the new DC plans and it appears her trilogy will remain unfinished. It is unclear if Ryan Coogler will return for Black Panther 3, or if DC has plans to bring David F. Sanberg back for a Shazam 3 or James Wan for Aquaman 3.
Yet there are a few rare cases where one director does stay on for a superhero trilogy. This director lends a guiding hand to a franchise and can use the three films in their superhero trilogy to tell a grander story. These are the six filmmakers who actually got to finish their superhero trilogies.
Sam Raimi
Via: Columbia Pictures
After high-profile superhero directors like Richard Donner, Tim Burton, and Bryan Singer departed their superhero films after two entries, it just seemed like that was the fate for all superhero franchises. Yet Sam Raimi defied the odds and made the first superhero trilogy with his Spider-Man films.
It began in 2002 with Spider-Man, continued in 2004 with Spider-Man 2, and concluded in 2007 with Spider-Man 3. Raimi’s first two films were critically acclaimed and box office hits, and while Spider-Man 3 was still a box office hit the movie was less warmly received by fans and critics due to the film feeling overstuffed with too many characters.
Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy in many ways quintessential Spider-Man, with the three films each pitting him against his most iconic enemies of Green Goblin, Doc Ock, and Venom all while showing a young man trying to navigate the world and be with the person he loves. Spider-Man was intended to extend beyond a trilogy with Spider-Man 4 but that film was canceled due to behind-the-scenes disagreements with Raimi and Sony Pictures and the film was morphed into a reboot: The Amazing Spider-Man.
Christopher Nolan
Warner Bros.
Christopher Nolan never seemed like a franchise filmmaker, but it is a franchise that launched him into a new level of success that he is still enjoying to this very day. What began with Batman Begins in 2005 led to The Dark Knight in 2008 and while the director was skeptical about a third film he returned in 2012 with The Dark Knight Rises which marked the conclusion of The Dark Knight trilogy. The film series was all well-reviewed and was a box office hit, with The Dark Knight being a cultural phenomenon and shattering box office records at the time. The Dark Knight trilogy is not only regarded as one of the best superhero trilogies but one of the best trilogies of all time.
Unlike every other superhero trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises was truly meant to be the end of the franchise. Nolan’s trilogy explores the origins of Batman, a traditional Batman story with him facing off against his greatest foe the Joker, and concludes with an epic battle for Gotham City. Nolan’s trilogy explores the idea of Batman as a symbol, one of fear but also of hope for the citizens of Gotham. Batman the character in the film, much like the icon of popular culture, is more than a man and will live on forever.
Zack Snyder
Warner Bros.
Zack Snyder’s superhero trilogy is sort of a Schrödinger’s cat situation where it exists but also does not exist. He originally had a five-film plan for the DCU that began with Man of Steel in 2013, continued with Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016, and then was supposed to continue in 2017 with Justice League. Justice League would be a middle point and lead to two Justice League sequels making a Justice League trilogy that also was part of a five-part story arc for Superman.
Snyder was removed from Justice League and the 2017 film released in theaters was far removed from his original vision. His director’s cut was finally released in 2021 titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and in many ways marked the end of Snyder’s vision of the DCU. While Snyder did not get to finish his five-part story, the three films he did release do serve as a trilogy for his version of Superman and the birth of the DCU.
Jon Watts
Marvel Studios Sony
For all the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchises, none of the film series had ever had the same directors see the franchise through, as Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers were all done by multiple filmmakers. The MCU Spider-Man, however, was all overseen by filmmaker Jon Watts. The MCU Spider-Man trilogy includes 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Watt’s Spider-Man trilogy is very much an extended origin story for Peter Parker, that does skip the spider-bite but uses the three films as a coming-of-age story for Peter Parker where he goes from a kid at school and by the end finds himself in the classic Spider-Man set up. The light breezy high school nature of the series is very similar to the early Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics and with the addition of Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man in the third entry it feels like a celebration of Spider-Man as a film character.
Peyton Reed
Marvel Studios
The most recent addition to this list isPeyton Reed, who directed all three entries in the MCU Ant-Man film trilogy. Reed was brought on as a replacement director after Edgar Wright dropped out of directing 2015’s Ant-Man, and has stayed on for the 2018 sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp and the most recent film 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
While many may want to downplay Reed’s contributions to the Ant-Maemphasizetainly has left a major impact. Notable each film tends to put the emphasis on one unique element of Ant-Man’s powers, with the first film having an interest in ants, the sequel playing up the different aspects of size changing, and the third movie delving into the quantum realm area of the franchise. Reed also put a great emphasis on family dynamics, likely a sign of his love for The Fantastic Four, which he was at one point set to direct in the 2000s.
James Gunn
Marvel Studios
The MCU concludes two trilogies in 2023, following Ant-Man is the wrap-up to The Guardians of the Galaxy franchise under director James Gunn. James Gunn launched the franchise in 2014 with Guardians of the Galaxy and continued in 2017 with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is set to open in theaters on May 5, 2023, and will not only mark the end of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy but James Gunn’s time at Marvel Studios as he is now the co-head of DC Studios and is overseeing the new DCU.
Gunn himself almost did not get to finish his trilogy as in 2018 the director was fired by Disney due to some old offensive tweets the director had made in the early part of his career that had resurfaced. Gunn was rehired in 2019 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was put back on track. While it did not meet its original 2020 release date as part of the kick-off to Phase 4 it will now be part of Phase 5 and hopefully serve as a fitting end to this beloved series.
Organizers of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival said Wednesday that they are canceling their opening ceremony and “all festive events and concerts” related to the event following a tragic train crash in Greece late Tuesday that killed at least 38 people and injured more than 60.
The crash, which occurred in Tempe north of Athens, involved a packed commuter train colliding head-on with a freight train at high speed. The commuter train was traveling from Athens to Thessaloniki.
The festival is scheduled to kick of Thursday and run through March 12.
“Thessaloniki International Film Festival is canceling tomorrow’s opening ceremony, as well as all festive events and concerts scheduled to be held within the framework of the 25th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, taking part in the three-day mourning declared following the unprecedented tragedy of the train collision in Tempi,” the festival announced today. “The screenings of the films and Agora’s activities are the Festival’s sole activities to take place.
“In these hours of grief and pain, our thoughts are with the families of the victims, to whom we express our most sincere condolences.”
The search is ongoing to find additional survivors of the crash, which occurred just before midnight local time. The country’s transportation minister has resigned, and the stationmaster at the train’s last stop Larissa has been arrested.
At least 200 survivors were taken by bus to Thessaloniki, about 80 miles north of the crash, as authorities continue to account for all passengers.
MultiChoice, NBCUniversal and Sky have set a new partnership to bring content and technology to streaming customers across MultiChoice’s 50-market footprint in sub-Saharan Africa. MultiChoice launched Showmax as the first African streaming service in 2015 and via the deal announced today, the new Showmax group, which will be 70% owned by MultiChoice and 30% by NBCU, will build on Showmax’s success to date and aim to create the leading streaming service in Africa. It will be powered by Peacock’s technology and combine MultiChoice’s accelerating investment in local productions with international content licensed from NBCU and Sky, as well as third party content from HBO, Warner Bros International, Sony and others, and include live English Premier League football. Launch details about the new Showmax service will be announced at a later date.
Marcelo Ebrard/Twitter
The federal government of Mexico has struck a deal with the major Hollywood studios to form a working group focused on growing the film industry in the country, promoting new investment and jobs. A key objective is to attract more productions to Mexico. Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard along with 50 mayors and 17 economic development secretaries from 22 Mexican states met with representatives of Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros and the MPA in Los Angeles on Monday and agreed to launch a working group to translate the interest of the studios into the production of new films and series in Mexico. “This means more than a million jobs, more or less, in Mexico,” said Ebrard. It was also agreed to add film industry-related issues to the High-level Economic Dialogue agenda between Mexico and the U.S., which will facilitate coordination between the two countries in terms of promoting expansion in the audiovisual sector. The creative industries currently contribute 54B pesos ($3B) directly and 42B pesos ($2.3B) indirectly to the Mexican economy on an annual basis.
Integramos Grupo de Trabajo con Netflix,Paramount,HBO, Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros, NBC Universal y la Motion Picture Association con 50 alcaldes,17 Estados de la República y SRE . Más producciones, más empleos y bienestar en México. Gracias !! pic.twitter.com/UMMQbeHfmW
Journalists at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are due to stage a walkout next week, the first protected industrial action in 17 years, according toThe Guardian. This is the first step in a series of actions aiming to improve pay and conditions. Though it’s due to last just 40-minutes, it has been timed to make it difficult to cover a breaking news story – the Reserve Bank Australia board meeting and official cash rate announcement on March 7. It comes in the wake of news that BBC staff will stage their first 24-hour strike from 11AM on March 15, which has been timed to coincide with the UK’s government’s Budget while King Charles’ Coronation and Eurovision are also targets for industrial action.
“The Elephant Whisperers,” the Indian film nominated in the Oscars’ documentary short film category, has received an outpouring of love globally with young fans sending their fan art and appreciation in hundreds of emails to the filmmakers.
The film follows a couple, Bomman and Bellie, who devote their lives to caring for an orphaned baby elephant named Raghu.
Director Kartiki Gonsalves and producer Guneet Monga, along with the film’s team in India and the U.S., have been receiving fan art depicting their love for the orphaned babies and the caring couple from the film. They have also received testimonials from many parents and some fans who sent video clips of their own animal companions watching the film at home.
Monga told Variety: “We always knew the film was special, but to see it have such immense impact, especially on young minds makes this whole experience even more meaningful. To see kids as young as two watch this as their first film, and thousands submitting their fan art to us, has really moved us as a team.”
Gonsalves added: “Seeing these beautiful tributes means to me that the film did what I always hoped – that we are reaching people about the sacred bond between ourselves and the natural world, and a new generation is falling in love with these endangered animals.”
Documentarian Doug Blush, who serves as the film’s co-executive producer and co-editor, said: “I’ve been a part of over two hundred non-fiction films and series – and this is the first one ever to get actual fan art.”
The film also received appreciation from the parent of an autistic boy via an Instagram post.
Only one player can be the sole survivor in the 44th season of the Survivor TV show on CBS. As we all know, Nielsen ratings typically play a significant role in determining whether a TV show like Survivor is cancelled or renewed for season 45 (in this case, we already know the show’s been renewed). Unfortunately, most of us do not live in Nielsen households. Because many viewers feel frustrated when their viewing habits and opinions aren’t considered, we invite you to rate all of the 44th season episodes of Survivor here.
A CBS competition series, the Survivor TV show is hosted (as always) by Jeff Probst. In this 44th edition, 18 new players are relocated to the beautiful islands of Fiji. They must form a society and adapt to their physical and social surroundings, forcing players to choose between personal risk and reward, while navigating the complex social game and attempting to forge alliances to last another day. The castaways are initially split into three tribes of six — Ratu, Soka, and Tika. In the Ratu Tribe, there’s Maddy Pomilla, Brandon Cottom, Kane Fritzler, Matthew Grinstead-Mayle, Lauren Harpe, and Jaime Lynn Ruiz. Soka Tribe is made up of Matt Blankinship, Heidi Lagares-Greenblatt, Frannie Marin, Danny Massa, Claire Rafson, and Josh Wilder. The Tita Tribe members are Bruce Perreault, Yamil “Yam Yam” Arocho, Carson Garrett, Helen Li, Sarah Wade, and Carolyn Wiger. In the end, only one will remain to claim the title of Sole Survivor and win a $1 million prize.
What do you think? Which season 44 episodes of the Survivor TV series do you rate as excellent, terrible, or somewhere between? Are you happy to know that Survivor has already been renewed for a 45th season on CBS?
Check out our CBS status sheet to track the Tiffany network’s new series pickups, renewals, and cancellations. You can find lists of cancelled shows here.
The screenwriters working on “Gone With the Wind” went to “war” over the depiction of slavery – with more disturbing and violent elements eventually being cut from the 1939 blockbuster, according to a historian who discovered the scenes in an extremely rare original shooting script.
David Vincent Kimel, a history PhD student at Yale, wrote in The Ankler on Wednesday that he paid $15,000 for a shooting script that belonged to casting director Fred Schuessler. He says several writers pushed for a more realistic depiction of slavery and race relations during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but the scenes they wrote were ultimately cut.
“Gone With the Wind” has been criticized for decades over its sanitized version of slavery in the Antebellum South. HBO Max added a disclaimer to the film in 2020, saying it ignores “the horrors of slavery, as well as its legacies of racial inequality.”
“Gone With the Wind” was adapted from the 1936 epic novel, set in pre- and post-war Georgia and centering on belle Scarlett O’Hara, that sold nearly 30 million copies. Starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, the film was a colossal hit, becoming the highest-earning film ever – a record it still holds when adjusted for inflation. It also won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, the first-ever African American to win an Academy Award, and Best Picture.
Kimel says he acquired the extremely rare shooting script in 2020 and, while going through its 301 pages, discovered several cut scenes. He also found many notes and revisions, including fierce debates between writers about how to approach the slavery scenes.
“Much of the excised material was a harsh portrayal of the mistreatment of the enslaved workers on Scarlett’s plantation, including references to beatings, threats to throw ‘Mammy’ [McDaniel] out of the plantation for not working hard enough, and other depictions of physical and emotional violence,” Kimel wrote.
Kimel says the screenplay was a miracle find, given that “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick ordered all scripts to be destroyed. He wrote that perhaps a handful – worked on by around a dozen writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald – are still in existence.
Rival groups of writers soon formed, Kimel writes: “‘Romantics’ and ‘Realists’ who amped up scenes of mistreatment to highlight the brutality of Scarlett’s character and even condemn the institution of slavery itself.” (For his part, Fitzgerald was a “romantic” who wanted to see a montage of slaves singing, “toiling” and “the most beautiful pre-war shots imaginable.”)
The “Realists,” however, were creating material that “was so often so gritty and uncompromising that some of it was cut in drafts even before the creation of the script in my possession,” Kimel wrote. In one such scene, Scarlett hits a house slave with a rod, yelling: “Sit up, you fool, before I wear this out on you!”
Film historians have known for years about Selznick negotiating with Black cast members and advocacy groups like the NAACP over things like the inclusion of racial slurs and the KKK (which didn’t make the cut either). But Kimel’s account is believed to be the first to shed light on the producer’s struggle over whether to include harsh depictions of slavery – and his eventual decision to cut them.
Motion graphics is when the pieces of animation, digital footage, and graphic design are combined to form a digital film. The main benefit of the motion graphic is that it conveys ideas to the viewers easily and effectively. These graphics are presented through thaumatrope, stroboscope, phenakistoscope, zeotrope, etc. It differs from the common animation, meaning it is not strictly based on character-driven animation but often represents animated shapes, texts, and logos.
The history of motion graphics is related to computer graphics. As the development of computer graphics increased, it automatically resulted in the wider use of motion graphics. The common use of motion graphics is to create movie titles, ads, information sharing, etc. The main content of these graphics is text, and motion graphics are created by giving animation and adding audio to the text.
Effects of Motion Graphics
Though motion graphics has been a great invention, it does have affected the cinema industry in certain ways. Some of how motion graphics have affected the cinema are mentioned below:
TV Identities
Before TV identities were introduced, motion graphics, advertisements, serials, movies, etc., were less effective. Later, when television incorporated motion graphics into their identity and shows, the TV channels had two distinct groups.
The first one is the one that works on the brand of the channel itself, which is more restrictive and selective as they have certain rules that guide any other visual material created. And the one who works on each show, specifically the type of graphic, is more dynamic and open.
These types of TV identities are developed in a way where all the visual packages are seen on the screen related to the channel itself, such as the show’sshow’s schedule and lower thirds, line breaks, TV logos appearing on the screen, and end titles for some shows.
Most TV channels are continuously working on new shows for their schedules; thus, they develop motion graphic structures for those shows, similar to what you do for the channel. Being demanding, the work becomes more dynamic. However, it usually has less impact and has a constant demand.
Intros are also something that TV series have a great status. Some of them are simple edits of the scene of the shows, but the rest are beautifully designed and animated pieces such as Daredevil, Game of Thrones, etc.
Movie Titles
When motion graphic was introduced, it was in the opening titles of moves, and the intros we see in most of the movies contain the name of the staff behind their production. Earlier, these names were almost static, but once the motion graphics were introduced, we saw the titles were doing more than just presenting the names or cast of the movie. Nowadays, these intros introduce the story and build a good atmosphere where the connection with the viewers is deeper.
Nowadays, there are different varieties of titles shown in different movies. Especially in superhero movies – as it is about a superhero, it is hard not to have animated titles there. And this is becoming more and more popular, and there are plenty of designers who are dedicating their careers to this field.
Besides the titles, some of the motion graphics are also used in the movie itself. It is usually displayed as a visual interaction with an actor to represent texting or video appearing on a TV in the background. Sometimes, it is even the animations that interact with the characters.
Information Sharing
Before the motion graphics were introduced, sharing information with the audience was static and boring. But now, when motion graphic is there while sharing information with the audience, you can convert your idea into animation by adding suitable audio and other features so that the result of the content will be more acceptable and understandable for the audience.
Logo Graphics
With the help of motion graphics, your company’s logos, websites, etc., can be more attractive by adding animations. This helps in creating amazing visuals and interacting with the audience in a better way.
Social Media Post
Social Media is something that people are depended on for everything, like information, entertainment, news, online courses, etc. Adding motion graphics to the content you display on your social media can attract more people to the posts.
What are the 3 types of motion graphics?
There are three types of motion graphics, as mentioned below:
Promotional Videos: These types of motion graphics are used to help in sealing a product or service.
Explainer Videos: These motion graphics define a concept, product, or service, so the audience can easily understand this.
Emotive Videos: These motion graphics make your audience feel something.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Motion graphics
Motion graphics has greatly impacted the cinema industry to make their content more appealing to the audience, but everything has its advantages and disadvantages. In this section, we will learn the pros and cons of motion graphics.
Pros:
Perhaps the reason to go with motion graphics is that it doesn’t require physical space. With traditional video, you need to schedule a time to film, Rehearse lines, and find a suitable place to shoot. But since motion graphics was introduced, any need for these things has been eliminated. Because of this motion, graphics has been really helpful in COVID-19 restrictions.
One of the other advantages is that it requires less work from the client. Once the goals are discussed, no more effort is needed from the client’s end. The rest is on the professionals to produce the content per your specifications.
Motion graphics are used in movie titles, advertisements, information exchange, etc.
With the help of motion graphics, communication is easy and more effective.
Cons:
One of the disadvantages of motion graphics is that they can be impersonal. The benefit of the traditional video was that viewers get to see the place they will be visiting or the face they will be meeting. A motion graphic video is nothing more than an animated brochure if done improperly. That’s why using some live footage, photography, or voice-over is suggested to make it more appealing to the audience.
Takeaway
The quality of the channel establishes the relationship between what is good and bad in Motion graphics and creates a relationship between what is perceived as bad and good. Suppose the custom eLearning content development with motion graphics in TV identity is well designed. In that case, it will help you reach the right audience and define a quality among other channels. Whereas, in movies or series, the quality of the introductions and titles can be the building factor as it is the first thing that comes in contact with the viewer.
That is why it is important for those mediums. Motion graphics directly influence the audience’s perception of their movie piece or brand. Of course, if this is a long time goal, then the show’s quality also matters, but building a connection beforehand helps. Fan doesn’tdoesn’t get excited seeing those texts rising until the infinite space at the beginning of star wars.
I’m an e-learning specialist. I have been a professional e-learning and training consultant for more than 7 years. In the past, I have worked for a variety of well-known companies in the UK and the USA. I’m an expert in the field of instructional design and e-learning solutions development.
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