After Russian troops began invading Ukraine, Hollywood mobilized in protest. Major studios paused the release of films in Russian theaters. Netflix suspended operations in the country, halting future productions and acquisitions. This week, Discovery, WarnerMedia, and Amazon ceased their services in Russia. The U.S. film and TV business has, effectively and collectively, pulled the plug on Moscow.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Euphoria.Toward the end of Euphoria’s second-season finale, which aired Sunday, two former best friends, Cassie (played by Sydney Sweeney) and Maddy (Alexa Demie), take a breather after a vicious fight. Cassie’s nose is bleeding; Maddy’s foot needs ice. “Don’t worry,” Maddy says when Cassie breaks the silence with a self-deprecating comment. “This is just the beginning.
For more than 30 years, Bill Davis’s job has been to help famous people look like they know what they’re doing with a gun. As an armorer working in Hollywood, Davis teaches movie stars how to properly handle firearms, and some are fast learners: He helped train Tom Cruise on the set of the film Collateral and walked away impressed with the actor’s form.
Anne Duchesne, the hero of the film Happening, is an intelligent and serious 23-year-old woman who knows what she wants. It’s 1963 in southwest France, and if her leering university classmates judge her, the daughter of a working-class family, for her literary ambitions and for hooking up with local men, so be it. Played by Anamaria Vartolomei, Anne is economical with her words and her friendships. She rarely switches up her wardrobe or hairstyle.
For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival had to go completely virtual, but that didn’t stop the annual celebration from giving a robust preview of the most exciting emerging artists in Hollywood. Much of this year’s slate defied the pandemic’s limitations: Twisty horror films didn’t need Park City’s frigid climate to deliver chills.
Yellowjackets, the Showtime series about a high-school girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash, can be extremely stressful to watch. The drama, which ended its first season tonight and has been renewed for a second, is relentlessly violent, and the writers seem to delight in attacking or killing off the most lovable characters.
Maggie Gyllenhaal has a theory that the mothers we see on-screen tend to fall into one of two categories. First, there’s the “fantasy mother,” who’s perfect in every way except when she has, say, some oatmeal on her sweater or runs a little late for a parent-teacher conference.
In Dickinson’s third and final season, the titular poet (played by Hailee Steinfeld) travels forward in time and meets the author Sylvia Plath (Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman). Sylvia, it turns out, has a deep knowledge of her predecessor’s legacy. Apparently, Emily Dickinson lived a “miserable life,” should be considered “the original sad girl,” and, Sylvia whispers scandalously, “was a lesbian.
In Dickinson’s third and final season, the titular poet (played by Hailee Steinfeld) travels forward in time and meets the author Sylvia Plath (Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman). Sylvia, it turns out, has a deep knowledge of her predecessor’s legacy. Apparently, Emily Dickinson lived a “miserable life,” should be considered “the original sad girl,” and, Sylvia whispers scandalously, “was a lesbian.
Saturday Night Live’s final episode before Christmas is usually a festive affair, and this year’s was supposed to be even more triumphant than usual. As the last show of 2021, it would’ve marked the end of a full year of uninterrupted programming, after the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 led to canceled episodes and remote sketches.
This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Succession Season 3.Given how this season of Succession has gone so far, the Roy siblings should have reason to celebrate. They held on to control of the family’s company, Waystar Royco, after a Hail Mary negotiation. They helped choose the Republicans’ next presidential nominee from the comfort of their father’s hotel suite.
This may sound harsh, but Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye, was never the most exciting Avenger in the Marvel films. Next to near-invincible heroes such as Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk, he just looked ill-equipped, wielding a bow and arrow against monstrous aliens and killer robots. One of the original six protagonists in 2012’s Avengers, the master archer (played by Jeremy Renner) gradually became an afterthought, not even appearing in 2018’s Infinity War.
For decades, Hollywood has struggled to adapt anime, a type of Japanese animation. The genre has a distinct visual style—lush backgrounds, sleek camera movement, exaggerated facial expressions—that looks uncanny with live actors. And the storytelling, which tends to dramatize a character’s gradual change, doesn’t always fit into the usual conflict-driven Hollywood plot structures.
Passing looks like a daydream. Set in Manhattan at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the film is shot in sumptuous black-and-white. The soft focus of the lens distorts the frame’s edges. Hazy imagery—a fluttering curtain here, sunlight peeking through tree branches there—often fills the screen. And the story at the center appears mellow: Two women, Irene (played by Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), rekindle their friendship after years apart.
Kristen Stewart hit the height of her fame as the star of the Twilight movies about a decade ago, and to many audiences she will always be a teenage girl falling in love with a vampire. Last month, in an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times, the actor said she’s probably made “five really good films” at most. The quip immediately inspired blog posts and social-media jokes about how perhaps the Twilight quintet filled all of those slots.
This story contains spoilers for the third episode of Succession Season 3.There’s something haunting about the way Jeremy Strong has carried himself when playing Kendall Roy, the apparent protagonist of HBO’s Succession. For the first two seasons, the character didn’t really walk; he trudged, as if the weight of being part of the Roy empire had altered his personal gravitational field.
The 10 members of the Eternals are the most powerful protagonists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far. They are neither humans nor gods, but immortal attendants of humanity. And during the 7,000 years they’ve spent living on Earth, they haven’t interfered with civilization’s affairs unless Arishem—a colossal cosmic entity who manipulates seemingly all energy in the universe—told them to. (So, no, they didn’t do anything about Thanos.
As Season 3 of Succession begins, the mighty Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) is in the crosshairs. His son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) has exposed the family patriarch’s involvement in covering up a litany of scandals at their company, Waystar Royco, calling him “a malignant presence, a bully, and a liar.” The impulsive decision could be fatal for the media conglomerate, potentially attracting the attention of the government and affecting every employee.
When a Saturday Night Live host really commits to the job, even a sketch with a simple premise can feel surprising. Consider last night’s “Mattress Store,” in which Rami Malek, the show’s latest celebrity guest, and cast member Aidy Bryant play a couple searching for the right mattress by enacting every over-the-top scenario they might encounter in bed.
For the first 40 minutes of its runtime, the film Mass refuses to reveal why its four protagonists—two sets of parents—have gathered in a small room in a church basement. They don’t appear to be friends; they’re polite toward one another, but cold. They’re not there to pray or to eat the food that’s been provided. Their conversation is stilted and awkward, descending into silence every few beats.
Eighteen-hour workdays with no lunch breaks. Car accidents caused by sleep deprivation. A crew member who returned to set the day after a miscarriage.For months, members of a union representing more than 150,000 behind-the-scenes workers in the entertainment industry have shared hundreds of these stories on social media—anonymous testimonies about the grueling conditions on TV and film sets.
Apologies to Morticia and Gomez Addams, but a kiss to the upper arm wasn’t sexy until Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac did it on the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival. A slow-motion clip of the moment, amplified by Isaac’s singular smolder, went viral earlier this month. More than 11 million Twitter users basked in the pair’s, let’s face it, pure hotness—and then presumably had to fan themselves afterward.
I wish I had words for this but I really do not pic.
To celebrities, the red carpet of the Met Gala is like an average person’s front lawn: a place for making bold statements. The event, an annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, is made for flaunting ostentatious couture. The dress code is determined by a theme—this year’s was “American Independence,” in honor of a forthcoming exhibition—that can be interpreted however an attendee prefers. Tickets are $35,000 a pop.
Three weeks before the release of Marvel’s latest superhero movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the lead actor and the distributor seemed poised for their own showdown. Bob Chapek, Disney’s CEO, had described the film as an “interesting experiment,” given that it would be the company’s first franchise title since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic to hit theaters without simultaneously streaming on Disney+.
Steve Martin and Martin Short’s rapport isn’t that of a comedic partnership so much as that of a musical duo. Since their first collaboration more than 30 years ago in Three Amigos, they have developed a natural rhythm: Martin is the straight man with a wise-ass streak; Short produces over-the-top characters with wild facial contortions. Martin gets the audience to laugh with him; Short, to laugh at him. Theirs is a harmony that comedians often dream of developing but rarely achieve.
The opening scenes of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings paint a rich portrait not of the film’s titular hero but of its villain. Played by the Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung, Wenwu (a.k.a. the Mandarin) is the owner of the magical Ten Rings. As such, he’s an immortal man burdened with, as the saying goes, the great responsibility that comes with great power.
Reservation Dogs wears its pop-culture influences proudly, and not just in its title. FX’s new comedy series abounds with cinephilic homages: A paintball shoot-out in the pilot ends with an absurd remake of a scene from Platoon. The four teenage protagonists suit up like the thieves in Reservoir Dogs, their gang’s namesake. One of the characters is even named Elora Danan, after the baby in the cult fantasy film Willow.
Four minutes for Flag Day. Five minutes for Aline. Nine minutes for The French Dispatch.The Cannes Film Festival, which concludes today, has long held an unusual reputation for its lengthy standing ovations. The tradition—which perhaps reached an apotheosis when Pan’s Labyrinth received 22 minutes of applause in 2006—has at times attracted mockery.
The weather, often derided as a mundane conversation topic of last resort, has actually been a prolific source of entertainment. Natural disasters drive big-budget blockbusters. Solar power fuels Lorde’s latest single. Double rainbows produced a lasting meme. But is the weather worthy of an entire streaming service?Fox certainly thinks so. This fall, the network is set to launch Fox Weather, a platform for meteorology programming 24/7, rain or shine.
The weather, often derided as a mundane conversation topic of last resort, has actually been a prolific source of entertainment. Natural disasters drive big-budget blockbusters. Solar power fuels Lorde’s latest single. Double rainbows produced a lasting meme. But is the weather worthy of an entire streaming service?Fox certainly thinks so. This fall, the network is set to launch Fox Weather, a platform for meteorology programming 24/7, rain or shine.