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.
When A’ziah King, a.k.a. Zola, a.k.a. @_zolarmoon, hit Send on the first of her 148 tweets about a trip to Florida gone wrong, Twitter was a different place. In 2015, users could publish only 140 characters at a time. A debate about the color of a dress could dominate the platform for a week.
Every Fast and Furious movie strains credulity, but F9 shatters it so completely, even the production’s own characters have noticed. In the ninth main installment of one of Universal’s most durable film franchises, Dominic Toretto (played by Vin Diesel) and his trusty band of drag-racing ex-cons are so indestructible that they ride out bullets, land mines, and the void of outer space. (I repeat: Outer. Space.
The creators of Kevin Can F**k Himself have yet to go on the record about this, but they’re clearly tired of lopsided sitcom marriages. The series, with its pointed title, seems to be a roast of shows starring the comedian Kevin James over the years, such as The King of Queens; notably, his characters’ spouses didn’t have lives of their own outside of doting on him. (One even got unceremoniously written out off-screen between the first and second seasons.
This article contains mild spoilers for the first two episodes of Loki.For 13 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe built up the Infinity Stones as objects of grand power, capable of manipulating all existence when united. In Avengers: Infinity War, they turned half of the cosmos to dust; in Avengers: Endgame, the surviving heroes chased them down across time. In Loki, the Disney+ series released today, they’re nothing more than colorful paperweights.
Hollywood has a crowded slate of films—delayed by the pandemic and otherwise—to release over the next three months. That makes choosing what to see more stressful than usual, especially when some titles can be seen both in theaters and at home. To make the process more manageable, I’ve scrutinized trailers and even screened some of the films below to put together this guide for all your needs, whatever they may be.
This summer will see the release of a spate of new films, including long-delayed ones. Here are seven to mark on your moviegoing calendar. Then: We send you off with some weekend reads.After more than a year of pandemic-induced delays, Hollywood plans to drop both big-budget franchise flicks and indie stunners this summer.
This story contains spoilers for the film Spiral: From the Book of Saw.Saw, that undying paean to torture porn, finally started running out of stamina when its eighth—eighth!—entry hit theaters in 2017. The once-popular Lionsgate series had gotten predictable; the death traps were rusty, the box-office returns waning. Even B-listers hadn’t joined the cast in years. It needed a new star and a new purpose.As it turned out, the studio could kill two birds with one Chris Rock.
Early in the action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead, Angelina Jolie’s character, Hannah, straps on a parachute and hops onto the back of a pickup truck. As the vehicle snakes through the Montana wilderness, she deploys her gear and lifts off, laughing as she glides back down. Hannah’s a smoke jumper—a trained firefighter who drops into wildfires from above—and she’s clearly tough as hell.
Elon Musk is an eyebrow-raising choice of host for Saturday Night Live. He’s a controversy-courting tech CEO with a tenuous connection to the entertainment industry. He’s never seemed interested in performing sketch comedy. And his Twitter following of more than 50 million accounts eclipses SNL’s audience—this season, the series’ highest-rated episode drew about 9 million viewers. Musk, in short, doesn’t need SNL.
When 2020 began, the future of movie theaters looked bright. Seemingly every major Hollywood studio was pursuing its own cinematic universe, and every big-budget film was seeking a sequel. Viewers were promised a slew of surefire hits, including a new Christopher Nolan thriller, Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond, and the next era of Marvel movies. “There’s no way one can say theatrical is dead,” Deadline observed of the year to come.
Earlier this week, The Hollywood Reporter published a detailed cover story on the veteran film and theater producer Scott Rudin’s alleged mistreatment of his employees. The piece features on-the-record testimonies from former staffers and a slew of accusations describing physical assaults, traumatizing outbursts, unreasonable demands, and a penchant for throwing things.