Less than one week after a Texas grand jury indicted Netflix over its distribution of the controversial coming-of-age film Cuties, the company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos has hit back at what he calls a discussion of “censoring storytelling.” The film, a feature debut from Maïmouna Doucouré, follows an 11-year-old Senegalese immigrant, Amy, as she attends her new school and befriends a dance group called the “Cuties.” As her family life becomes more stressful, Amy begins to teach the group racier and racier moves—all of which are at odds with her traditional upbringing. Netflix first promoted the film with an image of the […]
Movies
32 posts
I can’t tell you what a balm it was to watch Michelle Pfeiffer talk to a cat. That’s literal and figurative, as is everything in French Exit, the quirky bisous of a film that closed the New York Film Festival this week. Pfeiffer’s character both is and isn’t actually talking to a cat, just as this is and isn’t a celebration toasted to a major gala presentation of cinematic note. Who needs to walk out of Lincoln Center into the first crisp winds of autumn when you can just watch Michelle Pfeiffer belittle a cat while reclined on the couch in […]
Republicans’ crusade against the French film Cuties, which garnered widespread controversy as it debuted on Netflix last month, just reached a new level of stupidity: A Texas grand jury has indicted the streamer for “promotion of lewd visual material depicting a child.” A press release from the office of Tyler County Criminal District Attorney (and former model and actor) Lucas Babin states that per state law it is illegal to “knowingly promote visual material that depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child, which appeals to the prurient interest in sex and […]
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: Me: Cast gay actors in gay roles!!! Also me: Unless it is Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in this movie that will absolutely destroy me!!! I can’t explain why the rules are such that The Tooch and Sir Firthy forever get a free pass in the debate over whether it matters that straight actors are constantly cast in gay romances while there is still […]
Netflix’s new mystery movie, Enola Holmes, showcases the full breadth of Millie Bobby Brown’s talents with one of the entertainment industry’s time-honored traditions: Letting her do battle against the lung-crushing oppression of a corset. From the moment Brown crushed a Coke can with her brain as Eleven in Stranger Things, it was obvious she was going places. But the young actress’s fascinating potential could only be revealed with time and a proper starring role. (And her feature debut, a supporting role in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, did not quite meet that mark.) Enter Enola Holmes, a delightful adventure that premiered […]
As people are living in a time of pandemic, movies about viruses and the living dead have become more popular than ever. There are some Korean works that are worth seeing during a lockdown. “Zombie Detective” KBS 2TV’s drama “Zombie Detective”, starring Choi Jin-hyuk, started airing on the 31st of August. “Zombie Detective” official posters. The series stars “Last Empress” actor Choi Jin Hyuk and “Extracurricular” actress Park Joo Hyun. Premieres on August 31. pic.twitter.com/HngOrMkd1n — All About Korean🍒💞 (@AllAboutKorean7) August 17, 2020 The plot is built around Kim Moo-young (Choi Jin-hyuk), who lives as a living dead for two years […]
Kenneth Nicholson Freed from the New York Fashion Week runway, designers like Kenneth Nicholson are reveling instead in forms like filmmaking. Grasp, an excellent short film he co-directed with Stefan Colson, introduces us to David (Dorion Wordlaw), who wakes up in his Los Angeles apartment after dreaming of himself as a small boy at church. That little Black boy spies a young white girl in a lemon-colored dress opposite him, and then imagines himself in the same pretty dress. As an adult, he takes a walk in sun-dappled streets, and then takes tea—and we see him encounter a range of people […]
We’ll likely never know exactly how Osama bin Laden personally reconciled his many jarring contradictions, but we can be reasonably certain he would have loathed Bin Laden’s Hard Drive, National Geographic’s deep dive into the cache of digital and written materials that were confiscated by the Navy SEAL team that stormed his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, and ended his life on the orders of President Barack Obama. For a man who prized his secrecy, this public disclosure of his most private thoughts and fixations would have been the height of embarrassment—especially since, as the TV special reminds […]
Chadwick Boseman’s hometown is already working on a statue dedicated to the late actor—but it will not replace the Confederate monument that still stands in the town square. After the actor’s tragic death from colon cancer, fans began signing a petition calling for Anderson, South Carolina, where Boseman was born and raised, to replace the Confederate statue that claims the soldiers who fought for the South “were in the right” with one dedicated to Boseman, the town’s most famous resident. More than 60,000 people have signed it so far, although it’s unclear how many of the signatories hail from Anderson itself. […]
In 2002, Matthew and Naomi, the latter eight months pregnant at the time, traveled to Norway for Naomi’s book tour. They were driving overnight to a signing in a remote area of the mountains when a gnarly winter storm hit and made continuing on not only unsafe, but almost impossible. They pulled over and decided to sleep in the car until it was clear to hit the road again. The new movie Centigrade, available on VOD and in drive-in theaters this Friday, begins when the young American couple wakes up, horrified to realize that their car has been completely snowed in […]
Afghan actress, director, and activist Saba Sahar has been hospitalized after three men fired into her car while she was on her way to work in Kabul. Sahar is one of Afghanistan’s best known actresses and first female directors—as well as a prominent women’s rights activist. She’s also a high-ranking police officer and vocal critic of the Taliban. She was recently promoted to a deputy position overseeing the special forces dedicated to gender issues, and has used her police experience to inform her films and documentaries. Sahar’s husband, Emal Zaki, told the BBC that Sahar was in the car with four […]
Criterion President Peter Becker knows that his company’s film collection has long ignored Black artists. And now, he says, he’s ready to do something about it. In a fascinating feature well worth reading in full, The New York Times spoke with Becker about the scarcity of Black and African American directors within Criterion’s ranks. “There’s nothing I can say about it that will make it OK,” Becker told the Times. “The fact that things are missing, and specifically that Black voices are missing, is harmful, and that’s clear. We have to fix that.” Criterion’s DVD collection can be coveted among cinephiles […]
Though I might like to claim otherwise, I’m no expert on big-screen T&A&D. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies, however, makes a bid for being the definitive documentary on the subject. Driven by a cornucopia of film clip and talking heads—led by actors, directors, historians and critics—it delivers a thorough chronological timeline of cinematic nakedness. Too bad, then, that when it comes to actually delving into the most interesting aspects of its topic, Danny Wolf’s non-fiction film proves, ahem, skin-deep. Debuting on VOD on August 18, Skin is most valuable as a survey of movie nudity, ranging from the […]
As Seth Rogen and his production company, Point Grey, feel their way through the novel coronavirus pandemic, one thing is certain: They won’t be taking their cues from Christopher Nolan. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Rogen quipped, “I’m waiting to see what Chris Nolan does… ‘WWCND’ is basically what we’re saying at all times. ‘What would Chris Nolan do?’” THR’s interview, conducted via Zoom, happened to take place on the same day that Warner Bros. and Nolan confirmed that Tenet’s release, previously set for August, would be delayed for a third time. The decision followed widespread controversy over the film’s intended […]
The most haunting thing about She Dies Tomorrow is that although its central character is certain she’s going to… well, you know… it’s almost impossible to nail down how she actually feels about it. One would think that the most obvious reaction to one’s imminent demise would be terror. But as writer-director Amy Seimetz’s protagonist (also named Amy and played with transfixing subtlety by Kate Lyn Sheil) repeats the words “I’m going to die tomorrow” to anyone who will listen, that doesn’t seem to be her experience. Seimetz, who co-created Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience and used the money she earned starring […]
https://cdn1.img.sputniknews.com/img/07e4/07/12/1079920452_0:30:1521:886_1200x675_80_0_0_661aea5d0554b0fb04add2b0a4b473f4.jpg Sputnik International https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/i/logo.png Sputnik https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/i/logo.png https://sputniknews.com/society/202007181079920481-from-vertigo-to-the-hunger-games-la-entertainment-auction-to-feature-over-850-items/ Movie buffs and collectors of Hollywood memorabilia will be given the opportunity in the coming weeks to browse, bid on and buy more than 850 coveted pieces of entertainment history during a virtual auction next month. Prop Store, a prop art hobby shop headquartered in both London and Los Angeles, California, will host what it describes as “one of LA’s largest and most exciting Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auctions” on August 26 and August 27. As the registration window for the virtual auction draws to a close, Variety reported that Hollywood classics of both the […]
People might debate whether The Old Guard is a superhero movie, what with its blessed existence outside the Marvel-DC dick-measuring contest and not a swatch of spandex to be found. To me, the film is as if the Avengers and the Justice League met up with the Fantastic Four and teamed up with the X-Men. It did the thing the superheroes movies are supposed to do—present a world where the best among us fight for what’s right—but which none had done before: present a world that feels like my own. The first time it’s acknowledged that the characters Joe (Marwan Kenzari) […]
Remember those chilling yet hilarious images of mannequins being used in restaurants to fill space? Television just kicked the craziness up a notch: As various productions resume, mannequins are now being used for crowd shots and even, in at least one case, sex scenes. The CBS soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful was one of the first TV productions to resume filming amid the pandemic—and as executive producer Bradley Bell recently told the New York Times, inanimate dummies quickly became indispensable. “One of the first ideas we had was to bring in mannequins for the intimate scenes and hospital scenes, […]
Palm Springs might be all about losing yourself in an infinite time loop, but it doesn’t waste a second. The indie Andy Samberg rom-com, which debuts on Hulu Friday after its January premiere at Sundance Film Festival, plunks an extremely likable cast—Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons—into a cocktail mixer and shakes them together in a wedding-inflected Groundhog Day gambit. The end result could have been lazy, resting on the charisma of its cast and the trendiness of time loops. But thankfully for us, this is not that movie; this one is deceptively empathetic and even stirring—and it all unfolds with crisp […]
No one laughed harder at the 69 joke than Cristin Milioti. The actress, the mother from How I Met Your Mother and your favorite part of so many projects since, plays the lead in Palm Springs, the mind-melting existential romantic comedy co-starring Andy Samberg and produced by his Lonely Island crew. Manifesting all the energy from the gasps in the audience after a shocking out-of-the-gate plot twist, the film launched a competitive bidding war after its premiere screening in January at the Sundance Film Festival. The Daily Beast’s Obsessed Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in […]
Though he wears the wooly red cap that Jacques Cousteau transformed into the emblem of deep sea divers, the figure whom famed oceanic photographer Amos Nachoum most closely resembles in Picture of His Life is fictional: Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. Possessed by an obsession with a creature of the deep that holds, for him, profound symbolic meaning, Nachoum is a man driven to risk life and limb to capture a picture like no other—and, in doing so, to exorcise the demons that have long plagued him. Unlike Herman Melville’s legendary protagonist, the Nachoum presented by Yonatan Nir and Dani Menkin’s documentary […]
Our feature film, Followed, which I wrote and helped produce, was supposed to open in over 300 traditional theaters across the country weeks ago. COVID-19, however, put the kibosh on that dream. It was to be my first screenplay to see national distribution, too. When I learned our movie would be released in drive-in theaters instead, it felt like another twist of the blade. I wanted, with all my heart, for audiences to experience our film inside the best theaters with optimum sound. Drive-ins, I thought, would be a second-rate, “lesser” experience. But then I realized something important I had long […]
When people said they were dying to see movies in cinemas again, the CEO of AMC Theatres may have taken the words too literally. Adam Aron, CEO and president of the country’s largest theater chain, is the target of pointed outrage after announcing that the company’s plan to reopen 450 of the more than 600 locations that were forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic does not include a rule requiring patrons to wear masks. In states where wearing a mask is required, the company will adhere to that mandate, and all employees will be required to wear them. Patrons […]
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: The Muggles are acting up. Everything you like is canceled. Some excellent counterprogramming. The best thing about Pete Davidson’s movie. Per usual, crying about Schitt’s Creek. The perfect tweet. The Best Movie Out This Week It can feel slight and pointless to spend energy focusing on movies and TV shows with all [gestures to the world] this going on. But as much as everything […]
It was a milestone decades in the making. The entire history of film in the making, really. Love, Simon was the first gay teen romance ever released by a major studio. It had the budget of a major studio, the marketing arm of a major studio, and everyone was meant to see and swoon over it, not just the gay community. That was huge. It had an appealing protagonist, a fizzy cast of supporting characters, thrilling emotional highs, and an endearing, easy-to-root-for love story that culminated in one of those big, spectacular, only-in-the-movies grand romantic gestures: a fireworks-scored kiss at the […]
Earlier this year, a Facebook post spread like wildfire through the Texas film community. It was the account of a young actress, alleging that Adam Donaghey, a rising producer in the region, had raped her when she was 16. Donaghey, who has denied the allegation, was subsequently arrested in late April on suspicion of sexual assault of a minor, and is currently free on bail. The Dallas Police Department would not provide any further information. Donaghey, 39, was a ubiquitous presence in the emerging Dallas movie scene. A rich childhood friend of the director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon), he had gained […]
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. There are many tools at our disposal to activate, demand change, inform, and amplify right now, including your television. There is no equating it to the work being done on the streets, in protests, at the ballot box, through petitions and grassroots campaigns, and with donations. But there is action and amplification—and therefore change you can advocate for—through the content choices you make. Now, especially, is a […]
As a child growing up in the ’60s in Indiana, few things were as sweet as a Saturday night at the drive-in. It was a cheap escape and quality family time. You didn’t have to worry about what to wear. In fact, the littlest ones often were in PJs so that as soon as we got home, they could immediately be put to b-e-d. There was something about piling into the backseat with sisters, cozy, comfortable, watching the big screen, which was way better than TV. Better still, if it was a pay week and we got to hit the concession […]
Michael Stuhlbarg elevates everything he’s in—a fact once again confirmed by Shirley, an excellent new biographical film about The Haunting of Hill House writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) from Madeline’s Madeline director Josephine Decker. As Jackson’s husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, an esteemed critic and professor at Vermont’s Bennington College, Stuhlbarg exudes formidable intellect, sharp wit, daunting imperiousness, and a unique mixture of staunch loyalty and brazen unfaithfulness, energizing a marital dynamic that’s further complicated by the couple’s decision to welcome two boarders—aspiring academic Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) and his wife Rose (Odessa Young)—into their home. Their crowded household is soon ripe […]
What’s immediately striking is the tone of his voice. No “Hey, What-the-fuckers!” No “How’s everybody doing?” No jangly guitar theme song. Just a halting, “Hey, OK, it’s Marc.” On Monday morning, less than 48 hours after his partner, the celebrated director Lynn Shelton suddenly passed away from a previously undiagnosed blood disorder, Marc Maron was there on his WTF podcast, as he always is, talking directly to listeners about what happened. The comedian’s voice immediately started to crack as he said the words, “I’m sure most of you know that Lynn Shelton died at about 12:45 a.m. on Saturday morning. She […]
As the COVID-19 crisis grows, some industries will recover quickly, but some won’t recover at all. In this episode we help you understand which is which. This is the second in a series of episodes on how the economic crisis is challenging and transforming different industries. NLW looks at: Disclosure Read More The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. Source link
From the moment it first debuted in 2000, Center Stage reigned supreme as the ultimate sleepover movie. Now, two decades later… it still does. On Tuesday, Center Stage celebrates 20 years as a cult classic. Critics savaged the film when it first came out—but everything they hated seemed to have the opposite effect on teens across the country, who lapped it up. After all, how could any self-respecting tween not gasp when Jody Sawyer, the ingenue with infamously “bad feet,” watched with lust in her eyes as ballet-bad-boy Cooper Nielson shook his Adonis-level tush to “The Way You Make Me Feel” […]