In August of 2020 — after eclipsing eight billion views across his various channels and being selected over pop stars Harry Styles and Shawn Mendes as People Magazine’s “Sexiest Heartthrob of 2019” — Dobrik bought a mansion in Sherman Oaks for $9.5 million. At some point in there, between Dobrik putting a puppy in the microwave and getting a super-lucrative sponsorship deal with Chipotle (they named a burrito after him!...
Anyone planning a film shoot can be forgiven for forgetting a detail, or two. You have to coordinate the schedules of dozens of people, unfamiliar locations, massive amounts of equipment, large sums of money, and the ever-fickle weather. And that’s before you make a single creative decision. Indie filmmakers often spend pre-production focusing on the big things: securing access to the right camera, location, or actor is understandably an essential part of the process....
It seems like one of the biggest hurdles in telling a story that plays with time and space isn’t the nightmare of logistics or coming up with the specific rules that make your version of a story work. It’s pinpointing the tiny details and phrases that take on some profound, mystical meaning when they get repeated over and over again. In “Undone,” one of those things is a set of keys....
Monroe stars as Julie, who joins her husband (Karl Glusman) when he has to relocate to his family’s native Romania for a new job. Julie only recently abandoned her acting career to follow him to Bucharest, and so she often finds herself alone, unoccupied and despondent amid the anonymous apartment complex that surrounds her. (The blank facades and crumbling interiors of the structures suggest corporate housing made after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu....
Creating a virtual awards ceremony that boasts the luster of traditional Hollywood events is no easy task, but whatever events follow in the coming months will be able to learn from the 2020 Emmys. The 2020 Primetime Emmys’ virtual format was well-received by critics — IndieWire’s Ben Travers lauded the show as “technically immaculate” in his review — and though the festivities weren’t without fault, the fact that much of it was live deserves particular praise....
Yes, this is an expertly contrived melodrama about defiance in the face of abandonment, and sure, it’s also a faintly self-exonerating caricature of a natural woman unspoiled by Western society. But underneath the story’s humid romance with Carolina marshland, and behind its Hollywood-ready façade of backwater Americana, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is really just a swampy riff on “Pygmalion,” with Eliza Doolittle reimagined as a semi-feral outsider who’s obviously the hottest girl in town, but lives in almost complete isolation until the Zack Siler of Barkley Cove teachers her how to read and make out....
The two basic-cable channels and the streaming giant notoriously go in on made-for-TV holiday movies, and this yuletide time will be no exception. But just how crucial to their respective (and very different) businesses is this type of programming, this time of year? For Hallmark Channel, as is the case for its namesake greeting-card business, December is truly a time to be merry. This year’s “Countdown to Christmas” will premiere 31 new holiday films on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights between Thanksgiving and Christmas....
Grifters are littering the TV landscape. From Netflix’s “Inventing Anna” and true-crime documentaries “Bad Vegan” and “The Tinder Swindler,” to Hulu’s “The Dropout,” and Apple’s new series “WeCrashed,” audiences are flush for choice when it comes to the art of being bad. But what is it about grifters that is currently attracting us? It’s a soup as complicated as the characters we’re seeing. This isn’t a particularly new trend; the conman, of course, is as American as apple pie....
The Wells Fargo gang previously forecast Netflix’s SVOD-only subscribers at 256 million subs globally by the end of 2025. In a June 3 report, the analysts raised their estimate by 16 million subs to 272 million global subscribers thanks to the coming addition of an AVOD (ad-supported video on-demand) tier. Of that sum, 101 million users — slightly more than one-third — will be on the AVOD tier, per their prediction....
This version saw strong reactions in multiple showings in Los Angeles and New York, but the color film proved to be a box-office disappointment with $9.7 million in after five weeks in theaters. The black-and-white screenings included sold-out shows with appearances by del Toro and lead Bradley Cooper. Word of this alternative version was first revealed when the director spoke to IndieWire’s Eric Kohn last month as part of our Awards Spotlight video series....
Peacock (and Paramount+, for that matter) experienced “tremendous growth,” they wrote. “The star of these charts is the rocket ship that is Peacock,” MoffettNathanson said. Take a moment to read that sentence again: “star… rocket ship… is Peacock.” MoffettNathanson tacked on a few caveats to that bold statement. Peacock’s ad-supported tier likely serves to exaggerate its growth; the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl also served to goose the quarter....
Appearing on The Playlist’s “Fourth Wall” podcast, Snyder shared the following while discussing how he pulled off directing the movie and serving as its cinematographer and camera operator: “There’s no sitting down, like, I banned chairs from the set. But the nice thing is, it’s really intimate. I can just talk to the actors right there, I’m not back in a monitor across the room. It was definitely the most purely engaged I’ve been making a movie....
“I saw that [and] I was quite honored that she would say that,” Zendaya said. “Obviously she’s incredible and I’m very flattered that she would think of me. You know, it’s just an idea. The internet kinda takes things and run with it.” Fox said she had not gotten any word from Tarantino about “Kill Bill Vol. 3” officially moving forward, but she appeared enthusiastic about the idea of Zendaya playing her character’s daughter as an adult....
Centered on the real-life all-female traveling baseball league formed in 1943, “A League of Their Own” introduces entirely new characters separate from the film. Jacobson stars as Carson, a catcher who joins a team during WWII and seems to spark a romance with slugger Greta (D’Arcy Carden). Chanté Adams (“A Journal for Jordan”) co-leads as baseball phenom Max, a composite character representing real-life Negro League players Mamie Johnson, Connie Morgan, and Toni Stone....
Set on a fantasy planet where only women can survive the harsh climate, the adventure follows a mother and daughter on a grueling journey to find and kill the evil “Kate Bush,” rumored to be death herself. One part “Annihilation” and one part “The Love Witch,” and cast under the veneer of a sadistic “The NeverEnding Story,” the film creates a lush — sometimes grotesque — alternate universe ruled by unique rules, creatures, and longings....
The very idea of cinema showing the horrors and travails of motherhood isn’t new. It’s a trend gaining speed with films like “Kindred,” “Umma,” and “Lamb.” And yet, what separates Wohl’s film from everything else is how it dissects the performative exteriority of maternal life by using postpartum psychosis as a means to inflict the real-life terrors, paranoia, insomnia and hallucinations experienced by new mothers. At its outset, “Baby Ruby” places the titular infant as the villain....
The film, at first seems like it may be building to an art-house Iranian version of shlocky horror-pic “Don’t Breathe.” Leila (Diana Habibi), a desperate woman on the run, finds shelter in a Spartan apartment. While the sirens call outside and the police flood the building, she huddles under a table, hand over her own mouth trying to stifle her own sobs. The apartment belongs to Ali (Navid Mohammadzadeh), a man who has lost most of his vision and despite what his doctor says, has little interest in taking the required medications to preserve what little he has left....
In a guest column also for TheWrap, the film’s co-writer and producer Ned Martel fired back at Duralde’s criticisms, including the charge that Emory’s “racist put-downs” of his friend Bernard, who is Black, lose their charge when coming from a Latinx actor and instead exonerate the white racism of the period. To wit, Robin de Jesús also played Emory in the 2018 stage revival of “Boys,” directed by Mantello, and earned a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play....
The documentary special, which premiered on Apple’s streaming service in August 2020, followed a group of teenage boys in Texas who created a representative government. Apple’s official synopsis for the documentary reads: “‘Boys State’ is a wildly entertaining and continually revealing immersion into a week-long annual program in which a thousand Texas high school seniors gather for an elaborate mock exercise: building their own state government. Filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine closely track the escalating tensions that arise within a particularly riveting gubernatorial race, training their cameras on unforgettable teenagers like Ben, a Reagan-loving arch-conservative who brims with confidence despite personal setbacks, and Steven, a progressive-minded child of Mexican immigrants who stands by his convictions amidst the sea of red....
There’s something in the air, something shifting. Even Joy (Elizabeth Banks) can feel it from the relative safety of her suburban Chicago enclave, all bake sales and PTA meetings and hanging out with her increasingly inebriated neighbor Lana (Kate Mara) on her breezy porch. It’s August 1968, and when Joy and her husband Will (Chris Messina) head into the city for a glitzy event for Will’s law firm, Joy is shocked to find a protest literally banging on the doors of the otherwise pristine hotel....
