Given some of the star-studded titles that have closed out SXSW in previous years, a romantic comedy that could best be described as Harry Styles Wish Fulfillment might seem like an odd choice to round out the festival. But “The Idea of You,” a Michael Showalter adaptation of Robinne Lee’s book of the same name, proves that romantic comedies, when done well, are every bit as deserving of the red carpet rollout.

Continue reading ‘The Idea Of You’ Review: Anne Hathaway Shines In This Romantic Comedy Done Right [SXSW] at The Playlist.

Look, let’s be honest. From the opening seconds of its debut trailer, we all knew that Alex Garland’s “Civil War” would not be a pill that went down easily. Garland may have built his career around challenging visions of the future, but a film about a second American Civil War—in an election year, no less—is the kind of thing that gives even professional discourse writers a headache. 

So, if it helps, I have both good news and bad news.

Continue reading ‘Civil War’ Review: Alex Garland’s Latest Is Both Unforgettable & Challenging As Hell [SXSW] at The Playlist.

Sometimes, it feels like Hollywood took the wrong lessons from the “John Wick” franchise. While many producers have tried to recreate lighting in a bottle by focusing on the aesthetics of the trade—suits and neon lighting everywhere on screen—the real lesson is the celebration of the practical and a renewed reverence for the stunt professionals who make those sequences happen on screen. That will no doubt be the legacy of David Leitch, whose evolution as a filmmaker post-”John Wick” has led him to “The Fall Guy,” a bright and energetic action movie about the joy of making action movies.

Continue reading ‘The Fall Guy’ Review: An Exuberant & Kinetic, But Sometimes Underwritten Love Letter To The Stunt Industry [SXSW] at The Playlist.

In the introduction to the SXSW premiere of his movie, Dev Patel joked that he had recently stumbled across an internet article asking where he was now. According to Patel, that answer is simple: he’s been working on “Monkey Man,” the Mumbai-set actioner he wrote, directed, and starred in. Having now seen the film, I can confirm it’s the sort of thing that would absolutely drain several years of your life.

Continue reading ‘Monkey Man’ Review: Dev Patel’s Goes Into ‘John Wick’ Revenge Mode In Mumbai-Set Actioner [SXSW] at The Playlist.

Hollywood trends may come and go, but horror? Horror never slumps. While the end-of-year narratives for 2023 may be overshadowed by questions of technology and corporate shenanigans – a word chosen for The Playlist’s audience of all ages – this was still a very impressive year for horror.

READ MORE: The 21 Best Films Of 2023

And like every year, the standouts come from every side of the industry. You’ll find on this list box office darlings, streaming standouts, and festival favorites.

Continue reading The Best Horror Films Of 2023 at The Playlist.

Last week, FX confirmed that the third season of its critically acclaimed series “Reservation Dogs” would be its last. It’s the second TV program about indigenous communities after Peacock‘s “Rutherford Falls” to get the ax recently. But hopefully Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi‘s series goes out on a high note in its final batch of episodes. After all, “Reservation Dogs” received high praise its first two seasons.

Continue reading ‘Reservation Dogs’ Season 3 Trailer: The Rez Dogs Say Goodbye To California Dreams On August 2 at The Playlist.

If there’s a silver lining to your favorite show taking three years off between seasons, it’s that I’ve had plenty of time to get people into “Warrior.” I’ve always pitched Max’s period action series as a West Coast version of “Gangs of New York,” one that weaves together historiography and spectacle in equal measures and features some of the most talented Asian-American actors in the industry today.

Continue reading ‘Warrior’ Review: Streaming’s Best Action Series Returns From The Dead With A Gripping Third Season at The Playlist.

When the vampire mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows” hit theaters in 2014, even its most ardent fans probably could not have guessed that its subsequent FX television adaptation would become one of the most popular comedies in a crowded television marketplace. But now, almost a decade later, the “What We Do in the Shadows” brand remains as strong as ever, and fans are ready for what season five will have to offer their favorite band of misfit vampires.

Continue reading ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Season 5 Trailer: Staten Island’s Vampires Return To Suck Your Blood at The Playlist.

It is part of the unspoken agreement between Hollywood and audiences that there always be one high-quality period show that explores the boundaries between the entertainment industry and exploitation. For many years, Netflix held up its end of the bargain with “GLOW,” but the decision to cancel that show left a void that needed to be filled. Thankfully, as the new trailer for “Minx” seems to confirm, this show about adult entertainment and feminism in the 1970s will continue to pick up the slack.

Continue reading ‘Minx’ Season 2 Trailer: Adult Publishing Dramedy Returns From The Dead At Starz In July at The Playlist.

With the premiere of “Killers of the Flower Moon” at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend, one of the key questions for audiences was if Martin Scorsese did right by the Osage Nation. While the film examines a critical turning point in the history of the tribe, as our own Robert Daniels noted, there are limits to how much even well-meaning direction can capture onscreen when a filmmaker is not part of the community he is covering.

Continue reading Osage Nation Leaders Speak Positively About ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ & Martin Scorsese at The Playlist.

If you have been wondering why the trailers for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” feature color and black-and-white footage, join the club. While audiences can recognize this as an artistic choice Nolan has made before, it was hard to say what Nolan would be doing with color in his latest release. But thanks to a new round of interviews, it now looks like Nolan can confirm that he is returning to a process he refined in “Memento” to anchor his latest movie in the objective and the subjective natures of memory.

Continue reading Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Will Use A ‘Memento’ Method at The Playlist.

With all the headlines dedicated to the #MeToo movement over the past few years, it can sometimes feel like the industry has made progress — certainly, enough to launch several biopics and television shows about its own misconduct. But this is still a time when “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” actress Adèle Haenel feels compelled to quit the French film industry in protest, and when the director of the Cannes Film Festival feels the need to say, out loud, that Cannes is not a “festival for rapists.”

READ MORE: Cannes Director Says Event Is Not “A Festival For Rapists”

Needless to say, there’s still work to be done, and it’s good that these conversations continue to happen – especially when they involve an icon of the French film industry, Marion Cotillard.

Continue reading Marion Cotillard Says #MeToo Has Taught Young Actresses What’s ‘Not Right’ at The Playlist.

If you caught “Fast X” in the theaters this weekend, you might have seen the return of a few familiar faces from the broader “Fast and the Furious” franchise. But one particular sequence may have surprised even the most optimistic franchise fans. In that scene — and spoiler alerts for those who treat mid-credit sequences with the gravitas of the preceding film — it is revealed that Luke Hobbs, the one-person army played by Dwayne Johnson, was back in the fold.

Continue reading How Director Louis Leterrier Orchestrated An Unlikely ‘Fast X’ Reunion at The Playlist.

Robert Carlyle is the champion of unexpected sequels. First was “T2 Trainspotting” in 2017, Danny Boyle’s follow-up to the 1996 British classic. And now there’s “The Full Monty,” an eight-episode series sequel that picks up 25 years later with the original film’s cast. The first trailer shows how the city of Sheffield has fared — and why things may not have gotten any easier for our ragtag group of working-class protagonists.

Continue reading ‘The Full Monty’ Trailer: Comebacks Are Hard To Come By at The Playlist.

In the early 2000s, BMW launched a new series of short, narrative films meant to showcase their car models through the work of celebrated filmmakers. The first wave of shorts included directors Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, and BMW has periodically resurrected the series, including bringing back Clive Owen to reprise his BMW Films character in 2016 for a film directed by Neill Blomkamp.

Continue reading BMW Films Returns With Pom Klementieff In ‘The Calm’ at The Playlist.

If you opened Twitter this weekend, the odds are that your feed was filled with loving tributes to Rick Dalton, Leonardo DiCaprio’s B-grade movie star from Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.” So naturally, the joke spread like wildfire, and before long, Dalton’s death notice had even been “added” to the marquee of the New Beverly Cinema, the repertory movie theater in Los Angeles owned by Tarantino himself.

Continue reading Rick Dalton, Star of ‘Bounty Law,’ Has Died at The Playlist.

With the recent popularity of shows like “Rutherford Falls” and “Reservation Dogs,” television has quickly become a home for Indigenous stories onscreen. Even now, though, those and other media remain the exception and not the rule. Consider Lily Gladstone, the actress of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage who broke onto the scene in 2013 with a role in Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women.” A decade later, Gladstone was inches away from leaving the industry altogether before being cast in a leading role in Martin Scorsese’s “Killer of the Flower Moon.”

READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gladstone shared that she was registering for a data analytics course when the meeting with Scorsese came through.

Continue reading Lily Gladstone Almost Quit Acting Before ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ at The Playlist.

When it comes to the production and distribution process of independent cinema, no news is often good news. If you’re making headlines for what’s happening on set, odds are that the production is taking on a terrible life of its own. But in the case of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, a little bit of production chaos is just the price of admission. And with Cannes a potential marketplace for his latest film, “Megalopolis,” Coppola is again here to tell us that everything is going pretty much as planned.

Continue reading Francis Ford Coppola Doesn’t Expect ‘Megalopolis’ In Theaters This Year at The Playlist.

In the era of Too Much Television, it can be challenging for any show to break through the noise. Then again, most shows aren’t about a nun caught in a cold war between the Catholic Church and an all-seeing, all-knowing evil algorithm. “Mrs. Davis” is another feather in the cap of Peacock, who has quietly survived the collapse of platforms like HBO Max to become perhaps the best creator-focused streaming service of 2023.

Continue reading ‘Mrs. Davis’ Review: Peacock’s Absurd Comedy Is Awash In Magic And Mystery at The Playlist.

If you happened to be at the Overlook Film Festival earlier this month, you were gifted with the rare opportunity to see Jim Jarmusch onstage twice. Once was during a live performance by Sqürl, the band he cofounded with collaborator and producer Carter Logan; the other was the tenth-anniversary screening of “Only Lovers Left Alive.” On paper, it was the perfect synthesis of art forms and artists, with Jarmusch and Logan playing songs from the “Only Lovers Left Alive” soundtrack before introing the film the following day.

Continue reading Jim Jarmusch & Carter Logan On The 10th Anniversary Of ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ [Interview] at The Playlist.

Few characters manage the passage of time quite like Dracula. From the character’s iconic beginnings as a Universal Studios monster to more recent attempts to craft a shared universe, Dracula adaptations often offer the clearest reflection of both the film industry and broader societal trends. “Dracula and vampire movies have run the gamut of metaphors,” notes Chris McKay, director of “Renfield,” a horror-comedy set in the current day.

Continue reading Chris McKay On ‘Renfield’ And The Art Of Making Nic Cage Memes [Interview] at The Playlist.

For the past decade, Jim Jarmusch has walked two paths in the entertainment industry. While he continues to be best known for his work as a filmmaker and music video director, Jarmusch also performs with producer Carter Logan under the name Sqürl, a self-described “enthusiastically marginal rock band from New York City” that has also collaborated on the soundtracks for Jarmusch’s last three films. But according to the director, only one of those roles may be part of his next project.

Continue reading Jim Jarmusch Says His Next “Quiet, Funny & Sad” Film Will Shoot This Fall & May Have No Music at The Playlist.

Immovable objects meet unstoppable forces. Netflix may not be the best platform when it comes to promoting its original titles, but when that original film happens to feature a retired assassin played by Jennifer Lopez, odds are you don’t need to put a ton of money into the marketing budget. Audiences have been hungry for more Lopez ever since her scene-stealing turn in 2019’s “Hustlers,” and the seeds planted in that performance – and the subsequent media cycles it inspired – are being paid off in 2023 with films like “Shotgun Wedding,” and now, “The Mother.”

READ MORE: ‘The Mother’: Jennifer Lopez To Play An Assassin In Netflix Action Film From ‘Mulan’ Director Niki Caro

In the first trailer for “The Mother,” Jennifer Lopez plays a deadly female assassin who comes out of hiding to protect the daughter that she gave up years before while on the run from dangerous men.

Continue reading ‘The Mother’ Trailer: Jennifer Lopez Is A Deadly Assassin Protecting Her Estranged Daughter At Any Cost at The Playlist.

In 2013, the body of a college student was found floating in the Seekonk River. The man was later identified as Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University undergraduate who had recently been misidentified as one of the Boston Marathon Bombers by users on Reddit. In the aftermath of Tripathi’s death, many worried that social media had become a danger to due process. That toxicity is a wonderful jumping-off point for director Philip Barantini and screenwriters Barnaby Boulton and James Cummings for their new thriller, “Accused.”

READ MORE: Chad Stahelski Thinks It’s Time For The Academy To Recognize Stunt Performers

There’s nothing extraordinary about Harri Bavshar (Chaneil Kular).

Continue reading ‘Accused’ Review: A Thrilling Take On Social Media Witch Hunts [Overlook] at The Playlist.

In the theater, someone screams. The lights come up, and the crowd sees two paramedics race down the aisle. Then, suddenly, Vincent Price’s voice booms from behind the screen. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm,” Price announces from the past, his voice the only sign that today’s screening does indeed continue. “She’s being attended to by a doctor and is quite alright.” As the crowd laughs and then begins to cheer, the two paramedics – who bear a striking resemblance to the festival programmers – carry the woman out on a stretcher.

Continue reading Joe Dante Reflects On ‘Matinee’ And Movie Theater Magic [Interview] at The Playlist.