With Kaya Scodelario and January Jones on the payroll, it’s frankly astonishing “Spinning Out” landed on Netflix earlier this month with little fanfare. The natural assumption? This figure skating series must be terrible. As it turns out, while that’s not totally wide of the mark, creator Samantha Stratton (“Mr. Mercedes”) also has a couple of tidbits in store for viewers that might be worthwhile – even those with zero interest in the chilly sport or similarly chilly human interplay.

Continue reading ‘Spinning Out’: Kaya Scodelario & January Jones Can’t Stop This Melodrama From Whirling Out Of Control [Review] at The Playlist.

Michelle Monaghan’s brimming résuméis back-to-back with an unusually equal blend of duds, hits and titles falling somewhere between both ends of the spectrum. While nearly every great actor manages to retain bee’s knees status even when working with rubbish material, Miss Monaghan mostly only performs well with a decent script in her hands – bar “Made of Honor” in which she came out on top despite some lazy screenwriting.

Continue reading ‘Messiah’: Michelle Monaghan Shows Us What She’s Made Of In New Political Thriller [Review] at The Playlist.

The new Netflix comedy series, “The Politician,” is the type of show that causes viewers to wince, draw breath through gritted teeth, and exclaim dismay at the dog’s dinner of themes and tones before their eyes. Creator-Producer Ryan Murphy’s latest bundle of satirical joy – born of his longstanding creative partnership with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan – is centered on the all-consuming political ambitions of one Payton Hobart (Ben Platt), with each season set to follow the go-getter across a different election in his career.

Continue reading ‘The Politician’: Ryan Murphy’s Star-Studded Satire Is Tediously Melodramatic [Review] at The Playlist.

As RuPaul Charles would say, “Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.” Why? Because James Mangold’s much-anticipated “Ford v Ferrari” just had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival followed up by the Canadian premiere in Toronto and the debut was a roaring success. In this high-speed biopic (titled “Le Mans ’66” in the U.K. and other territories), the “Walk the Line” and“3:10 to Yuma” director pits an underdog team of American automotive engineers against Ferrari in the 1966 ‘24 Hours of Le Mans’ endurance race in France.

Continue reading ‘Ford V. Ferrari’ Trailer: Christian Bale & Matt Damon Race To The Finish Line at The Playlist.

Since its earliest venture into true crime, Netflix has hooked viewers on the world’s most perplexing cases. The details of these—from the mysterious fire poker of “The Staircase” fame to the shocking abuse of police power in “Making a Murderer” —have made amateur sleuths of us all. The streaming platform hasn’t quite spanned the entire gamut of crimes as yet, but the latest addition to its whodunit shelf is a step in the right direction.

Continue reading ‘Unbelievable’: Kaitlyn Dever Delivers A Stunning Performance In New Netflix Sexual Assault Drama [Review] at The Playlist.

“Sweetness in the Belly” has been mired in controversy since the release of images showing Dakota Fanning portraying a “white Ethiopian Muslim” during filming. Concerned folks cooked up a social media storm, outraged at the idea of a white woman representing the contemporary African refugee experience. However, Ethiopian director Zeresenay Berhane Mehari (“Difret”) defends the romantic drama as having his homeland at its heart, calling the aforementioned description of the protagonist a mischaracterization and suggesting the story’s true nature was misunderstood.

Continue reading ‘Sweetness In The Belly’: Dakota Fanning Stars In A Contentious Refugee Drama [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.

Following a general pattern of decline since its ‘20s golden age, over the past two decades, Germany has seen a moderate revival of its limited—and drastically underfunded—film industry. Even so, despite a greater output of movies and higher box office returns, few recent German productions achieved mainstream success. Wolfgang Becker’s ingenious tragicomedy “Good Bye, Lenin!” and Tom Tykwer’s disturbing psychological thriller “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” are two internationally-acclaimed exceptions that prove the rule.

Continue reading ‘Pelican Blood’: Katrin Gebbe’s Astonishing Psycho-Drama Opens The Door To A Pint-Sized Psycho [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.

Best known for his chameleonic turns in a wide array of ludicrous scenarios, Emmy-nominated Sacha Baron Cohen embraces an immensely different role in “The Spy.” Inspired by actual events, Netflix’s six-part limited series sees an actor who usually leans towards the absurd get real for a change, playing the mustachioed Eli Cohen, an undercover Israeli agent who wormed his way into the highest ranks of Syria’s government in the ’60s under the alias Kamel Amin Thaabet.

Continue reading ‘The Spy’: Sacha Baron Cohen Is A Dramatic Powerhouse In Gideon Raff’s Bold Spy Series [Review] at The Playlist.

Steven Soderbergh is renowned for his experimental style and perennial disdain for mainstream film norms. For that reason, it came as no surprise when he shot his disturbing psychological thriller “Unsane” entirely using an iPhone 7 Plus in 4K. Trailblazing in the sense it proves feature films can be made on a relatively low budget – around the $1.5 million mark – Unsane has the director’s filthy fingerprints all over it.

Continue reading ‘The Laundromat’ Trailer: Steven Soderbergh Tackles The Panama Papers Scandal With Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman & More at The Playlist.

“An iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary.” When he died in 1983, these were the words chosen by The New York Times to epitomize Luis “The King of Surrealism” Buñuel. Across his lifetime, the award-winning Spanish filmmaker worked on no less than 33 movies, the sum of which earned him those descriptors.

Three years after his first feature “The Golden Age,” a controversial satire on bourgeois society and Catholicism co-written by Salvador Dali, Buñuel began to demonstrate the broad diversity of his talents.

Continue reading ‘Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles’: A Stunning Animated Film That Dives Into The Life Of A Filmmaker In A Wholly Unique Way [Review] at The Playlist.

In 1979, China rolled out its notorious one-child policy, banning its citizens – with some exceptions – from having more than one child. Part of an extensive birth-planning program, aiming to control a population nearing 1 billion in size and thus stretch limited resources further, it was the most extreme measure of its kind. In 2015, to improve the balanced development of the population and to tackle an aging population, China abolished the rule. Even though the government is under immense pressure to end restrictions altogether, it returned to a two-child policy similar to that enforced for a decade between 1969 and 1979.

Continue reading ‘One Child Nation’: A Gripping But Overstuffed Snapshot Of China’s One-Child Policy [Review] at The Playlist.

If the silver screen has one true love, it’s the transformation of tough real-life events into entertaining escapades. Sometimes, it works well. Films like “Argo” treat their source material respectfully, taking distressing true stories and making thoughtful, digestible features from them. As authentic characters place themselves in peril, narrowly dodging one life-threatening jam after another, audiences watch aghast, wondering, “Would we be as courageous?”

Other times, it doesn’t work at all.

Continue reading ‘The Red Sea Diving Resort’: Gideon Raff’s Career Sinks In This Dull, Exploitative True Story [Review] at The Playlist.

With her last film, the critically-acclaimed “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” Marielle Heller accepted the grueling challenge of painting an odious misanthrope in a positive light. And dang, she pulled it off with aplomb, Melissa McCarthy and screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty helping the director make notorious bunco writer Lee Israel not only excusable but utterly endearing (read our review here).

READ MORE: The Best Films Of 2019… So Far

Heller clearly isn’t tempted by an easy life, her upcoming feature “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” entailing molding Tom Hanks into the iconic Mr.

Continue reading ‘A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood’ Trailer: Tom Hanks Is Born To Play Mr. Rogers at The Playlist.

Some movies should never be graced with a sequel. Inexcusable in almost every way, Antione Fuqua’s 2013 action-thriller “Olympus Has Fallen” is one of them (read our review here). Sadly, Babak Najafi’s equally crummy “London Has Fallen” tread on its heels 3 years later (read our review here). And it seems the end isn’t quite nigh for the series. Following a similar recess, Ric Roman Waugh now sees fit to craft a full-blown trilogy with a script by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt.

Continue reading ‘Angel Has Fallen’: Somehow The ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ Series With Gerard Butler Made It To A Third Film at The Playlist.

Paramount Pictures has delivered a mixed bag of horrors over the past year or so, with some being innovative and others standard-issue. “Overlord” and “Pet Sematary” are decidedly mixed bags. Regrettably, “The Cloverfield Paradox” is mired in its own monstrosity at the bottom of the list. But none were as inspired as “A Quiet Place” though, a truly fresh offering by John Krasinski that sits as the best of the bunch. 

Continue reading ‘Crawl’ Trailer: Alexandre Aja’s New Film Is A Disaster Film With A Healthy Dose Of Horror at The Playlist.