Did movie culture need another movie about whistleblower Reality Winner after last year’s “Reality“?  Apparently, yes: Tina Satter‘s film, adapting her play “Is This A Room,” did well at the 2023 Berlinale and when it premiered on HBO last May.  But formally speaking, it’s a tricky film, sticking verbatim to the released interrogation transcripts taken from the day of Winner’s June 3, 2017 arrest.

Continue reading ‘Winner’ Trailer: Emilia Jones Stars In Susanna Fogel’s Reality Winner Sundance Satire at The Playlist.

Why would someone lie about having cats to get a date? When you think about it, that sort of lie really does start to become a bit… sinister. And that’s the question at the heart of the film, “Cat Person.”

Look, let’s get this out of the way first — “Cat Person” isn’t a “new” film in the strictest sense of the word. The film debuted at Sundance a year ago, got rave reviews, and then was in theaters for about one minute (give or take).

Continue reading ‘Cat Person’ Trailer: Susanna Fogel’s Acclaimed Film Finally Gets Wide Release On Hulu In February at The Playlist.

The first line of “Winner” says it all: “My name is Reality Winner.” This uninspired introduction to the character, an NSA employee who leaked classified documents surrounding Russian election interference to the media, sets the tone for what’s to follow. Susanna Fogel’s film is not actively bad, just aggressively bland.

READ MORE: Sundance 2024: The 23 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch

This ripped-from-the-headlines tale has no shortage of compelling material from which to pull, even beyond just the subject’s wild name.

Continue reading ‘Winner’ Review: Emilia Jones Can’t Really Rescue An All-Too-Safe Biopic Treatment [Sundance] at The Playlist.

Just the other day, we noted that James Gunn has launched a multi-year expansion of DC Studios: five films, five TV series, and that’s already about as long as a ten-year plan that’s reportedly not all he has to unveil in his “Gods And Monsters” phase of his DC Universe reboot. But so far, only one film has a release date, “Superman: Legacy,” due in summer 2025, which Gunn will write and direct himself.

Continue reading ‘Supergirl’: Milly Alcock, Emilia Jones & More Testing For DC Studios Film at The Playlist.

Well, it’s arrived: after its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Susanna Fogel‘s “Cat Person” arrives in theaters in October. Not sure what all the fuss over “Cat Person” is about? Here’s the short version: Kristen Roupenian‘s short story of the same name was published in The New Yorker in 2017, causing an immediate sensation.  

READ MORE: ‘Cat Person’ Review: Emilia Jones And Nicholas Braun Shine In Gripping, Uneven Adaptation Of Viral Sensation [Sundance]

With a story so viral it needs to be into a film, right?

Continue reading ‘Cat Person’ Trailer: Susanna Fogel’s Genre-Bending Movie About Modern Relationships Hits Theaters On October 6. at The Playlist.

Margaret Atwood said it best: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” This age-old discrepancy in the way the two genders experience the world is written both at the initial frame and very heart of Susanna Fogel’s mercurial “Cat Person,” a fiendishly playful relationship-gone-bad quasi-thriller with a sense of humor about its own unknowability. The two parties (who are barely in a relationship) are a beautiful, inquisitive 20-year-old college student testing the limits of her own sexual powers and a painfully average thirtysomething guy dying to impress her via clueless means.

Continue reading ‘Cat Person’ Review: Emilia Jones And Nicholas Braun Shine In Gripping, Uneven Adaptation Of Viral Sensation [Sundance] at The Playlist.

PARK CITY – When a toddler age Alysia Abbott moved to San Francisco with her father Steve in 1973 her life took a decidedly different direction. She was raised in what today would still be considered unconventional circumstances (no, it wasn’t in a commune). And like almost any father-daughter relationship that can lead to resentment and misunderstanding. She chronicled that journey in her novel, “Fairland: A Memoir of My Father,” which has been adapted into a new film, “Fairyland” which debuted at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival this morning.

Continue reading ‘Fairyland’ Review: Emilia Jones Shines In Uneven Father/Daughter Drama at The Playlist.

Emilia Jones, known for playing the lead in “CODA,” is taking the lead in “Winner,” a darkly comedic biopic based on whistleblower Reality Winner. Directed by Susanna Fogel, the writer of “Booksmart,” and the writer/director of “The Spy Who Dumped Me” (2018), Connie Britton has been cast to play Reality’s mother, and Zach Galifianakis as Reality’s father.

Continue reading Emilia Jones To Lead Whistleblower Reality Winner Biopic Co-Starring Zach Galifinakis & Connie Britton at The Playlist.

Ahead of the premiere of the second season of “Locke & Key” in October of last year, Netflix announced that the show’s third and final season had been commissioned. While fans may be disappointed that the show’s upcoming season marks its end, they can be reassured by the fact that the termination of the show is on the creator’s terms. Via an Instagram post, co-creators Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill wrote, “Once we began working on the series, we felt three seasons was the ideal length to bring the story of the Locke family and their Keyhouse adventures to a satisfying conclusion…As storytellers, we are grateful that we had the opportunity to tell our version of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s incredible story exactly the way we wanted.

Continue reading ‘Locke & Key’ Season 3 Trailer: Magic Will Be Unlocked One Final Time Starting In August at The Playlist.

Awards season got into gear on Monday night as the Gotham Awards returned to an in-person ceremony for the first time in two years. And it was a massive night for Netflix as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter” took Best Feature, Breakthrough Director, Best Screenplay and tied for Outstanding Performance (Olivia Colman). That’s a big award season win for the streamer as only one Gotham’s Best Feature winner over the previous seven years hasn’t been Oscar-nominated for Best Picture (“The RIder”).

Continue reading ‘The Lost Daughter’ Dominates the Gotham Awards Taking Best Feature at The Playlist.

By now, the odds are you have read the New Yorker short story “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenia. “Cat Person” was the year’s most downloaded fiction published in The New Yorker, and one of the most widely read pieces overall of 2017. The story follows the brief relationship between a young twenty-year-old female sophomore college student and an older man who is a regular at the movie theater where Margot works.  The BBC described the short story as “being shared widely online as social media users discuss how much it relates to modern-day dating.” The true hook of it all that makes the basic plotline more intriguing than it sounds?

Continue reading ‘Cat Person’: Full Cast Includes Geraldine Viswanathan, Michael Gandolfini, Hope Davis & More at The Playlist.

Trouble is afoot for the Locke siblings in the “Locke and Key” season 2 trailer. In the first season of the hit Netflix show, the three kids learned about the existence of magic keys’ in their father’s family home. The season 2 trailer hints that they’ll begin to truly understand what they’re in for with this powerful magic at their fingertips.

READ MORE: Fall 2021 TV Preview: 40+ Series To Watch

After Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode Locke discover the magical keys scattered around their father’s house in season one, they spent most of their time trying to protect the items from a demon name Dodge who hopes to claim it for herself.

Continue reading ‘Locke & Key’ Season 2 Trailer: New Magic Will Be Forged As Trouble Brews at The Playlist.

Apple TV+ has put out a bunch of high-profile original movies in the year-and-a-half since its launch.  “On the Rocks,” “Greyhound,” and “Cherry” were all made with veteran directors and big-name stars. But critics weren’t as enthusiastic about any of those projects as the streamer might have hoped.  “CODA,” on the other hand, has been piling up accolades without an A-lister in sight.  

Continue reading ‘CODA’ Trailer: The Deaf Culture-Focused Drama that Dominated Sundance Comes To Apple TV+ In August at The Playlist.

In this virtual era, it goes without saying that much of the communal aspect of a film festival has evaporated. Strangers don’t compare notes waiting inline or with their neighbor before a film begins. Reactions are confined to social media or you’re favorite message thread. And for Sundance, a festival that can launch a film into the stratosphere after one glorious world premiere, the loss of in-person screenings is even more painful. That being said, if there is any film that would elicit a buzzworthy standing ovation in both Park City’s gigantic Eccles Theater and in viewer’s living rooms it’s Sian Heder’s “CODA,” which was part of a slate of films to open the 2021 edition of the fest on Thursday.

Continue reading ‘CODA’ Transcends The Feel-Good Movie Genre Even When You See It Coming A Mile Away [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

We finally have our first look at Netflix‘s highly anticipated new horror-thriller series, “Locke & Key.” Based on the popular comic series written by Joe Hill, the show is centered around the Locke family who, after their father’s mysterious death, move to their family’s ancestral home, Keyhouse, in Massachusetts. Soon after, the Locke’s begin to find strange keys that lead them to suspect there may be more to their father’s death than they initially suspected.

Continue reading ‘Locke & Key’ Trailer: Netflix Finally Opens The Door To The Long-Awaited Horror Fantasy Series at The Playlist.