Something that is brought up quite a bit in Hollywood stories that are part of the #MeToo movement is the lack of nuance. With how society treats these stories today, most of the time, studios are quick to act against an accused person and that person is blacklisted. However, as Lena Waithe explains in regards to the recent sexual harassment situation on her TV series “The Chi,” many of these situations require nuanced thinking before reaction.

Continue reading Lena Waithe Says Jason Mitchell Allegations On ‘The Chi’ Were Handled Poorly: “I Trusted Someone Else To Do My Job” at The Playlist.

A week ago, it was announced that actor Jason Mitchell had been fired from the Showtime series “The Chi,” as well as an upcoming Netflix film, “Desperados,” due to on-set misconduct that included alleged sexual harassment. It’s a messy, sad story that seems to have been a fairly open secret for those that worked with Mitchell. How much of an open secret?

Continue reading ‘The Chi’ Showrunner Says Creator Lena Waithe & Showtime Knew About Jason Mitchell’s Harassment Allegations Before Season 2 Filmed at The Playlist.

After a star-making turn as Eazy-E in the 2015 box office hit, “Straight Outta Compton,” actor Jason Mitchell appeared to be on the fast-track for superstardom. He followed that film with a starring role on the critically-acclaimed Showtime series “The Chi,” and appeared in projects like “Mudbound,” “Kong: Skull Island,” and recently, “The Mustang.” But it appears that rough waters are ahead for Mitchell, as he’s reportedly been fired from his series work and an upcoming film due to some unsettling accusations.

Continue reading ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Actor Jason Mitchell Reportedly Fired From ‘The Chi’ After On-Set Sexual Harassment Accusations at The Playlist.

PARK CITY – There have been renewed calls over the past decade for significant criminal justice reform in the United States. Everything from rehabilitation programs to private prisons to racial profiling in sentencing, among other topics, are under the glare of a generation that sees how the policies of the past forty years have failed. In that context, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre‘s directorial debut, “The Mustang,” tells a familiar tale of a convict who needs a wakeup call and gets it in the most unexpected manner, wild horse training.

Continue reading ‘The Mustang’ Echoes Too Much Of ‘The Rider’ To Stand On Its Own [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

It’s that time of year again. No, we’re not talking about the holidays or awards season. Those are great and all, but we’re talking about Sundance trailers. That’s right, with the first major festival of 2019 already announced, we’re going to start seeing trailers for the films being released over the next few weeks. And first one out of the gate is an especially interesting one – “The Mustang.”

“The Mustang” tells the story of a convict that’s struggling after 12 years in prison.

Continue reading ‘The Mustang’ Trailer: Matthias Schoenaerts Attempts To Train Wild Horses In This Sundance Selection at The Playlist.

We’ve been anxiously awaiting the next major film from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts after he somehow made a Vietnam-era King Kong film not only good, but also just a hell of a lot of fun, with “Kong: Skull Island.” He’s been flirting with the video game world for a couple years now, as he gears up for (maybe) directing “Metal Gear Solid” and definitely directing the Sega vs.

Continue reading Jordan Vogt-Roberts Directs Jason Mitchell In A Live-Action ‘PUBG’ PS4 Short at The Playlist.

Normally, when a filmmaker is prepping to premiere at a film festival, they have to decide if they want to do a premiere in the early part of the year or wait until the fall festivals. If you’re writer-director Sebastián Silva, you do both. Silva is coming off the recent premiere of his film “Fistful of Dirt” at Telluride a couple weeks ago, but before that, he premiered “Tyrel” at Sundance.

Continue reading ‘Tyrel’ Trailer: Sebastián Silva’s Sundance Thriller Is Being Called This Year’s ‘Get Out’ at The Playlist.

Many of today’s most singular auteurs (like David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer, Antoine Fuqua, and Michel Gondry) fine-tuned their style by starting in the music video world before making a switch over to the film world. Now, prolific music video director Director X is joining the ranks with the remake of the 1972 blaxploitation film “Superfly.”

In the new teaser for the film, we can definitely see that this is a true reimagining of the original.

Continue reading ‘Superfly’ Trailer: Blaxsploitation Film Get’s A 2018 Makeover In A Brand New City at The Playlist.

You don’t need great performances for a great movie, we suppose — Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s mesmerizing 2016 documentary/art piece “Homo Sapiens,” for instance, doesn’t feature a single human being on screen and is still excellent. But on the whole, the two things go hand in hand: it’s impossible to imagine “Lawrence Of Arabia” without Peter O’Toole, “Star Wars” without Harrison Ford, “Cabaret” without Liza Minnelli, or “Tokyo Story” without Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama, to name but a few.

Continue reading The Best Performances Of 2017 at The Playlist.

In Netflix‘s “Easy,” Joe Swanberg presented his comedic look at Chicago, but Showtime goes for something more authentic with “The Chi.” The show comes from Lena Waithe, who y0u likely know from her role as Denise on “Master of None” (and for co-writing the episode “Thanksgiving,” which earned her an Emmy award).

Continue reading ‘The Chi’ Trailer: Showtime Takes You To Chicago’s South Side at The Playlist.

It’s going to be an interesting awards season for a number of reasons, and one of them is the question of whether Netflix will be able to properly crack the Oscars this year. It’s no secret that the streaming giant has been trying to make an awards splash for a few years, but while rivals Amazon arrived in a big way last year with “Manchester By The Sea,” Netflix have so far only really managed to figure into the documentary categories.

Continue reading New Trailer For Netflix’s Oscar Contender ‘Mudbound’ at The Playlist.

Continue reading Dee Rees Talks ‘Mudbound’ And Netflix As A “Place For Auteurs” at The Playlist.

The epic yet intimate “Mudbound” from director Dee Rees isn’t simply about an isolated, horrific event for a single black family or even a horrific period for black people in American history. By covering an oft-overlooked era and lifestyle, Rees is adding to the larger cinematic narrative around the American black experience, deepening our understanding – and hopefully our empathy. “Mudbound” doesn’t exist in a vacuum: its characters are affected by the centuries of slavery that preceded them, and their lives offer insight into the institutional racism and net worth inequality that continues to plague America today.

Continue reading ‘Mudbound’ Refuses To Let Oppression Have The Final Word [NYFF] at The Playlist.

With both “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have perfected stories about career-driven, obsessive protagonists who, after finding themselves out of their field or completing their decade-long task, are left with nothing but the feeling of “now what?” That same feeling permeates “Detroit,” albeit in a much different — and sadder — way.

Continue reading Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ Is An Uneven, But Powerful Docudrama [Review] at The Playlist.

[Updated Feb. 4]

Winner prediction:
1. Sam Rockwell, “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri”
2. Willem Dafoe, “The Florida Project”
3. Christopher Plummer, “All The Money In The World”
4. Richard Jenkins, “The Shape of Water”
5. Woody Harrelson, “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri”

Current predictions:

Best Picture
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Director
Original Screenplay
Adapted Screenplay
Editing
Cinematography
Production Design
Original Score
Best Song
Costumes
Sound Mixing
Sound Editing
Documentary
Foreign Language Film
Animated Feature Film
Makeup and Hairstyling
Visual Effects

Continue reading 2018 Best Supporting Actor Oscars Predictions at The Playlist.

Will Kathryn Bigelow once again find herself in the Oscar conversation following “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty“? That’s the big question surrounding “Detroit,” which is forgoing any big festival premieres or key fall season release dates, to land right in the middle of summer. But the bow makes sense, giving the explosive true story at its core.

With an ensemble that includes (deep breath) John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore, Jason Mitchell, Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever, Jack Reynor, Ben O’Toole, Joseph David Jones, Ephraim Sykes, Leon Thomas III, Nathan Davis Jr., Peyton Alex Smith, Malcolm David Kelley, Gbenga Akinnabve, Chris Chalk, Jeremy Strong, Laz Alonzo, Austin Hebert, Miguel Pimentel, Kris Davis, John Krasinski and Anthony Mackie, Bigelow’s film tells the story of civil unrest that lit Detroit like a fuse.

Continue reading New Trailer For Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ Tells An Explosive True Story at The Playlist.

Without necessarily reflecting on its quality, it sometimes takes a while for a movie to come down the distribution pipeline. Companies need time to put plans for a movie together, come up with marketing strategies and find the right release date, which sometimes means that films end up meeting the general public quite some time after festival audiences catch them. It shouldn’t be taken as a negative — both “Crash” and “The Hurt Locker” won Best Picture at the Oscars over a year after their world premieres at TIFF and Venice respectively — and as such, we have some faith in “Vincent-N-Roxxy.”

It’s exactly a year since the film premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, but it’s finally set to hit theaters in a month or so, and while that delay might give some pause, the film looks pretty decent from the trailer that Vertical Entertainment just premiered.

Continue reading Watch: Trailer For Crime Drama ‘Vincent-N-Roxxy’ Starring Emile Hirsch & Zoe Kravitz at The Playlist.

Kathryn Bigelow has spent the latter part of her career making films that vibrate with the pulse of the nation. “The Hurt Locker” zeroed in on the fallout from the Iraq War, “Zero Dark Thirty” brought audiences inside the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and now her latest film “Detroit,” about racial conflict in the city in the late ’60s, is strikingly relevant.

An absolutely staggering cast including John Boyega, John Krasinski, Jason Mitchell, Anthony Mackie, Will Poulter, Jacob Latimore, Joseph David-Jones, Algee Smith, Ben O’Toole, Jack Reynor, Kaitlyn Dever, Hannah Murray, Jeremy Strong, Chris Chalk, Austin Hébert, Ephraim Sykes, Laz Alonso, Nathan Davis Jr., Malcolm David Kelley, Peyton Alex Smith and Leon Thomas III, make up the crime drama that’s set against the backdrop of Detroit’s devastating riots that took place over five haunting summer days in 1967.

Continue reading ‘Detroit’ Burns In First Trailer For Kathryn Bigelow’s New Film at The Playlist.

A year ago it was over. In the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite movement, Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” shook Sundance and Hollywood in a way rarely seen since the festival was founded almost 40 years ago. It was your Best Picture lock or, at worst, a shoo-in for a nomination and Parker a shoo-in to win something, either Best Actor or Best Director. Eight months later those predictions vanished in a scandal that will be discussed for decades.

Continue reading If ‘Mudbound’ Is Going To Be Sundance’s Oscar Player For 2018 Netflix Has Work To Do at The Playlist.

We’re a week into the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and, like American democracy, things are starting to wind down. Most of the major movies have premiered, critics have their favorites (and least favorites), and many of the hot-ticket movies have already been snapped up by distributors, with the box-office success of “Manchester By The Sea” fueling a healthy market for sellers. There’s plenty more to come — we’ll be filing more reviews in the days ahead — but we wanted to start to take a view of the festival as a whole.

Continue reading The 30 Breakout Performers & Filmmakers Of The 2017 Sundance Film Festival at The Playlist.

PARK CITY – There is a moment toward the end of Dee Rees’ “Mudbound” that caused the audience attending its world premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Saturday night to gasp out loud. The film, based on Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel, had been brutally honest in its depiction of race relations in Mississippi after the end of WWII up to this point, but this visceral incident feels heart-crushingly real.

Continue reading Dee Rees’ Epic ‘Mudbound’ Powerfully Depicts Post WWII Racism In The Deep South [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, And Jason Clarke To Star In Dee Rees' ‘Mudbound’

Continue reading Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, And Jason Clarke To Star In Dee Rees’ ‘Mudbound’ at The Playlist.

20 Best Breakthrough Performances Of 2015

Continue reading 20 Best Breakthrough Performances Of 2015 at The Playlist.