Movies

While promoting the live-action Moana at CinemaCon, Dwayne Johnson shared his thoughts on how men should be portrayed in stories today.

It does eventually happen, but it takes a very long time. This Mummy movie is a ridiculously over-the-top, gross-out film that oddly tries to be a slow, thoughtful experience. (I hesitate to even use its full title, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which seems unnecessary considering the other Mummy films starring Tom Cruise and Brendan Fraser. It makes it sound like director Lee Cronin, known for Evil Dead Rise, is a major celebrity.) But the film doesn’t offer enough substance to justify its slow pace, as it moves from Egypt to the desert of the American Southwest, where the Cannon family – including teenager Sebastián and young Maud – are trying to rebuild their lives. It’s not nearly as unsettling or emotionally resonant as Hereditary, either in its portrayal of something deeply wrong within the family’s New Mexico home, or in its exploration of parental guilt and grief. By the time the movie finally embraces its wild side with peeling skin, reanimated corpses, and a scorpion attack, it’s already lost most of the audience’s patience.

The new film You, Me, & Tuscany highlights how much we need more romantic comedies with Black leads. Luckily, many of these films are genuinely enjoyable – some are well-loved classics, and others are delightful discoveries.

NBC has renewed Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for a 28th season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. This means Olivia Benson and her team will be back for another year, and the show will continue its run as the longest-running live-action primetime drama series in American television history. The renewal was announced on April 16th.

After Netflix secured the rights to continue the Benoit Blanc mysteries created by Rian Johnson, the films became known as the Knives Out series. Each new movie takes Blanc to a completely new location and presents him with a different murder to solve. As long as Daniel Craig wants to continue playing the charmingly Southern detective, Netflix can keep making and profiting from these “A Knives Out Mystery” films, potentially creating a long-running franchise.

The Julio Torres who was sitting next to me in his big bright Greenpoint studio is only sort of like that. He’s boyish but not at all naïve — he knows exactly what he is doing. He is so good at playing the wise fool that I realized that’s who I expected to meet. Julio Torres is “an unconscious construct,” he explained, when I asked the obvious question. “It’s like when you have a service job and you do your customer-service voice. ‘How’s everything tasting?’ That person’s not rehearsing in the mirror before they go to work. But they ask in a way that they have landed on so that the answer is ‘great.’ We all do it. There’s a version of ourselves that we put on when we go to work. My persona is as much of a persona as those.”

Marvel is launching a new Star Wars comic series called Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge – Echoes of the Empire. Written by Ethan Sacks, who previously worked on the Galaxy’s Edge comic, and featuring art by Jethro Morales and Roi Mercado with cover art by Phil Noto, the story follows Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chewbacca as they journey to Batuu seeking clues to Jabba the Hutt’s palace in order to rescue Han Solo (according to CBR). At the same time, Darth Vader is still searching for Luke, his son.

This is a developing story…

I just got a sneak peek at the new Brad Pitt film, and it’s a pretty intense ride. He plays a former Special Forces soldier who crashes in the Alaskan wilderness and has to fight to survive. From what I saw at CinemaCon, Pitt delivers a really haunting performance, clearly showing the character’s struggle with PTSD. But honestly, the dog – a German Shepherd – might be the star of the show. This isn’t just a man-versus-wilderness story; it’s about the incredible bond between a man and his dog, and how this fearless canine protects him from all sorts of dangers, like bears and wolves. It’s a classic ‘man and his dog’ tale, but with a really gritty, survival-focused edge.

This is a developing story…