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‘The Half Of It’ Review: There’s More Than Meets The Eye With This Charming Teen LGBTQ Riff On ‘Cyrano’ By Hoai-Tran Bui/May 1, 2020 11:00 am EST “This is not a love story.” So The Half of It warns us early on, but it’s easy to be lulled into complacency by the familiar tropes that Alice Wu’s teenage rom-com wields. A modern-day riff on Cyrano de Bergerac — the classic Edmond Rostand play that follows an intelligent man with an “ugly” nose who woos a woman through a more handsome suitor — The Half Of It presents itself as a cute LGBTQ twist on an age-old rom-com narrative: Guy asks girl to write a love letter to popular girl, girl falls in love with popular girl, everyone lives happily ever after....

‘The Haunting Of Bly Manor’ Trailer: Netflix’s ‘Hill House’ Follow-Up Invites Us Into A New Ghost Story By Ethan Anderton/Aug. 31, 2020 7:30 am EST Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan brought plenty of horror to Netflix with The Haunting of Hill House back in 2018. Now he’s back with even more terror with the next installment of the horror anthology series, The Haunting of Bly Manor. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the first series, because this takes place in a completely different setting, in an entirely different decade, and follows a whole new set of characters....

‘The Magician’s Elephant’ Will Be A New Animated Feature From Netflix By Chris Evangelista/Dec. 15, 2020 4:00 pm EST Netflix is making a new animated feature based on The Magician’s Elephant, the book from writer Kate DiCamillo. Featuring a voice cast that includes Sian Clifford, Pixie Davies, Natasia Demetriou, Dawn French, Brian Tyree Henry, Noah Jupe, Aasif Mandvi, and Mandy Patinkin, the story follows a boy looking for his long-lost sister and having to find a “mysterious elephant and the magician (voiced by Benedict Wong) who will conjure it....

‘The Magicians’ Takes Us Down The Rabbit Hole Of Grief With “The Wrath Of The Time Bees” By Vanessa Armstrong/Jan. 23, 2020 7:00 am EST People grieve differently. Some, like Julia and Alice, want to take their grief and transform it into something productive, something that justifies the pain that they feel. Others, like Eliot, want to push away their grief (along with all their other feelings) by whiling the days away as a fatalistic drunk....

‘The Office’ Star Leslie David Baker Is Kickstarting A Spin-Off About ‘Uncle Stan’ By Hoai-Tran Bui/July 3, 2020 8:30 am EST The Office star Leslie David Baker is coming out of retirement — kind of. Baker, who played the indolent salesperson Stanley Hudson for all nine seasons of the beloved NBC sitcom, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a The Office spin-off of sorts. The Kickstarter project, called Uncle Stan: Coming Out of Retirement, cleverly avoids any words like “The Office,” “Stanley,” or “owned by NBC” but is very clearly a continuation of Baker’s beloved The Office character....

‘The Umbrella Academy’ Season 2 Trailer: Doomsday Comes For The Swinging ’60s By Hoai-Tran Bui/July 8, 2020 8:00 am EST Class is back in session, at least for The Umbrella Academy. Netflix has released an official trailer for the second season of the TV series based on the comic book created and written by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá, which picks up on the superpowered family as they are transported back in time and must find a way to stop Doomsday from happening in 1963....

A New ‘Love Actually’ Parody Musical Skewers The Classic Rom-Com Through Song By Caroline Cao/Dec. 27, 2019 12:00 pm EST For me, Richard Curtis’ 2003 film Love Actually is half “guilty pleasure with twinkles and earned fuzzies” and half “cluttered product-of-its-time with stand-out problematics.” 16 years after its theatrical premiere, Love Actually represents cheesy holiday cheer for some and eye-rolling for those who don’t find romantic comedy their thing. It weaves a loosely threaded web of nine pairs pursuing, maintaining, saving their love—mostly romantic but some platonic—as Christmas creeps around the corner....

A Tribute To ‘Ballers’, HBO’s Comfort Food Comedy Few Would Admit To Loving By Jack Giroux/Oct. 18, 2019 12:00 pm EST There’s something to say about consistency in television. How many mighty shows have we seen fall in their final seasons? Too many, but for a show to stay true to its self, evolve, and entertain for many years, that’s a feat. It’s an accomplishment HBO’s Ballers pulled off through its five-year run on HBO, where it was the cable network’s most popular 30-minute comedy, and yet not the most popular comedy to talk about....

Check Out An Exclusive Track From ‘The Report’ Soundtrack By Chris Evangelista/Nov. 14, 2019 10:30 am EST The Report Soundtrack Lakeshore Records will release The Report—Original Motion Picture Soundtrack digitally on November 15. The soundtrack is composed by David Wingo (Barry, Midnight Special), while Scott Z. Burns directs the movie. “In some ways, I feel like I’d been preparing my whole career to do the score for The Report,” Wingo says....

Demi Lovato Passes The Audition For Will Ferrell’s Netflix Comedy ‘Eurovision’ By Hoai-Tran Bui/Aug. 21, 2019 9:30 am EST Demi Lovato has the X-Factor to join the Eurovision cast. The pop singer is joining the cast of Will Ferrell’s Netflix comedy inspired by the real-life global singing competition that captivates all of Europe and baffles most of America. Lovato has been cast as an Icelandic singer with an “angelic” voice....

Hot Toys Expands ‘The Mandalorian’ Figure Line With The Heavy Infantry Mandalorian By Ethan Anderton/Dec. 2, 2019 5:00 pm EST Even though the new live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian follows a singular bounty hunter from the tribe of the same name, we’ve learned there are plenty of other warriors donning the same signature armor. One of the more prominent characters introduced is called Paz Vizla, but when it comes to selling this guy as a new Star Wars collectible, he’s simply called the Heavy Infantry Mandalorian....

How To Build The Ultimate Home Theater During The Pandemic By Jason Gorber/July 31, 2020 8:00 am EST With the world shut down and movie theatres feeling like a distant memory for many, the time spent watching things at home has skyrocketed. We’ve never been in a better position to be able to have a home theatre setup that allows almost any film in the world to be viewed via streaming, disc or any other media in your library....

Independent Movie Theaters Call WB’s Deal With HBO Max A “Questionable Decision” By Ethan Anderton/Dec. 8, 2020 9:30 am EST When news broke that Warner Bros. Pictures was choosing to give their entire roster of 2021 movies a hybrid release in theaters and on HBO Max, we knew it was going to be one of the biggest Hollywood stories in years. Not only is it rubbing major filmmakers and major movie theater chains the wrong way, but independent cinema owners aren’t happy either....

Kevin Hart To Star In An Action Comedy From ‘Broad City’ Alums By Hoai-Tran Bui/Feb. 27, 2020 5:00 pm EST Kevin Hart has found his next comedy. The Jumanji: The Next Level star is attached to star in a yet-untitled action-comedy from Broad City alums Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs. The film is being developed by Universal Pictures, with Aniello and Downs set to pen the script as well as executive produce....

Netflix’s ‘Matilda’ Movie Musical Finds The Young Title Star And Recasts Miss Trunchbull With Emma Thompson By Ethan Anderton/Jan. 15, 2021 11:00 am EST Netflix’s adaptation of the musical version of Matilda has finally found a young star to take on the lead role of a precocious young girl with advanced reading skills and telekinetic abilities who feels like she doesn’t belong in her family of idiotic gamblers and crooks. Relatively unknown 11-year old actress Alisha Weir has landed the role of Matilda, but there’s already been a change with the casting of one of the other key characters, with Emma Thompson taking the role of the nasty headmistress Miss Trunchbull....

Official ‘The High Note’ Song “Love Myself” Shows Off Tracee Ellis Ross’ Singing Chops By Hoai-Tran Bui/May 17, 2020 11:00 am EST Tracee Ellis Ross comes from Supremes lineage, but the actress has worked hard to set herself apart from her music superstar mother, Diana Ross. But she’ll be channeling a little of her mother with the upcoming workplace dramedy The High Note, directed by Late Night filmmaker Nisha Ganatra. In The High Note, Ross plays legendary pop diva Grace Davis, who yearns to do more than Vegas residencies and performances of her greatest hits....

Superhero Bits: “Hollywood’s Superman” Has Passed Away, Scarlet Witch Theories & More By Ethan Anderton/Nov. 7, 2019 6:00 pm EST How many Easter eggs and comic references did you catch in the recent episode of Watchmen? Want a Spider-Man: Far From Home mini-poster by Matt Ferguson? Why are DC Comics writers arguing about naked Bane? Could Scarlet Witch be Marvel’s next big villain? Did you ever hear “Hollywood’s Superman,” a Los Angeles local celebrity of sorts?...

Superhero Bits: Karen Gillan Wants To Direct ‘Batgirl’, ‘Spider-Man 3’ Shooting Locations & More By Ethan Anderton/Jan. 17, 2020 6:00 pm EST Could Titans and Doom Patrol air first on DC Universe and then go to HBO Max the next day? What did Marc Guggenheim have to do to get Ezra Miller as The Flash in Crisis on Infinite Earths? Ready for the 80th anniversary of The Joker with a 100-page commemorative issue?...

The Best “Invisible Man” Movies That You’ve Never Seen By Rob Hunter/Feb. 28, 2020 10:30 am EST (Welcome to The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, a series that takes a look at slightly more obscure, under-the-radar, or simply under-appreciated movies. This week we go looking for little-seen movies featuring invisibility!) This week’s big new release is a fresh take on a classic – a Universal Monsters classic to be precise – but while Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man finds its own identity by playing around with the formula, plenty of other films have followed similar paths to entirely different destinations....

The Morning Watch: Captain America And Iron Man’s Character Arcs, ILM Revisits ‘Empire Strikes Back’ & More By Ethan Anderton/June 1, 2020 5:00 am EST The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fanmade productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows. In this edition, a video compares and contrasts the character arcs of both Iron Man and Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe....