Rejoice, for our long national nightmare is finally over—Universal Music Group and TikTok have finally come to an agreement. You may remember UMG pulled all its artists from the app, citing issues with “appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users.” Or you may not remember it, since Taylor Swift got to put her songs back on the app, and because users can basically upload whatever tracks...
Evil Does Not Exist takes its time. At the beginning there’s foreboding music on the soundtrack as the camera moves across nature and vegetation. Then a character appears out of nowhere, startling the audience. Almost half an hour passes before a character even speaks. In that dichotomy of patience and alarm lies the genius of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Drive My Car. It’s a fable, like a simple game of good versus evil, that unspools with such density of narrative that it...
Imaginary friends are coming in hot as one of the first big movie trends of 2024. We’ve already had Imaginary and are soon to see If, out later this month from the imagination of John Krasinski. Now, we can add Eric, an imaginary blue monster puppet, to the pack. Eric was dreamed up and drawn by a nine year old boy named Edgar (Ivan Howe), who goes missing on his way to school one morning. His disappearance haunts his father (Benedict Cumberbatch), a beloved puppeteer and creator of the...
Much like the actual Karate Kid, Cobra Kai is something of an underdog success story. The show went from a curious spin-off premiering on “YouTube Red” to a mega-hit Netflix original. Now, the series will see out its victory lap with the sixth and final season, which—along with a new teaser and some first-look images—Netflix announced today would be premiering in three parts, for some reason. The series will drop batches of five episodes at a time, starting on July 18, continuing on November 28,...
As the summer movie season gets ready to kick off in theaters, Hulu highlights some A-list stars in indie films for its May calendar. In Eileen, Anne Hathaway plays a psychologist working at a correctional facility for boys in Massachusetts during the 1960s. Nicolas Cage looks characteristically unhinged as “The Passenger” in the psychological thriller Sympathy For The Devil. Mads Mikkelsen stars in the epic historical drama The Promised Land based on the book The Captain And Ann Barbara by Ida...
Gonzo journalist-turned-literary titan Tom Wolfe’s second novel, 1998's A Man In Full, is similar to his barnburner of a debut, 1987's The Bonfire Of The Vanities. They’re both sprawling social satires about the powerful and the not-so-powerful and the cities they inhabit, namely Atlanta and New York City, respectively. The Bonfire Of The Vanities was a bestseller adapted by director Brian DePalma into a box office flop in 1990 starring a miscast Tom Hanks as a swaggering Wall Street “Master...
[Editor’s note: The recap of Hacks season 3, episode 2 publishes May 3.] It’s Deborah Vance’s world; the rest of us just live in it. Vegas’ greatest washout-turned–comeback kid made her supremacy abundantly clear in the Hacks season-two finale, when she abruptly fired her joke writer/punching bag/soulmate Ava Daniels at the height of their shared triumph. But in case you forgot this important fact in the two long years since Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky’s Emmys-sweeping Max...
Hot on the heels of their Showtime series The Curse—which is just revving up what’ll likely be a pretty extensive Emmys campaign—Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone are reportedly close to lining up their next project together. THR reports tonight that A24 is on the verge of securing the film rights to Checkmate, a book proposal about a high-profile chess-cheating scandal by writer Ben Mezrich, who previously penned the books that ended up generating The Social Network and last year’s Dumb Money....
The Klingons teach us—probably—that every living being is really just searching for the perfect death. To that end: What could be a more fitting end than to be the person who forgets they booked Airbnb’s floating Up house, walks out their rented front door one morning, and plummets off their front step and straight into the annals of (extremely fatal) history? The “hotels but without all those pesky extras like quality control” booker announced its new “Icons” line of gimmick rentals this week,...
No one could have predicted the everlasting popularity of the Child’s Play franchise when it launched in 1988—not even creator Don Mancini. But people seemingly (and thankfully) can’t get over the evil, hilarious menace that is Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif). And it’s a treat to watch this Good Guy Doll’s story continue and bring on new audiences with SYFY’s Chucky, which wraps its killer third season on May 1. After seven films, Mancini breathed new life into the franchise with this weird and...
“Holy shit,” the chef-testants announced when they entered the kitchen during this week’s edition of Top Chef: Wisconsin. That’s because host Kristen Kish was joined by a very familiar face: Brian Voltaggio, chef-owner of Maryland’s Thacher & Rye, brother to fellow celebrity chef Michael Voltaggio, and alum of Top Chef, Top Chef Masters, and Top Chef: All-Stars. “I’m just happy I’m not doing the cooking,” our guest judge joked. If the mere presence of one of the franchise’s most notable names...
Bluey is having a moment, undeniably. The Australian animated kids show—about a family of dogs who engage in ridiculously silly, funny, emotionally intelligent games of make-believe—has been steadily building up buzz for more than five years at this point, as parents caught on to a kids show that’s genuinely funny in a way that whole families can enjoy. The recent release of the show’s 153rd episode, “The Sign”—in which the Heeler family’s beloved home goes up for sale—caused that appreciation...