The major Hollywood studios skirted this post-election weekend and held off on new releases. Their absence is others’ gain though, as A24’s tricky thriller “Heretic” and Lionsgate’s seasonal play “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” each look to make a solid impression in their opening weekends.

But it’s Sony’s “Venom: The Last Dance” that continues to stay on top of domestic charts. After an underwhelming opening weekend, the “Spider-Man” spinoff has been putting up solid holds, turning in another one here. “The Last Dance” added $3.9 million on Friday, on its way to about $14 million for its third weekend of release. It has now notched $100 million in North America and will pass “Alien: Romulus” ($105 million), “If” ($111 million) and “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” ($113 million) over the next few days to become the 14th-highest-grossing domestic release of the year.

Then add in the lion’s share of its revenue that’s...

Zendaya and Anne Hathaway are joining Christopher Nolan’s next film at Universal, alongside previously announced cast members Tom Holland and Matt Damon.

Nolan is writing and directing the movie, which is set for an IMAX release on July 17, 2026. Plot details are currently under wraps. Universal had no comment on the casting.

It’s a reunion for Hathaway and Nolan, who previously collaborated on the 2014 space epic “Interstellar” and 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” Earlier this year, Hathaway expressed gratitude for Nolan, who cast her in “Interstellar” amidst a wave of online hate following her Oscar win for “Les Misérables.” “A lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online,” Hathaway told Vanity Fair. “I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve...

Get ready to head back to the Pleistocene era!

Disney and 20th Century Animation announced Friday that “Ice Age 6” is in the works, which means that Manny, Sid, Diego and the rest of the herd will soon return to screens. In a video announcing the sequel, Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, Denis Leary, and Simon Pegg, who have all led the voice cast of the family franchise, announced that they are coming back for a new adventure. The film is currently in production.

The last “Ice Age” film, “Collision Course,” opened in theaters in 2016, grossing $408.5 million globallly. It’s a franchise that’s had legs — the first film, “Ice Age,” bowed in 2002. There have also been several shorts and series featuring various woolly mammoths, ground sloths, saber-tooth tigers and other prehistoric creatures who populate the films, as well as a 2022 spin-off, “The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild.

Halloween may be over, but the scares keep on coming.

A24 and Hugh Grant’s new horror movie “Heretic” is launching at the box office this weekend, and it’s made $1.2 million so far in Thursday previews.

It will go up against Sony’s superhero threequel “Venom: The Last Dance,” which has reigned over the box office for the past two weeks. The Tom Hardy-led action movie is aiming to make around $13 million to $15 million in its third frame, which would be a 40%-50% from last weekend. “Heretic” is on track to open with $8 million to $10 million, so it will likely have to settle for second place.

“When two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attempt to convert a reclusive Englishman, it turns out to be far more dangerous than they could have expected,” reads the plot description for “Heretic.” Grant stars as the creepy Mr.

“The Dog Stars” will be Ridley Scott’s next film, working with Steve Asbell and the 20th Century Studios team, with “Gladiator 2” headliner Paul Mescal currently in advanced negotiations to star in the project, according to an insider with knowledge of the project.

The film will be based on the Peter Heller Apocalyptic thriller, with Mark L Smith writing the script adaptation. Smith, Cliff Roberts and Scott Free are producing.

The official logline for “The Dog Stars” is as follows: “In a near future where an unnamed pandemic has decimated American society, a civilian pilot lives a lonely life on an abandoned Colorado airbase with his dog and a tough ex-marine. The two men couldn’t be more mismatched but depend on each other to fend off roaming invaders. When a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside the pilot...

Who knew the family film of the year could be so controversial?

In what appears to be a major copy-editing snafu, Universal Pictures and toy company Mattel made an unfortunate error with their line of “Wicked” toys. The packaging lists a URL that’s presumably meant to link to the film’s website, wickedmovie.com. However, it instead lists wicked.com — which belongs to long-established porn company Wicked Pictures, former home to Stormy Daniels and Jenna Jameson.

Already, shoppers are posting their frustration on Reddit, TikTok, and other social media sites. IndieWire reached out to Universal and Mattel for comment but received no response at present time. We will update this article if they reply.

@thegmansour

Mattel and Universal Pictures mistakenly put an adult film website on their dolls packaging. This is causing quite the stir online. Imagine a kid seeing the site on the package and going to it?...

12 years is a long time to keep a TV marriage going, yet that's precisely what David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel managed to do on "Bones." Granted, their on-screen counterparts, Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan and FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth, weren't literally married the entire time (they didn't tie the knot until season 9), but for all practical purposes, they might as well have been. The two actors were also instrumental in ensuring that "Bones" was more of a character-driven procedural than Fox initially had in mind, even taking extra time to work with an actor coach on refining their chemistry. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine the show would've had anywhere near the longevity it achieved had its stars and creator Hart Hanson been content to merely xerox "The X-Files" like the network had wanted.

Even with that, though, the series had a hard fight to make it to 12 seasons. Whether it...

Filmmaker Tyler Taormina quickly fell in love with IFC Films’ idea for how to market his merry-and-bright feature. The indie distributor’s trailer for “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” plays as a full-on throwback to how holiday season comedies used to be advertised, complete with baby boomer doo-wop, a long list of grinning cast members and a warm narrator promising that, “It’s more than a holiday. It’s a gift for the whole family.” But the nostalgic packaging came with an unforeseen side effect.

“A lot of the people online are like, ‘Oh, I thought it was a horror movie.’ It was a very common reaction that was not at all thought of,” Taormina shares. “Earnest nostalgia is not able to be detected. The irony is expected. It bummed me out.”

No killer is mucking up the holiday in “Miller’s Point,” now playing in theaters after premiering...

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(This post contains spoilers for several Stephen King books. If you see the title of a book mentioned, expect to see a spoiler soon after.)

Every Stephen King fan remembers their first experience with a bad King ending. For many it's "The Stand," where after over a thousand pages of build-up the day is saved by God himself swooping down and blowing up the bad guys. For other readers, it's "It," which features a sex scene so controversial that most non-book readers think you're joking when you tell them about it.

My first disappointment with King came at the end of "The Long Walk," a riveting 300-page thriller King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. I read the entire book in one sitting almost without even realizing it; it was disturbing, immersive, and fast-paced, and by the final chapter I...

Following last week's superb episode of "Saturday Night Live" featuring comedian and former "SNL" writer John Mulaney, showrunner Lorne Michaels decided to stick with seasoned stand-up comedian talent by bringing Bill Burr back to host for a second time. Burr isn't exactly the most versatile performer when it comes to sketch comedy or acting in general, but he can do a few things pretty damn well, especially if it involves being belligerent and from Boston, two things that go hand-in-hand. 

While Burr's first time hosting "SNL" in the fall of 2020 wasn't a home run, it had some solid sketches, including a memorable Sam Adams beer commercial parody. Unfortunately, it seems like the wind was really sucked out of the sails of the writers room this week, presumably because of the election results, and this episode felt pretty clunky, landing somewhere between aggressively average and just plain poor. 

Plus, Burr had...

“Red One,” a Christmas-themed release in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Santa’s head of security, didn’t have too big a bounty to unwrap in its international box office debut. The film collected just $26.6 million from 25,195 screens across 75 overseas markets over the weekend.

By comparison, “Venom: The Last Dance” added $33 million from 66 overseas markets over the same three-day frame while in its third weekend of release. The third and final entry in Sony’s comic book trilogy has grossed $279.4 million overseas and $394.2 million globally to date. Though “Venom 3” has continued to draw audiences beyond opening weekend, the newest entry in the Tom Hardy-led alien symbiote saga is pacing behind its predecessors, 2018’s “Venom” ($642 million internationally and $856 million globally) and 2021’s “Let There Be Carnage” ($293 million internationally and $506 million worldwide). However, “The Last Dance” cost $120 million, a relatively economical budget compared to other comic book adaptations, so it...

This post contains spoilers for "Mortal Kombat" lore.

When Mortal Kombat was released in 1992, there was a sole female fighter among the game's limited roster: Special Forces agent Sonya Blade, who doggedly pursued her archnemesis Kano and ended up on a quest that dragged her to the ends of the Earth and beyond. As the mega-popular fighting game expanded into an ever-popular franchise (including multiple movies), more female combatants, both playable and non-playable, were added to Mortal Kombat lore, which is something of a beast in itself.

The age-old debate about which Mortal Kombat female character is the strongest is tricky, since this is a video game franchise that keeps releasing new titles, the very definition of strength keeps shifting, and playable versions of characters undergo markedly different power scaling than what their lore assigns to them. For instance, someone like Khameleon has reason to be considered strong due to her lore ties with Reptile,...

Lots of TV series struggle to find their footing during their first season. As charming as the first season of "The Simpsons" is, for example, the show really didn't hit its stride until the second season, and depending on who you ask, only really got going around season four. So, if a show as universally celebrated as "The Simpsons" needed a little time to really come into its own, you better believe the same can be said for "Stargate Sg-1."

Fans of the series will surely agree that season 1 has its fair share of bad episodes, but none are so universally reviled as episode four, "Emancipation." This infamous installment in the series has been ridiculed since its August 1997 air date, and not just by fans. In a 2009 interview, "Sg-1" co-creator Brad Wright even said in response to a fan question, "Sometimes things get made that shouldn't. Emancipation."

What's so bad about this particular episode?...

Is there a more unholy pairing than children's cartoon characters and the internet? That's a question that the writers of "Saturday Night Live" may have been asking themselves when putting together this week's "Rorschach Test" sketch. Returning "SNL" guest host Bill Burr plays a firefighter whose responses to the famous ink blot test all share a common, childhood-ruining theme.

It's a sketch idea that can only have come from the writers accidentally stumbling upon "Rule 34" material online. Though broadly speaking Rule 34 refers to the ancient internet truism "if it exists, there is porn of it," it most commonly takes the form of decidedly non-sexual characters from Disney movies and other kids' media being put into erotic situations for the purposes of titillation.

In this instance, it seems "SNL" set itself the challenge of coming up with Rule 34 material that even the internet hadn't managed to think of yet. And that's...

Well, at least we didn’t get Maya Rudolph singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

It was a tough night at Studio 8H this past Saturday, where a Bill Burr-hosted episode kicked off with some standard political satire, albeit this time focused on appeasing newly elected Donald Trump — a figure they’d spent most of the fall skewering. “Saturday Night Live” is not a show that typically hides its liberal leanings, but in this new, likely fascist era, the cast wanted to make sure Trump knew he had their support and downright adulation. Cast members Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson, Heidi Gardner, Marcello Hernandez, Sarah Sherman, and Colin Jost all lined up to pledge their fealty, with James Austin Johnson even unveiling a new interpretation of Trump that sees him as a muscular, Rambo-type figure. Obviously, “SNL 50” was making light of the authoritarianism we are likely to face over the next few years,...

A Locarno world premiere this August, “Rita,” the directorial debut of Spanish star Paz Vega, has clinched first key market sales, rolling off the American Film Market.

Sales company Filmax has closed the U.K. and Ireland with Signature Entertainment, whose recent and upcoming releases include “The New Boy,” “Unicorns” and Viggo Mortensen’s “The Dead Don’t Hurt.”

In a separate deal, BookMy Show has closed rights to India. Filmax head of international Ivan Díaz expects to close other deals, he said.

The first sales news comes as “Rita”is fast becoming a fest favourite, playing Chicago for its U.S. premiere, Valladolid for its domestic Spanish bow, and now Tallinn, Seville and Huelva festivals.

Also written by Vega, and based on her own childhood in Triana, Sevilla – “Apart from the domestic violence, everything else that happens to Rita I’ve experienced,” Vega has told Variety – “Rita” weighs in as...

Jon M. Chu had a pretty good excuse for missing the premiere of “Wicked.”

The director of the two-part musical epic couldn’t make the starry Los Angeles event because his wife gave birth to their fifth child, a girl, on Saturday, Nov. 9 — the same day as the pink-and-green celebration.

“This movie has always moved in mysterious ways,” Chu wrote on Instagram Stories. “Today is a day I’ve been dreaming about for a long time. Two babies (a movie and a little girl) all at one time and I truly couldn’t be happier I won’t be able to be at the ‘Wicked’ premiere tonight with all of you. There was a change of plans at about 4 a.m. this morning…”

Chu jokingly added that “no, we will not be naming her Galphaba.”

That portmanteau nods to the two main characters in “Wicked,” Elphaba (aka the Wicked Witch...

Amanda Bynes had always been a natural performer. She began acting as a child, appearing in several TV commercials, demonstratively oohing and ahhing over the Cut N' Style Barbie or snacking on Buncha Crunch to a variation of the "Addams Family" theme music. At school, she appeared in the musicals "Annie," "The Sound of Music," and "The Music Man." She was bitten by the theater bug early on.

Bynes experienced her big break in 1996 when she joined the cast of the hit sketch comedy series "All That" on Nickelodeon. She was 10. "All That" ran for a whopping 11 seasons from 1994 to 2005 and proved to be a stamping ground for up-and-coming talents, serving sort-of as a junior version of "Saturday Night Live." Keenan Thompson, Kel Mitchell, Jamie Lynn Spears, and Nick Cannon also broke out thanks to the popularity of "All That." Bynes was a regular cast member for the show's third through sixth seasons,...

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We talk a lot around here about the best episodes of "The Twilight Zone," an influential and heartfelt show that perfected the moralizing genre story more than half a century ago. There's no shortage of great episodes of Rod Serling's fantastical anthology series, from still-timely political allegories like "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" to innovative twist-filled tales like "The After Hours" and "Eye of the Beholder" to episodes with great punchlines, like "Time Enough at Last" (which was Serling's personal favorite) and "To Serve Man." When it comes to the question of which "Twilight Zone" episode is the best one, there are a dozen or more correct answers, but there's another question worth asking that's equally loaded: what is the single worst episode of "The Twilight Zone"?

You probably have an answer to this question in mind already.

If there's one thing the Oscars love, it's a big moment. The envelopes containing the winners of the most prestigious film awards in Hollywood may be sealed, but that doesn't stop the powers-that-be behind each year's Oscars telecast from setting the night up for maximum surprise, drama, and inspiration. It doesn't always work, like when, at the 93rd Oscars, the categories were rearranged so the telecast could end with Chadwick Boseman's posthumous Best Actor win. Except Boseman didn't win, and category winner Anthony Hopkins wasn't at the ceremony, so the seemingly pre-planned big finish turned out to be an awkward dud.

Now and again, though, the Academy's penchant for trying to plan around potential wins results in some happy accidents. Such was the case in 1947, when Harold Russell made history as the first non-professional actor to win an Oscar -- and the only actor to ever take home two...

“Venom: The Last Dance” is looming over the domestic box office in its third weekend of release. The third and final installment in Sony’s comic book trilogy has added $16.2 million from 3,905 North American theaters, down 37% from the prior frame and enough to lead over two newcomers, A24’s horror thriller “Heretic” and Lionsgate’s family friendly “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.”

Although those new releases weren’t able to topple “Venom 3” from No. 1, they opened on the higher end of expectations, thanks to word-of-mouth and the otherwise desolate movie theater landscape. Hollywood mostly avoided the post-election weekend out of concern that people wouldn’t be paying attention to anything other than the presidential race. As a result, overall domestic box office revenues remain down more than 11% from 2023 and nearly 27% from 2019, according to Comscore.

“Heretic,” featuring “Notting Hill” star Hugh Grant playing against type as a villain, notched third place with $11 million from 3,221 venues.

Film audiences may have first recognized Ben Affleck for his appearance in the 1992 film "School Ties," where he played the main sidekick of the film's central bully. In 1993, Affleck was already behind the camera as well, having made a rather notorious 16-minute short film called "I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney." Affleck played a boorish womanizer named Shannon in Kevin Smith's 1995 comedy "Mallrats," and he teamed with Smith again in 1997 to make the stirring queer romantic drama "Chasing Amy." At the end of 1997, Affleck and his friend Matt Damon became awards darlings thanks to Gun Van Sant's "Good Will Hunting" which they both wrote and starred in. 

Affleck has remained a superstar ever since, having appeared in terse studio dramas, mainstream romances, and numerous action films. He played the superheroes Daredevil and Batman and continued to work with Kevin Smith.

[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Disclaimer” Episode 7 (“VII”).]

“Shut up, I’m talking,” demands Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), sharply halting Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) and his revenge narrative. Marked by her slapping Stephen at the end of Episode 6, it is finally time for Catherine to share her version of events, except the recounting of those haunting two days isn’t as easy as one would expect for a renowned journalist played by an erudite Blanchett. She trips over words, her recall of the dramatic events (including her rape and near drowning of her son) are out of order, and the images have the fleeting quality of memory and are often not grounded in sound. When “Disclaimer” creator Alfonso Cuarón was on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast, he credited this approach to his star.

“Cate did so much research about the consequences of a trauma like this, and part of the thing is the impossibility of talking, how difficult it is to articulate that past,...

Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti’s Israel-set family drama “Happy Holidays” won the top prize Sunday at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, taking home the Golden Alexander for best feature film.

Copti’s sophomore feature, his first film since his Oscar-nominated 2009 debut “Ajami,” premiered in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons sidebar, winning the best screenplay prize. Variety’s Siddhant Adlakha described it as “a piercing, realistic family drama, the inflection points of which reveal deep cultural and political dimensions surrounding gender and ethnicity.”

“Happy Holidays” follows four interconnected characters who share their unique realities, highlighting the complexities between genders, generations and cultures. The ensemble cast — comprised of Arab and Jewish characters alike — creates a multifaceted portrait of life in Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city.

The Thessaloniki jury, which included filmmaker and producer Sara Driver (“Boom for Real”), filmmaker Denis Côté (“Vic + Flo Saw a Bear”) and producer Konstantinos Kontovrakis (“How to Have Sex...

Let's be honest: not every "Game of Thrones" episode is a winner. Sure, the show's first four seasons are basically unimpeachable — and I think a strong argument can be made that, in the aftermath of a particularly bleak fifth entry, season 6 is actually really good — but the drop-off in quality when you get into the show's (frequently derided) later seasons is quite apparent, resulting in some really rough episodes. So, which ones are the absolute worst of the worst?

Because I can't nominate "all of season 7 and 8" for this dubious honor, I made some tough decisions and chose the five absolute crappiest "Game of Thrones" episodes, though there were some contenders I couldn't include here. Basically anything involving the Dorne plotline could have qualified, or anything involving the faceless assassin school in Braavos that beats the spirit out of Maisie Williams' Arya Stark. But installments like "No One" or "Mother's...

Yesterday, at the first-ever Brazil D23 fan event, Marvel Studios debuted a brand-new trailer and poster for “Captain America: Brave New World,” which opens in theaters on February 14, 2025.

Anthony Mackie, who plays Sam Wilson/Captain America, and Danny Ramirez, who portrays Joaquin Torres/Falcon, were on hand to greet fans before the new trailer was shown to the excited Brazil D23 crowd.

Continue reading ‘Captain America: Brave New World’: The New Cap Faces Off Against The Red Hulk at The Playlist.

For hardcore fans, the cancellation of a beloved television show can feel like a death in the family. The ardor is sometimes so great that letter-writing campaigns are organized (like way back in the day with "Star Trek"). Occasionally, outdoor demonstrations are held. Nowadays, social media protests spreading across multiple platforms is a sure-fire way to grab the attention of networks and advertisers. Alas, at the end of the day, sometimes there's nothing to be done because it's strictly a cold, hard business decision that should look good at the next shareholders' meeting.

When series don't inflame viewers' passions, the show is left up to the whims of network programmers who value stability above all else (see: the un-killable franchise that is "Law & Order"). They realize not every series is destined to be a top 10 juggernaut, so they look for solid performance in key ratings demographics that might not show...

Yesterday at the first-ever Brazil D23 fan event, Marvel Studios debuted a brand-new, special-look trailer for “Thunderbolts*,” their anti-heroes super team-up movie coming in 2025. “Stranger Things” star David Harbour (“Black Widow”), who plays Red Guardian in the film, was on hand to debut the new extended trailer for excited fans at the event.

Read More: Lewis Pullman Still Won’t Confirm Sentry Role, But Calls Marvel’s ‘Thunderbolts*’ Director A “Genius”

A mish-mash of villains, rogue heroes and morally-complex figures from the MCU, The film stars Florence Pugh (“Black Widow”) as Yelena, the new Black Widow, Sebastian Stan as The Winter Soldier, David Harbour as the Red Guardian, Wyatt Russell as John Walker/U.S Agent (“The Falcon & The Winter Solider”), Olga Kurylenko (“Black Widow”) as the Taskmaster, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost (“Ant-Man & The Wasp”) Lewis Pullman as Bob/Sentry, Geraldine Viswanathan, Chris Bauer, Wendell Edward Pierce and Julia Louis-Dreyfus...

They had $2m and six weeks. Everyone hated the name. Test audiences hated the film. Here’s the oral history of how Jennifer Kent’s debut got made – despite the odds

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His eyes are depthless pools, his mouth a taut rictus. His fingers taper to blade-like claws and he looms like a scarecrow. In the dark you might only make out his cheeks, a shock of bone-white puncturing the night. He is furry, hairy, a little scary. Or maybe he’s just misunderstood?

You know the Babadook even if you haven’t seen the film: Australian director Jennifer Kent’s ornate, expressionistic horror that premiered at Sundance in 2014 before becoming a household meme a few years later. The creature leaps from a menacing picture book to torment a single mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), and her son Sam (Noah Wiseman). The pair’s already...

Most people think of retirement as one of life's rites of passage, something akin to graduating from school or getting a promotion at a job. While some people have careers that treat retirement in this manner, there are many others for whom retirement is more of a state of mind than anything else. This is certainly true of an artist; some never seem to want to stop or slow down (may I remind you that The Rolling Stones just finished their latest tour this past July), while others feel that they don't wish to wear out their welcome. Then there are other factors, such as changing cultural norms as well as the waxing and waning of opportunities as they dwindle with age. Of course, age itself can be a factor; bodies do inexorably decline, after all.

For Jack Nicholson, one of the greatest actors of his generation, his reasons for...

This article contains discussions of addiction.

Charlie Sheen isn't exactly quiet about his opinions, for better or for worse. So, what does he think of "The Big Bang Theory?" Not a whole lot!

In a 2013 interview with The Guardian, the troubled nepo baby went off on Chuck Lorre's hit sitcom while simultaneously bragging about his own successes; as he told interviewer Emma Brockes, he thinks that his sitcom "Two and a Half Men," which also had Lorre at the helm, kickstarted the success of "The Big Bang Theory."

"You gotta think about the shows that my show launched. I should have added in a clause that said anything that uses me as a lead-in, cut me in." (In the article, Brockes notes that "The Big Bang Theory" was supposed to run after Sheen's post-"Two and a Half Men" project "Anger Management.") From there, Sheen continued to crap...

Five years after his feature debut “All This Victory” took the Grand Prize and the audience award at Venice’s Critics’ Week, Lebanese filmmaker Ahmad Ghossein is gearing up to shoot his next film. The filmmaker’s sophomore effort, “The Side Effects of Trusting Life,” was selected as part of this year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Agora Crossroads Co-Production Forum, where it took the Midpoint Consulting Award.

“The new film is challenging because of what is going on in Lebanon but I wrote it before it all,” Ghossein told Variety, referring not only to the current war with Israel but the turmoil the country has faced in the last five years. “In 2019, Lebanon collapsed completely — economically, politically and socially. It was an example of how capitalism and the new liberalism failed. If you want to look at the banking system and how it is failing worldwide, just look at Beirut.

Look, I won't mince words: I love the Disney theme park experience. Every year, my family and I head to one of the magical kingdoms and dutifully churn out 25,000 steps daily, zipping from ride to ride at the house Walt built. I love the food, the atmosphere, and how excited my girls get when spotting Disney princesses throughout the park.

Now, my preference is Disneyland in California, due to its numerous attractions and dizzying entertainment collection. However, I always take advantage of every opportunity to visit Disney World in Florida, specifically Disney's Hollywood Studios. While featuring only a fraction of Disneyland's rides (other rides can be found in neighboring parks), this colorful tourist trap still packs enough goods to warrant a day-long visit.

Which rides should you focus on during your stay? I'm glad you asked, because I've devised a list of the top 10 rides at Disney's Hollywood Studios,...

One of the most remarkable things about "Frasier" is its consistency. When the "Frasier" pilot aired back in 1993, Niles actor David Hyde Pierce thought the episode was "terrible" at first. Oh, how wrong he was. The pilot, entitled "The Good Son," remains an exceptional debut episode in TV history, simply because all the characters arrived fully formed, their dynamics dialed in and their chemistry immediately evident. The writing was as good as it ever got, too, and most importantly, the show demonstrated its commitment to an underlying moral depth right from the off, with Frasier and his father clashing initially before making up in a touching moment that saw John Mahoney's Martin Crane calling into his son's radio show to smooth things over.

Not content with debuting a show that appeared to have been running like clockwork for years, "Frasier" writers continued to pump out quality over the ensuing 11 seasons.

After public outcry over her performance as Mamie Till in 2022’s tragic biopic “Till” being snubbed by the Academy and others, Danielle Deadwyler is returning to awards conversations for her haunting turn in Malcolm Washington’s upcoming Netflix film, “The Piano Lesson.” Adapted from August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, the story is set in 1936 and follows a Pittsburgh family as they confront the ghosts of their oppressive past in the hopes of finding a better present and future. Speaking in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Deadwyler shared that she felt “relaxed” about all the Oscar buzz she was receiving, but that this kind of material doesn’t make her think about individual recognition.

“That should not overwhelm one’s ego or psyche,” Deadwyler said. “I feel good and more settled in that understanding. The incessant questioning about awards, awards, awards can be too much.

Stephen King is not just a prolific writer, he's a ravenous reader. Those two qualities mean that he has a strong sense for, among other storytelling talents, what makes a great antagonist. (King's favorite villains include Count Dracula and Anton Chigurh.)

King's own books have plenty of memorable bad guys: Pennywise, Randall Flagg, Greg Stillson, Cujo, etc. One of his more obscure villains resides not in the "Kingverse," though, but the Marvel Comics universe.

Stephen King doesn't watch or like Marvel Studios movies, but he's been a comic book fan for a long time. Some of King's earliest stories, he's said, were ones he copied out of the comics he was reading as a kid. The love has endured since he became a professional writer. King's novel "Firestarter" feels like the superhero and horror genres converging, while "The Dark Tower" series features werewolves dressed like Doctor Doom ("the Wolves of...

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The stereotype of the actor-as-diva gets overplayed. Most actors are total professionals who occasionally fall prey to a bout of bad humor or a feeling of being unappreciated – i.e. they're just like everyone else on this planet. For the most part, they want to do what they've been hired to do: memorize their lines, study their character (insofar as there's a character to study), hit their marks, basically be the best of themselves they can be, and call it a day. They'd prefer not to be miserable, so that means they're not out to make anyone else's life miserable.

That stereotype, however, didn't just appear out of nowhere. It's not a whole-cloth invention. No. I'm here to tell you that monsters are real. Marlon Brando really did refuse to memorize his lines at a certain point in his career,...

Olivia Williams has long balanced her talent with a desire to tell it how it is – and she’s now feeling more frank than ever. The Dune star gets more than a few things off her chest, from the Hollywood patriarchy to AI and living with cancer

Since 2018, Olivia Williams has grown more blunt than she used to be. “I’m a bit less scared of the consequences of saying what I think,” she explains. The actor has never been particularly shy about speaking her mind, as a trawl through any of her old interviews, from the Rushmore days in the late 1990s to her more recent red carpet duties for The Crown, will reveal. But in the last few years, she has become less inhibited, for reasons we will get on to shortly. “Because how bad can it be?” she says, with a droll laugh. “You’re going to die,...

The actor on making a ‘cracker’ of a film with Cillian Murphy, the new female-led Dune TV series, and knowing when to give people the shark eyes

The British actor Emily Watson made one of the outstanding film debuts when she starred in Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves in 1996, aged 29. She was Oscar-nominated for that role, then again two years later for playing the cellist Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie. She is known for her fierce, fearless performances: she won a Bafta for her part as a social worker in Appropriate Adult, ITV’s 2011 Fred West drama, and received Emmy and Golden Globe nods for the Sky Atlantic miniseries Chernobyl. Watson is 57 and lives in south London with her husband and two children.

When you got an Oscar nomination for your first film, did you find it a lot to take in?

I was very, very...

The screenwriter behind hit TV dramas National Treasure and Kiri, as well as the Harry Potter stage play, talks about his new, more personal project created with his wife - a feature film, Joy, celebrat​ing the birth of IVF

In 1968, three people decided to cure infertility. In the 10 years between 1968 and 1978, Robert (Bob) Edwards, a scientist, Patrick Steptoe, an obstetrician, Jean Purdy, an embryologist, worked together, with many others, to do something incredible. Basing themselves in an outbuilding at Oldham general on scraps of money, with nurses volunteering their time, and patients their patience, they worked incessantly on the issue of infertility.

Bob had had a number of breakthroughs working with mice and rabbits, and thought that with Patrick’s innovations with laparoscopes (keyhole surgery), there was a possibility that tubal infertility could be, at least partially, cured.

Arnold’s feral, fantastical drama set in the rundown Kent of her childhood stars remarkable newcomer Nykiya Adams as a marginalised child who makes a strange new friend

Andrea Arnold’s films have a thrilling, entirely distinctive energy. Take her US-set American Honey (2016), with its itchy, restless outlaw spirit and music used front and centre, or the earthy fervour of her 2011 version of Wuthering Heights. The British director’s films are feral, unpredictable and untameable, informed by empathy, curiosity and a way of working that embraces chaos and discovery. With its marginalised milieu and themes of the wildness within, Bird, which earned an impressive haul of British independent film award nominations last week, could only be an Andrea Arnold creation.

In some ways, though, it’s also a notable departure for this continually evolving film-maker, who returns to the UK – specifically north Kent, where she grew up and later set...

As the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (Tccf) concludes its fifth edition, the event has reaffirmed its role as a significant platform for the creative industry on the island – and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

With a focus on collaboration and cultural representation, Tccf 2024 brought to light three key trends that reflect Taiwan’s evolving position in the global entertainment landscape.

International Collaboration Takes Center Stage

A prominent theme at this year’s Tccf was the increasing focus on international co-productions. Industry leaders gathered to discuss the practicalities and advantages of cross-border partnerships, both locally within southeast Asia and much farther afield. For example, Oscar-winning production company Fabula (“A Fantastic Woman”), the Chilean production house founded by Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín and Venice Critics’ Week Grand Prize winner Tana Gilbert (“Malqueridas”), is developing “Where Is Narumi?“, a documentary series examining the 2016 killing of Japanese student Kurosaki Narumi by her ex-partner Nicolás Zepeda.

"The Big Bang Theory" spans 12 seasons and the same number of years, so we have to face some facts here: some of the episodes are bound to be total stinkers. Certainly, a few episodes in "The Big Bang Theory's" storied history can compete for the absolute worst spot of them all, but what is the worst of the worst according to fans? We just have to look at IMDb ratings to find that out.

Chuck Lorre's massively popular, Emmy-winning sitcom — which stars Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Kaley Cuoco, Mayim Bialik, and Melissa Rauch as Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter, Howard Wolowitz, Raj Koothrappali, Penny Hofstadter, Amy Farrah Fowler, and Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz, respectively — focused on the personal lives of scientists (and Penny), including all of their ups and downs. Apparently, fans think that one episode in the show's ninth season is the absolute worst; I should note,...

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It's an election year and, because of the way things shook out, there has been a lot of talk about former president Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term in office as the Republican nominee, running against Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee and current Vice President of the United States. So, on one hand, "The Apprentice," a recent biopic about Trump's rise to fame as a New York businessman, seemed like a timely concept. It hasn't exactly panned out as it wasn't only a lightning rod for controversy, but it flamed out at the box office as well. It turns out, a couple of A-list directors passed up the opportunity to step behind the camera for this one.

"The Apprentice" was directed by Ali Abbasi, with Sebastian Stan, known best as Bucky Barnes, aka The Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,...

In a move to bolster film preservation across borders, India’s Film Heritage Foundation (Fhf) is teaming with French diplomatic missions in India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives on a two-year project dubbed Fisch (France-India-Sri Lanka Cine Heritage).

Supported by the French Embassy and the French Institute in India, alongside the French Embassy in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, the project spans over two years with a focus on training, film restoration, preservation and outreach.

The partnership has kicked off with a film preservation and restoration workshop, which continues till Nov. 14 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, southern India. The workshop, organized with the International Federation of Film Archives (Fiaf), is hosting 67 participants for intensive training in film restoration and preservation techniques. The initiative features faculty from prestigious French institutions including Cinémathèque de Toulouse, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé and Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (Ina).

Among the project’s first initiatives is the restoration...

It's not that Denzel Washington hasn't made some bad movies — the one where he played the ghost of a lawyer who has to guide Bob Hoskins through a police investigation is pretty indefensible. But the fact is that the best Denzel movies are some of the best movies ever made. The man just knows how to radiate charisma no matter what part he's playing, and his films are all the better for it. Does it mean that you can't help but see Denzel instead of his character most of the time? Well, it depends what era you're talking about.

For many who grew up with Denzel in his "Training Day" era, the actor very much just seemed like his whole Mo was to just show up, be Denzel, and go home. But those of us who were, at the time, too young to remember "Malcom X"-era Denzel were missing...

Though they play diametrically opposed cousins in the recently released film “A Real Pain,” Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg may be more like-minded in their sensibilities than people might think. Taking part in a live chat for Vanity Fair’s “Little Gold Men” podcast at Scad Savannah Film Festival, Culkin discussed his appreciation for Eisenberg’s directing style and how it made stepping behind the lens a more approachable possibility for him.

“Somebody asked recently if it made me feel like I want to direct, which I don’t. I don’t have that thing in me, but I get why the question is asked. We’re about the same age, we’ve been acting for a very long time. This made me look at it and the way he did it and go, ‘Well, Ok, I don’t want to, but if I did, I would want to do...

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It's almost hard to imagine anybody besides Jim Parsons playing Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory." For 12 years and seasons, Parsons perfectly crafted the lead character of Sheldon — a brilliant yet irascible theoretical physicist who lives with his best friend Leonard Hofstadter (played by Johnny Galecki). As it turns out, Galecki almost played Sheldon ... but then asked showrunner and creator Chuck Lorre if he could be considered for the role of Leonard instead.

As Galecki told Variety in 2015, he felt like he understood Leonard better than he understood the character of Sheldon — and he also wanted to pursue Leonard's storyline, in which the experimental physicist falls for and subsequently woos his gorgeous new neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco). As the "Roseanne" alum put it, he'd rarely gotten the opportunity to play a romantic lead yet in his career, and he...

There is a long history in theater of the "one man show," in which a single performer must hold the attention of the audience for the entire runtime. Sometimes they play more than one character, sometimes they play just one character, but they are always the focus. Over the years, cinema has created its own version of the one man show, where only one actor appears onscreen for the majority of the runtime. Occasionally we might hear someone offscreen or in voiceover or get a quick flashback with other actors, but for the vast majority of the movie, we're stuck looking at just one face. That takes some serious skill to pull off, no matter how good-looking the face might be. 

Here I've collected and ranked 10 of the best films featuring only one actor, ranging across the years and several different genres. I did not include comedy specials like Bo...

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In Stuart Galbraith IV's invaluable film biography "The Emperor and the Wolf" -- a detailed rundown of the collaborations between director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune -- Kurosawa was asked about Sergio Leone's Western "A Fistful of Dollars." Kurosawa reportedly said that Leone's film was "a fine movie, but it's my movie." Leone, as cineastes all know, will be able to tell you, ripped off Kurosawa's 1961 film "Yojimbo," pretty much beat-for-beat, to make "A Fistful of Dollars." Toho, the production company that distributed "Yojimbo," sued Leone and the case was settled out of court.

"Yojimbo," for those unlucky enough not to have seen it, is about a nameless ronin (Mifune) who wanders into a remote 1860s village to discover a vicious gang battle raging. It seems two groups of yakuza are fighting over the gambling rights in this town,...