Movie News

Amongst all the Spider-Man: Homecomings and Transformers: The Last Knights and Wonder Womans, it’s good to see that the cinema still has room for nice, self-contained little films about eccentric painters and their odd, funny relationships with their normie friends. Final Portrait casts the inimitable Geoffrey Rush as expressionist painter Alberto Giacometti and Armie Hammer as his art connoisseur buddy James Lord, who agrees to pose for Giacometti for what he believes to be his last work.

For those of you who read the comics, you’ll know that Magneto doesn’t really feature that prominently in X-Men’s Dark Phoenix storyline. But because Michael Fassbender is such a star, and because Magneto and Professor X’s relationship with each other is so integral to the X-Men film series, it sounds like Magneto’s gong to have a much bigger role in turning Jean Grey over to the Dark Side.

“My Spider Sense is tingling” is the most classic of Spider-Man catchphrases — but you won’t hear it in the new Spider-Man: Homecoming. The newest version of our friendly neighborhood web-slinger is different than his filmic predecessors in many ways, a big one being his lack of the traditional Spidey Sense, which alerts him to the presence of dangers he can’t immediately see. Homecoming director Jon Watts explained that the decision to leave his sixth sense out of the movie was very much on purpose.

Last week, Michelle Rodriguez posted an Instagram praising the eighth Fast & Furious movie, but also mentioning that the series’ treatment of its female characters might force her to sit out the next round, if the situation doesn’t improve. F. Gary Gray later responded to her criticisms, saying that he thought the latest film had a tons of strong roles for women, proving that he kiiinda gets it, but not really. Rodriguez has a point. And Vin Diesel, for one, is going to stick up for her.

Is the sequel to the ‘Rocky’ spinoff actually happening? Sly keep teasing it with a series of interesting Instagram photos.

Sony knows that it’s summertime and in the summer traffic can be bad. So bad, even, that you might be running late to the movie theater and miss the first few minutes of Spider-Man: Homecoming this weekend. I personally have a rule that if I miss more than the first few minutes of a movie, I skip the whole thing for another showing. So in case you’re worried about missing the beginning of Homecoming because some jerk decided to hit the emergency break on the subway, have no fear. Sony just released the first four minutes of their new Spidey outing.

Samuel L. Jackson hasn’t appeared in the MCU since Avengers: Age of Ultron back in 2015 — which wasn’t all that long ago in real-time, but with Marvel releasing two new superhero films every year, it feels like it’s been an eternity since the last time we saw Nick Fury on the big screen. That’s going to change relatively soon, as Jackson is set to appear in both Infinity War and its follow-up, and according to a new rumor, he may also have a part in another highly-anticipated MCU film.

It’s finally July, and more importantly, the month in which Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets comes out. The most generously-budgeted indie film to ever come out of Europe, with control in the grip of confirmed madman Luc Besson, it’s bound to be a spectacle of one sort or another. (Though it’s all but doomed to be crushed at the box office by Dunkirk, which arrives the same day.) And in an attempt to drum up some more excitement for the upcoming unveiling, distributor STX has set up a preview that audiences can’t help but attend.

You, incorrect: “Anchorman 2 is a pale shadow of the original Anchorman.”

Here’s a new theory I’ve been testing out as of late: the more inscrutable a TV episode’s plot summary is, the better it will ultimately be. It first dawned on me during the glory days of Mad Men’s run, when viewers were regularly given no more to work off of than some variation on “Next week, Don does a thing, and is sad.” The current airing of Twin Peaks’ revival season doubled down on the concept, almost taunting viewers with how little salient information the summaries provide. (A recent highlight merely read, “Don’t die!” which is actually pretty solid advice when you’re watching Twin Peaks.)