Cate Blanchett

The cast of Marvel’s new band of heroes assemble on a pair of gorgeous posters.

Cate Blanchett is in a phase of her career I would describe as… interesting. She is clearly unafraid of ambitious projects – Knight of Cups, Song to Song – experimental ones – playing 13 characters in Manifesto – and as one may say, rather off-brand though totally exciting ones, like playing a Marvel villain for Taika Waititi. But her most head-turning choice of late is a role in an Eli Roth film.

Now this is a thrilling combination of nouns: Amazon Studios has snatched up Lucy and Desi, an upcoming biopic written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Cate Blanchett as TV icon Lucille Ball. A masterful actress playing a masterful comedian in a film scripted by a masterful screenwriter is quite a catch, to say the least — all that’s missing is Desi himself, and given the talent involved so far, you have to imagine it’ll be someone great.

When the first trailer for Thor: Ragnarok dropped it, rightfully, blew the internet’s damn mind. Chris Hemsworth‘s God of Thunder was in the gladiator pit with the Hulk, Jeff Goldblum donning shiny blue makeup, Tessa Thompson as a warrior, and Cate Blanchett as an antlered Marvel villain – it was incredible...

Cate Blanchett is the type of actress that continues to mesmerize and surprise us. She can give dramatic performances as riveting as ones in Blue Jasmine and Carol, transform into a decadent menace as Cinderella’s evil stepmother, then play a Marvel villain in Thor: Ragnarok. But in case you’re not totally sold on Blanchett’s otherworldly versatility, her latest film will seal the deal.

If you thought the first official photos of Thor: Ragnarok were wild, just wait till you get a taste of the new teaser trailer. The third solo outing for the God of Thunder isn’t just any new Marvel movie, but a distinctly Taika Waititi one. That means it’s going to be a heck of a lot more fun than you’d imagine.

Richard Linklater is about to get behind the camera again this year to film Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, an adaptation of a 2012 bestselling novel about a restless Seattle housewife who becomes a recluse and disappears right before a big family vacation, prompting her husband and daughter to go looking for her. Cate Blanchett will play Bernadette, and today it was announced that Kristen Wiig is in talks to play Audrey, Bernadette’s nightmare neighbor.

When an actor works with Terrence Malick it means throwing out everything they’ve ever learned in drama school or on a film set. Whatever script they might have initially read goes out the window, and Malick asks his performers to just, be. Maybe he’ll hand an actor a scrap of paper with am aphorism written across it. Maybe he’ll give them some minor stage direction, then let the camera follow from there. Michael Fassbender recently described Malick’s style as giving his cast “flavors as opposed to direct commands or instructions.” Some actors love it; others notoriously hate it.

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: The new Terrence Malick film opens with a Die Antwoord song. The past several years have been the most productive of the reclusive filmmaker’s career as he’s been churning out more movies now than in the first three decades of his time as a director, but they’ve also been his most surprising.

There was a whole lot to take in from the first official Thor: Ragnarok photos, which debuted yesterday and revealed Cate Blanchett’s goth-y villain, Jeff Goldblum’s eccentric Grandmaster, Tessa Thompson’s warrior Valkyrie and, oh yeah, Thor’s super-short new haircut. Some big changes are afoot in the nine realms, and we’re not just talking about Thor’s makeover; director Taika Waititi has created a more colorful, more humorous return to Asgard, and after seeing those first photos, we’re sure you have lots of questions about the plot of Ragnarok.