Anthony Hopkins

The new Transformers movie is all about buried secrets. Texan Bostonian inventor bro Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and brainy Oxford professor Vivian Frumplebumple (okay I admit it: I didn’t catch her last name so I made that up) discover a world they never knew: The hidden history of Transformers on Earth. It turns out the Transformers have played a role in every armed conflict throughout time. The Transformers helped King Arthur, and they threw an assist to the Allies during World War II. There’s more to meets the eye in those history books, doncha know.

You would think that after five attempts, Michael Bay would eventually figure out how to make a coherent Transformers movie. Apparently not. I challenge anyone — including this film’s four writers — to explain the story of Transformers: The Last Knight, how the characters get from point A to point B, and why any of it matters. I maintain that it cannot be done. Either this movie is dumb or I am.

Transformers: The Last Knight has everything: bad Optimus Prime, King Arthur, planets crashing into other planets, giant flying machines, a robot dinosaur (hey there, Grimlock), Anthony Hopkins somehow taking it all seriously. A new clip featured on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, introduces Hopkins’ character, along with Laura Haddock as an Oxford professor, and their loyal assistant Cogman(!).

Seeing an international trailer for a Hollywood-made blockbuster can be an unexpectedly illuminating experience. Taking note of what elements get subtracted or added when appealing to a global audience speaks volumes about what studios and ad executives think will play across the Atlantic and Pacific. For instance, when advertising a mega-budgeted action assault, it’s best to frontload the universal: and in the instance of Transformers: The Last Knight, the cultural-divide spanning material happens to be the “comedy” of an alien robot dinosaur spitting out a chewed-up car covered in viscous green slime.

Everyone remembers Anthony Hopkins’ famous line as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs: “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” But did you know all three of those foods he mentions contain tyramine, a substance that can be deadly when taken with MAO inhibitors, the exact kind of drugs a mentally ill man like Lecter would likely have been prescribed. That’s just one of the delicious facts featured in the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

Transformers: The Last Knight is poised to redefine the paradigm of Transformers movies — that is, if anyone’s still following it at this point. The Transformers have been coming to Earth for centuries, even millennia, but what does it MEAN? Sir Anthony Hopkins has some ideas, which hopefully he will finally share in the actual movie, because all of this very mysterious marketing has been just that: very mysterious.

With the recent announcement that Transformers: The Last Knight would be hitting theaters two days earlier  —  moving from Friday, June 23 to Wednesday, June 21  —  fans are closer than ever to seeing their favorite Autobots (and humans) throw down against a reluctantly evil Optimus Prime. This is the summer of heel turns by beloved franchise characters; first we saw Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto betray his family in The Fate of the Furious, and now we’re counting down the days until Optimus Prime stabs Bumblebee in the face. Rough summer for heroes, it would seem.

The world lost a creative and compassionate director with Jonathan Demme’s death last night, and tons of stars who worked with him over the years shared messages of remembrance on social media today. His projects ranged from horror to concert documentaries, each film he directed unique and each memorable in its own different ways. Turns out the man was similarly unforgettable.

The Transformers have always been sneaky little miscreants. Their whole thing is that they’re “robots in disguise,” masquerading as cars or trucks or dinosaurs to better blend in with their surroundings. We know that they’ve been coming to Earth for a while now, and the new Transformers: The Last Knight promises to tell us why. The new tease for a trailer coming on Wednesday shows us that Anthony Hopkins may know the answer.

It’d be difficult to imagine someone beside Jonathan Pryce earning the High Sparrow’s fiery Game of Thrones end, but harder to envision anyone but Anthony Hopkins puppeteering that wild Westworld finale. That said, it seems Mad Men and The Crown alum Jared Harris was at one time up for either part, as revealed in a fascinating new interview.