Elizabeth Olsen

The first trailer for Avengers: Infinity War dropped this week, offering fans a sneak peek at Marvel’s biggest film to date. Featuring the largest collection of MCU characters to appear together on screen, Joe and Anthony Russo’s super-sequel will pit our heroes against Thanos in a massive war over the fate of the universe. As such, we can expect a few of our favorite superheroes to bite the dust, but we now know of at least one more who will survive the Infinity War to appear in Avengers 4. Potential spoilers ahead!

In Taylor Sheridan’s snowy western Wind River, Jeremy Renner plays a quiet divorcee and grieving father who spends his days tracking game on the titular Wyoming reservation. Renner’s Cory Lambert is one of the (if not the) only white man on the land, but his Native American ex-wife (Julia Jones) and young son give him a sense of connection and community to their people. After the body of a young Native American woman is found on the middle of a snowy hillside, it reminds Cory of a similar loss he suffered years ago. Cory, along with FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) and the local sheriff (Graham Greene), they trio attempt to solve the murder mystery.

In Wind River, a Native American woman’s dead body is found frozen in the snow. The latest crime drama from Sicario and Hell or High Water screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, also working behind the camera this time around, follows Elizabeth Olsen’s FBI agent attempting to solve a wintry murder with the help of Jeremy Renner’s Cory Lambert, a local animal tracker.

As far as the rest of this summer movie season is concerned, Ingrid Goes West is my most anticipated film (sorry, Spidey). Aubrey Plaza continues her totally unreal tour of pop culture insanity (see also: Legion) in the latest trailer for the Sundance favorite — a social media parable in which Plaza plays a self-destructive, Instagram-obsessed young woman who seeks validation through likes, which she confuses for legit human love…you know, like all of us.

From the ranks of the Sons of Anarchy cast, Taylor Sheridan has emerged as one of the buzziest screenwriters working today. He took Cannes by storm and scored an intelligent sleeper hit with Sicario, his south-of-the-border drug war drama. He made it to the Oscars with another yarn of crime and the solemn-faced folks working to stop it, the timely Western standoff Hell or High Water. And now, the accomplished writer has delivered another potboiler set on the grand expanses of the American plains, with a sweetened deal: he’ll get the chance to prove himself as a filmmaker, too, taking his debut directorial credit on Wind River.

Something that’s always peeved fans a little bit is Marvel’s somewhat labored finagling of romance into their movies. While shipping characters like Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes (a.k.a. Stucky), Thor and Loki (okay, it’s not like they’re really related), or even Tony Stark and Rhodey is all the rage amongst the fandoms, Marvel’s movies have generally kept things Extremely Hetero. Lately, we’ve gotten some weird stuff like Black Widow and Bruce Banner developing a relationship seemingly out of nowhere in Age of Ultron, and Scarlet Witch and Vision getting a little Stockholm Syndrome-y during Civil War. It looks like the latter is still on, as some new set photos from Infinity War have revealed.

“A stalker movie for the social media era” — that’s how our editor-in-chief Matt Singer described Ingrid Goes West in his review from the Sundance film festival back in January. That idea is only somewhat insinuated in this tightly edited (and tightly wound) red band teaser for the upcoming film, starring Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen in what might also be described as a modern cautionary tale for millennials with smart phones grafted to their hands.

If you know Taylor Sheridan’s previous screenplays, the drug cartel thriller Sicario and the heist movie Hell or High Water, then watching Wind River will occasionally feel like déjà vu. Character types, motivations, social commentary, even a couple of scenes (like a law-breaking interrogation in the back of a police car) reappear in a way that goes beyond an auteur returning to themes and ideas he finds particularly interesting. For the work of a first-time director, Wind River feels oddly familiar.

I have a young daughter, and I love sharing pictures and videos of her antics on social media. Occasionally people who follow me online will tell me in person how much they love my baby or how happy I seem with her. And I am. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows; I just don’t share the moments where she wakes the whole house up at 4AM or has diaper rash so bad that she screams for 10 minutes straight. The line bteween reality and fiction online can get very blurry — and sometimes the persona we create there is much more appealing than the real thing.

The absence of Michelle seemed not to hamper Netflix’s Fuller House revival, which only made the omission more notable with bizarrely bitter meta-references to the Olsen twins. One surprising story saw John Stamos admitting he’d approached Elizabeth Olsen for the role, but according to Fuller House bosses, a recast Michelle was never in question.