In the new movie Over Your Dead Body, Jason Segel wants out. His character, Dan, feels trapped in a seemingly loveless marriage to Lisa (Samara Weaving), and in the early scenes it becomes clear that […]
Jesse Hassenger
35 posts
In addition to the well-documented box office success of many pop-musician biopics – not surefire moneymakers, but pretty consistent ones for over 20 years now – there’s another track record that likely keeps actors signing […]
Has so much time passed that we can considered Paranormal Activity something that gets thrown back to? (Don’t answer that. I may crumble into dust.) A24’s new horror film Undertone very much plays like a […]
Paramount Pictures made a lot of money in the first half of the 1990s by bringing TV characters to bigger screens: The Addams Family and Wayne’s World became massive surprise hits, spawning sequels, imitators, and […]
Everyone is talking about Lena Dunham again. Though her recent Netflix series Too Much is over and her Natalie Portman-starring Netflix movie Good Sex likely won’t be out until fall, Dunham has been back in […]
Unlike his Universal Monsters colleagues Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy doesn’t have a specific literary classic lending him (or her) instant legitimacy. It’s just a loosely affiliated bunch of supernatural mumbo-jumbo related to […]
Aficionados of the Netflix Top 10 are accustomed to seeing catalog titles from the (relatively recent) past pop up as subscribers discover or rediscover them on the service. At the moment, for example, Netflix viewers […]
Last fall, I got up early on a Sunday morning and trekked down to Tribeca for an early screening of Christy, a biopic about female boxer Christy Martin. Plenty of movies screen early and often […]
One of the best TV surprises of the year so far has been DTF St. Louis, a twisty dramedy-mystery with especially strong roles for TV mainstays Jason Bateman, David Harbour, and Linda Cardellini. The creative […]
Everyone knows who, or at least what, the Mummy is. They may picture it differently – guy in bandages, giant face in the sky, Boris Karloff, maybe even Sofia Boutella and/or Tom Cruise – but […]
Does Keanu Reeves have a soft spot for nearly-canceled comedians? He filmed the new movie Outcome, directed by Jonah Hill, nearly back-to-back with last year’s Good Fortune, directed by Aziz Ansari. Neither Hill nor Ansari […]
You, Me & Tuscany is the rare contemporary romantic comedy that’s getting a full-fledged theatrical release, rather than sticking to streaming, where the genre has experienced a revival in the 2020s. But despite going out […]
The 28 Days Later series has a history of divisive endings. The original film was famously reworked to finish on a less downbeat note, pointing to the likely survival of three major characters, including Cillian […]
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains major plot spoilers for The Drama and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. You’ve been warned. The marketing for the new movie The Drama depends on strategically concealing a secret […]
In another era, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson might have made a beautiful rom-com together. Or maybe not beautiful, but certainly glossy and containing beauty: Her guarded, piercing eyes and luminous curls; his chiseled face that […]
The new movie Crime 101, which just arrived on Prime Video after an underwhelming (and ultimately unprofitable) theatrical run earlier this year, has been discussed primarily in terms of Michael Mann, particularly his seminal crime […]
By most standards, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was not a major success when it came out in theaters this past January. In retrospect, it was something of a gamble; while 28 Years Later […]
There’s a secret in The Drama, the new movie starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. The trailers allude to it. The characters in the movie are shocked by it. And audiences interested in the movie are […]
Taylor Swift has just performed a major and somewhat unheralded pop star flex: Getting someone else to star in your music video for you. She’s done it before, casting Sadie Sink as her stand-in for […]
The beloved indie studio/distributor A24 is known for its peerless self-curation. This is a company that’s released far fewer of its movies, among them some of the most acclaimed in recent American cinema, via the […]
Hulu subscribers can currently get two Vince Vaughns for the price of one in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, an action-comedy of sorts where a time-travel element allows two Vaughns to share the […]
A woman is trapped in a limited location where a group of people intend to kill her, sacrificing her to Satan to enrich their own power. Unwilling to surrender, she fights her way through various […]
As Project Hail Mary blew through worldwide box office expectations when it opened in movie theaters last weekend, reactions and reviews evoked a promising series of sci-fi titles. There’s The Martian, of course, the previous […]
The British version of Saturday Night Live that launched over the weekend closely resembled its American cousin in structure: a cold-open sketch, a host monologue, a mix of live and pretaped sketches, two musical performances, […]
What might have been joshingly referred to as a rough week for Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans – the Hulu reboot canceled at the pilot stage; Sarah Michelle Gellar given little to do in her […]
Becoming a horror-movie scream queen has been a viable career path for nearly half a century at this point, but it wasn’t always a particularly desirable one. Jamie Lee Curtis famously had trouble getting non-horror […]
It may be the most-publicized Oscar loss in years – not because it was a huge surprise, but because it seemed to be in motion for weeks or even months leading up to the ceremony. […]
Timothée Chalamet will have to wait until at least his next supposed Sure Thing to collect his Oscar. Though the prodigious young actor was tipped early in the awards season as a near-lock for Best […]
Sinners made Academy Awards history when it received a record 16 nominations, more than any other movie in history — breaking a record that had only been tied for the past 75 years. It missed […]
By winning the Oscar for Best Director for One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a belated Gen X triumph. The movie itself]feels authentically Gen X in that it doesn’t embrace selling out […]
There are tons of adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the past century-plus of cinema, including a Best Picture winner from 1949. But there’s only been so adaptation so far of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, […]
Best Supporting Actor felt like a genuine toss-up at this year’s Oscars right up until the point that Sean Penn’s name was called. He might have seemed like an unlikely choice, given that he already […]
This might sound strange, but people still clap for Nicole Kidman at the movies. Not necessarily at her movies, because there haven’t been so many of those in recent years. But she’s still the face […]
This weekend’s Oscars are seen largely as a race between One Battle After Another and Sinners, two terrific movies that are available to stream on HBO Max after lengthy theatrical runs. In fact, all of […]
Tim Burton’s 1996 film Mars Attacks! gets a lot of mileage out of a running gag about the incredibly simple conquest strategy employed by a gaggle of green, bug-eyed Martians. Over and over, they pretend […]