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A satire film intended to send a provocative message about race relations bombed at the box office on its opening weekend. Focus Features' "The American Society of Magical Negroes" took the 9th spot at the box office last weekend, grossing $1,304,270 while playing in 1,147 locations around the U.S. The film centers around a young man who is recruited to be part of a "society" where Black people use their magical powers to make White people comfortable, so that they don't hurt Black people. The movie's title plays off a trope of Black characters in films who are set up...

If you didn’t hear about a movie being released called “The American Society of Magical Negroes” then you couldn’t be blamed. It’s not a movie that was given a ton of attention…or at least positive attention. The movie is probably one of the most racist things that has ever been put to a silver screen. The summary is that the protagonist is a young black man who is welcomed into a secret society of magical black people whose entire existence is to make white people feel safe and cared about. Throughout the movie, the protagonist struggles with his new role...

I just got done watching "Spaceman" starring Adam Sandler and the only good news is that I am here to I report that you can spare wasting an hour and a half of your life on it. Since it starred Adam Sandler and was about space travel, I thought it would be some sort of funny space comedy. WRONG! Instead it was an exceedingly maudlin and sad story that pretty much goes nowhere.I can break it down to Man meets Giant Spider who acts as his shrink to make him appreciate his wife. I kid you not. Also we are...

The Best Years of Our Lives is a 1946 American drama film directed by William Wyler and starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo and Harold Russell. The film is about three United States servicemen re-adjusting to societal changes and civilian life after coming home from World War II. The three men come from different services with different ranks that do not correspond with their civilian social class backgrounds. The film was a critical and commercial success. It won seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor...

People are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates -- sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It's an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don't exist. When the first murder in years jolts this utopia, FBI agent Greer discovers a vast conspiracy behind the surrogate phenomenon and must abandon his own surrogate, risking his life to unravel the mystery.

ivil War, Alex Garland’s hotly anticipated dystopian drama on an America divided by military conflict, knows what we’re looking for. The film opens with the president (Nick Offerman) in profile, practicing lines as he prepares to address the nation. His assurances of strength and patriotism are interwoven with seemingly real, recent news footage: a flash of riot gear, police armed like soldiers, masses against shields, two seconds of a body being dragged. Garland, the writer-director behind such modern sci-fi hits as Ex Machina and Annihilation, doesn’t have to show much from 2020 or beyond to get the point across. We’ll...

How deep are Hollywood’s ties to China? Beijing’s tentacles have ensnared most major studios — and many smaller ones — as well as a raft of A-list names: Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Russo brothers. Even Tyler Perry isn’t immune to China’s power.In his new book Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn Many of the most recognizable blockbuster titles in recent years were made with Chinese money — the Transformers, Kung Fu Panda, and even some of the Mission: Impossible movies.Dune and its upcoming sequel were both financed by Legendary Pictures, which is majority owned by China’s Wanda...

It’s a movie that hasn’t been seen in decades, missing for so long that many didn’t even know it existed. That is, until it turned up in Omaha, Nebraska. On a projector in a Kansas City home, Gary Huggins cues up a recent discovery. “I was relieved to find it wouldn’t explode!”, he said. Huggins soon refocused his attention from the technical to find something he definitely wasn’t expecting. “Wow, I think I’ve discovered this film that nobody’s seen in at least 50 years, if not 100,” Huggins said. Huggins, a filmmaker himself, picked up the film at an auction...

Theodore Honey (James Stewart) is a mathematician charged with discovering what caused the crash of a "Reindeer" airliner. As he travels to investigate, he realizes en route that he's flying on the very same type of airplane. Convinced it will suffer a similar accident, he deliberately sabotages it once it lands, and soon finds himself defending his sanity in an English courtroom. Fortunately, a sympathetic actress (Marlene Dietrich) and a stewardess (Glynis Johns) come to his defense.

Recently-released movies can now be graded on a new “Climate Reality Check” test, which will gauge on whether or not the film addressed the so-called “climate crisis.” “There’s a new ‘Climate Reality Check’ test — these 3 Oscar-nominated features passed,” headlined the article by Chloe Veltman at NPR. According to Veltman, the new test offers something similar to the much-ballyhooed “Bechdel Test” by grading movies on purely ideological grounds; in this case, environmentalism. Only three Oscar-nominated movies released in 2023 met the criteria for either having themes or strong mentions of the so-called “climate crisis”: Barbie, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning...

When the poet W.H. Auden called the years leading up to World War Two "a low dishonest decade" in his poem "September 1, 1939", you have to wonder if this was simply a case of perfect hindsight. Were sensible people really living for years with the near certainty that another war was on its way? If so, it must have been intolerable; if not, it would explain a lot. Proof of this dismal mood is actually abundant even in entertainment – like Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 thriller The 39 Steps, one of the director's earliest and greatest successes. It's the story...

For Academy Award-winning actress Hilary Swank, starring in “Ordinary Angels,” the true story about a woman who rallied her local community to save a young girl’s life, allowed her to use her platform to spread a message of hope and service at a time when it's desperately needed. The 49-year-old actress plays Sharon Stevens in “Ordinary Angels,” from Kingdom Story Company and Lionsgate, a hairdresser struggling with alcoholism and estrangement from her son. But after discovering the story of Michelle, a little girl in need of a liver transplant in the local newspaper, Sharon pours her energy into raising funds...

The film's team tells The Hollywood Reporter about studio tension, favorite improvised lines, residual checks, typecasting and the surprising path to classic status: "I don't know that there's a right way to market this movie."Office Space is celebrating its 25th anniversary following its delayed path to success, although hopefully no one would get their ass kicked for saying something like that. Released Feb. 19, 1999, director Mike Judge‘s enduring and endlessly quotable workplace satire follows computer programmer Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), who decides to stop caring about his day job and teams up with Initech co-workers Michael Bolton (David Herman)...

Barack Obama's daughter, Malia Ann, has received some negative reviews over a debut short film that she both wrote and directed. The 25-year-old showed her 18-minute film, The Heart, at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, which tells the story of a grieving son tasked with an unusual request from his late mother, previously screened at film festivals in Telluride and Chicago, where it received recognition in the best live action short category. In a "Meet the Artist" video for Sundance, Malia Ann said that her project "is about lost objects and lonely people and forgiveness and regret." She added...

Seems every week there’s another article out about people being Concerned over the possible dangers posed by artificial intelligence (AI for short). A lot of the tech people involved in developing it are asking for some government guidelines and regulation, Somehow, they can’t seem to slow down on their own. Can’t afford to let someone else get it first, you see. The big worry is that somehow, any AI might determine that its goals are not in line with those of humans, and it will take over the world. The one movie that’s constantly referenced is The Terminator (1984), in...

Rob Reiner’s ‘God & Country: The Rise Of Christian Nationalism’ film opened up this weekend at the box office, and to the surprise of all progressives and no conservatives, it absolutely bombed, bringing in a mere $38,415 over an extended four-day weekend. The film opened in 85 theaters, averaging $451 a theater over four days, which is incredibly low. Assuming it had at least one showing each day (and likely it had several), it brought in around 112 dollars a day, or ten people a day spread across however many showings. We’ve talking three or five people per showing, on...

Like all Rob Reiner movies, Rob Reiner’s documentary, God & Country: The Rise Of Christian Nationalism, didn’t just tank at the box office, it was humiliated. In 85 theaters, Reiner’s bigoted attack on Christians who dared to vote for Donald Trump earned just $38,415 over four days. As one website put it, that’s “averaging $451 [per] theater over four days, which is incredibly low.” If you assume it only had “one showing each day (and likely it had several), it brought in around 112 dollars a day, or ten people a day spread across however many showings.” What, you’re telling...

One aggravating peculiarity of baby boomers – one of many, to be sure – was to imagine their parents and every preceding generation afflicted with a lack of self-awareness. From farm hand to Harvard man, they were all benighted rubes, overwhelmed by the speed of change and in thrall to authority and received wisdom. Irony was born out of thin air, in the smoky funk of a dorm room when someone put on a Lenny Bruce record after Rubber Soul. While it's far from the most egregious error their cohort ever forced upon the world (Earth Day and the music...

Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. “The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,” he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some theaters, eager to fill the demand, screened the...