“I’ll be honest with you here,” Phoenix said. “I did not want to get up anywhere and do anything. I was not excited about the opportunity. It’s just not who I am. I was full of fear.” Phoenix’s Oscar speech had less to do with “Joker” and more to do with fighting for animal rights, which is the main reason his speech went viral on social media. “We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow,” the actor memorably said while accepting the Oscar, “and when she gives birth we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable, and then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal....

“Deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman. Is that allowed, or am I being unrealistic?” the 81-year-old Cleese tweeted in response to one user who asked him, “Why the fuck can’t you just let people be who they want to be? Do you actually think there is some deep conspiracy to turn people ‘against their genders’? Or do you like her as a person and therefore there isn’t anything she can do wrong?...

During my ’80s stint at Film Comment Magazine, we published several directors’ guilty pleasures, from Michael Powell to Stephen King, as well as John Waters’ list of high-end art films, which included both Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema” and Woody Allen’s “Interiors.” The latest entry to my guilty pleasures list is Bronx-born playwright John Patrick Shanley’s “Wild Mountain Thyme,” a sublimely over-the-top, candy-cane romance that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s possible to imagine that a canny mainstream Hollywood director like Norman Jewison could have transformed Shanley’s adaptation of his 2014 Tony-nominated play “Outside Mullingar” (written after he turned 60 and inspired by his family’s farm in County Mayo) into something as wondrous as Shanley’s 1988 Oscar-winning “Moonstruck,” one of the most popular movies watched at home during the pandemic....

“Jupiter’s Legacy” has quietly emerged one of the most addictive shows of 2021. The Netflix series about children of superheroes has everything you want in a bingeworthy series. It marks the first collaboration between Netflix and Mark Millar since the streamer acquired Millarworld comics in 2019, and they have plenty more in the pipeline. For those unfamiliar, Millar is one of the most influential comic book writers of the last half century....

The Hollywood Reporter changed their initial report to the following: “A Lucasfilm source says that the Cara Dune role on ‘The Mandalorian’ is not expected to be recast and that she was not part of the Dec. 10 presentation, nor was she engaged in negotiations for future work.” The “Dec. 10 presentation” refers to Disney Investor Day, when the studio announced “The Mandalorian” was getting a slate of spinoff projects. One title, “Rangers of the New Republic,” was rumored to position Carano’s Cara Dune as its lead character....

Netflix’s “Lucifer,” the popular fantasy series that premiered its sixth and final season September 10, was the most-viewed original streaming show of the week by an impressive margin. The series was viewed for 1,588 million minutes, while Netflix’s “Clickbait” trailed in second place with 732 million minutes viewed, per Nielsen’s latest report on the most-viewed streaming TV shows. The company’s rankings were based on viewership data from from September 13 to September 19....

Per Netflix, the limited documentary series’ synopsis reads: Fran Lebowitz knows what she likes — and what she doesn’t like. And she won’t wait for an invitation to tell you. For decades, the critic and essayist has been expressing her opinions, sometimes grouchily, always riotously. A New Yorker to the core, Lebowitz has raised straight talk to an art form, packaging her no-nonsense observations about the city and its denizens into a punchy running commentary, one that spares nobody....