Posts

First footage from the new season debuted back in August and included a long-haired Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown), Hopper (David Harbour) with a flamethrower, and a classic shot of a group of kids racing down a dark street on bicycles. “I mean, it’s bigger, that’s the first thing,” Harbour said of “Stranger Things 4” in a Collider interview earlier this year. “In scope, in scale, even in the idea that we’re not in Hawkins anymore....

“The Spectacular Now” and “The End of the Tour” director James Ponsoldt aims to capture in a bottle those feelings of The Last Summer of middle school before stepping onto the next phase with his film “Summering.” The film written by Ponsoldt with Benjamin Percy centers on four girls weathering harsh truths and coming of age at the end of middle school. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and next will release from Bleecker Street Films nationwide on August 12....

The “Pussy Island” writer/director co-penned two songs for Taylor Swift’s upcoming album “Midnights,” titled “Karma” and “Lavender Haze.” The 13-track album is set to be released October 21, with the full song list revealed October 18 along with the co-writers. Swift co-wrote 11 out of the 13 songs with Jack Antonoff, plus Lana Del Rey for “Snow on the Beach.” The song “Vigilante Shit” is the sole track Swift alone wrote....

“The Batman” now looks like it could corral $400 million or more domestically. That would put it ahead of “Batman v Superman,” which opened better in 2016 but then collapsed (-69 percent second weekend) and totaled only $333 million (unadjusted). Credit positive reaction to the film for that, but also credit the new reality that the accepted norm is that more people see fewer movies. Which brings us to the other big story, in which these “Batman” returns are only part of an interwoven set of results that all relate to the biggest issue theaters now face: The major titles are doing better than ever, but the lack of a wider flow of new product is resulting in a still challenging exhibition situation....

Robert Pattinson was certainly up for the task, as the former “Twilight” star spent a decade honing his acting chops with arthouse films like “Good Time” and “Cosmopolis,” but “The Batman” still posed its own unique challenge. Pattinson is significantly younger than his predecessor Ben Affleck was when he donned the cape and cowl, so his performance would inevitably differ from Affleck’s grisled take on the character. For their interpretation, Affleck and director Matt Reeves mined both fiction and recent history for examples of men who come into vast wealth at very young ages to craft a blueprint for their version of Bruce Wayne....

While Judd Apatow’s “The Bubble” isn’t as grating or grandiose as Adam McKay’s apocalyptic “Don’t Look Up,” this star-studded Hollywood caricature is even more unexpectedly depressing. That element of surprise doesn’t work to Apatow’s advantage. It’s not meant to be a compliment when I say that “The Bubble” is depressing in a way that modern comedies rarely are — that it’s depressing in a way as novel as the coronavirus that inspired it....

When the film was preparing for its 2019 DOC NYC premiere, IndieWire’s own Anne Thompson wrote that it was an “intelligent examination of the peace process in the Middle East through the lens of six wily, strategically sensitive negotiators who led the diplomatic talks over 25 years with a series of U.S., Israel, and Palestine leaders.” The film boasts a wide variety of talking heads, all of whom come at the material from a place of deep understanding and, occasionally, still very real emotional attachment to their quest....