Nobody is hotter and more in-demand right now than Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette, and following her landing the role of Rogue in Marvel’s X-Men reboot, she’s just booked another major film. Deadline reports Navarrette will star in Apple’s The Waffle House Index, which sounds delicious but is about a lot more than waffles.
The film is based on a Black List script by Andrew Nunnelly, and refers to the “Waffle House Index”, an informal metric that FEMA and those in the South use to measure the severity of a storm and the need for disaster relief. How’s that? Well, Waffle Houses are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so if one of them is closed, you know the storm is going to be bad. Navarrette would presumably play Jane, who works the graveyard shift at her local Waffle House.
Navarrette will also serve as an exec-producer on the film, along with Apple Studios and Brad Pitt’s Plan B.
There’s supposedly a lot more going on than storms, such as killer crocs, aliens, gunmen, and secret magical bunkers.
Behind the camera will be Louis Paxton, whose quirky comedy The Incomer found a lot of fans at Sundance earlier this year. You can count me as one of them.
If you’ve been following the saga of Fast Forever, the supposed final movie in the Fast & Furious saga, it’s been kinda ridiculous. Fast X opened in 2023, ending on a huge cliffhanger, and ever since it’s been one delay after another, a complete lack of a script, budget woes that led to $50M being slashed, and a lot of Vin Diesel teasing things that simply weren’t happening. And now, Diesel is back and stirring shit up again.
So, the presumed director of Fast Forever is Louis Leterrier, returning to finish what he started with the last movie. However, whenever he talks about the film, he seems completely out of the loop. Perhaps we have a reason why now, because Diesel took to his Instagram (where else?) and posted a black-and-white photo of Dominic Toretto’s powerful Dodge Charger, with the words “Director…Hmmm…”
Um, is Vin Diesel directing Fast Forever now? You can’t take ANYTHING Diesel says at face value. He recently said that filming would begin in December, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe that’s true.
It could be that Diesel is just trolling Leterrier, but what purpose would that serve? Believe it or not, this wouldn’t be Diesel’s first time behind the camera. He directed the 1997 crime film, Strays, as well as the Fast & Furious short film, Los Bandoleros.
Despite his relative inexperience behind the camera, nobody knows these movies better than Diesel. In a way it makes sense that he’d finally direct one, the final one, since he has been the driving force (no pun intended) almost since the beginning. For now, Fast Forever is expected to open on March 17th 2028.
I’m happy to offer DC area readers the chance to attend a free early screening of The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s historical epic starring Andrew Garfield as leader of a rebellion against King Richard III.
SYNOPSIS: Andrew Garfield stars as the legendary leader of a ferocious rebellion against the tyranny of King Richard II. As war burns across England, he forms an army of the people to face the King’s might in a fight for justice and survival.
The screening takes place on Wednesday, September 9th at 7:00pm at Regal Majestic. If you’d like to attend, RSVP at the Focus Features site here! Please remember, all screenings are first come first served and you’ll need to arrive early to ensure seating. Enjoy the show!
The less you know about the real-life story behind By Any Means, a sweaty, southern crime flick from The Inspection director Elegance Bratton, the more you’ll appreciate it as a kind of classic Hollywood revenge tale. Mark Wahlberg plays notorious mafia hitman Gregory Scarpa, who, in 1966, helped the FBI find the bodies of slain civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. That case is pretty well-known, even if the FBI doesn’t want to admit anything. It says even less about the case involving Scarpa two years later: the murder of prominent voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer, played by Giancarlo Esposito. That’s what By Any Means is all about…sorta.
Sorta, because By Any Means seems to have more interest in creating a revenge fantasy, the stuff of many a blaxploitation film, than sticking to reality. That’s fine; those kinds of movies are far too rare these days. Pair up a couple of tough guys, give them a bunch of racists to beat up, and have a ball! Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Special Agent Wayne Strider, a fictional creation because there’s no evidence Scarpa ever teamed up with anybody. Striker makes the perfect kind of conflicted protagonist for this kind of story, anyway. He believes in law, order, and justice, but all it’s gotten him is being stuck behind a desk at the Mississippi field office, rather than taking part in actual cases as he did in Chicago.
That changes for Strider when he’s tasked with being Scarpa’s handler as he investigates the Dahmer killing. The two are oil and water, with Scarpa preferring to beat perps over the head with a bat than using any actual investigative techniques. This ideological divide between the partners is entertained for a little while in some fun but not particularly deep exchanges. Scarpa can respect the “by any means necessary” approach by Malcolm X, but Strider prefers Martin Luther King, Jr.
It doesn’t take long for Sascha Penn’s screenplay to dispense with the pretense and just get right down to the vengeful wish fulfillment. While Scarpa did engage in torture, pistol whippings, and other forms of violent intimidation, it’s unlikely he went on the killing spree that he and Strider engage in. They don’t just kill KKK members, but the corrupt local police aren’t spared, either. The body count is surprisingly high, not quite on a Quentin Tarantino Django Unchained level, but more than you’d expect from a movie based on real events. To be fair, By Any Means is a better movie for exaggerating things as much as it does, because who doesn’t want to watch Nazi scumbags get what they got comin’?
And who better to dish out punishment with a smile and big ol’ fake nose than Mark Wahlberg? His overacting is through the roof here, swaggering around and talking like someone auditioning to be an extra in A Bronx Tale. Wahlberg is clearly loving every second of this, and he’s by far the most enjoyable part of this movie because it doesn’t try to soften up Scarpa. He’s a bad guy doing bad shit for a good cause that he doesn’t even really believe in.
Abdul-Matteen II’s do-gooder FBI agent is kind of dull; even when he eventually goes rogue, he’s totally in Wahlberg’s shadow. Strider might be doing everything the right way, but Scarpa’s methods are getting things done a lot faster than following the rules. It’s a dilemma that is considered for a moment before Strider goes full-on Charles Bronson. By Any Means reveals some details of the real story during the credits, and they are a lot more boring than the sensational extremes the movie gave us. I’d much rather see a movie like this that dares to be provocative if it means being more entertaining than one that gives us the straight scoop.
On this episode of Cinema Royale, Justin Esquivel of Epic Film Guys joins me to talk about Adam Wingard’s return to gritty action flicks with ONSLAUGHT, starring Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, and Rebecca Hall! How does it measure up to THE GUEST or YOU’RE NEXT?
Also, beware of spoilers this episode! We get into everything!
When a rogue squad of genetically engineered super soldiers break loose in the desert, a badass Army sniper must unleash hell to protect her young daughter.
You can find Cinema Royale anywhere you get your podcasts, plus on YouTube in video form. Please subscribe to all the feeds if you can.
Last month, Sebastian Stan admitted that Avengers: Doomsday, in which he’ll return as Bucky Barnes, was shot without a finished script. Others have talked about it before, but this comment seems to have jump-started the chatter. Now the Russo Brothers themselves are defending this approach to the AP, saying it’s just how they’ve always done things…
“We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors,” Joe Russo said. “We like to see what the actors bring to the characters, and sometimes you don’t get the actors until a few days or few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens.”
Does anyone else recall the Russos having a reputation for basically flying by the seat of their pants? I mean, maybe way back when they did Welcome to Collinwood for like fifty bucks, but not on Marvel movies that cost in the hundreds of millions.
Marvel chief Kevin Feige has talked up this style as part of the MCU creative process, which includes multiple rewrites. But we’re not talking about rewrites here, are we? We’re talking about writing the script as production goes along.
I mean, did the Russos do this on their multiple failed non-Marvel movies, such as Cherry, The Gray Man, and The Electric State? It might explain something.
Anyway, the Russos also talked about what they need to accomplish with Avengers: Doomsday, and it’s not to fix the MCU, which many say has stumbled since Avengers: Endgame…
Anthony said, “It’s part of the unique challenge. The thing that Joe and I have always appreciated about our collaboration with Marvel is: Our job isn’t to answer for the entirety of the MCU. We intersect it in a very specific way. It’s that intersection which is where we can make sense of things.”
Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters on December 18th.
Tom Holland has been trying to get his Fred Astaire biopic off the ground for a few years, and it’s finally happening. He said it was next, following the record-breaking success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, with a January start date planned. And now comes word from Page Six that the list of candidates to play the female lead is down to two.
According to the report, Monica Barbaro and Margaret Qualley are the final contenders to play Adele Astaire, Fred’s older sister who performed dance numbers with him in vaudeville shows and on Broadway. The two worked together for nearly three decades.
Both Qualley and Barbaro have dance training, which would make them good fits for the role.
Qualley can be seen right now in Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars. She’s someone who has literally gotten better with each film. Next up for her is Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life, which will premiere at TIFF. I’ll be there for that one.
Barbaro was most recently in the dud rom-com, One Night Only. She’s really in demand right now following her Oscar-nominated performance in A Complete Unknown and her role in Crime 101. Later this year, she’ll be in Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI drama, Artificial.
There’s some beef going on between the Astaire estate, which claims Fred didn’t want projects like this about his life, and the filmmakers at Sony, including producer Amy Pascal and director Paul King. Looks like the movie is happening, anyway, but won’t be billed as an “authorized” biopic.
I had one of the biggest laughs in my life watching Mayday, the Apple TV spy comedy from the duo of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. The scene comes fairly early, as Kenneth Branagh’s burly, grizzled ex-KGB agent Nikolai Ustinov is fighting off swarms of Russian goons in a pub. Nikolai is comically unstoppable; they can’t lay a damn glove on this old guy who looks like he should be his grandkids some candy not sliding around like Floyd Mayweather. And I’m not sure if the scene is genuinely funny or not, it’s just so damned stupid and ridiculous that I burst into a fit of laughter that lasted literally for minutes.
I thought about why that scene was so funny to me, and it’s that it reminded me, fondly, of the absurdist Zucker/Abrahams movies that I loved in the ’80s, in particular my all-time favorite comedy, Top Secret! There’s a lot of that Cold War classic in Mayday in terms of the setting and the style of humor, which is often over-the-top slapstick. The more it leans into that, and the comic chemistry between Branagh and Ryan Reynolds, the better it works.
Mayday is sort of a synthesis of Top Secret! with another iconic film of that era, Top Gun, and the mix of espionage satire with military adoration jibes surpisingly well. Set in 1987, the film largely centers on Reynolds’ brash fighter pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly, who is recruited into an off-the-books mission in the newly-revealed SR-71 Blackbird across enemy lines. But when the plane is shot down and Kelly crashes down in Soviet Russia, it’s Ustinov who comes to his rescue. Kelly, who wakes up tied to a bed like he just landed in Misery, doesn’t understand his luck. He’s in the care of the most America-obsessed Russkie on the planet, someone who worships at the altar of Top Gun which he watches on a bootleg VHS tape.
I can’t remember the last time Branagh has been this funny and relaxed. Ustinov, a Russian carpenter with a kind soul, is the perfect contrast to Reynolds’ Kelly, who kinda comes across as the ugly, smug American ideal that we presented as for far too long. To Reynolds’ credit, he ultimately finds a nice balance with the tongue-in-cheek, self-referential humor he brings as Deadpool, but it takes a while to get there. Branagh and Reynolds capture the oil and water dynamic of classic buddy comedies, reminding at times of Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd in Spies Like Us.
Ultimately, Mayday is about Kelly and Ustinov trying to get out of enemy territory and to the safety of the U.S. embassy. They’re hotly pursued by the KGB and enforcer Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski), who want to hold Kelly hostage and likely imprison or execute Ustinov for being a traitor. The question becomes whether the U.S. will grant Ustinov, a former high-ranking KGB official, the asylum he desperately wants, not just for himself but for his daughter, played by Maria Bakalova in a small, underwritten role.
There’s considerably more action than expected, with all of it moving briskly and shot with a crispness by DP Barry Peterson. Goldstein and Daley have improved greatly as filmmakers, and it’s been as their writing has grown more confident. Their remake of Vacation couldn’t match the charm of the original, but it wasn’t terrible. They followed that with one the hilarious ensemble, Game Night, and their biggest film, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, easily the best attempt to capitalize on that epic pop culture franchise.
I would argue that Mayday could have been even better. There are some clear missed opportunities for bigger laughs; a train sequence in which each car is piled with more and more deadly Russian soldiers, just barely misses the mark. The film is never convincing in evoking any real sense of danger, or the paranoia that fueled the Cold War era and made laughing about it so therapeutic.
It’s a shame that Mayday is only arriving on Apple TV rather than in theaters, like the films it emulates were able to years ago. While hardly perfect, I suspect that it will be received as they were, and as many of Goldstein and Daley’s films are, as a cult favorite worth revisiting over and over.
It was brought to my attention recently that 2026 is the 25th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone hitting theaters, introducing us to Daniel Radcliffe and the rest of the franchise’s extraordinary cast. Besides making me feel extremely old, it also makes me feel that Warner Bros.’ decision to launch a new HBO Max series might not be the worst idea, even if it’s not for me. Today brings the teaser for season one, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, adapting the first of JK Rowling’s beloved books.
Dominic McLaughlin stars as Harry Potter, joined by Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger, and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley, Rory Wilmot as Neville Longbottom, Amos Kitson as Dudley Dursley, Louise Brealey as Madam Rolanda Hooch, Anton Lesser as Garrick Ollivander, John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as Minerva McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape, Nick Frost as Rubeus Hagrid, Bel Powley as Petunia Dursley, Daniel Rigby as Vernon Dursley, Lox Pratt as Draco Malfoy, Johnny Flynn as Lucius Malfoy, Katherine Parkinson as Molly Weasley, Leo Earley as Seamus Finnigan, Alessia Leoni as Parvati Patil, Sienna Moosah as Lavender Brown, and Bertie Carvel as Cornelius Fudge.
Kit Harington recently replaced Nicholas Hoult as vain celebrity wizard Gilderoy Lockhart. He’ll be introduced in season two, adapting Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Frances Gardiner is acting as showrunner, with Succession’s Mark Mylod directing multiple episodes.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hits HBO and HBO Max this Christmas.
Sian Heder, the filmmaker who taught millions what being the child of deaf adults was all about with her Best Picture-winning film CODA, is staying with the subject of disability. Heder’s next project, Being Heumann, centers on the trailblazing disability rights activist Judith Heumann, who will be played by Ruth Madeley. Today, Apple Original Film debuted the teaser trailer ahead of the drama’s world premiere next month at TIFF.
Being Heumann is based on Heumann’s memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, published just three years before her death. The film will chronicle Heumann’s efforts as a disability rights activist beginning in the 1970s, often challenging the administration of President Richard Nixon. In 1977, Heumann took part in the 504 Sit-In, leading over a hundred disabled people in a 28-day sit-in at the San Francisco Federal Building, the longest sit-in at a federal building. The protestors vowed to stay until the government enforced Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, requiring accessibility for all federal programs or activities.
It’s that 504 Sit-In that serves as the basis of the film. Heder and Rebekah Taussig co-wrote the screenplay.
Joining Madeley in the cast is Mark Ruffalo as Joseph Califano, who was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare for the Jimmy Carter Administration. Califano often stood against the demands of the disability rights movement.
Also in the ensemble are Dylan O’Brien, Will Brill, Michael Patrick Thornton, Antwan Tolliver, Rein Barcel, Charlie Rush-Reese, D’Arcee Charington Neal, Andrew Pilkington, Rio Finnegan, Daniel Durant, Russell Harvard, Matthew August Jeffers, Jon Beavers, Roberta Colindrez, Siena Rafter, Ray Fisher, Rob Delaney, and Madeline Delp.
Following its TIFF premiere, Being Heumann will open in select theaters on November 6th, then move to Apple TV on November 13th.
