Matthew Vaughn directed Fox’s X-Men: First Class back in 2011, followed a few years later when he produced X-Men: Days of Future Past. He hasn’t been involved with Marvel’s merry mutants since, but he apparently still keeps close tabs on it. And he’s got high expectations for Deadpool 3 and its potential impact on the MCU.
“The few snippets that I know about ‘Deadpool vs. Wolverine’ — or ‘Wolverine vs. Deadpool,’ I’m sure that argument between Ryan and Hugh is happening as we speak — are unbelievable.”
He continued, “That’s going to be the jolt… the Marvel universe is about to have a jolt of them, and it’s going to bring that body back to life… I think Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are about to save the whole Marvel universe.”
Vaughn’s time on the X-Men movies is different from everything else he’s ever done, and it’s because he loves the comics and wants to see the movies measure up…
“I’m a genuine fan of the X-Men; all I want is for the movies to be as good as they should be,” he said.
Deadpool 3 hits theaters on July 26th, and is expected to be filled with celebrity cameos and numerous ties to the old Fox Marvel-verse. Will it be enough to get the MCU back on track, though? We’ll just have to wait and see. I’m skeptical that it’ll have that kind of impact.
Minhal Baig made her feature debut a few years ago with the Anna Camp/Isabelle Fuhrman rom-com, 1 Night. And while it didn’t exactly earn rave reviews, the response to Baig’s sophomore effort, Hala, was much different when it premiered at Sundance a few years later. Baig’s latest, We Grown Now, had audiences buzzing at TIFF, earning the Changemaker Award and Indie Spirit nominations. Now that film is arriving in theaters next month, preceded by this brand new trailer.
Baig wrote and directed We Grown Now is set in 1992 Chicago and centers on two best friends who grow up in the rough Cabrini-Green housing complex. Cabrini-Green is a real place, but has been depicted in many movies, including Cooley High and the original Candyman.
The film stars Blake Cameron James, Gian Knight Ramirez, S. Epatha Merkerson, Lil Rel Howery, and Jurnee Smollett.
Here’s the synopsis: In 1992 Chicago, as Michael Jordan solidifies himself as a champion, a story of two young legends in their own right begins. As wide-eyed and imaginative best friends Malik and Eric traverse the city, looking to escape the mundaneness of school and the hardships of growing up in public housing, their unbreakable bond is challenged when tragedy shakes their community just as they are learning to fly.
We Grown Now opens in select theaters on April 19th, with a wider rollout on May 10th.
It’s a saying that Matthew Vaughn’s spy comedy Argylle likes to repeat. It sounds kinda nifty, kinda slick, like something a femme fatale looking to seduce a James Bond-type might say to him. But it doesn’t really mean anything, regardless of how it might sound. And that’s pretty much Argylle in a nutshell. All of the window dressing, the sped-up action, the big stars, it all looks very cool and if you think about it for even half a second it’s just the stupidest damn movie that makes no sense.
The sad thing about Argylle is that it’s also too smug for its own good. Vaughn’s movies always bear his self-satisfied fingerprints; whether it’s the tonally-similar Kingsman films or even X-Men: First Class. You can practically see Vaughn patting himself on the back, as if he’s giving you something you’ve never seen before, but that’s not true because he’s been doing the same style of movie for years, dabbling in the same ironies, the same heightened setpieces at the same pace, and with many of the same stars.
Argylle is a spy movie, but that’s only the beginning. Bryce Dallas Howard plays anxious, cat-loving writer Elly Conway. Her series of Argylle novels is a smash hit with millions of loyal fans. Henry Cavill, sporting an unfortunate flat-top haircut, plays agent Argylle as Elly dreams up his missions to then put on the page. These scenes also feature pop star Dua Lipa as sexy villainess LaGrange, John Cena as Argylle’s partner Wyatt, and Ariana DeBose as Keira, the tech wiz of the team. The opening mission goes awry, but then we learn that this is all a fiction as Elly sorts out her latest novel. Her mother (Catherine O’Hara), is none too pleased about the ending. “It’s a cop out”, she says.
So Argylle is both a spy film and a writer’s block story, as Elly tries to work past her issues. Oh wait, it’s more than that, too, because there’s a Stranger Than Fiction-esque component that finds Elly’s stories affecting her reality. This is never more real than when she’s approached on the train by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a cynical super spy who reads all of her Argylle books, and for good reason. Everything she writes about is a little too close to the truth for some folks in the espionage business, and they hope to use her predictive abilities for nefarious purposes. Don’t think about this too hard or your brain will crack it’s so dumb.
Vaughn is not an uncreative guy visually, and it’s impressive the way he shifts between reality and fantasy at the literal blink of Elly’s eyes, giving us both Cavill and Rockwell performing the same action sequences simultaneously. This nifty trick is also a problem, though, because we’re never quite sure what level the film is operating on. At times it wants us to take it seriously as an espionage caper, with the works of John Le Carre and others referenced throughout. But it also has that exaggerated Vaughn style where goofy things happen, like pretty much everything involving Elly’s cat Alfie, whom Aidan says he loves but appears deathly allergic to.
I love spy movies. For me, they are right up there with heist movies and assassin films as my all-time favorites. But the great thing about espionage, even in something silly like Kingsman, is exploring how deep the world of secret agents goes and how it reflects our world geopolitically. Argylle wants to have its cake and eat it, too; to be taken seriously and not at all. The ridiculous world Vaughn creates isn’t rich enough to succeed at either.
But Argylle shoots itself in the foot with a litany of twists supposedly meant to shock, but just leave you numb after a while. Characters played by Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Sofia Boutella, Rob Delaney, and more show up but none are who they appear to be. Some flip and then flip again, and when the “big” reveal happens involving a crucial lead character, and then another, you no longer have reason to care. Argylle is so pleased with itself over all of this nonsense, it’s like Vaughn just expects the audience to accept it and go with the flow because look at all of the fun casting and the CGI cat in a backpack! Isn’t that enough? Clocking in at an egregious 2 hours and 19 minutes, I’d say it’s about an hour too much.
Just days ago at Sundance, the world premiere of Winner (reviewed here) saw director Susanna Fogel and star Emilia Jones in attendance. But this wasn’t their first collaboration. That would’ve been almost exactly one year ago, also at Sundance, with the world premiere of Cat Person. While this odd little thriller about a young woman who dates an older man who says he has cats earned strong reviews, it opened in October and nobody saw it. To be fair, the distribution was a joke. Even the December streaming release was only on Hoopla (a real thing) and Spectrum. Well, that’s about to change as the film finally comes to Hulu.
So, if you missed Cat Person the first time around, and it’s likely that you did, the film hits Hulu on February 9th. Joining Jones in the cast are Nicholas Braun, Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis, Fred Melamed, and Isabella Rossellini.
The story is based on Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 short, and it’s definitely a weird one. Who would lie about having cats???
Here’s the synopsis: When Margot, a college sophomore (Emilia Jones) goes on a date with the older Robert (Nicholas Braun), she finds that IRL Robert doesn’t live up to the Robert she has been flirting with over texts. Cat Person is a razor-sharp exploration of the gender divide, the quagmire of navigating modern dating and the dangerous projections we make in our minds about the person at the other end of our phones.
You can check out Cortland’s review of Cat Personhere, as well as her interview with Susanna Fogel below.
In January of 2023, Nico Parker stole the first episode of The Last of Us, playing the doomed daughter of Pedro Pascal in the HBO existential zombie series. The follow-up to her breakout role is playing an average teenager in just as a devastating situation: dealing with her brother going through hospice.
Written by first-time writer/director Laura Chinn, Suncoast follows Doris (Parker) as she ignores her feelings about her brother’s impending death. As she starts to acclimate to her Christian High School, her mother Kristine (Laura Linney) moves her son into the Suncoast Hospice Center. It just so happens that it is 2005 and the facility is the same one where Terri Schiavo, a vegetative woman at the center of a national debate between right-to-die groups and pro-life ones, was placed by her husband.
Suncoast marks Chinn’s directorial debut, but she did cut her teeth writing for sitcoms like The Mick and Grandfathered. Despite her comedy background, the film is extremely moving and filled with pathos for every single character. Doris is a typical teenager that you’ve seen in other coming-of-age films, but because it is partially based on Chinn’s real life, the character feels like a groundbreaking representation. She takes advantage of the distance between herself and her mother by throwing parties at their home while Kristine sleeps at the center. Keeping an eye on her is Paul Warren (Woody Harrelson), a life advocate protesting Schiavo’s impending death outside the hospice.
Woody Harrelson plays the religious version of his character in The Edge of Seventeen. Guiding Doris along, he serves as more of a mentor character than someone on their own journey. It seems like Harrelson likes to break out the surrogate father figure every couple of years and he’s good at it.
Laura Linney is trading her prim and proper but ruthless character from Ozark for a vicious and passionate mother as Kristine. Both Linney and Chinn do a great job at making the character seem neglectful of her daughter for the most understandable reason. Linney is raw and yet grounded, throwing in a few laughs here and there.
Keyla Monterroso Mejia, who you may know from her guest spots on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Abbot Elementary, shows up as an overly smiley nurse. It’s a very small part but Mejia knows how to make the most of it.
Despite standout performances, Suncoast belongs to Parker. It’s a star-making turn for the young actress and somehow she can be relatable and funny in a very specific situation. She doesn’t milk the humor and instead brings a sweet awkwardness to Doris. Her performance, which won the Breakthrough Performance Award at Sundance, and Chinn’s script work beautifully together. If this is the role she chose as her follow-up to The Last of Us, then I can’t wait to see the full breadth of her range.
If you are part of any online community, you know about the power of the internet. Whether your platform is Tumblr, Discord, Xbox, or some other online game, these platforms have the singular power of connecting people of similar interests together quickly.
This idea is explored in Benjamin Ree’s latest documentary Ibelin. The breakout director of 2020’s The Painter and The Thief, the documentarian is becoming known for his prolific work looking at the lives of everyday normal people. This is no exception with his latest work looking at Mats Steen.
An everyday Norwegian kid, we learn through talking head interviews with his parents and sister, that he was diagnosed young with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a severe genetic disorder that took Steen, mobility, voice, and life. Like most teenagers, he found solace in the internet, more specifically playing collaborative video games likeWorld of Warcraft. Sometimes he would spend over twelve hours a day playing.
Mats’ father says that when Mats passed, he believes he deliberately left his computer password out for his parents to find. When they unlocked it, they discovered his blog and quickly wrote an obituary on it for readers to find. Unexpectedly, the family received hundreds of emails from people all over Europe sending their condolences and mourning with them, leading the family to wonder about what kind of life their son lived online.
This question is at the heart of Benjamin Ree’s film. Using those emails, a server with thousands upon thousands of hours and over 40,000 pages logged with Warcraft history, the documentarian can reenact and trace Mats’ online life. With the help of the game’s animators, they show how he was in the game, how he liked helping others, and – eventually – how his illness made his way into his online world despite his wishes against it.
Ibelin is not just a love letter to online communities but a portal to how Mats saw himself. Very rarely do we get disability representation like this that doesn’t celebrate the individual. We see Mats cut people out and be rude to those he disagrees with. He could be a womanizer online and it sounds like there were a few members of his guild that thought he could be an asshole. What Ree is great at showing in his work is someone as their full and true selves. He doesn’t demonize Mats and instead shows him through a light of empathy that is extremely moving.
While the World of Warcraft animation is a good idea, Ree over-relies on it, especially in emotional moments. In Ibelin’s final act, you still have the voiceover given to him from those talking-head interviews. More cuts back to the real world, lingering there instead of in the uncanny valley, would have packed a more significant emotional punch.
We eventually learn that Ibelin was the name of Mats’ avatar. He was buff, had a ponytail and a mustache, and liked to solve mysteries. The real Mats loved games and eating outside of his G-tube and had very complicated feelings about his situation. Ree marries these two figures in Ibelin, telling the remarkable story of an online community and an ordinary young man.
Netflix picked up Ibelin and will release it later this year.
We’re happy to offer our readers the chance to attend an early virtual screening of Upgraded, Prime Video’s upcoming rom-com starring Camila Mendes, Archie Renaux, and Marisa Tomei!
SYNOPSIS: Ana (Camila Mendes) is an ambitious intern dreaming of a career in the art world while trying to impress her demanding boss Claire (Marisa Tomei). When she’s upgraded to first class on a work trip, she meets handsome Will (Archie Renaux), who mistakes Ana for her boss– a white lie that sets off a glamorous chain of events, romance and opportunity, until her fib threatens to surface.
The screening is virtual and takes place on Monday, February 5th at 6:00pm. If you’d like to attend virtually, RSVP at the Amazon link here.
Enjoy the show! Upgraded will stream globally on Prime Video on February 9th.
The first movie I saw at Sundance this year was also one of the most talked about. IFC and Shudder’s In a Violent Nature, a brutal slasher movie with one of the most gnarly kills I’ve ever seen. So what makes this different from any other arthouse horror movie playing festivals? This one is told from the slasher’s perspective.
So basically, imagine Friday the 13th totally seen through the hockey mask of Jason Voorhees. In a Violent Nature centers on Johnny, who rises from his makeshift grave to retrieve something that has been stolen from him. Fueled by vengeance, he begins stalking down everyone in his vicinity, including a bunch of vacationing teens, and a sheriff tied to his past.
The film stars Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley, Liam Leone, Charlotte Creaghan, Lea Rose Sebastianis, Sam Roulston, Alexander Oliver, and Lauren Taylor, and was directed by Chris Nash in his feature debut.
I like this teaser because it doesn’t reveal too much. I do believe that a less is more approach is the right idea, and it should continue as we get closer to its release. What the film does right is explore the tropes of slasher movies, revealing some things we don’t typically see, from a viewpoint we’ve never seen.
Here’s the synopsis: When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year old crime, his body is resurrected and becomes hellbent on retrieving it. The undead golem hones in on the group of vacationing teens responsible for the theft and proceeds to methodically slaughter them one by one in his mission to get it back – along with anyone in his way.
In a Violent Nature will open in theaters soon, followed by a streaming release on Shudder.
Dune: Part One was a huge hit in 2021, both critically and at the box office during a rough time for movie theaters. When the sequel was delayed due to the strikes, it deflated fans who were eager to see Denis Villeneuve conclude his sci-fi epic. But, as most already know, these first two movies adapt just one of Frank Herbert’s novels, and if this is also a success, there’s a good chance we’ll see the next book adapted, Dune: Messiah.
If Dune: Messiah is going to happen, Villeneuve won’t have any trouble luring back stars Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. The trio spoke with Total Film about the prospect of returning for a third movie to conclude the story of Paul Atreides. Suffice it to say, all are pretty excited…
“Denis is an artist, and doesn’t like to share things until he’s got it figured out,” Zendaya said. “So whenever he’s ready, we’re all keenly ready to hear what his vision is.”
Chalamet added, “The idea excites me very much. If the time and opportunity comes to complete the story with ‘Messiah,’ I think we’re all super-enthusiastic about that.”
Villeneuve has said the script for Dune: Messiah is nearly finished, and thinks Paul’s story needs to be tied-up properly…
“All of the elements are there,” Villeneuve explains. “But I think the movie adaptation is more tragic than the book. The way that Part Two ends… it would create a total balance and equilibrium to finish Paul’s storyline in what we could say in Part Three.”
If you saw the new Mean Girls musical, then you are already aware of how funny and talented Avantika was as the dopey Karen Shetty. Her song “Sexy” totally stole the film. Well, Avantika is back and going in the complete opposite direction. She’s starring in the new horror, Tarot, and based on the title you probably already know what it’s about.
Well, let me take that back, because Avantika might be perfect as a stupid youngster who underestimates the power of tarot readings and unleashes evil supernatural forces into the world. Isn’t that always the way? Did these people not watch Talk to Me? Or any horror movie for that matter?
Joining Avantika in the cast are Spider-Man‘s Jacob Batalon, Harriet Slater, and Adain Bradley. The film is written and directed Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg. It marks the feature-length directorial debut for both, although Cohen previously wrote the Halle Berry thriller Moonfall. Make of that what you will.
Here’s the synopsis: When a group of friends recklessly violates the sacred rule of Tarot readings – never use someone else’s deck – they unknowingly unleash an unspeakable evil trapped within the cursed cards. One by one, they come face to face with fate and end up in a race against death to escape the future foretold in their readings.
