Two weeks after the wild Telluride premiere of Nathan Fielder and Primetime director Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes “documentary” You Can See Everything, people are still buzzing about it. I’m still getting questions from people asking if the depiction of the Theranos fraudster is real. Hey, your guess is as good as mine. Today, A24 has released the full trailer and announced an October 16th theatrical release date.
So what makes You Can See Everything so strange? Well, we learned over a year ago that Fielder was visiting the infamous Holmes in federal prison. Those visits are just a small piece of the story. Holmes apparently invited a film crew to document her life just 34 days before she was due to report to prison, and what unfolded was much crazier than the filmmakers expected.
SYNOPSIS: Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. From boundary-pushing directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim comes You Can See Everything.
Fielder is best known for HBO’s surreal docu-comedy The Rehearsal, which suggests this won’t be a typical documentary. Teaming up with Oppenheim, whose controversial Chris Hanson drama Primetime opens this weekend, only makes this project more interesting.
Robert Eggers’ Werwulf trailer played ahead of Resident Evil over the weekend, and I told a buddy of mine that I really wanted Eggers to do a romantic comedy next. It’s a ridiculous idea, which is why I said it, but it turns out I wasn’t too far off. THR reports Eggers will direct a Romeo and Juliet adaptation for Focus Features. How is this real life?
The film was part of a bidding war that included A24, Warner Bros., and Sony, with Focus Features, home of Eggers’ hit Nosferatu, The Northman, and the upcoming Werwulf, coming out on top.
Details are under wraps, and we shouldn’t expect that Eggers will give us a traditional take on Shakespeare’s tragic love story. One thing we do know is that the dialogue will be in Old English, unsurprising for a director who delivers incredibly detailed period pieces. His films The Lighthouse and The Northman had actors speaking in era and culturally specific dialects.
I’m curious to see who Eggers will get to star. You can count on Dafoe having a role. Maybe Anya Taylor-Joy for Juliet?
Toxic male friendships built on cruelty and violence are a familiar theme for Martin McDonagh, one that he returns to in Wild Horse Nine. The film stars John Malkovich, in a role that could lead to a Best Picture Oscar nomination, and Sam Rockwell, who already won an award for McDonagh’s Three Billboards, as undercover CIA agents fomenting political unrest in 1973 Chile while also grappling with past sins.
Written and directed by McDonagh, Wild Horse Nine premiered in Venice earlier this year. It recently played at Toronto, which is where I was finally able to catch up with it. The buzz for Malkovich’s performance is legit. He’s never been this funny, sympathetic, and menacing all at the same time.
Also in the cast are Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, Tom Waits, Mariana di Girolamo, and Ailín Salas.
Here’s the official synopsis: Shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, CIA agents Chris and Lee are dispatched from Santiago to Easter island by their bureau chief, MJ. Amongst the Island’s iconic statues, and as the longtime partners wrestle with their dark pasts and present conspiracies, Chris’s newfound bond with a pair of rebellious students threatens to send everyone’s trip to this remote paradise sideways.
It’s not fair to say that Brad Bird has been trying to make Ray Gunn for a long time. It’s been a career-long obsession, spanning nearly three decades. Finally, the animated noir is set to arrive courtesy of Netflix, which sees it as one of the biggest titles to emerge this awards season.
Netflix has dropped the first trailer for Ray Gunn, featuring the voices of Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson. Set in the fictional Metropia, a retro-futuristic city where humans and aliens co-exist. Rockwell voices Ray Gunn, the last human private detective investigating a murder case involving aliens and pop star Venus Nova, voiced by Johansson.
Also in the voice cast are Tom Waits, Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Chernus, Kether Donohue, Michelle Rodriguez, Aasif Mandvi, Matt Jones, Kathryn Hunter, John Ratzenberger, Justin Peck, and Patton Oswalt.
This is Bird’s first film since 2018’s The Incredibles 2. He previously directed The Incredibles, Tomorrowland, The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol.
Will Ray Gunn be the killer animated film that fans have been waiting for and that Netflix hopes it to be? I think it’s going to have some stiff competition at the Oscars from Forgotten Island, but we shall see. I’m pretty hyped for this one.
Ray Gunn will have its world premiere at BFI London, before opening in select theaters on December 4th, followed by Netflix on December 18th.
When you need a President who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, Samuel L. Jackson is your guy. Sorry, Harrison Ford! Following his action role as the POTUS in Big Game, Jackson is back as the chief exec in The Beast, defending the country from inside a heavily armed limo!
The Beast is directed by veteran filmmaker Renny Harlin, the guy behind Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and recently, The Strangers trilogy and Deep Water. The film is a reunion with Jackson, whom he directed in Deep Blue Sea, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Cleaner.
In The Beast, Jackson stars as the President of the United States, who jumps into action when a group of unknown hostiles attempts a violent coup. The President is forced to take control of “The Beast”, the presidential limousine, and unlock its full offensive capabilities to rescue an injured Secret Service agent, reunite with his wife, and save the country.
Joel Kinnaman plays the Secret Service agent. Oppenheimer actor Guy Burnet is also in the cast.
Is blood truly thicker than water? It’s a question that James Gray has pondered before, and he returns to it in the 1980s New York drama Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller. Following the film’s world premiere at Cannes, the film plays next, appropriately enough, as the opener of this week’s New York Film Festival, and NEON has dropped a new trailer.
Driver and Teller play brothers who, after coming up with a get-rich scheme that works too well, come under threat by the Russian mafia. As the pressure mounts, family bonds are tested with dire consequences.
Teller and Johansson joined Driver after Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway had to drop out due to other commitments.
The film is directed by Gray based on his own screenplay. It’s his first film since Armageddon Time in 2022, and returns to the familiar territory, exploring the dark side of the American Dream, as seen in We Own the Night and The Yards.
NEON will release Paper Tiger in select theaters on November 13th, before expanding a week later. Check out the teaser trailer below.
At the Toronto International Film Festival, there was very little buzz following the world premiere of Prima Facie, Susanna White’s courtroom drama starring Cynthia Erivo. An adaptation of Suzie Miller’s acclaimed one-woman stage play, the film has yet to acquire U.S. distribution as well. Perhaps all of that will change now with the release of a new trailer which shows that the story has been greatly expanded.
Adapted by Miller, Prima Facie stars Erivo as Tessa, who didn’t let her working-class background stop her from becoming a strong, confident defense barrister. She knows the ins and outs of the legal system better than anyone, but finds her confidence shaken after an assault by a colleague, leaving her to navigate that system herself.
Joining Erivo in the cast are Daniel Ings, Toheeb Jimoh, Noma Dumezweni, Simon Russell Beale, Elizabeth Dulau, Harry Treadaway, Sarah Junillon, and Elliot Levey. As I noted, Prima Facie was originally a one-woman show led by Jodie Comer, who won multiple awards for her performance.
Prima Facie has release dates coming up in the UK, Ireland, and Australia, but nothing in the US just yet. Check out the new trailer below.
Those, like myself, who are old enough to remember the reality TV craze that was To Catch a Predator, may not have stuck around long enough to see the ramifications. The Dateline NBC series ran from 2004-2008 and focused on the luring and exposure of pedophiles through televised sting operations. The men, because it was always dudes, were baited by someone pretending to be an underage minor, then lured to a home where an actor portraying the youth would let them in. But before anything sexual could happen, host Chris Hansen would enter, read some of the disgusting online discourse, ask the predator what they were thinking, much to their humiliation, then allow them to leave which is when police would tackle and arrest them. You might ask yourself, “So what’s the problem with exposing and arresting a bunch of pedos?” Nothing, if it’s done for the right reasons and in the right way.
Lance Oppenheim’s feature debut Primetime would seek to explore the morality of creating entertainment out of what could charitably be called “entrapment”, but the film lacks a clear direction and clear perspective. Robert Pattinson looks like Hansen, and sometimes he even sounds like him. He has this overly theatrical way of hanging on certain syllables for dramatic effect, a side effect of the pompous attitude he carries around. Hanson doesn’t consider what he’s doing at all. He’s too busy slapping himself on the back when the show gets picked up for a prime time slot on NBC, going head-to-head with Lost. Fans of the latter show will get a kick out of the frequent references to that once-powerful TV juggernaut. Hansen has questions of morality surrounding himself personally, too. He’s not a particularly good father or husband, with Anna Faris in a small role as his beleaguered wife. And there are allegations of infidelity that Hansen is trying to duck and hide from. How is he the right guy to judging the right and wrong of anything?
Merritt Wever can always be counted on to give a strong performance, and she’s great as fictional producer Andie Bender, an aggressive ratings grabber who is constantly pushing the show’s limits. Skyler Gisono plays another fictional figure, angel-faced actor Dan Plumb, who is brought in as “Decoy Dan”, the attractive jailbat too irresistible for the pedos to deny. The acting is strong across the board, with Pattinson delivering one of his best performances as Hansen, a detestible “hero” who read too few of his own press clippings. Hansen is the kind of guy who can wave aside any ethical issues by declaring that he’s cleansing the world of evil, when really he just wants the kind of journalistic respect that someone like anchor Stone Phillips gets. Pattinson is electric, and elevates Primetime when it loses its way, as it often does.
Is there anybody in the world who is interested in the extramarital affairs and workplace drama of Chris Hansen? Probably not, but that’s where Primetime puts the majority of its focus when the real meat is To Catch a Predator and its impact on him and society as a whole. It’s strange that Oppenheim, a documentarian of some renown, doesn’t seem that interested in exploring the phenomenon of law enforcement television (including shows like COPS and America’s Most Wanted) that turned justice into a circus for our amusement. However, he is interested in dramatizing some of the show’s most questionable moments; the arrest of a predator with cerebral palsy, and the one that most directly led to the series’ demise, the suicide of a prominent political figure in Texas. Primetime is more interested in the events but not whether Hansen, or anyone involved with To Catch a Predator, was changed by any of it.
Chances are that we’ll learn more about Hansen in the present than by anything that happened in the past. He’s purchased ad time ahead of theatrical presentations of the film, and is seriously considerig legal action against A24. Hansen is an attention-seeker, and chances are he’ll tune his opinion depending on how Primetime is received.
It’s two episodes of Cinema Royale for the price of one, as I’m trying to pick up the slack after being away in Toronto for the last week. First off, Chris Bumbray of Joblo.com and I review Zach Cregger’s RESIDENT EVIL, a total stripping down of the video game’s mythology into a lean, mean horror machine! Is it the best video game movie ever??
After that, Chris and I have a lot to say following the Toronto International Film Festival! Will People’s Choice winner LA BOLA NEGRA finally earn Netflix the Best Picture Oscar it has been seeking for years? Will I Play Rocky be a box office hit that earns Anthony Ippolito a surprise Best Actor nomination? Is Julianne Moore a lock to win Best Actress for THE DEBUT? What about John Malkovich and WILD HORSE NINE? Is it his path to the Best Actor Oscar? And what was it like in the room for Zack Snyder’s THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH?
All of this and more! 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.
Done punching bad guys for now with the conclusion of Reacher season four, Alan Ritchson will turn his attention to punching some bugs, instead. Following the recent exit of Jason Momoa from Helldivers, Sony Pictures and director Justin Lin are in talks with Ritchson to take over as star of the video game adaptation.
Ritchson would play one of the helldivers, if he puts pen to paper. Helldivers follows the titular shock troopers of a totalitarian government, armed with advanced weaponry and charged with wiping out alien threats to make way for colonization by the fascist Super Earth regime. Gary Dauberman is writing the screenplay.
Having already conquered the small screen, Ritchson is still finding his way as a movie star. He can be seen right now in the action-comedy, Runner, alongside Owen Wilson. He led the Netflix smash, War Machine, earlier this year, and has Adam Shankman’s Christmas comedy The Man with the Bag coming up in which he stars alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger. [Deadline]
