Hollywood romance has taught us that reuniting with the love that got away is like something out of the storybooks. Real life doesn’t work that way, and second chances are hard to come by. The film Lorelei centers on a second shot at love between characters on society’s fringes played by Jena Malone and Pablo Schreiber. Having premiered already in Deauville, France, it will open stateside next month via Vertical Entertainment.
Schreiber, who many will recognize from First Man and Den of Thieves, plays an ex-con just released from prison after 15 years. While attending an A.A. meeting he runs into his high school sweetheart, the love of his life. But their lives are hardly ideal. He’s got a rap sheet and she’s a single mother of three.
The film is written and directed by Sabrina Doyle, but what caught my attention are the producers of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. I can see some similarities in its depiction of people who live on the margins, and that has me very excited to catch this when it opens in theaters and VOD on July 30th.
After 15 years in prison, Wayland (Pablo Schreiber) reunites with his high school girlfriend, Dolores (Jena Malone), who is now a single mother of three. What follows is a lyrical take on love, regret, and second chances.
Holy shit it’s finally here! A film trilogy bringing to life the teen horror novels of the Fear Street Saga series written by R.L. Stine. His books spanned from 1989 to 1999 with revived variations up until 2014. There are over 100 books written between the two and are still wildly loved and respected by fans to this day, including myself. Thus the excitement for Netflix’s 3 week, back to back summer film release!
R.L. Stine’s Fear Street teen novels were the perfect medium for readers, like me, who wanted something more than the family campfire spooky story feel of his Goosebumps series but less of the wicked nightmares feared of Stephen King’s novels. Now that Goosebumps has had it’s run throughout film and TV over the years, it’s finally time for R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series to have a go. Kickoff the summer fun in July by slaying into Fear Street’s first film trilogy, starting with Part 1: 1994.
Fear Street Part 1: 1994 and the remaining two films in the set are directed by Leigh Junaik. She made her feature film directorial debut with horror/mystery Honeymoon (2014) starring Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) and Harry Treadaway (Penny Dreadful). She’s taken on the start of the first Fear Street set for Netflix and all at the same. That’s pretty ballsy and highly respectable!
It’s 1994 in Shadyside, Ohio and a circle of friends are uncovering the truth linked to an old witch hunt. They’re about to discover an ancient evil responsible for a series of brutal murders that has plagued their town for over 300 years. Can this group of friends put an end to the looming curse in time before they too become victims of just another “sad tragedy” for their seemingly unlucky town?
There are some familiar faces from the shows of Stranger Things and The Haunted Hathaways, among others. The cast (who may also be seen featured throughout the series) includes Kiana Madeira, Ashley Zukerman, Gillian Jacobs, Olivia Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Fred Hechinger, Julia Rehwald, Jordana Spiro, Jordyn DiNatale, Maya Hawke, Sadie Sink, and Darrell Britt-Gibson.
There is definitely a full embrace of the 90’s teen rebel vibe happening here. From an almost exact wardrobe (minus the Jenco pants, spiked dog collars, and Dr. Martin’s, and heavy eyeliner) to the grunge band (alternative rock these days) soundtrack that gives all the nostalgic feels. Part 1: 1994 features top hits from the bands of Garbage, Bush, White Zombie, Radiohead, House of Pain, and so much more.
Fear Street Part 1: 1994 totally slays at combining the Fear Street teen novel series and the thriller atmosphere of the 90’s teen slasher films that were in its peak of those days. Reminiscent of all the Scream movies, I Know What You Did Last Summer films, Halloween H20, and Urban Legends to name a few. An upgrade to an R rating as there is excessive profanity, a fear setting that stirs the sex drive, and of course, the blood and gore. All the things I thoroughly enjoy in a good horror/thriller film!! However, despite being a “teen thriller”, this one (nor the others) is not suitable for young teens or for the squeamish type.
So it’s established that Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is damn good. Yes, there are some flaws but nothing that should hinder seeing it let alone, the second or third installment of the set. The roller coaster of emotions displayed by the characters can be off putting. There are times that the teens are accentuating their acting and really go hard when they have to kick ass but when a friend/person is killed, especially in a pretty grotesque way, they act as if it’s no big deal. Sooooo, never mind Susie’s face just took an ax to it, let’s go grab a burger mentality…um, wtf?
Also, the blood. The blood throughout the film comes in various shades of red. Different and not sure if that was intentional but alright. There’s a scene where a girl had been stabbed and was choking on her blood. Coughs it all over her face. Camera pans away but comes back to the girl who has…a clean face. Whoops. Okay, for me..those little things are not that big a deal. Actually, it’s kinda funny. It’s that clumsy, over the top, fuck it-who cares craze that makes these slasher films all the more fantastic. As long as they stick to being unique and gore-y, it’ll do! I love it and look forward to seeing and reviewing the rest.
The interesting thing about 2016’s Don’t Breathe, a home invasion thriller about a group of friends who break into a blind man’s home and get more than they bargained for, is that you end up rooting for the seemingly crazy blind killer. He was the aggrieved party, right? They busted into his joint, not the other way around. Whether that was intentional or not, I don’t know, but the filmmakers are leaning into it with Don’t Breathe 2, because not only is Stephen Lang’s character back, but he’s definitely the hero this time.
Lang returns as “The Blind Man” Norman, who has settled down into a quiet life in a secluded home. He’s taken in a young orphaned girl and is raising her as his own, only to have that peace interrupted by a new bunch of criminals who kidnap her, torch the house, and force Norman to leave his safe haven.
While the first film’s director Fede Alvarez has stepped aside and taken a co-writing role, he’s joined by Rodo Sayagues in his directorial debut. Sayagues co-wrote the previous Don’t Breathe, which turned into a $150M+ hit, and did the same on this one.
I absolutely LOVE when someone comes out with a unique take on the vampire. The archetype has been around for literally 100’s of years in literature and was literally the subject of one of the first films to gain popularity, so to be able to provide a fresh take is something special. Blood Red Sky doesn’t reinvent the mythos, but it’s definitely a unique and intriguing situation. What if instead of being Wesley Snipes playing a Sky Marshall in Passenger 57, he was playing Blade? It would suck to be those terrorists, I can tell you that much. Nadja has a mysterious disease and is traveling from Germany to New York with her son to see a doctor that can help her. Unfortunately the plane is hijacked and Nadja is shot dead trying to protect her son….and then she wakes up. That mysterious disease? Vampirism.
Can you seriously tell me that’s not a cool plot? Adding in Dominic Purcell as the lead terrorist is just a cherry on top.
Check out the trailer below and look for Blood Red Sky July 23rd, 2021 on Netflix!
Official Synopsis:
Nadja and her ten-year-old son are on an overnight flight from Germany to New York when a group of terrorists violently take control of the plane and threaten the lives of the passengers. Suddenly Nadja faces an impossible choice – should she reveal her dark side and the inner monster she has kept hidden from her son for years in order to save him? The hunters become the hunted in this action-horror from director Peter Thorwarth, starring Peri Baumeister and Dominic Purcell.
*This review was originally published as part of our 2021 Sundance Film Festival coverage. Summer of Soul opens in theaters and Hulu on July 2nd.*
It’s almost unfathomable that something as truly, viscerally alive as the Harlem Cultural Festival could be locked, buried in a basement, for more than fifty years. A rhythmic rainbow of sounds and colors, fueled by the percussive energy of the 1969 civil rights movement and the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and more, the event regarded as “black Woodstock” drew hundreds of thousands of people, all there to hear the sounds of Motown, gospel, Latin funk, and more. The cost? Not a damn cent.
Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) marks the directorial debut by Roots founding member Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. It’s also a much-needed addition to the wealth of concert docs out there on bands we’ve seen and heard ad-nauseum, events that have been covered and covered again without a fresh take. The Harlem Cultural Festival is a slice of Black history that has been mostly forgotten and nearly went undiscovered. Sprung from the mind of singer Tony “The Continental Dreamboat” Lawrence, it was a celebration of Black pride, love, religion, politics, and culture.
Those intersections brought more than just the top musical acts of the time, but figures such as Jesse Jackson and then-New York City mayor John Lindsay. The Harlem Cultural Festival became a crossroads where the leaders of the civil rights movement met the Black Power movement (Black Panthers provided security), almost in a passing of the torch. The stage was filled with musicians who tapped into the energy of time and spoke, through their words and music, to the fear and anger many of the 300,000 attendees were struggling within the turbulent year of 1969.
Footage of the festival was captured by producer Hal Tulchin, who couldn’t find a buyer to take it off his hands. And so it sat until Questlove brought it out of hiding, and pieced together a blast of pure radical energy and spirit. The early portion of the show is like being taken to church, with Mahalia Jackson, The Staple Singers, and more helping everyone feel the hand of God through the power of song. Pop/R&B group The 5th Dimension, featuring the likes of Billy Davis Jr. and Marily McCoo, revved up the crowd while in interviews they spoke about the criticism they faced for their sound, which many said sounded too “white.”
A young Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips, David Ruffin, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Hugh Masekela, Babatunde Olatunji, Mongo Santamaría, Ray Barretto and so many more spoke to the diversity of acts on hand, which reflected the multi-cultural aspect of Harlem to a tee.
Even a heathen like me considered a conversion at the moment Mahalia Jackson, feeling ill, leaned on Mavis Staples in a performance of the uplifting and powerful “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” The song, a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, was performed just a year after his murder. I dare you not to tear up.
Questlove keeps his ambitions small in order to focus on the moment, conducting interviews with those on stage and those who were fortunate enough to be in the audience for this magical day of spirit-filling music. Only occasionally does he break away to focus on a particular subject, like the slick-dressed Lawrence, a go-getter who had begun putting together Harlem Cultural Festivals in 1967 with a limited amount of resources. It’s inescapable the feeling that Lawrence pulled off something of a miracle.
As a filmmaker, Questlove moves with the same confidence that he’s shown on the drums for years. In the footage, we see thousands of Black and brown kings and queens in the crowd singing, dancing, loving, and living, all wrapped in the music and the spirit. But make no mistake, they were also preparing for a revolution, a fight that those in power hoped could be quieted with an annual Harlem concert.
“It was like going to war. And we were propelled on a wave of music”, said professor/activist Denise Oliver-Velez.
Questlove’s Summer of Soul is a mixtape tribute to Black pride and excellence. He’s restored an essential moment that now, thanks to his monumental efforts, can be explored to calculate the full weight of its impact. That many of the obstacles faced by minorities at the time still exist today can’t be ignored, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others come calling to try and capture lightning in a bottle once more. If you see a new Harlem Cultural Festival emerge out of this, when racial tensions are higher than ever, don’t fight it. Get into the spirit.
That’s all I had to say following today’s incredible, mind-blowing episode of Loki, titled “The Nexus Event”. There were so many cameos (Sif kneeing Loki in the nuts!!) and shocking moments (poor Moebius!!!) and reveals (The Time Keepers are robots??) that it was exhausting. And then the mid-credits scene happens and it wakes you the fuck back up.
So first of all, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) gets pruned by Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), which should be the end of him for good. But it’s not, of course. I’ll be honest, my first thought was that Hiddleston was done with the MCU and they’d run with the Sylvie version of Loki from now on. But nope, Loki arrives in a desolate landscape and wonders if he’s finally made it to Hel with the other dead Asgardians.
However, Loki is then met with a voice that tells him he will definitely die unless “you come with us.” When we finally see them, it’s Richard E. Grant as the classic version of Loki. Straight out of the comic book pages, rocking the ugly green and yellow costume with the outlandish horned helmet.
Kneeling in front of him, and holding a pet lizard, is Kid Loki, played by Jack Neal. Why is he stroking a lizard with a similar helmet as the god of mischief? Who knows? And also in the group is Deobia Oparei as the hammer-wielding Boastful Loki.
I can’t tell what those buildings are in the background. Are they supposed to be Avengers Tower? I’m not sure. Whatever the case, it looks like the various pruned Lokis will have to team up if they’re going to survive whatever that place is.
With only two episodes left it feels like there’s a lot of ground left to cover. So who is really running the TVA? What happens to Sylvie and Renslayer? Is this what finally turns the latter into a villain and possible love interest to Kang the Conqueror? I can’t wait to find out.
The latest trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Ringshad a couple of huge surprises! While we’ve known for a while that Tim Roth would return as Abomination in the upcoming She-Hulk series, nobody expected that he’d show up in the kung fu master’s film and battling Wong (Benedict Wong) of all people!
But was that really what we thought we saw? The scene passes by pretty quickly and maybe our eyes are deceiving us? Not so, says Marvel’s Kevin Feige! Speaking with Rotten Tomatoes, he confirms that we are not crazy and Abomination and Wong are indeed throwing down!
“Yes, we just recently released the final trailer for Shang-Chi,” Feige said. “Some fans said, ‘This looks like a character they hadn’t seen in many years named The Abomination, fighting a character that looks like Wong. And I can say that the reason it looks like that is because that is Abomination fighting Wong.”
What in the world could cause characters from such different areas of the MCU to square-off in a gladiator setting? I think that’s the thing I’m most curious about now.
Feige also talked about the decision to finally debut the real Mandarin, after Ben Kingsley played the phony version, Trevor Slattery, in Iron Man 3…
“[we] only wanted to do it when we felt we could do it supreme justice and really showcase the complexity of this character, which frankly we couldn’t do in an Iron Man movie because an Iron Man movie is about Iron Man; an Iron Man movie is about Tony Stark…Just because that version wasn’t real didn’t mean there’s not a leader of the Ten Rings organization, and that is who we meet for the first time in Shang-Chi.”
Slattery’s story continued in the 2014 Marvel One-Shot, All Hail the King, in which he’s incarcerated at Seagate Prison. It’s there that Slattery first learns the Ten Rings terrorist organization is a very real thing, and they’re likely to come looking for payback. My hope is that Kingsley will return for Shang-Chi if only so we can see Slattery made an example of!
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings opens September 3rd.
This week on Cinema Royale we check the latest 1/4 mile time with F9, the latest in the Fast & Furious franchise, and just end up missing Gal Gadot’s Giselle. *sniff* Please come back, Giselle! Then we ponder how Liam Neeson is still a believable action star in his 70’s in The Ice Road which leads us down the road of a fun Canon Films retrospective that shouldn’t be missed! Last but certainly not least we talk about Loki‘s big revelation just in time for Pride month!
All of this and more!
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Even as production has begun on Knives Out 2, as confirmed by Rian Johnson himself yesterday, the stellar cast continues to grow. While prior announcements have come via the trades, the reveal of Ethan Hawke and Jada Pinkett Smith’s addition comes from set photos captured by Daily Mail.
Hawke is spotted on the set of Knives Out 2 which is filming in Greece. Hawke is seen looking suave in a white suit alongside co-stars Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson. I guess they must’ve been thirsty because Hawke is sporting a water pistol. Pinkett Smith is sporting a multi-colored gown as she’s being transported around the set.
The rest of the cast includes Edward Norton, Jessica Henwick, Janelle Monae, Leslie Odom Jr., Kathryn Hahn, and Madelyn Cline. Here’s hoping some of the castings remain a secret.
Timing on this is interesting, though. Hawke is playing a villain role in Marvel’s Moon Knight series which is shooting now in Budapest. Maybe his part isn’t so big? Pinkett Smith recently wrapped filming on The Matrix 4 where she returns as Niobe.
Welcome back to the land of the action flick, Kate Beckinsale. The Underworld and Total Recall star takes on a shocking new role in Jolt, a revenge thriller that looks like it could be the next Crank.
Headed to Amazon Prime next month, Jolt stars Beckinsale as a woman with a rare neurological disorder that causes random murderous impulses that she must shock herself with a special device to stop. That makes it pretty hard to find a real romantic connection, but when she finally does, the guy ends up murdered the next day. Time for some payback!
The film has a script by Scott Wascha, but what could catch the eye of cinephiles is director Tanya Wexler. She’s known best for her unique female-fronted films such as Hysteria and Buffaloed. Joining Beckinsale in the cast are Bobby Cannavale, Jai Courtney, Laverne Cox, Stanley Tucci, and Susan Sarandon. Hell of a cast.
Jolt hits Amazon Prime Video on July on July 23rd.
Lindy is a beautiful, sardonically-funny woman with a painful secret: Due to a lifelong, rare neurological disorder, she experiences sporadic rage-filled, murderous impulses that can only be stopped when she shocks herself with a special electrode device. Unable to find love and connection in a world that fears her bizarre condition, she finally trusts a man long enough to fall in love, only to find him murdered the next day. Heartbroken and enraged, she embarks on a revenge-filled mission to find his killer, while also being pursued by the police as the crime’s prime suspect.
