Directed by Angus MacLane, Lightyear is part of the Toy Story series. Chris Evans voices Buss Lightyear. The franchise’s popularity sparks a space ranger to the front as the cadet goes to infinity and… beyond. China’s talented Mu Le’en also stars.
I saw a post on Facebook, so it might not be accurate. That said, the story is about the hero, Lightyear. Thus, the Lightyear toy became a product.
Written by Christopher Borrelli and directed by David Hackl, Dangerous follows ex-con Dylan Forrester, played by Scott Eastwood. He attempts to reform his life outside of prison by seeing a psychiatrist, played by Mel Gibson.
In the trailer, Gibson’s portrayal of the psychiatrist is accurate, having psychotic episodes. Because Dylan’s brother dies under mysterious circumstances, he risks his freedom by taking off to find answers about his brother’s death.
The eccentric psychiatrist stays in touch by phone to ensure his patient remains stable. In fact, it is the psychiatrist who has lost his marbles, which is fun to watch in the trailer. During this time, Dylan is sidestepping the FBI agent, played by Famke Janssen, and confronting a gang of mercenaries who are also in the same pursuit as Dylan. The leader of the thugs, played by Kevin Durand, is hellbent on discovering the secrets. So, Dylan has to use his criminal mind to survive his latest pursuit.
The thriller also stars Tyrese Gibson.
Thank you, Collider, for some of this information.
Directed by Michael Bay, Ambulance takes place in Los Angeles within a single day. A husband and father, played by Abdul-Mateen II, tells his war buddy, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, he’s desperate because his wife has a severe illness that costs $231K. To solve the problem of getting enough money for her surgery, Jake’s character suggests they rob a bank.
The bank heist doesn’t go as planned, and they hijack an ambulance driven by a paramedic, played by Eiza Gonzalez, that’s transporting a police officer in critical condition.
Bay helms this movie as a remake of the Danish film of the same name directed by Laurits Munch-Petersen in 2005. The project passed several directors’ hands with the original script of having the two bank robbers brothers. The story changed when Mateen came on board, and the two brothers became fellow soldiers.
Garret Dillahunt, Keir O’Donnell, A Martinez and Moses Ingram also star in the movie.
Indie Wire helped with this information.
Sorkin has taken one of America’s funniest and most beloved TV couples, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, and turned it into a poignant story for a film. The Ricardos first appeared in the iconic sitcom I Love Lucy, which premiered in 1951.
In front of our TV sets, we saw a quintessential dizzy redhead and the charismatic Cuban bandleader, delighting record-breaking audiences each week. They’d see Lucy’s hare-brained schemes and hilarious antics.
Behind the scenes was a different story. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz faced problems that could have ended the successful show and their marriage. Kidman talks about Lucille Ball’s career and portrays her, “As an actress, she never really got a break when she was younger. Movies were not her métier. But that is part of what made her resilient. She, with Desi’s support and protection, reinvented herself as a comedy star. But it was all so tenuous and could be taken away by a couple of cheap headlines. That is still very relevant today.”
Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Being the Ricardos follows Lucille Ball, played by Nicole Kidman, and Desi Arnaz, played by Javier Bardem, as they face a crisis. They face the devastating fact that they most likely will end their careers and marriage. Lucy and Desi must deal with the impending threats of shocking personal accusations, political smears, and cultural taboos.
The film clip is like the trailer, but we see more of Kidman as Lucy and Bardem as Dezi.
We go behind the scenes of one of the most popular TV shows of our time, revealing a glimpse of the couple’s complex romantic and professional relationship. During one critical production week of their groundbreaking sitcom, “I Love Lucy,” we go into the writer’s room, onto the soundstage and behind closed doors with Lucy and Desi.
Having two Oscar winners play the lead roles of two influential personalities in the entertainment industry must be a dream come true for Sorkin.
The cast includes Jake Lacy, J. K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale and Alia Shawkat.
Sorkin says, “Javier made it clear he wanted the part. And he is simply irresistible. I didn’t need to be told he’s a great actor. We were finishing casting during the COVID lockdown and he was so winning, even during Zoom meetings. That quality was essential for Desi because we asked the audience to accept such bad behavior from him. Until the day he died, he was intensely in love with Lucille Ball, but he came from a culture that defines manhood very narrowly. It was hard for Desi to be a second banana, and that ultimately killed their marriage.”
Bardem calls Sorkin’s script “a love letter to two resilient, creative human beings dealing with serious problems and trying to remain united through them,” adding, “It is a journey of pleasure and joy and laughter — a lot of laughter. There are great comic moments in it. But there are also dramatic, emotional moments that show that these people who were so loved and admired were just a couple of human beings with flaws — as we all are.”
The actor says it was typical for the cast to perform five or more pages of the writer’s notoriously precise dialogue daily. “There are always two or three or four things happening at the same time,” he says. “As a director, Aaron likes to work fast. He knows what he wants, which is a great thing, but he leaves you the room to play with it. And he gives you a lot of layers to work with.”
Despite the many personal and professional successes the couple achieves, Desi’s philandering threatens to destroy the couple’s marriage at the peak of their fame. “He wanted to help Lucille, protect her, hold her — not only because she was the star of the show but because she was his wife, the mother of his kids and an amazing, creative mind,” says Bardem. “But there were many things that he could have done better.”
It was Arnaz’s ambition and versatility that the actor says provided him with the most inspiration. “When we play real people, we want to get as close as we can to reality, but there’s a moment where you have to let that go,” he believes. “You have to express what the person is going through, not how he looks or speaks. Desi had a motor inside of him that constantly pushed forward, pushed not only himself but the show and the whole Desilu company.”
For the role of Arnaz, one of the rare Latinx talents to achieve stardom in television’s early days, the filmmakers cast Academy Award winner Javier Bardem. The actor had pursued the role for years before the film was green-lit.
Bardem describes his co-star, Kidman, as “generous, caring, organic, fun to work with, fun to watch, inspiring — and she makes it all look easy. She gives you everything, so you don’t have to hold anything back.”
Written and directed by John Ridley and based on the short story by Robert Silverberg, Needle in a Timestack follows Nick, played by Leslie Odom, Jr. and Janine’, played by Cynthia Erivo, blissful life until her ex-boyfriend, played by Orlando Bloom, does a high-tech warp time to tear them apart. He uses Nick’s old girlfriend, played by Frieda Pinto, to complete the task.
Nick’s memories and reality disappear. He must decide how far he will go to save or let go of all that he loves. Does love endure, or is it all an illusion?
Mark Isham scored the movie soundtrack, and he always delivers.
Co-written, co-produced and directed by Matt Reeves, The Batman follows the cat-and-mouse game between Batman, played by Robert Pattinson, the Riddler, played by Paul Dano, and Commissioner Gordon, played by Jeffrey Wright.
The cast is enormous, with Colin Farrell as the Penguin, Andy Serkis as Alfred, Peter Sarsgaard as Gil Colson, and Zoe Kravitz, as Catwoman.
Matt Reeves’ credits include Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War of the Planet of the Apes. He also worked with J.J. Abrams on the TV series Felicity.
In this modern-day gritty love story, directed by Justin Corsbie, Hard Luck Song follows Jesse, played by Michael Dorman. The movie inspiration comes from Todd Snider’s seminal Americana hit, “Just Like Old Times.”
Jesse is a charismatic but down on his luck troubadour living out of cheap motels and making bad decisions. Jesse finds himself at an existential crossroads during a chance encounter with Carla, played by Sophia Bush, an old flame, as their complicated past and current troubles threaten to destroy their blissful reunion.
Watch Dermot Mulroney in the trailer. He’s hardly recognizable. The cast also includes RZA, Brian Sacca, Melora Walters and Eric Roberts.
Directed by George Clooney, The Tender Bar begins in 1972 and follows 9-year-old J.R. Maguire, played by Daniel Ranieri, later Tye Sheridan. He spends hours scanning the airwaves for The Voice, his name for the radio deejay father who deserted him and his mom years earlier.
As he dreams of the day they reunite, he and his fiercely protective mother Dorothy, played by Lily Rabe, live with her family in his curmudgeonly grandfather’s, played by Christopher Lloyd, rundown house in Manhasset, Long Island. They both work tirelessly to fulfill her dream of an Ivy League education for J.R.
Hungry for male attention, the boy finds comfort at the nearby Dickens pub, where the man behind the bar is his Uncle Charlie, played by Ben Affleck. A self-educated truth-seeker with a closet full of classic books and a thirst for knowledge, Charlie takes the boy under his wing, encouraging J.R.’s aspirations of becoming a writer. As J.R. grows to young adulthood with sporadic contact with his birth father, Charlie guides him through the mysteries of manhood and includes him in bowling nights, ball games and trips to the beach with his loyal band of quirky friends.
But when winning a scholarship to Yale, falling in love with a brilliant and beautiful classmate and getting his dream job still don’t seem like enough to J.R., he retreats once more to the bar, only to discover he already has everything he needs to claim his own dreams.
Adapted by William Monahan from J. R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same title published in 2005, “It’s the story of a not-privileged kid deciding to do the fundamentally impossible,” says Monahan. “But beneath the ordinary world, it is kind of an epic. It’s the very rare first book by a writer who doesn’t throw family and friends under the bus after chewing them up for material. It says of the family, I am them, and they are me.
“J.R. had a very supportive, very loving family,” he adds. “They got him into Yale, they helped him, they compensated for his lack of a present, decent father. And in the end, despite his searching, he realizes that he always had a father — his Uncle Charlie, and even his grandfather. There’s something heroic in his story.”
Clooney felt a kinship to the material. “Growing up in Kentucky, which is nothing like Manhasset, I had an Uncle George who I was named after,” he says. “George lived above a really beat-up old bar. When I was 9 or 10 years old, which is the exact time period in which the early part of the movie is set, he’d give me 50 cents to go get him cigarettes from the machine and a can of beer. So, I grew up in and around a bar like the bar in the film, with all the wild characters that called me ‘kid.”
Though Clooney has directed himself in some films. In The Tender Bar, he remains strictly behind the camera. “That simplifies the job for sure,” he says. “This was an easy one to direct anyway because it was a really good script, we had really wonderful actors and we had a great crew. I just loved all these characters. It’s The Wizard of Oz in a way. J.R. is constantly looking for happiness and his place in the world, and it’s right there all along. I think that’s a voyage we all enjoy watching.”
“Once we told Amazon we wanted to do The Tender Bar, the question was who was going to play Uncle Charlie,” says Clooney. “The character had to have two specific qualities. You have to believe he’s really smart and really well read. That is a no-brainer with Ben Affleck.
He’s a really smart actor and a smart man. And then he has to be a little worn down. He needs a bit of gravitas. Ben is a different actor now than he was 15 years ago. With age comes a little bit of gray in the hair and a little bit of crinkle in his eye. Ben couldn’t have played this part five or 10 years ago. Now he is exactly right for it. As soon as we read the script, we thought of him.”
“The luckiest thing that can happen to you as an actor is to have a great script with a great director fall out of the sky,” he says. “That’s what happened to me. The character’s intelligence and use of language, as well as his evident compassion for his nephew and the non-traditional ways he shows it made it extremely appealing.”
The seamless transition from boy to teenager to a young man in the film impressed Tye Sheridan, who plays the older J.R.,“That can be credited to a well-written script and a flawlessly constructed narrative,” says Sheridan. “I could not trust anyone more than George to guide that ship so that the audience believes this journey into the older version of the character.”
Sheridan says reading the book before filming was initially helpful, but he set it aside once production started. “It’s great to be aware of the source material,” he notes. “But you can get confused by what’s in the screenplay and what’s in the book, so eventually I just focused on the screenplay.”
At the beginning of the film, J.R. already carries the weight of his mother’s high hopes for him. “He feels a great responsibility to accomplish certain things — specifically to go to Yale and become a lawyer — but all he really wants to do is be a writer,” says Sheridan. “He has a lot to overcome in his life. That was something very relatable and really exciting for me to play.”
Despite the presence of his Uncle Charlie, his grandparents and extended family in his life, his mother is the only person J.R. feels he can totally depend on. “She’s his only parent,” Sheridan observes. “She’s it. Their relationship is tender and sweet. Sometimes he gives her a bit of an eye roll, but he loves her for all she is and has given to him. Lily Rabe, who plays J.R.’s mother, is a phenomenal actress who brings a depth that I don’t think many people could bring.”
Eight-year-old Brooklynite Daniel Ranieri, who plays the younger J.R., was discovered via a YouTube video that has come to be known as the “f—ing lockdown video.” In 2020, Daniel’s mother talked to him about the upcoming summer and all the outdoor activities. Daniel launched into a colorful rant about the need to comply with COVID-19 restrictions by staying indoors. The video she took of his comments went viral, earning him an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” A star was born.
“A friend sent the video to me as a joke, while we were trying to cast the young J.R.,” says Clooney. “We’d seen a lot of kid actors, but the reality is when you cast kids, it’s less about the quality of the acting and more about how close they seem to be to the character. Daniel has a great East Coast accent. He was very funny and has really good energy in the video. I got in touch with his family, sent over some pages, and he read them on Zoom. He was just right for the part. Every take we did with him was one take. He is just phenomenal.”
Co-written and directed by Scott Derrickson, The Black Phone is about a dead phone that keeps ringing to save a kid’s life.
The horror movie follows Finney Shaw, played by Mason Thames, a shy but clever 13-year-old boy abducted by a sadistic killer, played by Ethan Hawke, and trapped in a soundproof basement where screaming is of little use. When a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring, Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the killer’s previous victims. And they are dead set on making sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to Finney.
No stranger to horror, Derrickson’s other credits include the writer-director of Sinister, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Marvel’s Doctor Strange.
C. Robert Cargill co-wrote the script based on the award-winning short story by Joe Hill from his New York Times bestseller, “20th Century Ghosts,” a compilation of his short stories.
Ethan Hawke’s career covers acting, directing, and producing, with Oscar and Tony Award nominations for his acting. He’s also a novelist and wrote a graphic novel.
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Scream returns 25 years after a streak of brutal murders shocked the quiet town of Woodsboro. A new killer has donned the Ghostface mask and begins targeting a group of teenagers to resurrect secrets from the town’s deadly past.
Neve Campbell, as Sidney Prescott, Courteney Cox, Gale Weathers, David Arquette, and Dewey Riley return to their iconic roles.
The new cast members of Scream include Melissa Barrera, Kyle Gallner, Jason Gooding, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid, Marley Shelton, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Sonia Ammar.