Directed by Sean McNamara, in 1684 France, Louis XIV, played by Pierce Brosnan, – the Sun King – is the most powerful monarch on the planet.
His birthday and a rare solar eclipse are approaching, and he’s worried about the future of France. His spiritual advisor, Père La Chaise, played by William Hurt, comforts him.
His physician, Dr. Labarthe, played by Pablo Schreiber, informs him that scientists believe mermaids contain a life force that grants immortality.
Louis commissions Yves, a young sea captain played by Benjamin Walker, to search the North Seas for the heretofore-mythical sea creature.
Meanwhile, to help pay off war debts, Louis brings to Court Marie-Josèphe, played by Kaya Scodelario, the daughter of the mistress he always loved.
Orphaned at a convent since birth, Marie-Josèphe is educated and musically gifted yet bears inherent defiance of authority. Père feels he can use Marie-Josèphe to tap into the deep pockets of Lintillac, played by Ben Lloyd-Hughes, a wealthy young merchant angling for a position at court and using her musical abilities to satisfy Louis’ ear.
As the week of the Eclipse begins, Yves returns to Versailles, successfully capturing a mermaid played by Fan Bingbing. They order him to place her in a reservoir beneath the Grotto of Thetis and restore her to total health.
Marie-Josèphe discovers the mermaid, and the two quickly develop a mysterious communication ability. Kindred spirits forge an empathic bond based on a common thread: the mermaid, in her capture, has been separated from her children and yearns to be reunited, and Marie-Josèphe still longs to know her parents. Marie-Josèphe also falls in love with Yves, not knowing he is the mermaid’s captor.
Eventually, Marie-Josèphe finds out that Louis has planned not only to marry her off to Lintillac, whom she hates, but, worse yet, to kill the mermaid. When confronting Louis, she learns the secret that has shrouded her life: the King is her father. Her heart leaps at the revelation, but the King is more concerned with the future of France than building a relationship with his daughter.
In the end, Marie-Josèphe understands she must defy her father, her King, to rescue the mermaid.
“When I read the novel The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre, I completely fell under its magical spell. A King, a secret daughter, and an incredible mermaid that lived in the fountains of Versailles,” tells McNamara. “I love to make inspirational movies that delight audiences around the Globe. We adapted the book into the feature film The King’s Daughter.”
McNamara made films like Soul Surfer, Spare Parts, and The Miracle Season, branched out, and made a fantasy film that the audience appreciated. “When you meet the mermaid, I want you to feel her journey as she adapts to her new world and meets Marie-Josephe D’Alember.”
McNamara’s love for music and his love of the ocean come together as Marie-Josephe plays her cello and communicates magically with the mermaid.
Even the love affair between Yves and Marie-Josephe is one of the ages. “It’s pure and whimsical. In fact, after playing the roles in the movie, Kaya Scodelario and Benjamin Walker fell in love in real life and now have two beautiful children.”
Directed by Pierre Perifel and based on a popular Scholastic book series by Aaron Blabey, The Bad Guys is about five friends. A crackerjack criminal crew of animal outlaws tries to become model citizens and turn good.
After years of countless heists and being the world’s most-wanted villains, they finally caught the gang. Mr. Wolf makes a deal, which he doesn’t plan on keeping, to save them all from prison. The Bad Guys decide they better be good.
The voice cast includes Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Anthony Ramos and Awkwafina.
Bringing back David Yates, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore introduces Mads Mikkelsen as Grindelwald, a wizarding villain that Johnny Depp played prior.
The rest of the cast includes Katherine Waterston, Ezra Miller, Jude Law and Eddie Redmayne.
Directed by Swinton O. Scott III, Diary of a Wimpy Kid delivers an animated movie filled with similar situations described in Jeff Kinney’s bestselling books. In this 56-minute movie, Greg Heffley, voiced by Brady Noon, enters middle school and potentially explosive problems and hazards to friendships.
Personified as a digital, bulbous boy, Heffley appears to stumble through misadventures with his buddy, Rowley, voiced by Ethan William Childress. Together they ride out the dreadful mishaps of trying to social fit as a middle schooler. As seen in the trailer, the importance of saying “hang out” instead of “come over and play.” Remember not to go near or touch the revolting piece of swiss cheese in the playground.
Whether they’ve read the books, kids will enjoy the movie, and perhaps encourage them to pick up one of Kinny’s books to read since the film is less than an hour. Kids might want to read about more of Heffley’s mishaps.
Thank you, New York Times information about the movie.
Co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World: Dominion continues the science fiction adventure. Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum and Lauren Dern are returning.
The first online poster announces the movie. I like the shot of the young boy, making the image ominous.
The plot is no longer under wraps.
The trailer is fun, with chase scenes similar to James Bond. Still, having the original cast back as the conclusion to this franchise is epic. Of course, Goldblum gets his snarky line in at the end of the trailer.
Dern returns from an eclectic career, garnering an Oscar, an Emmy and five Golden Globe awards.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.
Adam Driver (Maurizio Gucci) and Lady Gaga (Patrizia Reggiani) in HOUSE OF GUCCI A film about the tumultuous Gucci family fashion dynasty and the murder of the founder Guccio Gucci’s grandson Maurizio Gucci. Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, Jack Huston
Directed by Ridley Scott, House of Gucci follows the headlines of the shocking true story of the family empire behind the Italian fashion house of Gucci. The Blu-ray/DVD comb-pack is now available.
I enjoyed watching the acting, amazing talent, though the pace of the film is slow. Like Scott’s The Last Duel, too much posturing by the actors. But, this is the director and editor’s job of starting the scene later and ending it sooner. I don’t think Scott has lost his touch. Perhaps the lack of pre-screening with audiences is the cause. That we can blame on the pandemic with the closing of the movie theaters.
Costume, makeup and the production design impressed me as well. Overall, the movie sparked my interest in how a family could self-destruct. That is an interesting story to tell. I don’t think Reggiani is totally to blame.
If you want to see some talented actors, see the movie. It’s worth it.
Spanning three decades of love, betrayal, decadence, revenge, and ultimately murder, we see what a name means, what it’s worth, and how far a family will go for control.
The scandal-ridden real-life family drama House of Gucci, the latest film from Scott, the protean director of such classics as Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Thelma & Louise.
Recognized and admired around the globe, Gucci is the fashion label of founder Guccio Gucci, who opened his first quality leather goods store in Florence, Italy, precisely one hundred years ago.
In the late 1970s, the story begins at a critical juncture in the famed Italian fashion empire’s history. As the Gucci family’s global reach has broadened, there are have hints of financial improprieties, stifled innovation and a cheapening of the brand. Guccio Gucci’s two sons, the colorful and wily Aldo, played by Al Pacino, and his more conservative and detached sibling Rodolfo, played by Jeremy Irons, oversee the Gucci business.
The tenacious Aldo has no intention of ceding control of the family concern, certainly not to his fanciful son Paolo, played by Jared Leto. He is more interested in becoming a clothing designer. His brother Rodolfo’s timid and overprotected scion, Maurizio, played by Adam Driver, would prefer to study law than assume the mantle of a global fashion empire.
Then Maurizio meets and falls in love with the beautiful and ambitious Patrizia Reggiani, played by Lady Gaga, and marries her against his father’s wishes. Uncle Aldo finds a kinship in the cunning Patrizia. Together, they persuade Maurizio to set aside his legalistic ambitions and join the company, thus becoming the presumptive heir — much to the displeasure of the hapless Paolo, whose design dreams outweigh his talent.
For a short time, the bad blood simmers, and the various members of the Gucci dynasty begin to co-exist. But as Gucci rivals threaten to erode their preeminent place in the quality fashion hierarchy, Patrizia goads Maurizio into staging a coup. After inheriting his father’s position in the company, the couple slowly and stealthily seizes control of the business. They connive Paolo into selling his shares by dangling false promises. And with the help of the family’s financial advisor, Domenico De Sole, played by Jack Huston, shortly after Aldo is released from prison for tax evasion, they buy him out as well.
As sole head of the company, and with a fresh infusion of financing from outside investors, Maurizio is no longer hesitant to revel in his power and the privilege it accrues. Having betrayed his family, he now turns on Patrizia and starts an affair with a childhood friend, Paolo Franchi, played by Camille Cottin.
Her ambitions are thwarted, and her marriage in tatters, Patrizia becomes panic-stricken and desperate. Maurizio files for divorce. She forges a dangerous alliance with a crafty psychic, Pina Auriemma, played by Salma Hayek.
Maurizio launches an ambitious plan to revive the Gucci name and reputation by hiring an up-and-coming American designer, Tom Ford, played by Reeve Carney. A deadly power struggle ensues, and Maurizio is besieged on two sides. The tenacious Patrizia and the company’s investors who abetted by his once trusted advisor, De Sole, attempt to wrest control of the fashion empire from the Gucci family’s hands.
