Alex Garland may have said that he’s not planning to direct again in the foreseeable future, but he is currently directing another film while his movie Civil War heads out into the world (you can read our review HERE) and he works on the scripts for the upcoming 28 Years Later trilogy (a follow-up to his Danny Boyle collaboration 28 Days Later). Garland’s new directorial effort is called Warfare, and he’s co-directing it with Ray Mendoza, who served as the military supervisor for Civil War. Garland and Mendoza also wrote the screenplay together. As Warfare moves forward, Deadline has just revealed the names of several cast members: Noah Centineo (The Recruit), Michael Gandolfini (The Many Saints of Newark), Taylor John Smith (Where the Crawdads Sing), Adain Bradley (Wrong Turn), Henrique Zaga (The Stand), and Evan Holtzman (Hidden Figures).
They join previously announced cast members Charles Melton (May December), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs), Kit Connor (Heartstopper), Cosmo Jarvis (Peaky Blinders), Will Poulter (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3), and Finn Bennett (True Detective: Night Country).
Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich of DNA and Peter Rice are producing Warfare. A24 will be handling the global release of the film. As Variety notes, this is just like any Garland project in that “plot details are being shrouded in secrecy.” So we have no idea what sort of war is being depicted in the film, whether it be a real-world event or a war that Garland and Mendoza have made up.
In addition to Civil War, Garland has also directed Ex Machina, Annihilation, Devs, and Men. He wrote The Beach, 28 Days Later,Never Let Me Go, and Dredd, among others. (There have been claims that he directed Dredd as well.) While 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle is returning to the helm for the first film in the 28 Years Later trilogy, it was just announced yesterday that 28 Years Later Part 2 will be directed by Nia DaCosta.
Are you interested in Warfare? What do you think of the cast Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza have assembled for the film? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.
EXCLUSIVE: Noah Centineo, Taylor John Smith, Adain Bradley, Michael Gandolfini, Henrique Zaga and Evan Holtzman have joined the ensemble cast of A24’s ‘Warfare’ from Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland https://t.co/nTNwMv0MTA
Plot: Harriet finds art imitating life when she discovers certain songs can transport her back in time – literally. While she relives the past through romantic memories of her former boyfriend, her time traveling collides with a burgeoning new love interest in the present. As she takes her journey through the hypnotic connection between music and memory, she wonders – even if she could change the past, should she?
Review: Music connects people in ways beyond sharing similar tastes in genre or artists. Music can evoke memories of times and places where significant events have occurred. Whether it be a happy or tragic memory, music can take us back whether we like it or not. That is the central conceit of The Greatest Hits, which literally takes the magic of music as it pushes and pulls the main character into moments from her relationship with her deceased boyfriend. It is a wonderfully original way to tell a story about love, grief, and moving on through a soundtrack of classic tunes, new tracks, and everything in between. Directed by Ned Benson and featuring solid turns from Lucy Boynton, Justin H. Min, and David Corenswet, The Greatest Hits has a lot of solid elements going for it but struggles to get past the genre’s cliches.
At the beginning of The Greatest Hits, we meet Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a music producer living an isolated life with a serial killer-esque wall of photos arranged in a timeline of the last few years. As she puts on a vinyl record, we see her transported back in time to a moment when she heard that specific song during a moment in her relationship with Max (David Corenswet). This sonic-induced travel is never quite explained but originated from a head injury sustained in the car accident that killed Max. Now, without any way of stopping, Harriet travels into the past when a musical cue hits her ears. Working in a quiet bookstore and walking around with noise-canceling headphones, Harriet’s only connection to the outside world is her best friend, Morris (Austin Crute), and a support group led by Dr. Evelyn Bartlett (Retta). Obsessed with finding the right song that can help her save Max’s life, Harriett is stuck. That is until she meets David.
David Park (Justin H. Min) recently lost his parents and is himself stuck, unable to let them go. David stumbles into the same support group as Harriet, and the pair immediately connect. Harriet feels she is cheating on Max and hides from David even though she really likes him. Even as she keeps traveling back to past moments with Max, Harriet wants to try and see if she can move forward with David. The will they/won’t they dynamic is short-lived as the film pushes Boynton and Min together before pulling them apart and back together, all to an eclectic soundtrack of everything from Roxy Music to the Kars 4 Kids jingle. It is an interesting concept and way to showcase the haunting and healing power of memory and music, but it repeats the same tropes repeatedly for one hundred minutes.
Movies heavily reliant on music as a part of the plot are nothing new. From High Fidelity to Sing Street, appreciating music and how it makes you feel has long been a staple of stories like this, but it is the chemistry between the characters that we invest in. Lucy Boynton, who was phenomenal in the aforementioned Sing Street and Bohemian Rhapsody, does what she can with Harriet’s reluctance to move on as she cites Max as the love of her life. In the flashback sequences and even commentary from Morris, the relationship between Harriet and Max is not robust enough to say they were soulmates. The lack of chemistry between Boynton and Corenswet doesn’t help matters either. Boynton does have an effortless connection to Justin H. Min, and that pairing makes it hard to root for Harriet to save her dead boyfriend. The struggle between these two romantic interests when one is clearly better suited than the other wastes much running time. I hoped seeing David Corenswet would reaffirm his casting as the new Superman, but this role is barely more than a glorified cameo.
Writer/director Ned Benson, best known for his three film debut The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, knows how to craft a romantic concept rooted in a blend of reality and fantasy. That film, which told a story from two distinct perspectives, offered a refreshing take on the genre that kept the formula intact but delivered it without being subjected to cliche after cliche. That same approach is missing in The Greatest Hits, which feels more reliant on tugging at your heartstrings without earning the emotional weight of it. The Greatest Hits has multiple areas where it seems that key scenes were cut to keep the running time under two hours, leaving me wondering why the story resolves itself so abruptly in the third act. I wanted to fall in love with this movie, but then it kept taking things in an all too familiar direction.
The most unexpected element of The Greatest Hits is the two musical cameos in the film’s final minutes, one from a band in concert and the other from Nelly Furtado. I wanted to know more about Harriet and the depth of her grief, but instead, Ned Benson seems content to use lens flares and clever editing to keep shoving her back in time without giving much explanation or rationale. Sure, time travel is fictional, but films usually set rules for how and why it is happening. Here, time travel instead serves as a convenient plot device to string together a bunch of seemingly disparate scenes to try and tell a cohesive story. The Greatest Hits was almost a good movie if it could have plumbed the depths of these characters a bit more. Instead, it is a forgettable romance with one of the best soundtracks in recent memory.
Back in September, the first image from the horror film Don’t Move was unveiled. That’s the image above, which doesn’t show us anything other than the fact that the movie stars Yellowstone cast member Kelsey Asbille. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more about Don’t Move soon, though, because Variety reports that the worldwide distribution rights to the film have been acquired by the Netflix streaming service. A release date has not yet been announced.
Don’t Move is being produced by genre legend Sam Raimi. Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, who directed episodes of the Raimi-produced anthology series 50 States of Fright, directed the film from a screenplay written by T.J. Cimfel and David White, who previously wrote the 2015 home invasion movie Intruders and the recent creepy kid movie There’s Something Wrong with the Children. This film follows a seasoned killer who injects a grieving woman with a paralytic agent. She must run, fight and hide before her body completely shuts down.
Coming to us from Raimi Productions, Hammerstone Studios, and Capstone Studios, Don’t Move is also produced by Zainab Azizi and Hammerstone’s Alex Lebovici. Schindler and Netto serve as executive producers with David Haring, Marc Manus, Petr Jákl, Ruzanna Kegeyan, Sarah Sarandos, Ara Keshishian, and Capstone’s Christian Mercuri. Hammerstone and Capstone provided the funding.
Asbille is joined in the cast by Finn Wittrock of American Horror Story.
Schindler and Netto have said that their goal with Don’t Move was to make an “absolute white-knuckle ride of a film”. Lebovici, who produced last year’s horror hit Barbarian, said to expect it to tell a “visceral, pulse-racing story”. And Raimi described it as a “compelling and twisted tale”, adding, “I am delighted to collaborate again with our co-directors Adam and Brian on this incredibly frightening and tense story full of so many twists and turns – it will deliver a fantastic horror punch to the audience!“ I love the way Raimi hypes things up; saying Don’t Move will “deliver a fantastic horror punch”, describing his film Drag Me to Hell as a “spook-a-blast”, etc. The fact that his name is on the movie makes it a must-see for me.
Are you interested in Don’t Move, and are you glad to hear it’s going to be released by Netflix? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Only two weeks have passed since we saw the first teaser trailer for the latest Yorgos Lanthimos / Emma Stone team-up, a film called Kinds of Kindness (previously known as And), but a second teaser trailer has already made its way online! You can check it out in the embed above. The film is set to reach theatres on June 21st.
When director Yorgos Lanthimos and actress Emma Stone make a feature film together, Academy Award nominations follow. Their 2018 collaboration The Favourite was nominated in the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Cinematography, and Editing categories, with supporting actresses Stone and Rachel Weisz also earning nominations and lead actress Olivia Colman taking home an Oscar for her performance. Their 2023 collaboration Poor Things racked up nominations in the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Original Score, Cinematography, Editing, and Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo) categories – and won Oscar gold for Makeup and Hairstyling, Production Design, Costume Design, and Stone’s performance in the lead role. We’ll have to wait and see if Kinds of Kindness earns any nominations, but the odds are in its favor.
The film is officially described as a triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.
While walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes, Lanthimos described Kinds of Kindness as follows: “It’s three contemporary stories, and there’s a core of actors — seven total — who play one character in each story,” he said. “So, they’ll play three different characters.”
Joining Emma Stone in the cast are Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse), Jesse Plemons (Civil War), Hong Chau (The Menu), Margaret Qualley (Drive Away Dolls), Joe Alwyn (The Favourite), Mamoudou Athie (Jurassic World: Dominion), and Hunter Schafer (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Song Birds & Snakes).
Are you looking forward to Kinds of Kindness? What did you think of the second teaser trailer? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Have you ever wished you could escape into a different life that’s still your own? What if infinite lifetimes were waiting behind a door, and the hallway goes on forever? Would you step through to see what the other side is like? What is a version of you who wanted your original life would do anything to take it? Joel Edgerton is about to discover what lurks behind a dark door in Apple TV+‘s Dark Matter trailer.
Based on the blockbuster book by New York Times bestselling author Blake Crouch, the new, nine-episode Apple Original series will premiere globally on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Wednesday, May 8, followed by one new episode every Wednesday through June 26, 2024.
Per today’s official Dark Matter press release:
Hailed as one of the best sci-fi novels of the decade, “Dark Matter” is a story about the road not taken. The series will follow Jason Dessen (played by Edgerton), a physicist, professor, and family man who — one night, while walking home on the streets of Chicago — is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Wonder quickly turns into a nightmare when he tries to return to his reality amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could have lived. In this labyrinth of realities, he embarks on a harrowing journey to get back to his true family and save them from the most terrifying, unbeatable foe imaginable: himself.
Crouch serves as creator, executive producer, showrunner, and writer alongside executive producers Matt Tolmach and David Manpearl for Matt Tolmach Productions. Edgerton also serves as executive producer. “Dark Matter” is produced for Apple TV+ by Sony Pictures Television.
Joel Edgerton (Boy Erased, The Gift), Jennifer Connelly (Labyrinth, Requiem for a Dream), Alice Braga (Predators, I Am Legend), Jimmi Simpson (Black Mirror, Westworld), Dayo Okeniyi (Emperor, Hypnotic), and Oakes Fegley (Pete’s Dragon, The Goldfinch) lead the cast of Dark Matter.
What do you think about today’s Dark Matter trailer? Would you step through one of the doors? What’s the one thing in your life another version of you would covet? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Prepare to let your imagination go as the new trailer for John Krasinski’s family comedy, IF, releases its final trailer. The new preview gives audiences a little bit more of a peek into the population of the imaginary friends. In addition to the trailer, Paramount has also released a collection of character posters featuring some newer peeks of the rest of the IFs. The posters have also revealed an impressive array of guest voices that will be featured in this film. IF is set to hit theaters on May 17.
The official synopsis from Paramount reads, “From writer and director John Krasinski, IF is about a girl who discovers that she can see everyone’s imaginary friends — and what she does with that superpower — as she embarks on a magical adventure to reconnect forgotten IFs with their kids. IF stars Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Fiona Shaw, and the voices of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr. and Steve Carell alongside many more as the wonderfully unique characters that reflect the incredible power of a child’s imagination.”
The additional voice talents that join our imaginary companions are revealed to be some pretty big names, including George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bradley Cooper, Richard Jenkins, Sabastian Maniscalco, Amy Schumer, Christopher Meloni, Jon Stewart, Maya Rudolph, Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key, Blake Lively, Emily Blunt and Sam Rockwell. The movie is produced by John Krasinski, Allyson Seeger, Ryan Reynolds and Andrew Form. Krasinski writes and directs with the executive producers including John J. Kelly and George Dewey. Allyson Seeger, p.g.a., John Krasinski, p.g.a., Andrew Form, p.g.a. and Ryan Reynolds are all on board as producers of the film.
Krasinski would explain that this “extremely personal” project was something made for his kids to finally see, Krasinski explains, “IF is a movie that I made for my kids because I don’t think they’re allowed to see A Quiet Place; Emily [Blunt] calls it PG-40, ‘You’ll get to see it when you’re 40!’ So I had to make a movie that they could see, and I’m really, really excited about it. I mean, Ryan Reynolds is as good as it gets in every single way, shape and form, and this incredible phenom of an actress, Cailey Fleming, is in the movie. For me, it was just about what if we could tell a story about these time capsules? Imaginary friends are adorable and all those things, but they’re also time capsules of your hopes, dreams, and ambitions when you were the most fertile of a brain, and it never goes away. I think we’re told that we’re adults instead of what if you realize that you never stopped being a kid.”
As soon as Saw X, the tenth entry in the Saw franchise (you can read our review HERE), was released last September, franchise producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules were already talking about the potential of a Saw XI. The official announcement came in December, along with a release date: September 27th. But over the last few months, the filmmakers have come to realize they need some extra time to make Saw XI something special, so the release has been pushed back a year, to September 26, 2025. So Lionsgate has unveiled a teaser trailer asking fans to play the waiting game, and you can check it out in the embed above.
Saw X screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg (who also wrote Jigsaw and Spiral: From the Book of Saw) have let it be known that they’re not coming back for the new sequel, but Saw X director Kevin Greutert will be back at the helm.
Greutert edited the first five Saw movies, and did the same on Jigsaw. He made his feature directorial debut with Saw VI and signed on to direct Paranormal Activity 2 after that. That movie was scheduled to be released on the same day as the seventh Saw movie, Saw 3D – so Lionsgate decided to remove Saw V director David Hackl from Saw 3D and replace him with Greutert, stealing him away from Paramount and Paranormal Activity 2. The Paranormal sequel ended up being directed by Tod Williams and was released the week before Saw 3D. Between Saw 3D and Saw X, Greutert directed the genre films Jessabelle, Visions, and Jackals.
We still don’t know who’s writing the film. Leigh Whannell wrote the first three films, sharing story credit with James Wan on the first and third and screenplay credit with Darren Lynn Bousman on the second. The writing duo of Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan took over for parts 4 through 7 (with Thomas Fenton also getting a story credit on Saw IV). Then we reached the Goldfinger/Stolberg era.
Are you looking forward to Saw XI? Are you disappointed that it’s going to be released a year later than initially expected? Take a look at the teaser trailer, then let us know by leaving a comment below.
PLOT: Infected by the bite of a werewolf, a man sets out to bring down a shady businessman before arranging the end of his own life.
REVIEW: Larry Fessenden has over 100 acting credits to his name, and if you’ve been following the horror genre over the last few decades there’s a good chance you’ve seen him show up in something, whether it be a Ti West movie, Stake Land, Late Phases, You’re Next, or the movie I first noticed him in, Session 9. He’s also a prolific producer, and has directing credits stretching back to the 1980s – most of those credits being on horror movies. Over the course of his career, he has told stories of vampires, the Wendigo, a man-eating fish, and even came up with his own take on Frankenstein’s Monster with his 2019 film Depraved. Continuing down the path of putting his stamp on the concept of classic monsters, Fessenden has now made an update of The Wolf Man, beating Universal Pictures to it by a year.
The lead character in Fessenden’s Blackout isn’t Larry Talbot, the beleaguered fellow Lon Chaney Jr. played in five movies back in the 1940s, but that character does get a prominent shout-out in the film, as the events take place in a town called Talbot Falls. Wolf Man franchise fans will remember that Larry Talbot hated being afflicted with his curse and was always hoping to be put out of his misery, whether through a cure or death. Similarly, the lead character in this film would rather be dead than be a wolf – but he has some unfinished business to attend to first.
Our lycanthropy-afflicted protagonist here is alcoholic painter Charley, played by Alex Hurt – and this could turn out to be something of a breakthrough for Hurt (who is the son of William Hurt, and there are pictures of his dad in the movie to prove it), as this was my first time seeing him in anything, and I was impressed by his performance. He does a good job of carrying the film on his shoulders and getting across the drama of his character’s situation. My only issue with Charley was actually due to the writing, not Hurt. As soon as we see Charley, we assume he’s the wolf man in this story, and it’s not too long before Fessenden confirms our suspicions. But for a long stretch of the movie, none of the everyday life scenes involving Charley show him expressing concern about his lycanthropy problem. Instead, his scenes are focused on his attempts to bring down shady businessman Hammond (Marshall Bell), who has made some questionable decisions while pushing forward his plan to build a resort called Hilltop in Talbot Falls. Charley goes around town, talking to people (including a lawyer played by genre icon Barbara Crampton) about Hammond, and it got to the point where I was getting frustrated. “Why is he always talking about Hammond instead of worrying about the fact that he’s a wolf man?” But Fessenden eventually explains why Charley is so focused on the businessman: he wants to do something good by bringing Hammond down before he exits this world. Once I got that explanation, I could go along with the story, but it took a while to get there.
Amidst all the Hammond talk, Fessenden gives Charley a few opportunities to wolf out and do the things we expect wolf men to do. Things go poorly for several Talbot Falls residents, and these sequences are fun to watch. You shouldn’t put this movie on expecting to see a really cool werewolf design, but the FX artists did fine work with their version of the classic Wolf Man idea of a werewolf.
You might think that Charley’s vendetta against Hammond would be complicated by the fact that he was dating the guy’s daughter Sharon (Addison Timlin), but his enemy and his former lover being related to each other doesn’t add much to the story. It wouldn’t have changed things if Hammond and Sharon had never met in their lives. Even though that element isn’t played up, Timlin was given some good dramatic scenes to work with, and her presence in the story was another thing that reminded me of the films from the ‘40s.
Actors who show up in smaller roles, like Crampton, include Joseph Castillo-Midyett, Ella Rae Peck, James Le Gros, Marc Senter, Joe Swanberg, John Speredakos, Kevin Corrigan, and Rigo Garay, among others, with a standout for me being Motell Gyn Foster as Charley’s buddy Earl, the only person he has told his werewolf secret to. Charley and Earl have a plan for how to deal with the problem, but you’ll have to see the movie to find out how that works.
Since he has made so many creature features, Fessenden has jokingly said that he’s competing with the major companies by building his own Monsterverse – or maybe you could call it a Dark Universe, since it includes characters inspired by Universal Monsters movies. I thought he did a great job updating the story of Frankenstein with Depraved, and while I didn’t find Blackout to be quite as fascinating as that movie was, I always liked Universal’s Frankenstein better than The Wolf Man, too. Blackout is a good update of the ideas presented in The Wolf Man, and is probably more in line with the original film than the official reboot coming from Universal and Blumhouse will be.
In a nod to the major studio cinematic universes, Fessenden drops a Depraved Easter egg into the end credits of Blackout, a moment that is sure to be baffling for viewers who haven’t seen Depraved. Fessenden was just having fun by putting this quick moment in the credits, but it does give me a reason to say that anyone who watches Blackout should also seek out Depraved, and vice versa. Both of these monster movies are recommended viewing.
Dark Sky Films is giving Blackout a digital and VOD release on April 12th.
