Earlier this year, it was announced that Tom Cruise will be starring in the new film from director Alejandro Iñárritu for Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment, with this being Iñárritu’s first English language movie since The Revenant, which hit theatres back in 2015. Now Deadline has revealed the names of six of Cruise’s co-stars, breaking the news that he has been joined in the cast by John Goodman (The Big Lebowski), Jesse Plemons (Civil War), Sophie Wilde (Talk to Me), Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), and Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me by Your Name), with Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal) in final negotiations to join in as well. Details on the characters they’ll be playing are being kept under wraps.
This will be Cruise’s first time working with all of these actors except for Plemons. Cruise and Plemons were in the 2017 film American Made together.
Iñárritu co-wrote the script last year with Sabina Berman as well as his Birdman co-writers Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone. While plot details were not shared when Cruise’s involvement was first announced, Deadline has now dug up some information. The story is said to center on the most powerful man in the world, who embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.
Cruise is producing this currently untitled project alongside Iñárritu. As we have previously noted, Iñárritu has a history of delivering Academy Award nominations for the actors in his movies. Sean Penn and Naomi Watts both received Oscar nominations for 21 Grams; Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi were nominated for Babel; Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone each received nominations for Birdman; and Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy were both nominated for The Revenant, with DiCaprio taking home the gold. Cruise has been looking to return to more serious, dramatic fare with an award-winning director, and teaming up with Iñárritu definitely fits the bill. That said, the fact that he appears to be playing the most powerful man in the world and humanity’s savior in the film also makes it sound like this will fit right in with most of the action projects he has been working on in recent years. Imagine if he could earn an Oscar nomination for starring in an Iñárritu movie where he’s humanity’s savior… it would be the best of all worlds.
Are you interested in this Tom Cruise / Alejandro Iñárritu project? What do you think of the supporting cast that has been assembled? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Diablo IV’s first big expansion, Vessel of Hatred, is just a few weeks away. The add-on will bring new stories, quests, and the Spiritborn class on October 8. If you’ve been sleeping on it since it launched last year, the RPG is on sale until September 2. However, if you’re looking for something to do this weekend,…
Diablo IV’s first big expansion, Vessel of Hatred, is just a few weeks away. The add-on will bring new stories, quests, and the Spiritborn class on October 8. If you’ve been sleeping on it since it launched last year, the RPG is on sale until September 2. However, if you’re looking for something to do this weekend,…
Today sees the release of Strange Darling in theaters and if you’re a fan of cinema then you need to get your ass to a theater as soon as possible. Because there’s an element of the film that must be seen to be believed. And that’s not even getting into the wonderful performances from stars Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerald. To give yourself the best chance, you absolutely need to see this opening weekend before someone on TikTok thinks they’re funny by spoiling it. There are few experiences so pure and so unique, that I have been practically shouting from the rooftops both: to never watch any promotion for the film, and to see it immediately. You can check out my absolutely glowing review HERE.
I had the privilege of speaking with writer/director JT Mollner as well as director of photography Giovanni Ribisi about the film. Given the very “don’t talk about the spoilers” nature of this talk, I was shocked at how they were able to skirt specifics. We were able to talk about some of the films that inspired Strange Darling, as well as the homework they gave the actors to help them get into their roles. This was an enlightening discussion as they clearly had a very creatively fulfilling experience from start to finish (not often a guarantee when making a movie). Thankfully we avoid all spoilers in the interview, so you’ll still be able to go in completely fresh.
Strange Darling plot: In Strange Darling, nothing is what it seems when a twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer’s vicious murder spree. Written and directed by JT Mollner (Outlaws & Angels), Strange Darling stars Willa Fitzgerald (The Goldfinch, Reacher), Kyle Gallner (Smile, Dinner in America), Ed Begley Jr. (Better Call Saul, A Mighty Wind), and Barbara Hershey (Black Swan, Insidious).
STRANGE DARLING IS PLAYING IN THEATERS ON AUGUST 23RD, 2024.
Today sees the release of Strange Darling in theaters and if you’re a fan of cinema then you need to get your ass to a theater as soon as possible. Because there’s an element of the film that must be seen to be believed. And that’s not even getting into the wonderful performances from stars Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerald. To give yourself the best chance, you absolutely need to see this opening weekend before someone on TikTok thinks they’re funny by spoiling it. There are few experiences so pure and so unique, that I have been practically shouting from the rooftops both: to never watch any promotion for the film, and to see it immediately. You can check out my absolutely glowing review HERE.
I had the privilege of speaking with writer/director JT Mollner as well as director of photography Giovanni Ribisi about the film. Given the very “don’t talk about the spoilers” nature of this talk, I was shocked at how they were able to skirt specifics. We were able to talk about some of the films that inspired Strange Darling, as well as the homework they gave the actors to help them get into their roles. This was an enlightening discussion as they clearly had a very creatively fulfilling experience from start to finish (not often a guarantee when making a movie). Thankfully we avoid all spoilers in the interview, so you’ll still be able to go in completely fresh.
Strange Darling plot:
In Strange Darling, nothing is what it seems when a twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer’s vicious murder spree. Written and directed by JT Mollner (Outlaws & Angels), Strange Darling stars Willa Fitzgerald (The Goldfinch, Reacher), Kyle Gallner (Smile, Dinner in America), Ed Begley Jr. (Better Call Saul, A Mighty Wind), and Barbara Hershey (Black Swan, Insidious).
STRANGE DARLING IS PLAYING IN THEATERS ON AUGUST 23RD, 2024.
Everything old is new again as Marvel Studios announces James Spader’s return to the MCU as the malevolent automaton Ultron for the upcoming Vision series. Marvel’s Vision series is a follow-up to WandaVision, with Spader joining the project as Ultron’s voice. James Spader first played Ultron in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, the sequel to Marvel’s The Avengers.
After giving a group of unlikely strangers hell with his demonic aspirations in NBC’s The Good Place, Ted Danson is partnering with the show’s creator, Mike Schur, for another off-beat comedy series called A Man on the Inside. Formerly known as A Classic Spy, the new series premieres on Netflix this November.
In A Man on the Inside, Ted Danson plays Charles, a retired man who gets a new lease on life when he answers a PI’s ad and becomes a mole in a secret investigation. Consisting of eight thirty-minute episodes, A Man on the Inside is based on the documentary The Mole Agent, a 2021 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature.
Joining Danson for his sleuth-tastic series are Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Stephanie Beatriz, Lilah Richcreek Estrada, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sally Struthers, Margaret Avery, John Getz, Susan Ruttan, Lori Tan Chinn, Clyde Kusatsu, Marc Evan Jackson, Jama Williamson, Wyatt Yang, Deuce Basco, Lincoln Lambert, Kerry O’Malley.
Mike Schur started as a Saturday Night Live writer before becoming a producer and writer for The Office on NBC. After finding tremendous success and becoming a trusted name in the industry, Schur focused on creating Parks and Recreation with Greg Daniels. Parks and Recreation, starring Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt, Adam Scott, Aziz Ansari, Retta, Rob Lowe, and Jim O’Heir, became a sitcom sensation, lasting for seven seasons of laugh-out-loud municipal comedy.
In 2016, Schur created The Good Place, with Ted Danson starring as the lead organizer of Heaven. Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Jammela Jamil, Manny Jacinto, and D’Arcy Carden lead the ensemble, with Marc Evan Jackson, Maya Rudolph, and Jason Mantzoukas guest-starring. The Good Place ran for four hilarious seasons, with a mind-bending twist in the latter half of the series, changing everything we know about The Good Place. Danson’s Michael is an affable, determined, and creative force in The Good Place, though his management skills could use a little work. Schur and Danson clearly have an excellent working relationship if they’re joining forces for A Man on the Inside, with Danson, once again, taking center stage. Considering the talent involved with this new show, we can’t wait to see it. To tease the series, Netflix shared a gallery of first-look images of the show. You can check them out below.
After giving a group of unlikely strangers hell with his demonic aspirations in NBC’s The Good Place, Ted Danson is partnering with the show’s creator, Mike Schur, for another off-beat comedy series called A Man on the Inside. Formerly known as A Classic Spy, the new series premieres on Netflix this November.
In A Man on the Inside, Ted Danson plays Charles, a retired man who gets a new lease on life when he answers a PI’s ad and becomes a mole in a secret investigation. Consisting of eight thirty-minute episodes, A Man on the Inside is based on the documentary The Mole Agent, a 2021 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature.
Joining Danson for his sleuth-tastic series are Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Stephanie Beatriz, Lilah Richcreek Estrada, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sally Struthers, Margaret Avery, John Getz, Susan Ruttan, Lori Tan Chinn, Clyde Kusatsu, Marc Evan Jackson, Jama Williamson, Wyatt Yang, Deuce Basco, Lincoln Lambert, Kerry O’Malley.
Mike Schur started as a Saturday Night Live writer before becoming a producer and writer for The Office on NBC. After finding tremendous success and becoming a trusted name in the industry, Schur focused on creating Parks and Recreation with Greg Daniels. Parks and Recreation, starring Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt, Adam Scott, Aziz Ansari, Retta, Rob Lowe, and Jim O’Heir, became a sitcom sensation, lasting for seven seasons of laugh-out-loud municipal comedy.
In 2016, Schur created The Good Place, with Ted Danson starring as the lead organizer of Heaven. Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Jammela Jamil, Manny Jacinto, and D’Arcy Carden lead the ensemble, with Marc Evan Jackson, Maya Rudolph, and Jason Mantzoukas guest-starring. The Good Place ran for four hilarious seasons, with a mind-bending twist in the latter half of the series, changing everything we know about The Good Place. Danson’s Michael is an affable, determined, and creative force in The Good Place, though his management skills could use a little work. Schur and Danson clearly have an excellent working relationship if they’re joining forces for A Man on the Inside, with Danson, once again, taking center stage. Considering the talent involved with this new show, we can’t wait to see it. To tease the series, Netflix shared a gallery of first-look images of the show. You can check them out below.
Plot: Zee is a mysterious and infamous assassin known, and feared, in the Parisian underworld as the Queen of the Dead. But when, during an assignment from her shadowy mentor and handler, Zee refuses to kill a blinded young woman in a Paris nightclub, the decision will disintegrate Zee’s alliances, attract the attention of a savvy police investigator, and plunge her into a sinister criminal conspiracy that will set her on a collision course with her own past.
Review: Before coming to Hollywood and delivering modern action movies Broken Arrow, Hard Target, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible II,John Woo revolutionized action cinema with the one-two punch of The Killer and Hard Boiled. Both films starred Chow Yun-fat and changed the landscape of action movies forever. In the years since their release, John Woo’s signature style has been copied ad nauseam, resulting in the appearance of slow motion, doves, and any balletic action sequences as cliche. Woo returned to English-language film with last year’s Silent Night. This innovative and relatively dialogue-free film gave me hope that his long-in-development remake of The Killer would be equally as refreshing. While it is nice to see Woo’s brand of beautiful bloodshed back on screen, the new take on The Killer is rote and redundant without offering a single moment that makes it worthwhile.
There is little that the 2024 version of The Killer shares in common with the 1989 original outside of the barest plot structure. Both films follow an assassin protecting a blind singer while being pursued by a police officer. In the original, the reluctant friendship between the killer and the cop creates a unique bromance twist. At the same time, the melodramatic plot existed to deepen the character development when Woo was not filming expertly choreographed gunfights and car chases. In the new film, the cat-and-mouse dynamic still exists between the killer and the cop, as does the blind singer, but beyond that, the story is vastly different. Now, the killer has a different reason for defending the blind singer, and the friendship that develops with the cop pursuer borders on romance. The character development now feels forced into the story and bogs down the action rather than augmenting it. There is significantly less action in this new The Killer than the trailers would lead you to believe.
Nathalie Emmanuel takes on the title role as Zee, the best assassin in France, who works for her handler, Finn (Sam Worthington). Zee has a rule that her targets deserve to die, and she will not kill civilians. When hired to clear a room of criminals, Zee dispatches them with a samurai sword and inadvertently blinds young American singer Jenn (Diana Silvers) but leaves her alive. When Finn sends Zee back to finish the job, Zee runs into Detective Sey (Omar Sy), who is pursuing a related theft of heroin that connects to a high-ranking French crimelord as well as a Saudi Prince (Said Taghmaoui). Sey is a righteous cop who does not always play safe, hates politics and has crossed paths with Zee before. Zee and Sey have mutual respect despite being on different sides of the law, and eventually, they find themselves working together to stop the true bad guys. Sy and Emmanuel have good chemistry on screen without turning it into a sexual relationship, but neither actor can overcome the soporific dialogue that bogs down the entire screenplay.
Clocking in at over two hours, I was hoping that The Killer would be jam-packed with action sequences along the lines of Woo’s previous efforts, but most of the movie is focused on characters talking rather than fighting. The Killer takes over ninety minutes to develop any momentum in the action. The 1989 film built up the characters over six months, whereas the new film shifts everything to take place in a matter of days. This diminishes the development of the characters’ shifting allegiances and feels forced and overly familiar. There is also the addition of new assassins to stand in Zee’s way, one of whom is played by John Woo’s daughter, Angeles. But, their introduction early in the film completely botches what is meant to serve as a twist in the plot. By the time the action kicks into gear, it is too late, and the movie has already beaten the familiar plot to death without adding anything new to make the viewer care about this new interpretation.
When John Woo wrote and directed The Killer in 1989, he was in his early forties. At 77, Woo still packs a punch when lensing action sequences but relies on the script work from Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken, which fails in every conceivable way. Helgeland, best known for his whipsmart films L.A. Confidential and Payback, offers nothing more than stilted and wooden dialogue that not even the charming Omar Sy and Nathalie Emmanuel can rescue. The exposition is heavy-handed and bland, as is the entire look of the film. Suppose you can get past Mauro Fiore’s vanilla cinematography or the generic score by Marco Beltrami. In that case, you may appreciate the classic style of Woo’s action sequences, but they cannot help but feel cheap and low-budget. Once the movie hits the final act, Woo manages to evoke what has made him a film legend, but it is too late to salvage this forgettable remake.
The Killer was a masterpiece ahead of its time, while the 2024 version is well past its time. Despite Nathalie Emmanuel being perfectly cast in the lead and Omar Sy doing a great job, The Killer cannot help but be an uninteresting and overlong waste of time and talent. As evidenced by Silent Night, John Woo still has something in the tank, but The Killer is a total misfire in every sense. While seeing how a filmmaker can realize a concept in two completely different ways is interesting, The Killer may be the most unnecessary remake since Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. The Killer is the worst thing an action movie can be: boring. Avoid this movie at all costs unless you are a John Woo completist, and even then, you will be disappointed that you waited over thirty years for this.
Dune: Awakening, the survival MMO set in Frank Herbert’s iconic sci-fi world, looks huge. Developer Funcom, the team behind Conan Exiles, showed up at Gamescom with a hefty amount of new gameplay footage to pour over. In addition to giving a release window of early 2025, the footage highlights seemingly every major…
