In 2015, the BBC & PBS adapted the first two books of Hilary Mantel’s excellent Wolf Hall trilogy into a six-episode miniseries called Wolf Hall, starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII. Now they’ve made a second miniseries that covers the events of the third book, The Mirror and the Light. Here’s a trailer and synopsis:
The TV sequel picks up in May 1536 after the beheading of Anne Boleyn and follows the last four years of Thomas Cromwell’s life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared and influential figure of his time. These are years when Henry’s regime is severely tested by religious rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion. Cromwell must deftly navigate the moral complexities that accompany the exercise of power in this bloody time; he’s caught between his desire to do what’s right and his instinct to survive. The question is: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s brutally mercurial gaze?
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light premieres in the UK on BBC One on Nov 10 but Americans have to wait until March 23, 2025 to watch it on PBS.
Somehow, I missed that the teaser trailer for season two of the excellent The Last of Us premiered almost a month ago. I guess both I and the world have been busy with other things and also keeping tabs on the entire interest and media landscape is just not something that’s possible.
The second season, based on the 2020 game The Last of Us Part II, follows Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) five years after the events of the first season, and introduces Abby (Kaitlyn Dever).
And that “the season is expected to span seven episodes”.
The trailer for season two of Silo, which starts on Apple TV+ on November 15. It doesn’t reveal much but I am excited to watch the new season! (No spoilers please from folks who have read the books.)
These solidly middlebrow shows like Silo, The Diplomat, and The Gilded Age are some of my favorites to watch these days because they are well-produced with quality actors but don’t tax the viewer (ok, me…they don’t tax me) as much as more serious fare like Shōgun, My Brilliant Friend, Severance, or Chernobyl (all of which I love to bits but sometimes feels like eating your vegetables, if you know what I mean). But a good media diet is a varied media diet and stuff like Silo is really hitting the spot for me right now.
The food documentary series Chef’s Table returns with chefs & culinary experts from Italy, China, Cambodia, and the US who all work in the medium of the noodle. Here’s the trailer for Chef’s Table: Noodles:
Separated is the newest documentary film from Errol Morris. Based on Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, the film probes the inhumane family separation and immigration policies of the Trump administration. From a review in The Guardian:
The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages. It was inhumane treatment, which was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and effectively write every parent’s worst fear into law. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said blithely. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s forensic, procedural documentary walks us through the bureaucratic backrooms to show how the policy was hatched and implemented. It explains how its principal authors — Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions — junked the pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) in favour of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass imprisonment. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that typifies much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that is entirely understandable. The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
“Harm to children was part of the point,” says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy that the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White isn’t exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.
And here’s an interview with Morris & Soboroff about the film:
For his second term, Trump and his team are planning a blockbuster sequel to these inhumane crimes entirely in the open: deporting up to 20 million people (undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and political opponents) with a minimum of due process, which will require a massive increase in the scale of the police state and concentration camps. That’s 6% of the US population. We don’t know if they will succeed but they will try. Those are the stakes.
Music By John Williams is a documentary film about the legendary composer who did the scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Superman, E.T., Home Alone, Schindler’s List — seriously, one person composed all these?! — Saving Private Ryan, Harry Potter, Lincoln, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and the Olympic Fanfare and Theme that NBC uses for the Olympics.
For his first movie since 2019’s Parasite, filmmaker Bong Joon-ho is coming out with a sci-fi dark comedy film called Mickey 17. The trailer is above and the synopsis from Wikipedia is:
Wanting to get out of Earth, Mickey Barnes signs up to be an “expendable”: a disposable employee where after one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of their memories intact. After one of his “multiples”, Mickey 17, unintentionally survived a human expedition to colonize the ice world Niflheim, he goes head-to-head with a new multiple, Mickey 18.
Mickey 17 will be out in theaters in late January. I found the trailer for this from Aaron Stewart-Ahn, who says:
David Zaslav’s Warner Bros has been trying to bury Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi follow up to Parasite for over a year now, refused to let it play Cannes, and is now dumping it in January. Rumors are Robert Pattinson’s weirdo performance also bothered them which to me means it must be friggin’ awesome.
Per Wikipedia, production wrapped in late 2022 so yeah, it sounds like they didn’t know what to do with it.
Apollo 13: Survival is a documentary film that uses original footage and interviews to tell the story of NASA’s Apollo 13 mission, what went wrong, and how the astronauts returned safely to Earth. It’s now playing on Netflix.
I love My Brilliant Friend — it’s one of my all-time favorites and might be the best show you’re not watching. I agree completely with Clare Thorp’s description of it as “criminally underrated”.
As the trailer above shows, the previous two lead actors (who were excellent) have been replaced by older ones, a change I’m a little apprehensive about, but everything else about the show has been pitch perfect so I’m gonna trust the process. From an NPR piece on the new season:
“This child is you, when you were a child,” Maiorino recalled her friend Alessia saying about the novel’s titular protagonist and sometimes antagonist Lila. Like Lila and her friend Lenù, Maiorino is from Naples and stayed in the south, while her friend left to study in the north of the country, get married and have children.
Art has now truly imitated life for Maiorino, who plays Lila in the fourth season of the series.
New episodes of My Brilliant Friend started airing on HBO last night and will drop every Monday for the next 10 weeks. Go check it out!
Saturday Night is a forthcoming movie directed by Jason Reitman about the premiere of Saturday Night Live.
At 11:30pm on October 11, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television — and culture — forever. Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Gil Kenan & Reitman, Saturday Night is based on the true story of what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Full of humor, chaos, and the magic of a revolution that almost wasn’t, we count down the minutes in real time until we hear those famous words…
According to Wikipedia, Succession’s Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg) plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson in the film. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
I was among the minority of viewers who enjoyed the first season of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series The Rings of Power, so I was excited to watch this extended trailer for the show’s second season. It seems to give away a little too much of the story for my taste (even though we all knew where it was going), but I am definitely pumped for season two.
Sauron has returned. Cast out by Galadriel, without army or ally, the rising Dark Lord must now rely on his own cunning to rebuild his strength and oversee the creation of the Rings of Power, which will allow him to bind all the peoples of Middle-earth to his sinister will.
Well, the teaser trailer answers almost no questions about the second season of Severance, so job well done with the teasing there lads. Here’s one thing though: the season starts on January 17, 2025 on Apple TV+. Oh, and this:
In season two, Mark and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.
Season 2 reunites its ensemble cast of stars including Emmy Award nominee Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, Jen Tullock, Michael Chernus, Dichen Lachman, Emmy Award winner John Turturro, Academy Award winner Christopher Walken and Academy and Emmy Award winner Patricia Arquette, and welcomes new series regular Sarah Bock.
✅ Teased
✅ Interest piqued
✅ New event created in my calendar for Jan 17
✅ And a stick of butter
Ok, this trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II really got me wound up. Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen — I am here for all of it. November 22 can’t come soon enough (for several reasons…)
Wallace & Gromit are returning for a feature-length film later this year — and so is Feathers McGraw, the scofflaw penguin that made off with the wrong trousers in, um, The Wrong Trousers. Here’s the premise of Vengeance Most Fowl:
In this next installment, Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified, when Wallace invents a “smart” gnome that seems to develop a mind of its own. When it emerges that a vengeful figure from the past might be masterminding things, it falls to Gromit to battle sinister forces and save his master … or Wallace may never be able to invent again!
Timely! Vengeance Most Fowl will debut on BBC in the UK in late December and at some later date on Netflix in the US and elsewhere.
A 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai is heading to theaters this summer. The film screened at Cannes in May and screenings in the US start in July:
Janus will open the restoration on Friday, July 5 in New York at Film Forum after which a Los Angeles premiere will take place at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre on Sunday, July 7. The film will open wide on Friday, July 12 in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal.
Here’s the official poster for the restoration:
On a personal note, I’m pretty disheartened there’s a 99% chance this won’t be playing anywhere near me in Vermont. Run Lola Run was rereleased in theaters last week and I couldn’t find it anywhere within a reasonable drive. And the nearest IMAX is 2h15m away. I’m thankful that I can get all sorts of culture pumped into my house at gigabit speeds, but per contemporary wisdom, “we’ve got Seven Samurai’s 4K restoration at home” is just not the same.
The first Black Barbie doll was created and sold in 1980. Black Barbie, a documentary streaming on Netflix later this month, tells the story of how the doll came to be and the impact it had on a generation of young people who were able to see themselves in a doll with the same color skin, perhaps for the first time.
The trailer opens with this line: “If you’ve gone your whole life and you’ve never seen anything made in your own image, there is damage done.” Which is then echoed later in the trailer when a little girl is describing her Barbie: “Really pretty, and has lochs, just like me”.
I was a little too young (and culturally sheltered — like I’d never heard of New York magazine) in 1985 to really understand what the heck the Brat Pack was (not to mention what the name was referencing), but as a child of the 80s, I obviously grew up watching movies and TV shows that featured these actors. According to Wikipedia (which is a good read if you’re unfamiliar with the whole thing), here are some of the actors that were in the Brat Pack (or Brat Pack-adjacent): Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, James Spader, Robert Downey Jr., John Cusack, and Matthew Broderick.
The Brat Pack moniker was coined in a 1985 New York magazine article and it stuck. And according to some of the members, it ruined lives, careers, and friendships. Now one of the group members, Andrew McCarthy, has directed a documentary about the group: Brats. From Deadline:
Brats looks at the iconic films of the 1980s that shaped a generation and the narrative that took hold when their young stars were branded the “Brat Pack.” McCarthy reunites with his fellow Brat Packers — friends, colleagues and former foes, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Jon Cryer, Lea Thompson and Timothy Hutton, many of whom he had not seen for over 30 years — to answer the question: What did it mean to be part of the Brat Pack? The actor-filmmaker also sits down for a first-time conversation with writer David Blum, who fatefully coined the term Brat Pack in a 1985 New York Magazine cover story.
That trailer definitely hooked me in. Brats will be available on Hulu on June 13.
I have to admit, The Bear is a little up and down for me. But the highs (Forks, Fishes, Honeydew) are so high that it’s well worth the effort. Anyway, the trailer for season three dropped yesterday and, no surprise, it looks intense.
So. Much. Unaddressed. Trauma. That these people are inflicting upon one another. (Men will literally open a Michelin-starred restaurant instead of going to therapy.) It seems like Carmy, not the restaurant, is the titular Bear. (via laura olin)
Two of my biggest childhood touchstones were Sesame Street and the Muppet Show. The creative spark behind both shows was Jim Henson, the subject of a forthcoming documentary directed by Ron Howard. From the press release:
Produced with the full participation and cooperation of the Henson family, “Jim Henson Idea Man” is an unprecedented, intimate look at Henson’s illustrious, revolutionary career and complex personal life. Using never-before-seen personal archival home movies, photographs, sketches, and Henson’s personal diaries, as well as interviews with those who knew him best, the film is the definitive portrait of one of the world’s most inspiring and iconoclastic creators.
Queendom is a documentary film by Agniia Galdanova about queer Russian activist and performance artist Jenna Marvin and her unusual form of protest against the war in Ukraine and Russia’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people. From a short review in the Guardian:
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, some brave souls took to the streets of Moscow to voice their horror at the war, and were met with batons and police brutality. Radical queer performance artist Gena Marvin took a different approach. Wearing platform boots, body paint and wrapped in barbed wire, she walked the streets of Moscow in a stark, silent statement against the war. To call Gena a drag artist fails to capture just how subversive and courageous are her public “performances”. Her otherworldly costumes, created from junk and tape, show the influence of Leigh Bowery; her fearlessness evokes the punk provocation of Pussy Riot.
Marvin’s performances can be intense — check out this video from Paris in 2022. France had just advanced into the semifinals of the World Cup and she went out on the streets dressed in an all-black costume straight out of Alien or Pan’s Labyrinth:
Queendom opens in theaters and will available on streaming on June 14.
I am apparently one of the few people who really liked the first season of the Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power. I mean, it had its rough spots and maybe there was a little too much table-setting, but in general it left me wanting to see what was going to happen next. The trailer for season two just dropped and it looks pretty action-packed and stocked with characters & events that would be familiar to those who have read the main book series. Here’s the synopsis:
Sauron has returned. Cast out by Galadriel, without army or ally, the rising Dark Lord must now rely on his own cunning to rebuild his strength and oversee the creation of the Rings of Power, which will allow him to bind all the peoples of Middle-earth to his sinister will. Building on Season One’s epic scope and ambition, the new season plunges even its most beloved and vulnerable characters into a rising tide of darkness, challenging each to find their place in a world that is increasingly on the brink of calamity. Elves and dwarves, orcs and men, wizards and Harfoots… as friendships are strained and kingdoms begin to fracture, the forces of good will struggle ever more valiantly to hold on to what matters to them most of all… each other.
And they also released a behind-the-scenes look at the production of season two:
The second season of The Rings of Power premieres on August 29 on Amazon Prime.
Francis Ford Coppola has been making Megalopolis since 1983 and has self funded it “in part by the sale of a significant portion of the director’s wine empire”. But the trailer is finally here and it premieres at Cannes in two days’ time. Here’s a synopsis shared by Coppola himself:
A man balances precariously on a ledge high above a once-grand city in the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS, and the movie that follows is — at least in part — about an entire civilization teetering on a similarly precarious ledge, devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda, while a few bold dreamers push against the tide, striving to usher in a new dawn. The man is called Caesar (Adam Driver), like the Roman general who gave rise to the Roman Empire, Cesar the labor leader who organized California’s farm workers in the 1960s, and a few other notably great men of history. But he is also clearly an avatar of Coppola himself — a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it. And, after decades of planning, MEGALOPOLIS the movie is the powerful elixir he has produced: a sweeping, big-canvas movie of provocative ideas and relentless cinematic invention that belies its maker’s 84 years of age.
Coppola seems to have been born-again by a strike of filmic lightning, and the movie — no, the experience (complete with in-theater “live cinema”) — that has emerged feels at once the work of a film-school wunderkind unbowed by notions of convention, but also the work of a wizened master who knows much about life and the ways of the world. To paraphrase Coppola himself speaking decades ago about his APOCALYPSE NOW, MEGALOPOLIS isn’t a movie about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it. Only, where APOCALYPSE left us in a napalm-bombed fever-dream haze, MEGALOPOLIS, surprisingly and movingly, bestows on us a final image glowing with hope for the future.
You should also watch this clip of the film shared by Coppola, which reveals another aspect of the story:
This is either going to be amazing or a beautiful disaster, but either way I’m excited to see it…if they can find someone to distribute the film.
Here is a pleasantly painful trailer for a new movie from the filmmaker Joanna Arnow. It opens this Friday, April 26, at IFC and Lincoln Center in NYC. I don’t know if I’m going to watch it, but I couldn’t really look away.
Arnow also stars as…
an emotionally detached young Brooklynite drifting through unremarkable days and nights. Neither her on-again-off-again BDSM relationship with a mildly disinterested older dom, nor her nondescript corporate job, appear to bring her any satisfaction.
And yet “she finds a core of poignant truth about the ways people search for … emotional happiness and sexual gratification” (per the Lincoln Center summary). It’s currently at a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, FWIW. (This bit also made me laugh out loud.)
How many times last year did you go to church? How many times did you go to a dinner party? How many times last year did you go to club meeting? In barely a couple of decades, half of all the civic infrastructure in America has simply vanished. It’s equivalent to say half of all the roads in America just disappeared.
Here are all the cool new movie trailers that they played during The Big Game™. Or, the ones that I give a shit about anyway. First up, Deadpool and Wolverine:
Did I even see the second Deadpool movie? Does it matter? I’ll see this one. Next: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
Apes in charge, running down the humans? I’m in. There’s also Despicable Me 4 (a franchise I like more than I care to admit), The Fall Guy (based on the 80s TV show I very much didn’t watch; starring, somehow, Ryan Gosling & Emily Blunt — I hope this is a pleasant surprise), and Twisters (the Twister sequel no one asked for).
This is the trailer for Orion and the Dark, an animated kids movie written by Charlie Kaufman. Yes, the I’m Thinking of Ending Things; Synecdoche, New York; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Charlie Kaufman. And it’s getting pretty good reviews so far. The AV Club:
Orion And The Dark may look almost nothing like any Charlie Kaufman film to date, but it bears his personality. While that might be a bit much for the youngest kids, for 11-year-olds like those depicted in this story, it may strike a chord simply by refusing to underestimate their intelligence.
Adam Sandler in a movie about space… I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I clicked play on the trailer for Spaceman this morning. Was I going to get Waterboy / Billy Madison Adam Sandler or Uncut Gems / Punch-Drunk Love Adam Sandler? Thankfully, it appears to be the latter. Spaceman is directed by Johan Renck (who directed the excellent Chernobyl) and is based on Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia.
Six months into a solitary research mission to the edge of the solar system, an astronaut, Jakub (Adam Sandler), realizes that the marriage he left behind might not be waiting for him when he returns to Earth. Desperate to fix things with his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), he is helped by a mysterious creature from the beginning of time he finds hiding in the bowels of his ship. Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano) works with Jakub to make sense of what went wrong before it is too late.
I’m still catching up from being blissfully away from the internet in December so apologies to those of you for which this is old news, but Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga looks %$&*#@ good. My expectations for this film couldn’t be any higher — Fury Road was one of my favorite films of the past 10 years. Crucially, the Furiosa production team includes editor Margaret Sixel and several other folks who won awards for Fury Road — that’s a great sign.
Origin chronicles the tragedy and triumph of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson as she investigates a global phenomenon of epic proportions. Portrayed by Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“King Richard”), Isabel experiences unfathomable personal loss and love as she crosses continents and cultures to craft one of the defining American books of our time. Inspired by the New York Times best-seller “Caste,” ORIGIN explores the mystery of history, the wonders of romance and a fight for the future of us all.
I’m intrigued! Origin is set for a wide release in theaters on Jan 19th.
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