‘Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget’ Review: The Flock from Aardman’s First Flick Hatches a Plucky Mission Improbable

On Sunday, the world woke up to the devastating news that Matthew Perry - most known for playing the character of Chandler Bing in Friends - had passed away at his Los Angeles home. It's thought the 54 year drowned in his jacuzzi, with the Los Angeles Police department stating that "foul play is not suspected." In the days since Matthew's passing, the actor has received a slew of tributes and condolences from his fans to fellow celebrities. One celeb and fan yet to speak out is Courteney Cox, who played Matthew's on screen wife, Monica Geller in the iconic sitcom.

It’s been another very busy week in the world of pop culture!

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it’s a loaded symbol in an imagined conversation between world-famous “sex doc” Sigmund Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins, in irritable curmudgeon mode) and converted atheist C.S.

The headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow haunts the American imagination each autumn. New York City native Washington Irving breathed life into the galloping ghost in 1819, when he penned "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," one of his tales of life among Dutch settlers along the Hudson River. It stands 203 years later as one of the most famous ghost stories in world history — remade in many versions and retold in scores of languages.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Like “Testament” — the 1983 made-for-TV movie that imagined the fallout, both nuclear and psychological, after an atomic bomb is dropped on American soil — “Leave the World Behind” depicts a plausible doomsday scenario from the perspective of a handful of ordinary characters. Not military experts, not scientists, but two families obliged to shelter under the same roof out in the East Hamptons while something scary unfolds a few hours away, off-screen, in New York.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic With “Leo,” Indian director Lokesh Kanagaraj adds another “badass” to the growing network of formidable action heroes he calls the “Lokesh Cinematic Universe.” How do we know this guy’s a badass? Because the Tamil film’s techno soundtrack tells us so, chanting “Leo Das is a badass!” before even establishing who Leo Das is. By this time, the character in question has already wrestled a wild hyena into submission with his bare hands.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic When DreamWorks’ original “Trolls” movie was released, it wasn’t immediately apparent that the studio was launching a musical franchise. The rainbow-bright computer-animated feature boasted a sparkly soundtrack and the voice of Justin Timberlake as grumpy, gray-skinned Branch, but it wasn’t until the sequel — “Trolls World Tour,” released straight to streaming during the pandemic — that the series explicitly embraced its top-40 ’tude.

A man from Wythenshawe has completed the massive achievement of cycling just under 1200 miles across 11 countries in just over two weeks.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In America, doing what Andy Lau does in Hong Kong film industry satire “The Movie Emperor” would likely net him an Oscar nomination. Or at least an MTV Movie Award.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic One fan drove all the way from Louisiana to Little Rock to see the new Austin Butler movie, “The Bikeriders,” hoping the “Elvis” star might show up. Unfortunately, the ongoing actors strike prevented Butler from attending Filmland, a local industry fundraiser that hosted the Arkansas premiere of the film earlier this week — a rowdy portrait of a 1960s motorcycle gang freely inspired by a book of photos New Journalism pioneer Danny Lyon took while embedded with the Outlaws.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In 2016, John le Carré published a memoir called “The Pigeon Tunnel,” which the late spy novelist — who died in late 2020 — claims had been the working title of nearly all his books at some point. For le Carré, the term describes the passage through which naive birds of sport were forced from their nests, only to emerge as targets for marksmen waiting with rifles poised at a hotel in Monte Carlo.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “The Bikeriders,” a drama starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Tom Hardy and directed by Jeff Nichols, has been delayed amid the ongoing actors’ strike. Disney and 20th Century were scheduled to open the film on Dec. 1 but it’s been taken off the calendar for now.

Between the Rains and The Echo are among the big winners at the prestigious Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas.

American Fiction” from writer, director and producer Cord Jefferson, and the recent winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award. Based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison,” a frustrated novelist who is fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired narratives and themes. After he writes an outlandish book making fun of the offensive tropes, his success propels him into the center of hypocrisy.

By any metric, 23 years is a long time to wait for a sequel to Chicken Run, even when you factor in the fiendishly slow gestation of Aardman Animations’ meticulous stop-motion process. Surprisingly, it still feels fresh, not just because of the spring-clean of the core voice cast — Mel Gibson being the highest-profile casualty, lopped off as the “lone free-ranger” Rocky — but because, in the hands of director Sam Fell and his writing team, Dawn of The Nugget delivers a cleverly modern kind of family entertainment that, while it works to a formula, never feels written by committee.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The world will never know what was going through 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau’s head when he was shot and killed by arrows off the coast of North Sentinel Island. There are jokes, of course, and educated guesses, but the best most of us can do is search inside ourselves for the answer.

A total of 10 picturesque areas are in the running to be designated as Scotland's next National Park.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Godfrey Reggio, creator of the Qatsi trilogy, has been down this road before. The obsessions are familiar — nature’s innocence corrupted by industry, technology and the atomic age — but the audience is presumably different.

Get ready for the return of Chicken Run!

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic What would a monk want with a gun? Bringing wisdom and a streak of wry humor to his Bhutan-set sophomore feature, “The Monk and the Gun” director Pawo Choyning Dorji teases any number of possible answers to that question over the course of a droll, shrewdly satirical fable, in which Western values crash against a seemingly intransigent (but potentially more enlightened) South Asian culture. A gifted storyteller who keeps audiences guessing about his characters’ motives until the surprising moment everything comes together, Dorji was born in Bhutan, but attended university in Wisconsin.