Mark Ruffalo is sharing stories while eating some hot wings!
19.11.2023 - 21:33 / variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Dashing Through the Snow,” Lil Rel Howery has the off-the-cuff funk energy of a hustler who’s so quick that you believe his spiel before you’ve had the chance to outthink it. The whole issue of believing is key to the movie, since Howery plays Santa Claus — or, perhaps, a petty criminal who’s pretending to be Santa Claus. The character calls himself Nick, and he’s dressed as a variation on the old-school Victorian Santa: half-frame glasses, a coat festooned with gold buttons and paramilitary shoulder flaps, a vest of gold finery, along with a few token bits of street cool (pearl earring, two-tone beard, fingerless leather gloves).
Howery’s line readings sound improvised, and that’s a good thing. He’s the ebullient, fast-talking spark plug of a formula comedy with a cheap engine, though one that putters along harmlessly enough. Not so long ago, there were maybe three or four Christmas movies per holiday season.
Now, in the streaming era, we have the Christmas-movie-industrial complex. They roll off the assembly line by the dozens, and most of them have a strikingly similar tone, derived from around the time that Hollywood was making comedies like “Jingle All the Way” (1996). It’s a tone at once silly, synthetic, and cynical, dunked in the excesses of the consumer culture, but it always builds up to a heartwarming way of saying that Christmas still has soul.
Mark Ruffalo is sharing stories while eating some hot wings!
A new Covid variant that has spread around different countries across the world has been causing concern for health officials that the NHS may struggle to cope with the pressure it could create.
Given this rising age of anxiety we’re in, where problems of uncertainty and instability feel like they’re global and yet local, intimate, and personal too, writer/director Sam Esmail’s unnerving global collapse thriller, “Leave The World Behind,” feels like it arrives at an all-too-perfectly timed moment. Its opening moments are arresting.
EXCLUSIVE: Sean Penn-starring Ukrainian anthology movie War Through the Eyes of Animals has wrapped shooting in LA and more details have emerged about Penn’s involvement.
Grand Theft Auto VI arrived a little early after a copy was leaked online.Rockstar Games released its first look for the sixth game of the cult-classic video game series Monday evening — roughly 15 hours before the planned Tuesday morning unveiling — while citing the leak.“Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube,” Rockstar Games wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, just after 6 p.m. ET Monday.Rockstar Games and its New York parent company, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., did not provide further details on the leak.
A dad-of-seven whose family are the last ones living in a now-derelict street has hit out at council chiefs who want to bulldoze his home. Demonique Wilson and his wife Thabo are locked in a bitter dispute with Salford town hall bosses over the value of his house which is set to be demolished to make way for a £250m regeneration project.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Every fan of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) loves the scene where Gene Wilder, as the mystical candy maker, takes his guests on a psychedelic tunnel ride, zooming through the bowels of the Chocolate Factory as he chants a little verse (“There’s no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going…”), getting angrier and more hysterical by the second. Wilder’s Wonka was a sweetheart, but he had a hidden maniacal side. And in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Tim Burton’s majestically wacked 2005 remake, Johnny Depp, then at the apex of his movie stardom, went full Depp, playing Wonka like some louche vampiristic cross between Anna Wintour and Michael Jackson.
Society of the Snow” is entering awards season. The film, directed by Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona and produced by Netflix, is based on the true story of the survivors of a horrifying plane crash in the Andes, who managed to survive for two months in inhospitable conditions.
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, the beloved trio from The Grand Tour, have reportedly filmed their final special for the show.This comes just days after it was announced that Top Gear, their former BBC show, is also being put on hold.The streaming site Amazon Prime Video, which has been home to The Grand Tour since 2016, is expected to bring in new hosts if the show returns.The current presenters are said to be content with this decision. An insider shared: "It's a surprising decision and everyone realises it very much marks the end of an era for the three presenters." "The Grand Tour is one of Prime Video's most watched shows and Jeremy, James and Richard have a devoted following.
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May have = decided to end Prime Video's The Grand Tour, according to reports. The much-loved trio launched the show in 2016 after they departed from BBC's Top Gear.
Dyson is notorious for not discounting its hair tech. Most of the year, even during big sale periods, the max you can get off a product like the Airwrap is £50 in a Boots Advantage Card deal – but that isn't the case this Black Friday.Though Dyson is yet to announce any discounts on hair electricals, I've just found out about a 'secret' deal that can give you up to 50% off an Airwrap.
On the first day of a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters rallied in the Fairfax District. A portion of the crowd marched through the streets and into The Grove as part of a nationwide effort demanding a lasting ceasefire in the war, as well as an end to U.S. aid for Israel.
Martin Scorsese has revealed that Robert De Niro wanted the whole of Killers of the Flower Moon to be filmed in the Osage language.Scorsese revealed the news during a Q&A session with fellow filmmaking legend Steven Spielberg after a screening of the film last week (November 14) at the DGA Theatre in Los Angeles.The recently released film – which is led by Leonardo DiCaprio, De Niro and Lily Gladstone – is based on a non-fiction book of the same name published in 2017. It tells the true story of a series of murders of Osage Native Americans over the rights for the oil under their land in Oklahoma.The film includes several scenes in which the Osage language is spoken, and De Niro in particular enjoyed learning it so much that he asked the director whether the whole film could be made in that dialect.Scorsese said: “By the way, a lot of the Osage language is lost, but they’re putting it back together, so to speak.
Naman Ramachandran South Africa‘s Quizzical Pictures has commissioned eight-part crime series “Murder By The Sea.” The series is set in Blaasgat, a fictional coastal town named after its giant blowhole. When Lennart Cato, a local man-made-good, is found dead inside a papier-mâché whale on the opening night of a new Whale Museum that he’s funding, the locals turn to town resident and retired old-school thespian Lawrence Mantooth for answers.
Emerald Fennell’s dark comedy Saltburn takes a massive jump from to over 1,500 screens today as Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Hayao Miyazaki’s latest The Boy and the Heron, animated They Shot The Piano Player and other festival favorites launch awards season runs this Thanksgiving specialty weekend.
Maggie Betts, writer-director of The Burial, spoke about her film’s Oscar-winning stars Saturday at Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles event. Jamie Foxx plays a lawyer representing a funeral home owner (Tommy Lee Jones) in a lawsuit against a big corporation. Betts learned she had to give Foxx space for his process.
The Peasants would already be a daunting project in the best of times. Like their previous film, Loving Vincent, directors Hugh and DK Welchman oversaw a team of animators painting each frame of the film based on live-action reference material. Hugh, who came to Los Angeles from Poland just for his 12-minute Contenders panel, said The Peasants also had to work around COVID and the Ukraine War.
An Oodie fan who decided to try out the brand following advice from Martin Lewis has revealed she totally loves one of the cosy pullovers available online.
Dashing Through The Snow, took to the red carpet for the first special screening of the movie.The film is directed by Tim Story and follows Eddie Garrick (Ludacris), a good-hearted man who has lost his belief in the wonder of Christmas. While spending time with his nine-year-old daughter Charlotte on Christmas Eve, he befriends a mysterious man in a red suit named Nick.Said man in red suit is the hugely talented Lil Rel Howery, while Madison Skye Validum plays the role of Charlotte in the film.All three were present on the carper and spoke about working on the film and their roles.
David Bowie once wore during his famous introduction to the 1982 adaptation of The Snowman is now available for purchase.The brand NotJust Clothing revealed their Christmas collection, featuring The World of The Snowman™ branded items. Some of the items include a festive jumper, scarf and blanket inspired by Raymond Briggs’ iconic and best-loved picture book, The Snowman, which was first published in 1978.The legendary scarf – which is priced at £19.99 – was inspired by the one seen on Bowie which he wore in his own attic during the filmed introduction to The Snowman when the animation was first broadcast in the US.For years fans of the beloved Christmas animation have searched for the garment, with Bowie’s own son, Duncan Jones, rediscovering the original scarf last year.Brian Harding, who produced Bowie’s introduction for the film, shared the story behind the scarf in an X/Twitter thread upon Jones’ discovery.“The Scarf was knitted by the lady in the accounts department of TVC, the production company who made the animation.