‘The Blackening’ Review: The Rare Slasher Movie That’s Also an Entertaining Social Satire

J. Kim Murphy Indiana Jones has begun his last box office crusade, with the fifth franchise entry earning $24 million on its opening day from 4,600 theaters. It’s a figure that includes $7.2 million in previews in Thursday previews. The action-adventure film from Disney and Lucasfilm is expected to debut near the bottom of projections, projecting a three-day opening of $60 million or so. It’ll be more than enough for the Harrison Ford finale to land in the top spot on domestic charts, setting itself up to draw crowds through the Fourth of July holiday — but it’s not exactly the victorious tone-setter for one of the 20 or so most expensive blockbusters ever made. With a whopping $295 million production budget, “Indiana Jones 5” faces quite the trek to theatrical profitability.

EXCLUSIVE: After hitting 300 North American theaters via The Avenue last fall, the action thriller The System, starring Tyrese Gibson, Terrence Howard, Jeremy Piven and Lil Yachty, has been set to premiere on Starz on July 1st. The film will have its linear premiere there at 12:00 p.m. ET on July 6th, also airing that night at 11:30 p.m. ET.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Carlos” has one of the best openings I’ve ever seen — or heard — in a music documentary. We hear Carlos Santana, waxing philosophical and wise (as he’s prone to do). Intercut with his words, at throbbing intervals of about 20 seconds (and at top volume), are the iconic organ-and-bass notes — BOM BOM!…BOM BOM! — that open “Oye Como Va,” the 1971 hit by Santana. I’ll confess that “Oye Como Va” is one of those classic-rock radio staples I feel like I’ve heard more times in my life than I ever need to. (Sort of like “Moondance” and “Tempted” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”) Yet “Carlos,” instead of assaulting you with the song, severs those four notes from it (BOM BOM!…BOM BOM!) and blows them up into a piece of pop art, like a Warhol sound painting. It asks us to hear the magic of what Carlos Santana did by reveling in the sonic texture, the Latin-gone-psychedelic moxie of those notes.

Five-year-olds in Britain are, on average, up to seven centimetres shorter than children in other wealthy nations, new data has revealed.

Angelique Jackson SPOILER ALERT:This interview contains spoilers from “The Blackening,” now playing in theaters. Dewayne Perkins is living his dream — though the $8 million box office tally for “The Blackening” wasn’t something he actually dreamed was possible. The microbudget (just $5 million) horror-comedy, co-written by and starring Perkins, follows a group of college friends who reunite to celebrate Juneteenth at a cabin in the woods, only to be hunted by a killer. But in a genre where the Black character usually dies first, what happens when all the characters are Black?

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives. The movie was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of “free love” really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

The Bear returns for its second season this month.Created by Christopher Storer, the show’s first season followed award-winning chef Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) who returns to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop following the suicide of his older brother.The second season picks up after Carmy’s decision to close the shop in order to open a new restaurant, alongside Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie (Ebon Mass-Bachrach).A synopsis reads: “Carmy, Sydney and Richie work to transform their grimy sandwich joint into a next-level spot. As they strip the restaurant down to its bones, the crew undertakes transformational journeys of their own, each forced to confront the past and reckon with who they want to be in the future.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In recent years, as the romantic comedy has done a slow fade-out from the big screen, it often seems to have taken sex right along with it. Maybe that accounts for the extraordinary interest sparked by the trailer for — and media coverage of — “No Hard Feelings,” a sort of romantic comedy about a 32-year-old out-of-work Uber driver, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who gets involved with a gawky 19-year-old virgin geek who’s about to enter Princeton. There’s been some moralistic pearl-clutching over the trailer, though probably for the very same reason that the movie could connect: It looks a little pervy. Yet when you see “No Hard Feelings,” you realize that the film’s promise of risky business is little more than a big tease.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Superhero fatigue” is a phrase that tends to make devoted movie lovers swoon with rapture. If you’re someone who cares about movies, who cares about cinema, the very prospect of superhero fatigue inspires you to think: Yes! There’s hope! People will get tired of this shit! But let’s be honest — that’s probably wishful thinking. In the last 20 years, led by Marvel but by no means limited to Marvel, comic book movies have infiltrated our culture and our consciousness to the point that they’re now part of who we are. If you ask any number of people, especially dudes of a certain generation, to name their favorite film, they will look at you and say “Star Wars,” often with a smirk that’s really saying, “’Star Wars,’ of course!” These aren’t just “Star Wars” fans. They’re “Star Wars” fundamentalists, who built the seedbeds of their imaginations on the original trilogy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I’ve always been shy when it comes to writing about Wes Anderson, because he’s a filmmaker I rarely connect with. When I watch one of his movies, I can’t help but see his talent (the visual wizardry, the debonair lapidary cleverness), but I feel like I’m experiencing something that was made on a different planet from the one I live on. I have felt that way from his very first feature, “Bottle Rocket” (1996), and I really felt it at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998 when I saw “Rushmore” — because everyone there did a backflip of ecstasy, already hailing Anderson as the filmmaker of his generation, and I didn’t get it. I mean, I kind of saw what people were talking about: that “Rushmore” was like “The Graduate” for the new millennium, that the Jason Schwartzman hero had a formidable Holden Caulfield-gone-meta-deadpan attitude that was equal parts devious and desperate, that the Bill Murray character seemed the apotheosis of Bill Murray, and other things. But the bottom line for me is that “Rushmore,” on some essential chemical cinematic level, was too flip, too ironic, too whimsical, too in love with its cheeky postmodern self, and (yes, let’s use the word! How could we not?) too twee.   

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix on Friday announced its acquisition of The Dads, a documentary short billed as a quiet meditation on fatherhood, brotherhood and manhood that counts 13-time NBA All-Star Dwyane Wade amongst its EPs.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you see a documentary about a game-changing pop star, you assume you’re going to get the story of the music, and also a good look at the life, and that there’ll be enough (on both counts) to go around. I was eager to see “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary portrait of Cyndi Lauper, because it’s directed by Alison Ellwood, who made “The Go-Go’s” a few years back, and that movie had everything: the drama, the trauma, the saga of a total pop-music reset, as we watched the Go-Go’s bust down doors that had been too tightly shut for too long. Cyndi Lauper was no less revolutionary a figure, arriving in the early ’80s, along with Madonna, to announce that we were in the midst of a seismic new definition of what it meant to be a female pop star. The definition was: a star who could rule — and change — the world.

J. Kim Murphy Robert Gottlieb, an editor extraordinaire who worked with writers as varied as Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro and Bill Clinton, died Wednesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92. Gottlieb’s death was confirmed to the New York Times by his wife, actor Maria Tucci. Working at publishers Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, Gottlieb’s impressive record of shepherding manuscripts into well-regarded, sometimes bestselling and award-winning works earned him a towering reputation among literary elite. John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok and Ray Bradbury were among his clients, along with Katharine Graham, the once publisher of the Washington Post.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Bucky F*cking Dent,” the second movie written and directed by David Duchovny (the first was “House of D,” in 2004), is based on a novel by Duchovny that was published in 2016, and whether or not the story is autobiographical, it feels autobiographical, and I mean that as a compliment. Set in the summer of 1978, it’s framed around one man’s obsession with the Boston Red Sox — meaning, of course, the curse of the Bambino, going back to 1918, the last time (until 2004) the Sox won the championship. The man is Ted Fulilove, which is a terrible last name for a movie character, though he’s played by Duchovny as a cussed crab apple with an amusing misanthropic put-down for every occasion (like: “Closure’s for morons”). “Bucky F*cking Dent” has a handful of characters, but it’s essentially a father-son two-hander — one of those dramadies in which the dad is a heartless-on-the-surface coot who was no good when it came to how he treated his family, and the son is a lot nicer and more sensitive, but maybe too sensitive (as a correction to all that paternal dickishness). Which also means that he’s lost.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s one of the inside-out realities of our era that scandal, if you give it enough time, turns into myth. So it is with the story of Milli Vanilli, the German-French R&B pop duo of the late ’80s and early ’90s who, having sold close to 50 million records, were revealed to be a fake: a pair of lip-syncing Euro pretty boys who hadn’t sung a note on any of their hits or at any of their concerts. Once they’d been unmasked, the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli played out on two levels. The first was the spectacular embarrassing bad joke of it all — though it was never just a joke, since Milli Vanilli’s fans felt a tremendous sense of anger and betrayal at having been fooled. (The joke was on them.) The second level recognized a crucial and obvious truth: that the scandal wasn’t only about Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, with their teenybop dreads and break-lite dance moves, getting up onstage and singing to prerecorded tracks, as if it had all been their idea. No, the brazen fakery of Milli Vanilli echoed, or at least rhymed with, various other kinds of fakery that were embedded in the music industry (the packaging of boy bands, the use of lip-syncing by established stars). This was certainly more extreme, and worthy of being called on the carpet for, but it wasn’t a stand-alone sin.

The HBO Original documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore reveals the life of the titular actress, producer and philanthropist who dazzled family, friends and fans both on and off screen until her death in 2017.

The HBO Original documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore reveals the life of the titular actress, producer and philanthropist who dazzled family, friends and fans both on and off screen until her death in 2017.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In comic-book movies, when it comes to a hero’s superpowers — flying, lifting objects, repelling bullets, the indomitability of a shield or hammer — the audience is almost always on the outside looking in. But in “The Flash,” when the title character throttles forward at the speed of the hot-singe lightning streaks at his back, or floats through the air in slowed-down motion so beyond bullet-time that a mere second appears to last forever, the movie makes us part of the experience. We know just what he’s going through, which is why the scene gives you a jolt.     Early on, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), a forensic chemist in the Central City Police Department, receives a call from Alfred (Jeremy Irons) — yes, that Alfred — letting him know that there’s an attack underway, and that none of the other Justice League members, notably Batman, is around to help. So Barry, in his form-fitting red thermal crystal helmet and suit, zoom-runs all the way to Gotham City, where he confronts a high-rise hospital whose east wing is collapsing, leaving a nursery full of newborns falling through the air. The extended sequence in which he saves them, grabbing energy bites of candy and burrito in between, has the feel of an underwater comedy ballet. It’s life-or-death but cheeky as hell. Just like our cracked hero.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Vice TV is once again expanding its “Dark Side” franchise with a new spinoff that should hit close to home for millennial audiences in particular: “Dark Side of the 2000s.” Premiering July 18 at 10 p.m., the 10-episode season will cover aughts subjects including the radio wars between Howard Stern and Opie & Anthony, “TRL,” the rise of TMZ, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen’s “Two and a Half Men” conflict, “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” “The Bachelor,” Siegfried & Roy and men’s lifestyle magazines, or “lad mags.” Per its official logline, “From outrageous shock jocks to record breaking reality TV, and the rise of celebrity gossip to the downward spiral of a child star, ‘Dark Side of the 2000s’ delves into the decade’s untold histories, revealing dark secrets and personal insights from the people who witnessed it all first hand.”

EXCLUSIVE: A holiday movie franchise that got its start at Hallmark is moving to Great American Family.