The Real Meaning of ‘Barbenheimer’: If You Build Exciting Movies, They Will Come

Film director William Friedkin, who died Monday at age 87, was best known for “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” but he also directed two high-profile and controversial gay-themed movies — “The Boys in the Band” and “Cruising.”

Like a lot of book-to-movie adaptations, not everything from the Red, White and Royal Blue novel made it into its film adaptation.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City trailer is here and it’s packed with drama and Mary Cosby’s big return. OGs Whitney Rose, Lisa Barlow, Heather Gay and Meredith Marks all return for season 4 with Jen Shah noticeably missing as she serves her prison sentence after being convicted of wire fraud charges.«For three years we were tormented, brutalized and lived in fear,» Gay declares in the preview, «and it's time to end it.»With Shah's departure, Bravo added two new Housewives to the cast, season 3 friend Angie Katsanevas and newbie Monica Garcia.

Sydney Sweeney is looking so chic for her big night!

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” has a terrible title, but in theory the film sounds intriguing. It wants to be an old-fashioned monster movie, the kind they used to produce back when horror films were actual movies, made with the stodgy well-carpentered rhythm that any movie was made with. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is set in 1897, and for most of it we’re aboard a large wooden ship with multiple sails — the Demeter, a handsome relic, since this is already the era when metal ships were coming in — that’s sailing from Bulgaria to London.

Sophia Scorziello editor Netflix has released the first trailer for the erotic thriller “Fair Play,” which the streamer acquired for $20 million in one of the biggest deals out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor and “Oppenheimer” actor Alden Ehrenreich star in the film, which unravels the complex relationship of a power-hungry couple contending for power at a cutthroat financial firm.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Gran Turismo” is a race-car movie that gives the audience a contact high. That’s what you tend to want from an action drama about souped-up sports cars snaking their way around labyrinthine tracks at 300 kilometers per hour. But there’s an innocence to this one, and a surprise authenticity.

Sharon Rosen Leib I recently discovered my pioneer producer great-grandfather Sol M. Wurtzel’s obituary in the April 16, 1958 edition of Variety. In 1917, mogul William Fox sent Sol to oversee production at his Hollywood studio.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The saga of American movies in the 1970s is now a mythology. In the first half of the decade, the movies that emerged from the New Hollywood were unprecedented in their realism, their immersion in the gritty side pockets of everyday life, their perception of the darkness hidden in the American Dream. Then, of course, came Lucas and Spielberg, who kicked off the blockbuster revolution — the transformation of movies from reality into fantasy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When did the “Mission: Impossible” films become action movies? I’m not sure when that happened, but I do know this much: For a series like the one in question, it’s live by the action, die by the action. For a few days there, people were chattering about all the great action in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” talking up the Fiat car chase or that train-dangling-from-a-cliff climax as if we’d never seen a sequence like that one before.

Strictly Come Dancing fans have been left divided over one of the first contestants announced to be taking part in this year’s series.

A24 will be releasing its first movie musical later this year and it looks hilarious!

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The movie-mad phenomenon of “Barbenheimer” has been a thrilling reminder that audiences can still embrace the movie-theater experience, turning up in awesome droves when they’re offered something new and adventurous. It’s also been powerful evidence that films that aren’t formulaic sequels can succeed in a way that too many recent cookie-cutter franchise films have not. But will all that go down as a lesson for the future? Or a giant anomaly? We probably shouldn‘t kid ourselves.

Angus Cloud has died 10 years after the terrifying incident that almost took his life.Last year, the then-24-year-old actor shared the story behind the curved scar that runs along the left side of his scalp, an injury that almost killed him before his career even began. Opening up about the harrowing injury in the 2022 Power of Young Hollywood issue of, Cloud said, «It's real. I broke my skull on Friday the 13th.»In 2013, Cloud was walking down a darkly lit street in his hometown of downtown Oakland when he fell into a construction pit below.

A gang spashed cash from a huge drug plot on holidays to Spain and Greece, a court has heard.

Barbie movie, but the real team looks a little different.In Greta Gerwig’s new film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling – which has been praised for its feminist message and storytelling – the chair of the all-male board is played by Will Ferrell.The actor pops up in the film to “play the dim-witted CEO”, as NME wrote a four-star review.The real Chairman and CEO of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, is indeed male, but does sit alongside female board members, too.According to the Mattel website, the real Board Of Directors currently consists of six men and five women, who comprise “global leaders from various fields and industries, with a broad and diverse range of experiences and perspectives required to provide independent governance and oversee the execution of our long-term strategy”.The feminist messaging of Barbie has been a key topic of discussion after opening weekend (July 21).America Ferrera, who plays Mattel executive Gloria, revealed that one of the most pivotal sequences of dialogue – about the double standards women face – took 30 to 50 takes to film.“It worked on the page, and so I definitely wanted to give that feeling to the audience as the person performing it— to make it resonate the way that it did with me when I read the words on the page,” Ferrera told Vanity Fair.The actor said that while it “felt like” 500 takes, it was probably closer to 30 to 50 “full runs”.In other Barbie news, it was recently revealed that the marketing budget was more than it cost to make the film.According to Variety, the marketing budget for the film was a staggering $150million (£117m), eclipsing the $145million (£113m) it cost to actually make the film itself.Elsewhere, Robbie has said she was teased by her friends for not having a

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In America today, no one has a lock on conspiracy theory. It has become the air we breathe, the Kool-Aid we drink, the rabbit-hole ideology that defines too many of us. Yet conspiracy theories come in different shapes and sizes. Many are false, some are true. Many are bat-house crazy, some are more than plausible. All, in one way or another, work as metaphors: for the forces (within government, corporations, whatever) that collude in hiding things from us, for the sinister tantalizing truth that we aren’t allowed to see. “They Cloned Tyrone” is a slow-burn inner-city sci-fi nightmare thriller, one that plays off the spirit of conspiracy theory that has often thrived — with justification — within Black culture. The Tuskegee experiment was a conspiracy that happened; its horrific impact on the hearts and minds of African-Americans is beyond measure. And in the 1970s, the belief that the CIA, linked by the war in Vietnam to the Golden Triangle (the source of most of the world’s heroin), was dumping drugs into America’s inner cities was a notion that gained currency, culminating a decade later in the theory that the CIA was the hidden force behind the crack epidemic.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Lawrence Sher, the Oscar-nominated cinematography for “Joker,” revealed on “The Trenches Talk” podcast that he “never even met” Lady Gaga on the set of the sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” because she was presumably in character the whole time (via IndieWire). Gaga stars opposite returning lead Joaquin Phoenix in the 2024 comic book movie, which casts her as Harley Quinn opposite Phoenix’s Joker. Sher said it wasn’t until he started calling Gaga by the name “Lee” (presumably a nod to Harley) that she even warmed up to him. “I didn’t know Stefani at all,” Sher said referring to Gaga’s real name, Stefani Germanotta. “Strangely, I felt like I never even met her, even during the makeup/hair tests. Maybe it was my philosophy of not trying to get in their space. And then I remember for a week, being like, ‘God, I feel like we are disconnecting. Not even connecting. We are like on opposites.’ And I would say to my crew, ‘Jesus, I can’t crack it. She either hates me or we hate each other. There’s something weird going on here.’”

Sofía Vergara and Joe Manganiello surprised their fans with their recent statement, opening up about their divorce on Monday July 17, following their 7-year marriage. The celebrity couple asked the media and online users to be respectful, as they now enter a new episode in their lives. However, fans can’t help but wonder about the reason behind their split.“They have been growing apart for some time now and tried to resolve things, but they are focused on different areas of their lives,” a close source to the Colombian actress told People.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the early scenes of “Oppenheimer,” J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), an American physics student attending graduate school in England and Germany in the 1920s, with bright blue marble eyes and a curly wedge of hair that stands up like Charlie Chaplin’s, keeps having visions of particles and waves. We see the images that are disrupting his mind, the particles pulsating, the waves aglow in vibratory bands of light. Oppenheimer can see the brave new world of quantum mechanics, and the visual razzmatazz is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a biopic written and directed by Christopher Nolan: a molecular light show as a reflection of the hero’s inner spirit. But even when “Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.