Review: Searching

by Lynn Lee

At first glance, Searching has all the marks of a conventional “missing child” thriller.  Single dad’s teenage daughter goes awol, leaving signs to fear the worst; police investigation reaches dead end or obviously-wrong conclusion; dad realizes there was too much about his daughter he didn’t know but doggedly solves the mystery on his own after several red herrings and, of course, a shocking twist.  Slightly condensed, the entire film could fit into a one-hour TV crime procedural. As it is, the movie clocks in at a lean, tightly paced 102 minutes and hits all the requisite plot beats with impressive efficiency.

And yet, there is something different about Searching that distinguishes it from other examples of the genre.  Two somethings, actually...

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Who will win the Emmy for Leading Actor in a Drama?

By Spencer Coile 

If you were to go back and evaluate the Lead Actor in a Drama Series race from the past decade, you may expect to find a lot of Bryan Cranston for his performance as Walter White on Breaking Bad. Yet, intriguingly, while Cranston won his fair share of Emmy’s, this category is more unpredictable than you might expect. 

With winners including Kyle Chandler for Friday Night Lights, Jeff Daniels for The Newsroom, Rami Malek for Mr. Robot, and of course Cranston and Jon Hamm for Mad Men, Lead Actor is often changing hands. In fact, Cranston is most recent consecutive repeat winner (back in 2010). Will last year’s winner Sterling K. Brown break this new one-off trend, or will a new winner emerge...

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Red Carpet Lineup: 26 Venice Lewks

Having previously covered those pink pink pink first days in Venice, on to some other memorable looks (and a few actresses included just because we like to look at them...)

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Summer Box Office Top Ten. Are These "Popular Achievements"?

by Nathaniel R

It's probably foolish to continue to poke fun at The Academy for their desperation in wanting to honor "Popular Achievements" but we can't help ourselves. It's so redundant. Box office success is its own reward and has nothing to do with "best" really, just with "success of brand awareness" and "delivering what people are expecting". The charts prove that it's getting more and more rare for an original picture to make it into the year end top ten. Even in the summer, with a much smaller field of contenders, it's still really hard for any movie that isn't a sequel to be one of "the most popular." Summer movie season kicked off on April 27th with The Avengers and ends right about now on Labor day weekend.

Herewith the TEN biggest hits of Summer 2018... How many of them did you see and if you controlled all box office, how much would they have earned?

SUMMER TOP TEN (Figures as of 9/2/2018)

1. AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (April 27th) $678+ It was always going to be huge but the phenomenon of Black Panther helped push it way way over the gross of the preceding Avengers picture which made $459 domestic. (Global Gross to Date: $2 billion... the first Marvel movie to ever do that... Black Panther grossed $1.3 billion globally though it's a bigger hit than Infinity War in the US)

2. INCREDIBLES 2 (June 15th) $601+ Proving that audiences were really impatient for a sequel to the 2004 smash, they turned out in droves 14 years later, the rose still in full bloom (Global Gross to date: $1.1 billion)

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Dance Break: "A Lot in Common"

Fred Astaire and Joan Leslie tapping up a sweet storm 75 years ago in The Sky's The Limit (1943). Just because.