Emmy Review: Lead Actor in a Comedy

By Abe Friedtanzer

Of the major categories, this one is the most unchanged from last year. Two-time winner Bill Hader is out because season three of Barry has yet to premiere, and Golden Globe winner Ramy Youssef is in his place. Larry David didn’t make the cut. Both Ted Danson and Eugene Levy have won Emmys in the past, but this is their last shot to win a trophy for their current shows. 

I’ll try to avoid major plot details in my analysis – but if you’d like more spoiler-filled descriptions, click on the episode titles. Let’s consider each nominee…

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The Link Purple

• /Film The Color Purple musical is getting a film version. It will be directed by Black is King helmer Blitz Bazawule. No word on casting yet but I think we can all agree that Cynthia Erivo should reprise her Tony-winning role!
• Broadway World meanwhile Erivo has launched her own production company

WHEW we have a lot to get through still. More after the jump including the business of movie theaters, Tenet's opening plans, Polanski's losing request, Netflix cancellations, Tiger King's spinoffs, and LGBTQ icons in comic books and on HBO...

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Horror Actressing: Anya Taylor-Joy in "The Witch"

by Jason Adams

There is model beauty, and then there is movie star beauty, and they overlap less than you'd imagine. The thing about movie stars is they've got faces that are interesting more than they are perfect, and once our interest has found them their so-called "imperfect" curiosities -- Michelle Pfeiffer's mouth, Daniel Day-Lewis' nose, to be all Age of Innocence example about it -- become in turn cache. Nobody was walking into a plastic surgeon's office asking for Michelle Pfeiffer's lips before 1982 but you can be sure there was a spike in such utterances once "Cool Rider" had come and gone.  

I begin with this to say I knew the second I saw Anya Taylor-Joy's eyes that a star was being born right in front of me. I might have actually missed several important details plot-wise watching Robert Egger's The Witch that first time in 2015, so lost was I in trying, and failing, to find footing astride those eyes' ginormous bedevilry. The film opens on them... perched as they're wont on the the two separate sides of her face, anime teardrops wandering in opposite directions. You wanna live deliciously you stare into those eyeballs for an hour and a half, that's my recipe.

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Yes No Maybe So: Ammonite

by Nathaniel R

Okay. NOW it feels like prestige film season is about to begin... even though it isn't, not really, at least not in its traditional way. Behold the lovely poster for Ammonite, pairing two star profiles in ethereal fashion, The trailer is even more thrilling. Let's break down the Yes No and Maybe So of it all after the jump...

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The New Classics: Moonlight

By Michael Cusumano 

Scene: Kevin and Black at the Diner
We consider Trevante Rhodes’s Black carefully throughout the last act of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, searching for traces of the younger versions of his character. That we don’t find many is not surprising considering how we’ve seen this child get battered and abused by life. Chiron doesn’t grow from segment to segment so much as he transforms as survival demands. Moonlight’s second movement ends on such a violent act of self-annihilation, we should be surprised to spot any remnant of the adolescent in Black when he walks into Kevin’s diner a decade later. 

And yet despite the intimidating presence Black developed as a barrier against the world, the aspect that unmistakably connects him with his teenage self, and to Little before that, is his fragility. All his outward defenses - the bulked up physique, the sullen manner - hang on him like an ill-fitting suit of armor. When he is in the presence of Andre Holland’s Kevin it looks a stiff breeze would blow him over...

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