Review: No fun to be had in 'Morbius'

By Ben Miller 

Too silly to take seriously, but too serious to be any fun, Daniel Espinosa's Morbius suffers from a lack of vision and commitment from its stars and filmmakers. Jared Leto stars as Dr. Michael Morbius, a brilliant scientist suffering from a rare blood disease that has been wrecking his body since childhood. Dr. Morbius is supported by his colleague Dr. Martin Bancroft (Adria Arjona) and his best friend Milo (Matt Smith), who also suffers from the same blood disease.

Morbius attempts to cure himself by using the genetic mapping of vampire bats to compliment his own DNA. You can guess that the experiments go array giving Morbius a form of vampirism...

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Review: "Charlie Says"

Screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Now in Theaters. This post was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. 

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, arriving in July, isn’t the first Manson Family murders / Sharon Tate-related movie hitting theaters during the 50th anniversary year of those abominable crimes. 

The first out was The Haunting of Sharon Tate starring Hillary Duff, which was largely dismissed as exploitative. The second, newly arrived in theaters, is Charlie Says (Sharon Tate, played by Grace van Dien, is a very minor character in the film). Tarantino’s film will feature Margot Robbie as the doomed actress. And still a fourth picture is coming, a biographical drama called Tate starring Kate Bosworth, though its focus will not be on the actress’s murder.  This true crime story is quite obviously all the rage in Hollywood at the moment. 

Whether or not these films are appropriate in their timing and conception will be up to individual viewers to determine. As ever, how creepy or opportunistic true crime stories feel is largely dependent on artistic ambition and execution. 

Marianne Rendón (reclined), Hannah Murray, and Sosie Bacon are always saying "Charlie says..."

But if you’re going to make a picture like this at all, director Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner, the women behind Charlie Says, are the filmmakers to choose…

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Five From Tribeca 2019

by Jason Adams

The 2019 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs from April 24th to May 5th, announced their Feature Film line-up this week -- you can check out the entire thing right here. Once again yours truly, along with a couple of familiar TFE faces, will be covering, and glancing through what I've got coming to me I can already feel the tips of my toes and fingers tingling with expectation. There are a ton of goodies again! So many, many goodies, actually... there are 103 movies already announced... oh my god it's a lot. So much. Okay okay before I start hyperventilating let's narrow this down. Here are the 5 films I'm most looking forward to right off the bat...

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Sundance: Keira Knightley has "Official Secrets"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance

As if there wasn’t enough going on in today’s American and international politics, events that happened a decade and a half ago seem to be coming into focus again. The start of the Iraq war and its implications were covered in the Best Picture nominee Vice and are the subject of two new films premiering at Sundance. Murtada just shared his thoughts on The Report, which focuses on the investigation into torture practices used by the United States. Official Secrets takes place across the pond, following the fallout of one British intelligence translator’s decision to leak an NSA memo detailing plans to blackmail United Nations security council members into voting to go to war in Iraq...

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The Men of Venice '18 Can Get It.

TIFF begins tomorrow (Chris and Nathaniel will both be reporting to give you double the coverage!) but the 75th annual Venice Film Festival is still swinging. It concludes on Saturday September 8th so that's when we'll know who took the coveted Golden Lion (you may recall that a little film called Shape of Water won last year, though their winner is usually far less mainstream).

Alfonso Cuarón, Lee Byung-hun, Nicholas Hoult, Bradley Cooper

But here are the most handsome men in lux menswear we've spotted on the red carpet coverage. Joe Alwyn, Ryan Gosling, Matt Smith, Mads Mikkelsen, Matthias Schoenaerts and many more are after the jump...

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