Nicole in HBO's "The Undoing"

by Eric Blume

There are few things in life more exquisite than watching Nicole Kidman unravel.  And she does so with her usual panache in the new HBO miniseries The Undoing, from director Susanne Bier.  

HBO is releasing the six episodes week by week, so we're currently only two episodes in, but what we have on our hands with The Undoing is a genuine potboiler!  The program slowly lays out its icy upper east side NYC terrain with careful deliberation, only to end the initial episode with a fun corker that sets Nicole into a fiery actressy spiral...

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Links: Wicked delays, Jennifer's campaign, Disney streaming

• Deadline Stephen Daldry is leaving Wicked. Universal wanted to work faster than Daldry was willing but losing a director will slow them down anyway so why not meet his schedule? 
• Variety The Avengers acting heroes want you to Vote Blue this election
• EW Jennifer Hudson fires up her second Oscar campaign (for Aretha Franklin biopic Respect) with an EW Cover and profile

Jeff Bridges cancer reveal, Disney news, Noah Jupe confession, Dirty Dancing tribute, Sigourney's Avatar training, and more after the jump...

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Podcast: Ford v Ferrari, Honey Boy, and Marriage Story

with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R 

Index (59 minutes)

• 00:01 Ford v Ferrari, Christian Bale, impressive crafts, and Oscar talk
• 19:06 Marriage Story, the opening scene, comparisons to Kramer vs Kramer, and more. Plus a lot of love for the actors including Alan Alda.
• 36:05 Honey Boy a Shia Labeouf's confessional with a great Noah Jupe directed by Alma Har'el. But, we confess we have Lucas Hedges fatigue.
• 47:10 Best Costume Design. We're rooting for extreme longshot Hustlers but we survey the whole field.

 You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Ford v Ferrari

Sundance: A whole new Shia Labeouf in "Honey Boy"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance

Shia Labeouf and Noah Jupe, pictured at Sundance, play father and son in "Honey Boy"

Shia LaBeouf’s career hasn’t gone how anyone expected. At age fourteen, he was starring on the popular Disney comedy series Even Stevens. By the time he turned twenty-one, he anchored the movie Disturbia and then blew up as star of the Transformers franchise. More serious performances like the one he delivered in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and his bizarre forays into public self-reflection and public self-destruction provide contradictory images of the actor, who is now thirty-two. 

His best performance to date was in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, but he may just have outdone himself in his new picture, which he also wrote based on his own experiences. Honey Boy is the feature film debut from respected documentary filmmaker Alma Har’e (Bombay Beach) and LaBeouf is at first almost unrecognizable as a version of his own father...

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Contrarian Corner: A Quiet Place

Contrarian Corner is an irregular series in which TFE team members sound off on a film that they just can't join the consensus with. Chris loved the movie (as audiences seem to). But here's Sean Donovan with quite a different reaction...

A Quiet Place is very very quiet, as all of the characters are keen to remind us, frantically throwing up a finger to their lips in a suppressed SHHHHH. The monsters can hear you, a mysterious species blind but intensely sensitive to sound, and capable of swinging in from far off distances to decimate any disturbance in the soundscape. As a result, one survivalist family of this ruined civilization (dad John Krasinski, mom Emily Blunt, children Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) have calibrated their lives perfectly to function without sound.

I, for one, wanted more of a sense of this family’s regular routine in their soundless environment: how do they communicate, how are their lives different, how do they have fun? You can imagine the Swiss Family Robinson or Rube Goldberg machine fun this movie could have had: what are Noah Jupe’s favorite sound-free toys? How does Emily Blunt make toast so the toaster stays PERFECTLY SILENT? 

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