Tweetweek: Madonna Bootcamp at Wayne Manor

This is actually a great question. 

People keep listing Robert Pattinson's acting credentials to show he’s more than Twilight, but what I wanna know is when did we as a society decide playing a vampire was silly and playing Batman was prestige

— Kenny Keil (@kennykeil) March 5, 2022

More curated tweets involving The Godfather, The Power of the Dog, the genius of Laurie Metcalf, the upcoming Madonna biopic, and of course The Batman are after the jump...

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I'll Link to That: System Crasher, A Man Called Otto, Turning Red

• Collider Tom Hanks A Man Called Otto (a remake of Sweden's A Man Called Ove) is getting a Christmas 2022 theatrical release. You might recall that the original was nominated for Best Makeup so Hanks is already attempting to dominate that category next year with this film and those prosthetics on Elvis...
• TFE ...the trailer of which we discussed here a few days back
• The Daily Beast lots of drama on the set of Euphoria this season

Andrew Garfield, Elliot Page, Tahar Rahim, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Paul Thomas Anderson, a gay film causing a stir in Egypt, and more...

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Review: "Nightmare Alley" only in theaters

by Matt St Clair

Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s anticipated follow-up to The Shape of Water, is quite a risk for the Oscar-winning auteur. Del Toro ditches the phantasmic monsters he’s known for in favor of human monstrosity, the beasts within all of us that drive our carnal needs. As with the original 1947 noir, Nightmare Alley is an exemplary exercise on the folly of man and what happens when the line between man and beast becomes blurred. 

The main anti-hero who toes that line is Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a carny with a knack for manipulating people. His subjects include fellow carny and eventual love interest/accomplice Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara), Paul Krumbein (David Strathairn) and his fortune teller wife Zeena (Toni Collette), and a wealthy fearsome widower Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins). Cooper's piercing eyes and bewildering smile make him a perfect casting fit for the manipulative con man. He is a man of few words which is just as well; the words when they come are lies and deceit. It is in Cooper’s expressive face where we see Stan’s constant fear of his troubled past resurfacing...

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Beauty Break: To Rita Moreno on her 90th Birthday

by Nathaniel R

Today marks 90 years since the blessed birth of the legendary EGOT winner Rita Moreno. With Steven Spielberg's West Side Story remake upon us in theaters, the trailblazing Puerto Rican star is back in the spotlight. Not that light hasn't always followed her.... hell, emanated from her. Are we laying it on thick? Who cares, she deserves it!

As faithful readers know, the original West Side Story (1961) is my all time favourite so it was hard not to be skeptical / worried about the remake. Naturally then, the new rendition is taking me a bit of time to process but, in short, though some of the raves are hyperbolic, the movie is mostly a thrill. Of its many pleasures, the one that we most emphatically co-sign was uttered by Rita Moreno herself who said...

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Review: Jake Gyllenhaal's one-man show "The Guilty"

by Matt St Clair

Despite being a proponent of Bong Joon-ho's advice to overcome the "one-inch barrier" of subtitles, I confess that I never got around to seeing the popular Danish film The Guilty (2018) which became an Oscar finalist for Best International Feature in its year. As a result of this blind spot, none of my thoughts on the new English-language remake will pertain to how it measures up to the original. Instead, let's talk about what a tense one man show this is. 

Although Jake Gyllenhaal has actors surrounding him, both in-person and through vocal performances on the telephone, The Guilty is laser focused on his character, 911 dispatcher Joe Baylor. Joe is on the phone trying to save a woman named Emily (voiced by a skillfully elusive Riley Keough) who’s being kidnapped by her ex-husband...

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