Links: Captain Chris Evans, Fan Bingbing, and Queer-free Freddy

• THR A yummy Chris Evans cover story on Trump resistance, Captain America as the key figure that allowed the MCU to flourish, and his superhero-free future. He really wants to do a musical!
• Oh So Geeky fetishisizes the good captain with millions of gifs in this piece about his arc within the MCU and Avengers Infinity War in particular. So much Chris Evans this week!
• The Guardian For its Chinese release Bohemian Rhapsody has lost three full minutes (including all queer references, any mention of AIDS, and what sounds like the loss of one entire character - Mercury's boyfriend). The movie has made almost a billion worldwide. Maybe have some respect for Mercury's legacy, Warner Bros, and just not release it in China?

More after the jump including animation lawsuits, what's next for Alex Wolff, the end of Game of Thrones, and a must-read Fan Bingbing article...

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Lupita & Jordan Strike Gold

The huge launch of the new buzzy horror flick Us proved three things. First, that horror is the most reliable genre outside of superheroes for automatically high grosses. Second, that Get Out was no one hit wonder and Jordan Peele's name in the director's chair is something to remain excited about. Third, that Lupita Nyong'o has zero trouble carrying a big picture as its leading lady (which we knew the second we fell for her in 12 Years a Slave but it took six long years for it to actually become fact.) Please no more voice or mo-cap roles, are you listening Hollywood/Lupita's management? We want HER onscreen, not just her voice onscreen with her glamour on red carpets. More after the jump...

Weekend Box Office (Estimates) (March 22nd-24th) / 🔺 = new or expanded theater counts
W I D E	PLATFORM / LIMITED
1 🔺 Us  $70.2 on 3741 screens *NEW* SNEAK PEAK, REVIEW	1 🔺  Gloria Bell $1.8 (cum. $2.4) on 654 screens   REVIEW, JULI LEADS

2 Captain Marvel $35 (cum. $321.4) on 4278 screens REVIEW	2  No Manches Frida 2 $1.7 (cum. $6.6) on 472 screens

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Review: "Us"

by Chris Feil

With his Academy Award winning debut feature Get Out, Jordan Peele distilled an expansive theme into one formidable package. His follow-up Us - a film as giddy to scare us as the kind of carnival house of horrors that its young Adelaide wanders into in the film’s opening moments - does the exact opposite. Here Peele builds upon a single idea, one that doesn’t come into its clearest view until the final moments. Whether Peele is asking us to look inward or look outward, he has shown to be one of the sharpest modern storytellers when it comes to exploring an expanse of intertwined psychosocial ideas.

After her brief ominous prologue, we are reintroduced to the adult Adelaide Wilson, played by the immediately knighted scream queen Lupita Nyong’o. Adelaide is beginning a summer vacation with her husband Gabe and two children, Zora and Jason, but she is seemingly ever at ease. After returning to the beach of her unspoken trauma brings her lingering paranoia to the surface, her family is visited upon by a doppelgänger one. And each of these uninvited guests has brought a very large pair of scissors.

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SXSW: Jordan Peele has another winner with "Us"

Guest contributor Tony Ruggio reporting from SXSW

Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five years-old I witnessed what they would call the 11:11 “phenomenon.” Essentially, I saw a three or four-number combination of 1 in all walks of life. I saw it on television, often the last four of a Crash Bandicoot lawyer’s telephone number. I saw it during lunch time, the split-second moment a microwave hit that magic number. Most of all, I saw it on a clock, at least once a day every day. The paranoid and pretty rad among us consider this phenomenon many things: good luck, a sign from God, a glitch in the Matrix, a pang of the end times, or even a calling to those chosen to effect change and save the world from itself. Jordan Peele must have been a “witness” himself or simply heard about it and did his research, because Us is littered with references to this numeral phenomenon and the conspiracy theories that have sprung of it. More traditional horror than Get Out, and a better film too, Us gets hung up on making a big statement, but ends up making a great horror film regardless.

This might be sacrilegious to those already devoted to Peele: Get Out is a good film, one whose merits lay more in writing than in directing. Silly folks label it a thriller, denying it “horror” status. Even if you grant that Get Out was not a horror film in concept, it's definitely a horror film in execution. Therefore, I knocked it at the time for not being scary enough. With Us, Peele is firing on all scary-movie cylinders, and doing so with a wider array of tools at his disposal, chief of all his confidence...

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YNMS: "Us"

by Chris Feil

Yesterday, Jordan Peele was our Santa Claus doling out cinematic gifts. First thing Christmas morning, the writer/director of the Oscar winning Get Out dropped the trailer to his follow-up to that mega-smash, the cryptically titled Us. And the internet promptly snapped - or snipped, given the film's scissor fascination.

Curiosity would naturally be at a fever pitch for what Peele has in store for us for his sophomore feature, and Us has smartly been quiet until now. The film centers around Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide, a mother taking her family (including Winston Duke as her husband) on a beachside vacation only to be visited by a menacing family of their doppelgangers, The Tethered.

The trailer, which really plays like an extended teaser, gives us hints at the themes Peele is working with - family, trauma, self-reflection. And if Peele's promises that this film would be more firmly planted in horror elements hadn't convinced you, hold onto your butts...

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