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Cinemas want you to pre-book your tickets. Historically, cinemas have also not made this job particularly easy.

It’s a difficult piece for me to write this, given that I love the cinema, and that picturehouses around the world are in such challenging times. I still contend though that sometimes, the modern multiplex can be its own worst enemy.

There’s a video down at the bottom of this post where I natter about this a little bit more, but my technically excellent local cinema, which I’ve been a patron of since the 1990s when it first opened, isn’t short of its annoying quirks. An unlimited pass that now has restrictions on which seat you can book, pic ‘n’ mix that lists the individual calories per sweet (can’t touch the stuff ever again now) and an Argos-style way of ordering your food and drink. On the (significant) plus side,...

In Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper goes rogue and launches an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. He is asked by Raf Group Captain Lionel Mandrake — a voice of reason in the madness — to recall the B-52 bombers that will end civilization. Ripper refuses. Mandrake asks politely, in an arch British way, why he feels the need to blow up the world. The general talks of how forces beyond our comprehension are slowly poisoning America with a toxic chemical known as … fluoride.

Sad news in the world of late-night comedy. Conan O’Brien’s parents both passed away this week, within just three days of one another. The redheaded host’s father, Dr. Thomas O’Brien died on Monday at the age of 95, while his wife, 92-year-old Ruth Reardon O’Brien, died “peacefully” on Thursday.`

While much of the news of the O’Briens’ deaths has obviously been framed around their celebrity son, it turns out that they were incredibly impressive professionals in fields that in no way involved, say, having a meltdown on YouTube while rubbing hot sauce on your nipples.

O’Brien’s mother, for example, was reportedly “one of just four women in her Yale Law School class.” She later clerked for a “former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, became a real estate attorney and was the second woman to become a partner at the renowned Ropes & Gray law firm in Boston.

Television host Conan O’Brien recently endured a family tragedy that came out as a double loss. The comedian’s mother has recently passed away. Notably, this comes out just days after O’Brien’s father had also died.

Conan O’Brien’s Parents Had Been Married For Sixty-Six Years

The comedian’s mother, Ruth O’Brien, passed away on December 12, 2024. She was 92 years old at the time of her death.

Notably, this comes out just three days after the death of the late night host’s father, Dr. Thomas O’Brien. He had been 95 at the time of his passing.

Conan O’Brien – YouTube

An obituary was published for Ruth on the Bell O’Dea Funeral Home’s website. It was noted that she “passed away peacefully” and had been married to her husband for “sixty-six” years.

As a graduate of Yale Law School, the obituary also noted that Ruth “was...

An exclusive look inside how the Apple TV+ comedy staged a surprise “How I Met Your Mother” meet-up.

Season 2 of “Shrinking” saved one of its best casting reveals for last. In “Changing Patterns” — the antepenultimate episode of the Apple TV+ comedy’s strong second season — Jason Segel’s Jimmy has a charged meet-cute with a fellow single parent named Sofi, played by Segel’s former “How I Met Your Mother” co-star Cobie Smulders. It’s the first time Segel and Smulders have appeared together onscreen since the CBS comedy’s finale in 2014.

“We wrote the part and then we were like, ‘Who do we put in this?’ And I said, ‘What about Cobie?’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah, that’s great,’” Segel tells Gold Derby about getting his former co-star onto the show. “It’s a pretty small world, and everybody kind of knows everybody one way or another. So...

We have some tragic news to report about one of the world’s best-loved comics, Conan O’Brien.

Multiple sources have now confirmed that both of Conan’s parents passed away within the past week.

Longtime fans of Conan’s comedy know how frequently the former late night host referenced his close-knit, Massachusetts-based Irish-Catholic family.

Conan O’Brien visits SiriusXM at SiriusXM Studios on May 17, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

A Devastating Week

Conan’s dad, Dr. Thomas O’Brien, was the first to pass away. He died on Monday at the age of 95. According to a report from The Boston Globe, “his health had been failing,” for some time before his death.

Just three days after that sad development, Conan’s mother, Ruth Reardon O’Brien, died at her home in Brookline, Massachusetts

Just four days shy of her 93rd birthday, Ruth passed away “peacefully,” according...

Conan O’Brien has been hit by double heartbreak after losing both of his parents just three days apart. The beloved talk show host’s father, Dr. Thomas O’Brien, died on Monday, December 9, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, per The Boston Globe. He was 95. Then, just three days later, Conan’s mother, Ruth Reardon O’Brien, passed away on Thursday, December 12, also at their home. She was 92. Conan and his brother, Justin, spoke to the Globe about their parents, with the former crediting his father with instilling in him a love of comedy. “The loudest I’ve ever heard anybody laugh was sitting next to him in a theater watching Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie,” Conan recalled. “He was often the funniest guy in the room. And when he would laugh, his whole body would convulse and he would almost hug himself.” Ruth and Dr. Thomas O’Brien; Legacy.

Steve Coogan stars in Armando Iannucci’s West End adaptation of Dr Strangelove, which will be broadcast in cinemas next year.

“You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” is one of the most iconic quotes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying About The Bomb. Starring Peter Sellers in multiple roles, it told the story of a rogue US general who triggers a nuclear crisis.

Kubrick directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Terry Southern and Peter George.

Satirist Armando Iannucci, who himself co-wrote and directed a film about useless politicians inadvertently triggering a war, the wonderful In The Loop, itself a spin-off from acerbic sitcom The Thick Of It, has adapted the film for the stage with Sean Foley, who also directed the show.

Steve Coogan takes on the daunting task of following in Sellers’ footsteps,...

In 1949, Alec Guinness dazzled critics and paying audiences alike by playing eight members, male and female, of the D'Ascoyne family in the deliciously dark comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets." There weren't many actors alive cocky enough to attempt such a thing, let alone pull it off, so you'd think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would go gaga for the actor's brazen feat and hand him the Best Actor Oscar before the ceremony began. Amazingly, he didn't even receive a nomination (though John Wayne snared his first for basically playing John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima").

How did Guinness not even earn the honor of an Oscar nod? He made one critical mistake: he gave his bravura performance in a comedy.

Of the 96 films that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, only 15 could be called comedies (and I'm being super charitable with movies like "Green Book...

Shirley MacLaine is making a ghastly racket. It sounds like a combination of retching and the “aack” noise that the protagonist of that old “Cathy” comic strip used to make whenever she was nauseated, horrified, infuriated or you name it. We’re discussing an encounter that MacLaine had with Donald Trump in the ’80s, when she went to look at an apartment in one of his buildings. “In his head, I could see he was undressing himself and me, and I got out of there very fast,” MacLaine writes in her new book, “The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories From This Marvelous Lifetime.”

MacLaine is even more animated when I ask her what she made of the real estate developer turned Maga leader. “Did you hear me shriek?” she asks. “I think that says it all.” She pauses for dramatic effect before delivering a final, emphatic: “Yuck!”

Even at 90, MacLaine,...

Some audiences might have first spotted Matt Damon during a notable dinner scene in Donald Petrie's hit 1988 drama "Mystic Pizza." Thereafter, Damon turned up as an extra in "Field of Dreams" and as one of the many handsome students in the 1992 boarding school thriller "School Ties," both of them with his longtime friend and collaborator Ben Affleck. Damon went on to score some considerable screen time in Edward Zwick's "Courage Under Fire" before delivering his first lead performance in 1997 in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Rainmaker." That same year, Damon and Affleck became acclaimed Academy darlings for writing and starring in Gus Van Sant's "Good Will Hunting." The pair won Oscars for their screenplay and have both been major Hollywood players since.

Damon, having gained the clout to be picky and the fame to be noticed, thereafter became attracted to projects by established directors. After having alreayd...

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To this day, Rod Serling's sci-fi anthology series "The Twilight Zone" regularly tops lists of the best TV shows of all time. Serling, and a team of some of the best sci-fi authors of the 1950s and 1960s, conceived of 156 miniature morality stories, usually with a supernatural bent, and in so doing changed the very face of television. Sci-fi and horror were considered more commercially viable, inspiring a new slew of imitators and a shift in the public's attention. Serling also introduced a unique form of storytelling efficiency with "The Twilight Zone," proving that an entire, closed morality fable could be wrapped up in a mere 25 minutes (or 51 minutes in the show's fourth season). Serling was also careful to explicitly state a moral in every episode, making "The Twilight Zone" a fantastic social commentary. 

"The Twilight Zone" ran from...

Over the weekend, the Chicago International Film Festival and Second City honored Mike Myers with a “Career Achievement Award,” in recognition of his work in beloved movies such as Wayne’s World, Austin Powers and Shrek. Thankfully, the event didn’t end with one of the organizers suddenly remembering that The Love Guru exists and attempting to wrestle the award out of Myers’ hands.

The ceremony also included a “lengthy conversation” between Myers and Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley. The talk touched on a number of different subjects, including Myers’ fears that the studio wouldn’t release Wayne’s World, his fears that the studio wouldn’t release Austin Powers and how Michael Caine couldn’t get Beyoncé’s name right while filming Austin Powers in Goldmember. “He’d just go, ‘Hey, Be-yonts,’” Myers recalled.

They also chatted about how Myers’ Wayne’s World 2 co-star Christopher Walken seemingly couldn’t...

The office of the President of the United States is way more famous than any specific president. Compared to, say, the king and queen of England, a new person gets to be the head of state every four or eight years via election rather than inheritance. This means you can...

Alvin Rakoff, the veteran Canadian filmmaker best known for pics like the 1982 feature A Voyage Round My Father starring Laurence Olivier, died in Chiswick, London, October 12 surrounded by his family. He was 97.

Rakoff’s former personal agent confirmed the news with Deadline this morning.

Born on on February 6, 1927, in Toronto Rakoff was the third of seven children. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a psychology degree, Rakoff spent time as a news reporter. His first job as a writer was with the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), which later sponsored Rakoff to visit the UK. Within days of arriving, he sold his first fiction script to the BBC. He was soon invited to join the BBC’s director’s training course and, the following year at the age of twenty-six, Rakoff became the youngest producer/director in the BBC drama department.

As Rakoff once recalled: “I trained at the BBC as a director-producer.

Alvin Rakoff, the Canadian director who made films including Say Hello To Yesterday and who helped launch the careers of Sean Connery and Alan Rickman, has died at the age of 97.

Rakoff died on October 12, “peacefully…surrounded by his loving family in the same, beautiful old house in Chiswick he had bought back in 1971”, according to Nick Pourgourides, a long-time representative of the filmmaker.

Rakoff directed 11 feature films across a near 70-year career, including 1969 crime film Crossplot starring Roger Moore and Claudie Lange; 1970 drama Hoffman led by Peter Sellers; and 1971 romantic comedy Say Hello To Yesterday starring Jean Simmons.

He...

Exclusive: There was a top-secret code name on the sides Ruth Bradley was sent to prepare for an audition. “I didn’t know who the characters were, I didn’t know what the show was, but I was like, this dialogue is some of the best dialogue I’ve ever read.”

Bradley immediately emailed her agent: “Who wrote this stuff? It’s amazing.”

Smiling, Bradley recounts: ”They said, ‘Well, actually, it’s Slow Horses.”

That was Bradley’s prelude into the world of Slow Horses and Jackson Lamb, the Falstaffian slob who came in from the cold to oversee intelligence service agents exiled to serve out of harm’s way — they think — in a dilapidated dwelling known as Slough House.

Bradley, at that point, had vaguely heard of Mick Herron’s series of award-winning thrillers upon which the show is based, but she hadn’t then seen any of the...

The Beatles‘ Ringo Starr is one of the most famous drummers who ever lived but he penned very few of the Fab Four’s songs. He was the mind behind a beloved track from Abbey Road. Notably, that tune was a rip-off of another hit song from the 1960s.

Ringo Starr wrote only 2 Beatles songs by himself

Starr wrote two Beatles songs on his own: “Don’t Pass Me By” from The White Album and “Octopus’s Garden” from Abbey Road. Nobody remembers “Don’t Pass Me By.” It’s hard for the simple rock tune to stand out on the same record that gave us instantly memorable tracks like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Revolution 9.”

Meanwhile, Starr also wrote “Octopus’s Garden” from Abbey Road. “Octopus’s Garden” is far more indelible than “Don’t Pass Me By.” The former is a fascinating combination of children’s music,...

If you’re in the mood for a classic comedy, Prime Video is a great place to stream. You can get started with a 30-day Free trial, and there’s a lot to love.

30-Day Free Trial $8.99+ / month amazon.com

Classic Comedy Movies on Prime Video

Classic Comedy TV on Prime Video

Add More Comedy with Prime Video Channels

Classic Comedy Movies on Prime Video

For the purposes of this list, we’ll consider “classic comedies” as titles that came out at least 20 years ago.

Death Becomes Her The Big Lebowski Dr. Strangelove Heathers Swingers Galaxy Quest Fargo Billy Madison An American Werewolf in London Sweet Home Alabama Election Army of Darkness Overboard Dirty Rotten Scoundrels American Graffiti Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Bowfinger Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood CB4 Roxanne Sprung Duck Soup Wallace & Gromit: The...

September 8 marks the birthday of actor and comic legend Peter Sellers. The British star had achieved acclaim on the stage, in recordings and most famously on the radio, particularly for the “The Goon Show,” the popular comedy series regularly heard on the BBC.

However, it was in film where Sellers achieved his greatest worldwide success. He was nominated for his first Academy Award in 1959 for co-writing and producing the live-action short “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” Sellers also received two other Oscar nominations, as Best Actor for 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove” (from Stanley Kubrick) as well as for 1979’s “Being There” (from Hal Ashby).

Sellers won the Best Actor Golden Globe for “Being There” and was nominated on five other occasions, including three times for “The Pink Panther” series (from Blake Edwards) in which he portrayed bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the role for which he will likely be best remembered.

Ian Nathan guides viewers through the 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack, a satirical take on British industrial life. The film, starring Ian Carmichael, Peter Sellers, Richard Attenborough, and Margaret Rutherford, is the focus of this episode. I’m All Right Jack is a 1959 British comedy film directed and produced by John and Roy Boulting, […]

Classic Movies: The Story of… I’m All Right Jack...

There really hasn’t been a filmmaker quite like Blake Edwards. He could go from the silly-billy comedy of his “Pink Panther” comedies starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau to “Days of Wine and Roses,” a devastating drama dealing with alcoholism to the gender-bender musical comedy “Victor/Victoria” starring his wife Julie Andrews to the underrated Western “The Wild Rovers” with William Holden and Ryan O’Neal. Edwards even turned the diminutive British comedian Dudley Moore into a leading man thanks to his 1979 romantic comedy “10.” And let’s not forget the extraordinary collaboration he had with composer Henry Mancini who earned four Oscars including best song “Moon River” from 1961’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the title tune from 1962’s “Days of Wine and Roses.”

Still, there was no love lost between Edwards and Hollywood.

In my 2003 Los Angeles Times interview with Edwards, who had personality to spare, said “I have been a...

Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" remained depressingly relevant. We live on a planet wherein humans have invented single explosive devices powerful enough to eliminate all life on Earth, and yet they are being handled by whiny, insecure, clownish politicians and violence-obsessed military wonks with impotence and delusions of grandeur. It's telling that one of the biggest hits of 2023, Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer," was also about how petty egos tend to take precedence over the profound immoral invention of the nuclear bomb.

1964 was a time when phrases like "balance of power" were bandied about in the news, all while politicians and pundits argued about the moral righteousness of every major global superpower possessing the ability to destroy the world with equal skill. If everyone on Earth can blow up the planet, surely, then, everything is in perfect balance.

Kubrick...

Will Forte is a comedy superstar known for a variety of roles within the entertainment industry, but comedy and writing were not always his career path. Following in his father’s footsteps, he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, and ultimately became a financial broker. Growing up, Will Forte had always shown interest in the comedy world and has referenced comedians such as Peter Sellers, David Letterman, and Steve Martin as some of his comedy idols. However, he had shown interest in comedy. Will Forte never really planned on making it into a career for himself until he convinced himself that being a financial broker was not all life could offer him. While working as a financial broker, Will Forte co-wrote a feature-length script and quickly realized that he had a passion for writing. While attending the University of California, people had encouraged Will Forte to take on comedy.

This article contains spoilers for The Boys season 4 episode 8.

Following in the footsteps of the baddie known as “Doppelganger, “it was only a matter of time before Prime Video‘s superhero satire The Boys introduced another shapeshifting character. That moment finally arrived in season 4’s penultimate episode “The Insider,” in which a chameleonic assassin took on the form of Annie January a.k.a. Starlight (Erin Moriarty).

In the finale,* the shapeshifter is thwarted in their mission to take down U.S. President-elect Robert Singer (Jim Beaver) by none other than the real Annie January herself. To put it mildly, embodying two characters involved in the same physical fight would is a bit of an acting challenge. Thankfully, Starlight actress Erin Moriarty knew exactly where to turn for inspiration.

*Following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on July 13, Prime Video removed the original title of this episode, “Assassination Run,...

Jason Segel was just 18 when he landed the gig in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. He revealed that he didn’t go to college to film the show. When it was canceled, Judd Apatow tried his best to help him out. However, the period after the 1999 series was a dark time for the actor and he almost considered quitting the industry during this depressed state.

Jason Segel and Linda Cardellini in Freaks and Geeks | NBC

However, it was the CBS series, How I Met Your Mother, which saved him from descending into madness. The show ran from 2005 to 2014, giving him a day job when he was struggling. During this time, he also landed some film roles, including Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, that further heightened his career prospects.

How I Met Your Mother Brought Jason Segel Out Of His ‘Cave of Depression’ Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan in...

The Overlook Hotel is being revisited in a new “The Shining” documentary, certified by the Stanley Kubrick Film Archive and family estate.

The just-announced documentary, titled “Shine On – The Forgotten ‘Shining’ Location,” will premiere on the official Stanley Kubrick YouTube channel on Friday, July 26 at 11 a.m. Pst/2 p.m. Est to commemorate the late filmmaker’s birthday. The feature captures the location scouting and making of the art direction for the Overlook Hotel at Elstree Studios.

Michael Sheen narrates “Shine On,” which includes interviews with “The Shining” executive producer Jan Harlan, art director Les Tomkins, and Kubrick’s daughter Katharina Kubrick, who worked as a location researcher on the film. The interviewees will “revisit the studio locations and share their memories about a film frequently voted the best horror film of all time,” per the official synopsis.

Almost 50 years after the film’s release, all the Overlook Hotel’s...

It’s not just Maxime Le Mal, the “Despicable Me 4” villain with the broad accent, that has a distinctly French flavor.

In fact, Universal and Illumination’s animated franchise boasts Gallic DNA throughout all of the hit movies. And even though Chris Renaud, the Oscar-nominated director of the latest “Despicable Me” and two of its predecessors, owes his French-sounding name to his Canadian origins, the helmer says “essentially everybody” working on the films is French. The only exceptions to this geographic over-representation are the writers (Mike White and Ken Daurio) and some of the storyboarder artists who are U.S.-based.

“Everything from what we call the layout, up through the animation, lighting and compositing — almost the entire team is French! The picture that you see is all compiled and created here in France,” says Renaud, who moved to Paris in 2010 to work on the first “Despicable Me” production...

Let’s salute the 15 greatest depictions of fictional commanders in chief, ranked from worst to best, that have appeared both on TV series and in movies. Known sometimes by the name of Potus (President of the United States), we’ve got a large variety chosen for our photo gallery.

Two of the top characters featured are both from the mind of Oscar and Emmy winner Aaron Sorkin. He wrote the Rob Reiner film “The American President” starring Michael Douglas in the title role and Annette Bening as a potential romance. Not long after, he was one of the creators of “The West Wing,” which starred Martin Sheen as President Jed Bartlet and his dedicated staff, played by Emmy winners Allison Janney, John Spencer, Richard Schiff and Bradley Whitford, plus Emmy champ Stockard Channing as his wife.

Across our gallery, you’ll find dramatic presidents from “24” (Dennis Haysbert), “Deep Impact” (Morgan Freeman...

Geoffrey Rush is one of the rare few who have achieved the triple crown of acting, meaning he has received an Emmy, Oscar and Tony Award (all three major acting awards) for his work (he refers to it as the Toe while waiting on his Egot).

Rush was an acclaimed actor in his native Australia for nearly two decades before the film “Shine” made him a known commodity in the rest of the world. He was 45 years old when suddenly his whole career changed and he was being considered for major roles in various mediums. That film about a pianist dealing with scars from his childhood won Rush the Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG Award for Best Actor. Those awards and acclaim launched him into a highly successful international career. He has since earned even more Oscar nominations, with two as Best Supporting Actor for “Shakespeare in Love” and...

After teaming with Noah Baumbach to direct one of the best-ever documentaries about filmmaking, De Palma, Jake Paltrow is back with a new feature. June Zero is a vividly textured telling of the preparations for the 1962 execution of Adolf Eichmann through a triptych of perspectives––a Jewish Moroccan prison guard, an Israeli police investigator (and Holocaust survivor), and a clever and precocious 13-year-old Libyan immigrant. In advance of the June 28 release from Cohen Media Group, we’re pleased to exclusively reveal a series of influences the director has programmed for NYC’s Quad Cinema.

“Origin Stories: Jake Paltrow’s Notes on June Zero,” which runs June 21-27, features seven films that informed and influenced June Zero, with titles spanning humanist deep-cuts of world cinema from the likes of Miloš Forman and Abbas Kiarostami to underscreened classics of 1970s Israeli cinema. Watch the exclusive trailer for the series below, along with...

In a world where superhero movies reign supreme, a new contender emerged in 2023, as the fifth installment in The Toxic Avenger film series. Well, it’s not your typical caped crusader tale, but Elijah Wood and Peter Dinklage’s film still contained the potential to take the DC Universe by storm.

Peter Dinklage in The Toxic Avenger | Legendary Pictures

Delivering a cocktail of weirdness that even the notorious Batman & Robin would fear to compete with, Macon Blair’s DC-inspired horror comedy The Toxic Avenger garnered a stunning 91% rating, despite its eccentricities. Considering that Blair’s strangest visions become a delightful source of entertainment, let’s dig deeper into the 2023 movie and its DC inspiration.

Macon Blair Reimagined Elijah Wood and Kevin Bacon as DC Villains

Reimagining the 1984 low-budget cult classic, Macon Blair came up with the fifth installment in the franchise – The Toxic Avenger reboot, in 2023. Unlike the inaugural installment...

There must be something in the air lately because I have been seeing and reviewing a number of really good and intriguing documentaries on iconic showbiz figures. At Cannes I saw new docus on Faye Dunaway (Faye), Elizabeth Taylor (Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes) and others on Michel LeGrand and Jacques Demy. Currently on Max you can see a wonderful docu on the great Albert Brooks directed by his longtime friend Rob Reiner, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.

Add to the list of must-sees in this sector Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, which clearly has the star’s blessing because she is prominently interviewed in it. The focus ultimately on how she became her own person, especially how she managed to navigate the spotlight put on her after mother Judy Garland’s all-too-tragic death caused much speculation that the same thing might happen to her equally talented powerhouse performer of a a daughter.

After a decade and change playing superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe sandbox, Robert Downey Jr. wants to remind everyone there's more to him than Tony Stark. In the years since permanently (?) retiring his MCU alter ego in "Avengers: Endgame," the actor has lined up an ambitious slate of projects. Between getting an Oscar for his supporting role in Christopher Nolan's Best Picture-winning "Oppenheimer" and pulling a Peter Sellers by tackling multiple colorful characters in Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar's "The Sympathizer" miniseries, it's fair to say Rdj the character actor is officially back.

As chance would have it, we're now 10 years removed from the last time Downey tried (but failed) to renew his acting bonafides with "The Judge." Directed by David Dobkin, the 2014 drama stars Downey as Hank Palmer, a big-shot lawyer from Chicago who returns to his podunk hometown in Indiana to attend his mother's funeral.

"The Wicker Man" is the gold standard of occult horror. Police Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), a God-fearing Englishman, arrives on the island of Summerisle to investigate the reported disappearance of a young girl. Howie soon discovers the islanders are pagans and spends the movie angrily berating them. Soon, it becomes clear the cultural differences are more sinister than the proper way to worship.

The islanders' crops are failing, so Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) has plotted a virgin sacrifice to appease their gods. No one ever said the virgin had to be a young girl; no, it's the unmarried Howie, who is burned to death in an excruciating sequence as the Summerisle villagers sing.

Despite being underserved by producer/distributor British Lion Films (to the point where Lee had to promote the film on his own time), "The Wicker Man" is now regarded as a horror classic. 2023 was the 50th anniversary of "The Wicker Man,...

Back when he was finishing “Dumb and Dumber To” in 2014, Jeff Daniels was ready to leave show business. “I’m done,” he told Jim Carrey. “You can’t stop man,” Carrey said. “You can’t, you’re creative, you’re going to create something, you’ve got to keep creating. That’s what we do!”

These days, Carrey’s off in Hawaii painting. And when Daniels is not acting, he’s writing songs and plays, which he mounts at his Michigan hometown’s Purple Rose Theatre Company. “It’s what keeps me going,” Daniels told me on Zoom. “It keeps me alive. It’s what I’m supposed to do. It’s helped me between the phone calls for the acting jobs. Because you can go insane staring at that phone. They’ll call you when they need you. And so I’ve always battled whatever depression or fear might...

Jeremy Strong was a relatively successful working actor before he joined the cast of HBO’s “Succession,” but his turn as the neurotic, pathetic Kendall Roy won him an Emmy Award and established him as a genuine star. Now, in a new interview, Strong opened up about the stress of moving on from the pivotal role after the series concluded its four-season run.

“There was a moment when the show ended where I felt a profound sense of, ‘Was this the thing? Was this the event of my life?” Strong said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine (via Variety). And then a great determination to achieve exit velocity from it so I could attempt to do more.”

Among that “more” may be a bit of comedy. You read that right.

While “Succession” won Strong a legion of fans and admirers of his work, stories about his Method...

While starring on the Emmy Award-winning HBO series “Succession,” Emmy winner Jeremy Strong developed a reputation as an actor who takes himself and his craft incredibly seriously, perhaps overly so. There was a controversial New Yorker profile, and critical comments from his co-star Brian Cox that suggested some frustration with Strong’s methods. Strong famously could not understand why people thought “Succession” was a comedy, even though it was hilarious. Even when his fellow actors were playing it as a comedy, he was always deadly serious.

In a new interview with The New York Times, Strong reflected on his reputation for humorlessness, and it sounds like he might be lightening up. Just a little bit.

Asked if he’s interested in comedy, he acknowledged that “Succession” was “wickedly funny,” which is a change from how he used to talk about the show. “I don’t know that that show can be put into any box,...

Jeremy Strong’s Emmy-winning tenure as Kendall Roy on HBO’s “Succession” is over, and he told The New York Times Magazine in a recent interview that “there was a moment when the show ended where I felt a profound sense of, ‘Was this the thing? Was this the event of my life?’ And then a great determination to achieve exit velocity from it so I could attempt to do more.”

That “more” is now coming into focus. Strong is currently on Broadway headlining the play “Enemy of the People” alongside Michael Imperioli and Victoria Pedretti. He’s also set to play Roy Cohn in the upcoming biographical drama “The Apprentice,” which features Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump.

Strong told the publication that “I haven’t spent much time worrying about” whether he’ll be able to distance himself from the career-defining role of Kendall Roy.

Wellness, self-help and “woo woo” culture are the backbone of Nora Turato’s new exhibition so, naturally, it brings the contemporary artist to Los Angeles for her first West Coast outing. Hosted by Wilshire Boulevard gallery Sprüth Magers, it’s not true!!! stop lying! runs from Feb. 28-April 27, and finds Turato playing with words and phrases by pulling text from about anywhere she finds inspiration — social media posts, commercials, movies, billboards and viral trends. She then places the text across enamel panels or paints them extra-large on walls. The former graphic designer even created a custom font for the pieces.

One wall features the word “authenticity” and another “haha” in supersized letters. The enamel pieces showcase phrases like “speaking my Truth!!!”, “become pointless,” “Sleep / it’s good for you! and “this isn’t me / I need some healing.” The Croatia-born artist who is based in Amsterdam also zeroed in on...

Tom Priestley, the British film editor whose work assembling the dueling-banjos sequence and hellish “squeal like a pig” attack in John Boorman’s Deliverance landed him an Oscar nomination, has died. He was 91.

His death on Christmas Day was only recently revealed.

Priestley also cut two other movies helmed by Boorman: Leo the Last (1970), which won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival, and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).

He also edited The Great Gatsby (1974); Blake Edwards’ The Return of the Pink Panther (1975); That Lucky Touch (1975), starring Roger Moore; Voyage of the Damned (1976), featuring an all-star cast; and Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979).

Priestley was the only son of renowned British novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley, who wrote the classic 1945 drama An Inspector Calls for the theater and served as a BBC Radio broadcaster during the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II.

Upon its release in 1972, Deliverance became the...

George Harrison appeared in a handful of films and even opened his own production company. He loved movies, but there was one film he simply couldn’t get behind. In the 1960s, he watched a screening of a much-loved Western while on LSD. He couldn’t stand the movie, referring to it as a “load of baloney shite.” Here’s the movie that aggravated him so deeply.

George Harrison was not a fan of a much-loved film

In the 1960s, The Beatles were in Los Angeles and decided to take LSD. They spent their afternoon swimming in a pool with Peter Fonda and members of The Byrds. Later in the day, they attended a screening of the film Cat Ballou.

“Later on that day, we were all tripping out and they brought several starlets in and set up a movie for us to watch in the house,” he said in The Beatles Anthology.

The BBC is celebrating the art of the literary adaptation by screening a variety of classics on BBC Four. More details here.

The BBC is quite rightly celebrated for its rich history of book to screen adaptations, such as the iconic 1995 version of Jane Austen’a Pride And Prejudice to Cbbc’s hugely successful adaptation of Dame Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker series.

It has now put together a season of 14 adaptations from the BBC archive, some of which have rarely been seen since their original broadcast.

The dramas are:

The Great Gatsby

Toby Stephens, Mira Sorvino and Paul Rudd lead the cast in this 2000 BBC adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel on the American dream in the jazz age.

Small Island

Naomie Harris, Ruth Wilson, David Oyelowo, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ashley Walters star in this 2009 TV version of Andrea Levy’s novel focusing on the lives and...

In 1969, George Harrison temporarily left The Beatles. He had long been growing discontent with his role in the band and he finally decided he’d had enough. He eventually returned to the group, but his bandmates didn’t seem too concerned about the fact that he’d quit. When Harrison walked out, they began jamming together.

The Beatles began jamming when George Harrison quit the band

While The Beatles were recording Let It Be, George Harrison decided he’d had enough of the band.

“It was a very, very difficult, stressful time, and being filmed having a row was terrible,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “I got up and I thought, ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m out of here.’ So I got my guitar and went home and that afternoon wrote ‘Wah Wah.’”

According to Ringo Starr, the rest of the band didn’t even realize Harrison had left.

Noé Debré, the co-writer of “Dheepan” and “Stillwater” and creator of the European Parliament sendup series “Parlement,” marks his feature directorial debut with the bittersweet comedy “A Nice Jewish Boy.”

Produced by Moonshaker, sold by Charades and making its world market premiere at this year’s Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris, the freewheeling film follows a 27-year-old man-child Bellisha (Michael Zindel) and his ailing mother, Giselle (Agnès Jaoui), who together make up the last remaining Jews living in a working class neighborhood that all of their friends and family have long since fled.

At first that’s just as well for the easy-going Bellisha, but health concerns, prejudice and most of all an acute sense of alienation soon begin to creep in. Below, Variety catches up with Debré at this year’s Rendez-Vous.

How did this feature idea come about?

I saw a short film called “Masel Tov Cocktail,” about a Russian-Jewish teenager living in Germany.

“Going into making the film, I always had in my head that it would be great to get to represent the country and help it have more of a voice in terms of world cinema,” says Michael A. Goorjian, the writer, director and star of “Amerikatsi,” Armenia’s submission for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards. “Not a lot of films have been made in Armenia, partially because it’s a post-Soviet country, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, a lot of the infrastructure for film fell away. It was one of our goals with the film to help showcase what’s possible in Armenia. I’m very excited about it.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.

The film follows Charlie (Goorjian), who escapes the Armenian genocide as a boy by fleeing to the United States. When he returns as an adult and is arrested, he watches an...

Rod Serling was famous for a lot of things. He was one of the most acclaimed television writers of the mid-20th century, the creator of the genre-defining anthology series "The Twilight Zone," he co-wrote the screenplay to the original "Planet of the Apes," and he even helped give Steven Spielberg his big break. But even though he's famous for a lot of things, he was a prolific writer and even some of his best and most fascinating projects have been largely forgotten by the public over time. Like, for example, an adaptation of one of the most popular Christmas stories ever told, transformed into one of the most politically charged Christmas movies ever filmed.

Serling was no stranger to Christmas stories. After all, he wrote the classic yuletide episode "Night of the Meek," a hopeful story about an alcoholic department store Santa who stumbles across a magical sack that...

The Shape is back! Well, of course he is. He can't be killed, after all, and the "Halloween" franchise must go on to ensure that Michael Myers will still be terrorizing the fine folks in Haddonfield for generations to come. "Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers" continued the trend established in "Halloween 4" and "Halloween 5" of weirdly copying the sequel titles of the "Pink Panther" movies starring Peter Sellers. There was "The Return," then "The Revenge" and now it was time to dive a little deeper into "Halloween" lore, for better or worse.

Honestly, it was something of a miracle that "Halloween 6" even got made at all. After becoming the first in the series to actually premiere on Friday the 13th, "Halloween 5" was the lowest grossing movie of the franchise when it opened in October of 1989. After the development for "Halloween 6" stalled multiple times due to legal issues,...

1964's "The Pink Panther" is not a complex film. There is little to suggest a full-fledged film series in its story of a jewel with the shape of a panther buried deep within. Somehow, that premise resulted in a series of films lasting decades, with eleven unique (or mostly unique) live-action entries. And the cartoon character who showed up in the title sequence, dancing to Henry Mancini's iconic theme music? There was a Saturday morning series starring him that ran in various incarnations from 1969 to 1980.

When writer Maurice Richlin pursued director Blake Edwards with an idea for a film about a jewel thief, neither man could have predicted the surprising longevity of that idea. Certainly, they couldn't have predicted that the extremely thin premise of "The Pink Panther" would result in a series of films running into the 1990s. Nor could they have predicted that the protagonist would be...

“Poor Things” marks a radical shift for Yorgos Lanthimos. The director gained global acclaim with the microbudget “Dogtooth” in 2009; by 2018, he scored 10 Oscar nominations and one win for star Olivia Colman with the $15 million “The Favourite” ($95 million worldwide). With Venice Golden Lion winner “Poor Things,” he has a $35 million budget, critical acclaim, and another crack at multiple Oscars.

Based on the 1992 novel by Scottish artist and author Alisdair Gray, screenwriter Tony McNamara (“The Favourite”) focused the narrative on young Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a woman reanimated by scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who placed her own baby’s brain into her skull.

Lanthimos loved Gray’s book and in 2009 traveled to Scotland to meet the author and plead his case for adaptation. Around 2015, Irish producers Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Element Pictures optioned the rights with Film4, Lanthimos’ longtime backer.

“We were all in. Yorgos was so passionate about it,...