So I checked a thesaurus and I found a new one that sounds fake, but whatever, I’ll take it: Kate Beecroft’s “East of Wall” is unputdownable. I couldn’t put it down if I wanted to, in part because it’s captivating and spellbinding and beautiful, and in part because I can’t think of anything bad to say about it. No put downs today, dear readers: “East of Wall” is the real deal. It won an Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and look, sometimes that audience is really onto something.

Beecroft’s film stars Tabatha Zimiga as, in a spot on bit of casting, Tabatha Zimiga. Like the real Tabatha Zimiga, the fictional version is a rancher who trains and sells horses for a living. It’s less clear how much of the rest of the film is explicitly based on her life experiences but it sure feels like we’re a fly on the wall. I’m pretty certain her mom isn’t really Jennifer Ehle and that Scoot McNairy never tried to buy her ranch, but you could tell me every other part of the film was real and I’d probably believe you. “East of Wall” is as sincere as Linus Van Pelt’s pumpkin patch.

“East of Wall” begins with Zimiga in dire straits. Her husband ended his own life, and not very long ago. He left their 3,000 acre ranch to his son, and Tabatha is the caretaker until he comes of age. That’ll be a while, since the kid is only three. She keeps the place running by training horses with her daughter Porshia, who also plays herself, and selling them at auction. They’re obviously showstoppers but they don’t sell for much. Maybe the buyers know how desperate she is. She has to send her daughter to the grocery store without her just to avoid having to pay her whole tab.

Tabatha isn’t just good with horses. She’s magical with horses, but that’s not what I’m getting at either. She’s also good with kids, and she keeps accidentally acquiring them when local parents, who either can’t afford or don’t give a damn about their own children, drop them off on her land, knowing she’ll do anything to take care of them, no matter the strain. She’s a decent person and her decency is a self-destruct sequence, and we can feel it counting down.

The Zimigas catch the eye of Roy (Scott McNairy), a Texan with money to spare and an eye for talent. He makes Tabatha an offer she wants to refuse, inviting her to sell the ranch and stay on as an employee. He seems like an OK guy. In a lesser film he’d cackle whenever she’s off-screen, because this would all be a scheme to take everything she’s got. Including her daughter, who reminds Roy of his own lost child. This isn’t that kind of movie. Thank God.

There isn’t an arch bone in “East of Wall’s” body. Kate Beecroft’s debut feature doesn’t need artifice to enrapture its audience. The Zimigas may be playing themselves but I think we all know, whether we’ve ever thought about it or not, that playing yourself on camera isn’t as easy as it sounds. Stan Lee didn’t get a lot of Oscar buzz for “Mallrats,” but Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga are so incredibly complex and present, just completely in the moment, that we can’t help being mesmerized.

Jennifer Ehle plays Tabatha’s mother Tracey, and it’s only her presence — and Scoot McNairy’s — that cracks the illusion Kate Beecroft generates. They’re great actors, the both of them, but it’s not their film, and they never make “East of Wall” about their performances. It’s a generous production, one that lovingly offers meaningful moments to every member of the cast, even the actors with only one scene. When a group of older women gather to celebrate Tracey’s birthday they share drunken sob stories by the fire, and Tabatha Zimiga delivers a powerhouse monologue, but so do all the other women around her, whether we’ve met them or not.

You try putting that down. I’ll bet you can’t, or at least that you wouldn’t want to. “East of Wall” is a nourishing motion picture. It fills you up and fuels you. Kate Beecroft never horses around with this debut feature. Even the parts with the horses.

“East of Wall” is now playing in theaters.

The post ‘East of Wall’ Review: Kate Beecroft’s Sundance Sensation Isn’t Horsing Around appeared first on TheWrap.

But not much else. The scarring traumas that haunted Chris Smith, aka John Cena’s homicidal title hero, were so bathetic they came off like sophomoric snark, even if that wasn’t Gunn’s intention.

That was 2022, though. Now showrunner, lead writer and occasional director Gunn is also co-head of DC Studios. The second season of “Peacemaker” is the next step in his effort to resuscitate Warner Bros.’ chronically self-kryptoniting superhero franchise following last month’s somewhat successful “Superman” movie reboot.

Does Gunn grow up and approach these eight new episodes with some sense of corporate responsibility? In the five chapters shown to critics, the answer is: sort of.

So far, there’s been an orgy sequence that extends beyond anything from the first season in length, variety and naked body count (although it still operates on a prom night level compared to similar scenes in “The Boys”). Speaking of body counts, Season 2 is on track to have even more gratuitous deaths than came before.

But Chris and his teammates’ deep state difficulties this time around are of a more down-to-earth nature; they’re character-based and smarter for it.

After Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) exposed her mother Amanda Waller’s rogue operation at the end of last season, the outgoing A.R.G.U.S. boss made sure most of the 11th Street Kids got blackballed from government work forevermore.

This has put a strain on Adebayo’s marriage as she tries to start up her own security business, which potential clients want to mistake for a call girl operation. Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), whose great but only skill is sanctioned kickassery, isn’t hired by another agency due to her “toxic masculinity.” Self-styled Vigilante Adrian Chase (Freddie Stroma) is back at fast food gigs, but still Peacemaker’s number one fanboy.

Sedentary yet surprisingly lethal tech geek John Economos (Steve Agee) still works for the Advanced Research Group Uniting Super-Humans, but at the cost of his soul. Rick Flagg Sr. (Frank Grillo) is the organization’s new head, and he’s understandably obsessed with bringing down Chris for killing his son in Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” movie. Forced to spy on his friend, poor Economos also has to deal with an obnoxious direct supervisor, Langston Fleury (Tim Meadows, whose horny martinet is consistently hilarious). A running gag about Fleury’s bird blindness — he can’t tell Chris’ pet eagle, Eagly, from a parrot — is immensely stupid, but Meadows not only sells it, he makes viable plot points out of it.

Another uproarious bit that advances both plot and character comes early on when Peacemaker goes to a humiliating job interview for the Justice Gang, the hero group introduced in “Superman.” Chris is even more frustrated by his failure to convince Emilia that the thing they did on the boat that time was not a drunken mistake. She’d rather start fights in biker bars than entertain that notion.

Anyway, A.R.G.U.S.’s electronic surveillance of Peacemaker’s humble abode picks up strange energy surges, which trigger the season’s most satisfying story arcs. The blasts come from his dead dad’s alien quantum unfolding chamber. Chris keeps it locked in a closet, and it contains doorways into 99 other universes. When Chris inadvertently stumbles through one of those, he discovers a world much like ours — except everything, for him anyway, is infinitely better there.

Chris’ terrible childhood wasn’t. His house is nice. The public adores Peacemaker. And that world’s Emilia even smiles — plus, they apparently shared more than one night of drunken lovemaking in the past and she’s willing to give him another try.

If he can prove he’s a better man now, that is. Which the Chris we know may have a hard time doing, but he’s more than properly motivated. He may not be who anybody in this universe thinks he is, but damn, if one whopper of a cover-up is the main thing between you and your dream, you’d be a fool not to go for it.

Having indeed played Peacemaker as a fool in earlier shows, pro wrestler Cena nails this season’s emotional and moral complexities with the aplomb of an Actors Studio graduate. That hangdog face, so purpose-built for looking stupid, now expresses longing, regret, determination and ever-so-tentative joy in subtle yet unerring ways.

As a consequence, all of the ridiculously tragic experiences Chris poorly coped with before — his hateful father (Robert Patrick), the death of a brother he blames himself for, killing Rick Flagg Jr. — are revisited with powerful dramatic impact this time. Cena’s bruising action moves and tossed off one-liners are still impressive, but the most thrilling part of this performance is the way he makes this Super fully Human. Can’t wait to see how he plays it when the house of interdimensional cards Chris/Peacemaker has built for himself inevitably comes crashing down.

When was the last time we anticipated character development in a Gunn project? Maybe something with “Guardians of the Galaxy’s” Nebula (if your answer was the talking raccoon, sorry, you’re beyond help). While I hesitate to say it about scripts that bring back the annoying likes of Nhut Le’s Judomaster and introduce a Native American wannabe eagle hunter (if you’ve longed to watch Michael Rooker ghost dance in a loincloth, now’s your chance), Gunn displays a new level of maturity with his second season writing.

Practically all of the characters, from profoundly conflicted Economos to still silly Adrian, have new depths and poignance that makes them the season’s most memorable elements. The gags and gore remain plentiful, but they’re not the dominant takeaways this time. Gunn even finds emotional resonance in the multiverse concept — something Marvel, for all its efforts in that dimension, has so far failed to locate.

Maybe this was how Gunn planned to revive the DC Universe all along.

“Peacemaker” Season 2 premieres Thursday, Aug. 21 on HBO Max.

The post ‘Peacemaker’ Season 2 Review: John Cena’s Antihero Finds Promising Depth in the DC Multiverse appeared first on TheWrap.

And just like that … we don’t have “And Just Like That” to kick around any longer. The HBO Max reboot we all loved to hate but couldn’t stop watching ended Thursday with its Season 3 finale, “Party of One,” written by showrunner Michael Patrick King and Susan Fales-Hill, a half hour of television that feels very hard to believe was conceived as the final word on its legacy-brand mothership “Sex and the City,” though the announcement of this chapter’s end implied that all parties involved were on board with concluding the story here.

While it had some nice final moments that almost lived up to the franchise’s significance, the rest was a hodgepodge of filler — a wayward group of annoying Gen Z-ers, way too much Victor Garber (something I don’t say lightly) and way too many bathroom hijinks. It’s hard to take most of this as a serious summation of 27 years of these once truly significant pioneers of single womanhood on television.

In its better moments, the episode presented itself as a meditation on what it means to go through your later decades alone or in a committed relationship, which honestly sounds like a great uniting theme for a series that I would like to watch sometime. Instead, “And Just Like That” consistently backed away every time it got vulnerable or interesting, like a commitment-phobic lover. I had been encouraged in earlier episodes by the introduction of heavier themes like Harry (Evan Handler) being diagnosed with prostate cancer and Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) eyeing an affair, but somehow Harry’s cancer was ultimately played for laughs and Lisa’s possible infidelity was wrapped up without consequence in one hasty scene.

In this final episode, the women attend a bridal fashion show together under a very flimsy pretense — one of the subjects of Lisa’s documentary is the designer, or something? — and they have an all-too-brief discussion on the merits of marriage. TLDR: Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Lisa, the married ones, have their complaints but would do it all over again, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) felt “chosen” when she married Big and Seema (Sarita Choudhury) thought she wanted to get married, but maybe she doesn’t because her current beau told her he didn’t believe in marriage while peeing in front of her that morning(!?). Carrie actually speaks Big’s name aloud here and admits that he died, which is more than we’ve gotten in previous episodes, so there’s that.

But the rest of the episode, until the final moments, sells these characters far short of their due. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) hosts a Thanksgiving that almost everyone bails on, except for Carrie, Miranda’s son Brady (Niall Cunningham), Brady’s baby mama and her random Gen Z friends, and Mark Kasabian (Garber), a gallery owner whom Charlotte seems to be setting Carrie up with. Mark finally leaves after a literally execrable scene in which Miranda’s toilet overflows and we actually see poop on screen. Choose your favorite metaphor here for how this series is ending its run. To emphasize: Literally one of the final scenes of Miranda Hobbes on screen is her cleaning up human waste. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Harry celebrate the holiday with their own family and are thrilled when he gets his first post-cancer boner as she’s cooking Thanksgiving dinner, declaring himself, I’m sorry to say, “crisp and ready to baste.”

It’s hard to overstate the insult this all feels like to characters we have loved and followed for decades.

This series finale purports to have a thesis, that all along it was about how it’s fine to grow old without a mate, as long as you have your friends beside you. The final moments were some of the best of the entire series, showing Carrie blasting Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything” in her beautiful house, alone, eating pumpkin pie while standing in the kitchen, still in her striking red tulle skirt that feels like an homage to the tutu in the original’s iconic opening credits. She’s finally relishing being alone, indulging in what the original series memorably dubbed “secret single behavior,” stuff you can do only when by yourself at home. Then she types a new ending to her book: “The woman realized she was not alone, she was on her own.” I have many complaints about this book she’s writing, but this was a nice denouement.

To be honest, I like this ending better than the original’s over-the-top romantic antics between the toxic Big and Carrie. I always thought she should have ended up unattached and back in New York with her friends.

But in its three seasons, “And Just Like That” has not shown much interest in Carrie counting on her friends instead of a man, as she went from grieving one man (the deceased Big) to clinging to another (her longtime ex Aidan), while Seema has, if she had any discernible plot, continued to pursue a happily-ever-after. Meanwhile, the women have been so busy with their work and romantic or family lives that they have barely ever been together. Unlike the original series, “And Just Like That” did not center the women’s friendships, and suffered for it. Perhaps it wouldn’t be realistic for particularly the characters with husbands and kids still at home to be flitting off to brunch with friends, but this show was hardly concerned with realism in any other way. And, in fact, Carrie seemed to hate Miranda whenever they were together this season, a tension that remained unacknowledged and unresolved. I was particularly disappointed that the final half hour failed to unite at least the original three women — Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda — for a nice Thanksgiving moment together.

So what, if anything, was “And Just Like That” about? Carrie grieved Big, and dragged out a once-again-revived relationship with Aidan that mainly proved that he was awful. Miranda expanded her sexuality at midlife, which is interesting. But her relationship with the unfunny nonbinary comedian Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez) destroyed the confident and grounded Miranda we all loved from the original series, and the character never fully recovered. Nothing of consequence really happened to Charlotte in these three seasons, aside from a glancing struggle with her child coming out as nonbinary and her husband having mostly humorous cancer. And the women of color added to the cast — Seema, Lisa and the forgotten Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman) from the first two seasons — never quite came into their own, a waste of the actresses playing them.

Having written an entire book about “Sex and the City,” and having spent two decades defending it as a truly great and significant show, it has been painful for me to watch the reboot erode its legacy. I know many of my fellow fans have felt the same, as this series became an outlet for our rage week after week. But this is the chance we take when we keep tapping the well of nostalgia with works that have nothing new to say, no animating principle that makes them vital in the moment.

“And Just Like That” could have redefined how we see women over 50 the way that “Sex and the City” redefined singlehood during its original run, but it too often made the characters pathetic or turned them into jokes. It also often, as many fan rants have pointed out, simply didn’t make sense and lacked attention to detail. During this season in particular, this relationship began to feel truly toxic.

I had the strangest feeling watching those delightful final moments of Carrie looking truly joyful alone in her house. I could see the Carrie spark back in Sarah Jessica Parker’s performance after she spent so much of these three seasons mourning Big or moping about Aidan, and I thought, This could be the beginning of a great show.

That’s what this show does to me, and to so many of us. We keep wanting to watch, hoping for something better that never manifests. I will miss it, this perpetual hope, and the bonds I could instantly form with fellow fans by complaining about “And Just Like That.” But it is really, really, really time to say goodbye.

The post Making Sense of That Bad ‘And Just Like That’ Ending and an Eroded ‘Sex and the City’ Legacy | Commentary appeared first on TheWrap.

“Mamma Mia!” was another story, having been a big hit in London. Here was a feel-good show that recycled a bunch of songs by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, and asked nothing more of us than to be entertained and forget all our troubles, which continued to feel downright apocalyptic. The Broadway community needed a hit and even the critic at the New York Times had to comply by repeating his female date’s positive take on the show. What Ben Brantley really thought of “Mamma Mia!,” no one ever knew from that carefully crafted money review.

The “Mamma Mia!” that opened Thursday at the Winter Garden is a touring production, and at intermission I was not thinking of the recently destroyed World Trade Center. I went much further back, to the 1970s when vanity productions like “Angel,” “Doctor Jazz,” “Got tu Go Disco” and “Platinum” took up their brief residences on the Rialto among now-classic shows by Sondheim, Kander & Ebb and Lloyd Webber. The current “Mamma Mia!” remains under the control of its original director, Phyllida Lloyd; production designer, Mark Thompson; and other creatives. Frankly, the show looks so tacky that it could be the original 2001 production with a not-very-good paint job.

The songs by Andersson and Ulvaeus have never had much to do with Catherine Johnson’s book about a bride-to-be who invites three men to her wedding, thinking that one of them may be her father. Generally, the first line of songs like “S.O.S.” and “The Winner Takes It All” have something to do with that story, and then the lyrics go off in another direction. That disconnection bothered me back in 2001. Now, I was just relieved that the actors were singing and not reciting lines from Johnson’s book, which failed to elicit more than a few isolated giggles at the preview performance I attended. Most of the big laughs come from some slapstick business, like the chorus boys wearing swim flippers.

I missed the eye candy of Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard, the three possible inseminators from the 2008 movie. On stage, in the Brosnan role of Sam, Victor Wallace emotes enough for a dozen actors. It’s contagious. After intermission, Amy Weaver’s bride and Christine Sherrill’s mother-of-the-bride also caught his overacting bug.

As the mother’s sidekick friends, Jalynn Steele and Carly Sakolove manage to rise above the dispiriting mess around them.

“Mamma Mia!” opens Thursday and runs through Feb 1, 2026.

The post ‘Mamma Mia!’ Broadway Review: The Bride Has Seen Better Days appeared first on TheWrap.

Speaking many years after the murder, he notes that the case is still identified primarily as the “Amanda Knox” case, even though Knox, Kercher’s American roommate in Perugia, Italy, was acquitted of killing Kercher in 2015 after a yearslong odyssey that included four years in custody.

His observation makes a viewer presume the show will finally get to the part where it tells us more about Kercher, whose brief life story, as Knox herself has said in real life, was obscured by the sensational, yearslong legal battles of Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, the Italian boyfriend arrested alongside Knox.

But that part never comes, and its absence mars this mostly engaging and well-acted limited series anchored by Grace Van Patten’s (Hulu’s “Tell Me Lies”) compelling immediacy in the title role. Along with telling Knox’s story in detail, the show devotes significant screen time to the backstory of one-time beau Sollecito (played with great sensitivity by Giuseppe De Domenico). Yet Kercher remains a cipher, shown mostly in flashes.

Knox served as an executive producer on this series, created by K.J. Steinberg (“This is Us”) based on Knox’s 2013 memoir (another dropped this year). But to ascribe any or all storytelling choices to Knox would just follow old patterns. As “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” makes clear, the instinct of Italian police to impose traits and behaviors on Knox that did not exist is what started her harrowing journey through Italy’s criminal justice system.

Van Patten does not resemble Knox, nor does she mimic her. But she captures that slightly off-kilter intensity that has always made Knox a figure of fascination — and is acknowledged by Knox and other characters in the series. Knox’s on-screen quirks include a make-out session with Sollecito shortly after Kercher’s body was discovered, in full view of police.

Van Patten’s Knox is also overly demonstrative, prostrating herself to thank a housemate for making dinner and hanging on friends. You can see how what might come off as playful and puppyish to some observers would give others the ick.

Her unconventional behavior — especially just after the murder — unfairly makes Knox the subject of suspicion in “Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.” She also raises eyebrows for having decided, the morning after the crime occurred, to take a shower and get ready in the villa she shared with Meredith and two Italian women despite noticing the door being left open and blood spots in the bathroom.

Knox is also sexually active and keeps a vibrator in a clear makeup case visible under the sink — behavior that puts her on the wrong side of the Madonna-whore line in heavily Catholic Italy. She also (sit down for this) smokes marijuana.

Subject to intense police questioning, Knox confesses to being home the night of the murder and implicates her boss, Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, in the attack. Her naming of Lumumba, who in real life is the subject of a successful slander prosecution against Knox, is presented as having occurred under obvious duress and as the result of heavy suggestion by police. Yet there is no denying the visceral impact of seeing a young, white woman implicate a Black man: It looks and feels like scapegoating.

Knox walked back her statement almost immediately, according to the series, and DNA shows Rudy Guede, an acquaintance of Knox’s downstairs neighbors, to be the killer. But the Italian prosecutor (Francesco Acquaroli) continues to pursue Knox and Sollecito based on an elaborate scenario of sexual deviancy and revenge — plus dubious physical evidence. Acquaroli is powerful yet enigmatic as a man whose conscience always seems at war with his need to be right.

Steinberg’s heightened, almost operatic storytelling approach of unusual camera angles, dramatic music, and lawyers assassinating the characters of innocent young defendants in passionate Italian, suits the proceedings’ weird mix of absurdity and frightening stakes.

Within this theatrical atmosphere, a quiet moment where Knox stands to dispute testimony by her Italian housemate — whom Knox is shocked to see testifying for the prosecution — turns even more heartbreaking. Van Patten shows the intense betrayal of a young person just discovering that people can be nice to your face yet talk behind your back.

The misogyny on display is so over the top it seems out of a different century. But Knox’s time as one of the world’s most famous defendants occurred during a particularly nasty flashpoint for tabloid treatment of young women including Knox, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Amy Winehouse. Although coverage of Knox in the U.S. leaned more toward bring-our-girl-home, People-magazine protective, the European press practically burned her in effigy. Paparazzi swarmed her court appearances.

Still, a supposedly fraught sequence in which a vehicle carrying Knox seemingly must evade photographers or other haters comes off as anticlimactic. Another sequence set years later involves a dangerous road trip in Italy with family members including Knox’s loyal mom (a solid Sharon Horgan). The mother later yells at Knox that the trip, despite all the worry and stress it caused, was for nothing.

One could take a cynical view and suggest that it was not for nothing, since it provided content for a limited series. Knox puts out a lot of content, as an author, podcast host and advocate for the wrongfully convicted. She offers her services as a speaker for hire.

It is clear Knox’s heart is in the right place and somewhat heartening to see her more at ease in the spotlight. But “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” suggests, in moments where Knox is back home in Seattle after prison, that she might not have had full autonomy in picking her career path.

When she goes to a Halloween party, young people she’s known her whole life treat her differently and cannot help but stare. She also learns that family members mortgaged their houses to pay for her lawyers and starts writing her first memoir so she can sell it and pay them back.

Apart from changing her name and going off the grid, the real-life Knox seems to have had few viable options but to continue in public life. Out of many things that befall her in “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” this is one of the saddest.

“The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” premieres Wednesday, Aug. 20, on Hulu.

The post ‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ Review: Grace Van Patten Nails the Murder Suspect’s Essence in Hulu’s Operatic Limited Series appeared first on TheWrap.

Papyrus is not the most respectable of fonts. Even before “Saturday Night Live” correctly roasted James Cameron for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the CGI in “Avatar” only to cheap out on the subtitles, papyrus was generic shorthand for kinda-old-looking-but-not-really. It’s the font middle schoolers use for the title of a history report, and an early sign that they’re going to get a B-. The fact that “Red Sonja” uses this font in its closing credits isn’t itself a problem. But it’s emblematic of the film’s whole vibe.

The new “Red Sonja” is a sword-and-sorcery epic that can’t swing the “epic” part. It’s got big ambitions but can’t realize most of them, seemingly for lack of budget. The flat lighting and generic sets evoke pleasant memories of “Xena: Warrior Princess” and SyFy Original Movies from the 2000s, but this isn’t a made-for-TV production. It’s kind of supposed to be a big movie. It’s not very convincing. It’s the papyrus of the peplum genre.

“Red Sonja” has an unusual history. “Conan” creator Robert E. Howard introduced a character named “Sonya of Rogatino” way back in 1934. Almost 40 years later, Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith reimagined the redheaded warrior from the ground up in the pages of Marvel Comics, and she’s been an icon on the page ever since. The first attempt to make a “Red Sonja” movie, starring Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger, was — since it was based on the comics version, not Howard’s original story — technically the first live-action theatrical Marvel movie. Not that it gets any credit for that.

The first “Red Sonja” adaptation isn’t as awful as you might have heard. It’s got a few memorable characters and undeniable camp value. But there was serious room for improvement. In many ways, M.J. Bassett’s new version is that improvement. Matilda Lutz (“Revenge”) has more range than Nielsen, and Bassett eschews most of the sleazier notions Thomas and Windsor-Smith bestowed upon the character. Sonja no longer vows to sleep with any man who bests her in battle (not that they ever did). That weird character trait can now be found in her modest love interest, Osin the Untouched (Luca Pasqualino). And yes, if you move the letters around “Osin” is an anagram for “Sonia.” How coy.

In the film, Sonja is the last member of a tribe obliterated by barbarians. She now lives idyllically in a forest, looking for her people — but apparently always in the same place, so maybe she could be trying harder. She’s so one with the land that she takes honey from a beehive and the bees seem cool with it. When hunters invade her territory and brutalize the animals, she tries to teach them a valuable lesson, only to get abducted and shipped to a gladiator arena by Emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan) and his badass warrior girlfriend Annisia (Wallis Day).

Draygan was a slave who deciphered an ancient book and used that knowledge to build tanks and an unlimited electrical power source and mind-control devices he activates with his scepter. How he managed to acquire the power and resources necessary to fund all those projects and take over the kingdom in the first place is a mystery left unsolved, but it certainly didn’t involve charisma. He’s introduced dismounting from his war machine, looking around in confusion and quietly asking “What?” to no one in particular, about nothing in particular. It’s like they didn’t tell Sheehan what movie he was in until he got there that day, and they filmed his disappointment.

Anyway, Sonja becomes a gladiator and frankly isn’t great at it. Draygan doesn’t need her to compete, he just needs her to guide him through the forest so he can find the missing pages of his book. So why, if he’s so smart, is he letting her compete at all? It seems like he’d probably want to get on her good side, or at least make it less likely she’d get randomly killed by a cyclops. But she fights anyhow, she leads a rebellion, and that’s the rest of the movie in a nutshell.

“Red Sonja” has a lot of ideas that are worth exploring. An emperor with anachronistic war machines that would challenge even the most legendary warrior is an amusing conceit, even though the film winds up arguing against science in almost every form. There are also vivid fantasy creatures who are, sometimes, a little convincing. Usually not. And hey, there certainly is a lot of action.

Bassett has already made some memorable action films, usually on the lower end of the budgetary scale, so it was possible that she could work wonders with what little she’s given here. It hasn’t worked out that way. “Red Sonja” is stretched too thin, unable to spare the time and resources necessary for any one part to stand out. Instead it just looks kind of OK. The tenacity Bassett brought to the Mercenary Megan Fox vs. Killer Lions movie “Rogue” — which is a hoot and a half — never materializes in “Red Sonja.” That’s a pity.

“Red Sonja” does get something right, and refreshingly so, by eschewing the exploitative history of the character and treating her as an action hero, never a sex object. But apparently someone involved didn’t get that memo. Sonja’s forced to wear a useless armored bikini in the ring to appeal to the prurient masses, and yet when she upgrades her armor, it still leaves most of her skin unprotected. At least her shoulders will be safe. It would have made more sense to update her look completely, but sacrifices must be made to the Gods of Nostalgia. I guess.

The new “Red Sonja” isn’t terrible, it just isn’t much. It aspires to grandeur but it’s never grand. It’s action-packed but the action is just OK. Were this the pilot episode for a TV series, it would be promising, but even the prerequisite sequel set-up is arbitrary and vague to the point of pointlessness. We’ll have to keep waiting for a great “Red Sonja” movie. It took 40 years to upgrade from cheesy to mediocre. 2065 should be one hell of a year!

The post ‘Red Sonja’ Review: A Solid Pilot Episode (Unfortunately, It’s a Movie) appeared first on TheWrap.

The 2021 action-comedy hit “Nobody” was about yet another professional killer who came out of retirement to kick ass and reclaim his self-confidence, as well as — ironically — the love and respect of his family, the same people for whom he quit the job in the first place. “Nobody” starred the previously unassuming Bob Odenkirk, who wasn’t known for kicking ass on camera, and withheld the reveal that this suburban husband Hutch Mansell was a professional butt-kicker for so long it qualified as a twist. In the end, violence solved all of Hutch’s problems, and although it was entertaining, it was still yet another action flick that equated that violence with masculinity and celebrated both in equal measure.

The best part of “Nobody 2” — a sequel that outshines the entertaining yet cynical original — is that Hutch’s self-worth came with a price. His wife Becca (Connie Nielsen), and his two kids Brady (Gage Munroe) and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath), love and respect him, but now he’s a full-blown workaholic, unable to turn off his mass murdering brain long enough to spend one non-violent day with his family. This problem never gets solved over the course of “Nobody 2.” It’s a defining personality flaw. He’s either denying his compulsive urges and miserable, or caving in and jeopardizing his family. Anything he does, literally anything, is wrong… even if it’s right.

So all it takes to get “Nobody 2” going is to send the Mansells on a family vacation and wait for Hutch to ruin it. It doesn’t take long. They travel to a waterpark Hutch loved as a kid and almost immediately run afoul of the locals, one of whom tries to intimidate Brady (big mistake), while another slaps Sammy (huge mistake). Of course, Hutch goes haywire. And, of course, it turns out this waterpark is somehow the cornerstone of a vast criminal empire ruled by a corrupt Sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks) and a cartoonish kingpin named Lendina (Sharon Stone).

The plot of “Nobody 2” is irrelevant, which is a good thing because it’s also hackneyed. All that matters is Hutch can’t help himself. It’s tempting to say he’s his own worst enemy, but he has a lot of those. It’s also tempting to say he’s his own worst victim, but I think the dude he murders with a table saw would raise an objection. Or at least, he would if he hadn’t just been murdered with a table saw.

Hutch picks a fight in the wrong town, everyone tries to kill him and his family; we don’t need any more than that. There’s glee to be taken in this series’ elaborately choreographed yet working class violence, where Hutch makes the most of whatever happens to be handy to slaughter “bad” guys, almost all of whom have certainly orphaned fewer children than Hutch has. But when they try to turn the tables and use those same weapons, Hutch tosses them over the side of a boat and says nobody gets to use them anymore. I guess he doesn’t like tasting his own medicine — which makes sense since his medicine is homicide.

Sharon Stone has a blast playing a better Batman villain than that one time she kinda played a Batman villain. (She was in “Catwoman,” try to keep up.) But although she’s a deadly opponent, she’s not the real threat in “Nobody 2.” The real stakes are whether this family vacation gets ruined or not. It’s like a National Lampoon movie where Chevy Chase is a mass murderer. That’s a great pitch, dang it, and Timo Tjahjanto throws it at 105 miles per hour.

Timo Tjahjanto may not be a known quantity to mainstream American audiences, but he’s been making a name for himself in the horror and action genres for years, with frenetic genre films that half-ass nothing and whole-ass everything. Films like “May the Devil Take You” and “Headshot” display the same cinematic verve we used to associate with Sam Raimi, and although Tjahjanto’s movies have a sense of humor, “Nobody 2” is atypically breezy for him. Give credit where it’s due: Tjahjanto adds his own flair to this franchise while embracing the drollness that makes it feel ever so slightly different from so many similar films.

It’s easy to write “Nobody 2” off as “Nobody Too” and to accuse this series of simply repeating itself in a new locale. It’s also not entirely unfair, but repetition doesn’t ruin a franchise unless that franchise hinges on its plots. “Nobody 2” hinges on its characters, and they’re a likable bunch who are mostly at war with themselves. The sequel even goes a long way towards retroactively improving the first “Nobody,” since it solidifies that the Mansells didn’t solve all their problems with violence. Violence will always be their problem. Whether they’re attacked by the mob or inconvenienced at a grocery store, Hutch will always struggle to keep his work life separate from his home. As long as the cast stays this committed and the writers don’t lose track of that inner conflict, this great sequel could have plenty of great sequels of its own.

“Nobody 2” hits theaters this Friday.

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1997 gave audiences the film adaptation of “The Rainmaker,” John Grisham’s well-received novel about a young lawyer named Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) who gets in over his head with a case just after graduating from law school. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and released the same year as Damon’s Oscar-winning “Good Will Hunting,” “The Rainmaker” cemented Damon’s movie star status and adapted the novel for a modern audience.

In 2025, viewers are stepping back into Grisham’s gritty legal drama, this time in television form via the USA Network. Playing Rudy this time around, British actor Milo Callaghan infuses the baby-faced law grad character with a scrappy attitude as he is fired from a highfalutin southern law firm, Tinley Britt, where his girlfriend works, just six weeks before they take the bar exam. Having no other job prospects, Rudy defaults to working for an ambulance-chasing firm headed up by Bruiser (Lana Parrilla) and her even scrappier paralegal, Deck (P.J. Byrne).

Bruiser and Tinley Britt’s Leo Drummond (“Mad Men” alum John Slattery) often don’t see eye to eye, facing each other in court where Bruiser is seen as a foul-mouthed shyster against Drummond’s reputation as a courtroom lion. Complicating matters is the new client Rudy brings to Bruiser, the mother of a son who died in a hospital under suspicious circumstances. With Tinley Britt as opposing counsel, Rudy and his girlfriend Sarah (Madison Iseman) are now on opposite sides of a case that could bring national attention to all of their careers.

The term “rainmaker” refers to a lawyer who wins significant cases with substantial financial awards as part of the ruling. Rudy hopes to become such a powerhouse lawyer, but his reckless arrogance and inexperience might hinder those dreams from coming true. For a series and premise that relies on Rudy’s behavior to reflect a positive end result for his client, actor Milo Callaghan doesn’t believably sell the high stakes of the case.

The first five episodes of “The Rainmaker” available for review create a 1990s feel full of shady dealings and courtroom antics that fail to stand out in a saturated landscape of television legal dramas. However, the case at the center of the action keeps the attention of the viewer as we follow the alleged murderer, Melvin Pritcher (Dan Fogler), outside of the spectacle involving the lawyers handling the case. Pritcher is a naughty nurse with seemingly ill intentions, played to perfection by a menacing Fogler who is more known for his comedic work.

Series creators Michael Seitzman (“Code Black”) and Jason Richman (“Stumptown”) do a marvelous job of using the recent law school graduates as conduits for viewers to understand complex legal jargon and mediation techniques. The series is at its best when we are introduced to Pritcher and watch in horror as his character is exposed to the outside world. However, the story isn’t as fluid or solid in scenes involving Rudy and Sarah, which should evoke emotional resonance that doesn’t memorably materialize.

Some of the best scenes in this newly adapted “The Rainmaker” are those that see Bruiser and Drummond go head to head, one-on-one, even when in a restaurant booth, trying to make a deal to settle the case. It’s clear these two characters have a history, and it shows on screen when two actors of high caliber like John Slattery and Lana Parrilla enjoy sparring with one another.

A series like this provides room for a character-driven drama that doesn’t neglect its audience’s intelligence, yet hardly ever adds anything new or intriguing. As the stakes escalate and tension builds between the four main characters (all supposed to be Southern yet no one has a Southern accent), mysteries deepen and more conflicts arise. Pritcher’s motives are unclear and his violent nature begins to explode without control, making an already complicated case unravel by the minute.

“The Rainmaker” succeeds in a cable network environment as it refuses to paint any of its characters as purely good or evil. The series strives for a theme of underdogs competing against well-funded high-priced firms with influential attack dogs, but sometimes juggles too many subplots with an inability to weave personal drama with legal suspense. Slattery plays Drummond with poisonous charm while Parrilla’s Bruiser is a ball-busting woman of the law, making for two characters worth watching.

“The Rainmaker” Premieres Aug. 15 on USA Network at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

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I am one of the handful.

That doesn’t make me special. That doesn’t make me right or wrong. It just means that I didn’t care for the film, no matter how much I may admire its various pieces. As a professional critic it is my responsibility to be honest about my opinion — whatever it is, whether anyone agrees or not — and explain how I got there. Without an explanation it’s not criticism, it’s just an opinion. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, of course, but I’m not allowed to stop there. Getting into the nitty-gritty is my trade. And since you’re reading one of the trades right now, let’s talk about that.

My review of “Weapons” was, in the interest of not spoiling the film before release, written with my hands tied behind my back. The reason I didn’t care for “Weapons” is easy to explain but propriety demanded that I shut the hell up about it. To explain why I didn’t like the film I would have to discuss the plot of “Weapons” in detail, right up to the end, and engage with the resolution of the film’s many mysteries. And that would be a big “no no.”

It would be good criticism, of course, but it would “spoil” the movie. A “spoiler,” just to make sure we’re all on the same page, is information that, if revealed, would theoretically ruin the impact of the work of art. What counts as a “spoiler” has always been a matter of debate. I distinctly remember seeing “Blade Runner 2049” and being told, flat out, what the studio considered a “spoiler.” The first scene of the movie was on the list. How the heck are we supposed to write about a film when we can’t write about the film? Remember “Caddo Lake?” Of course you don’t, because we weren’t allowed to talk about “Caddo Lake.” The film’s premise was declared off-limits.

But sometimes the definition of a “spoiler” is pretty obvious. In the case of a film that’s built around a mystery, “the solution to the mystery” qualifies as a spoiler by any reasonable standard.

So here, now that the film is out in the world, is my full spoiler review of “Weapons.”

SPOILER ALERT: We are going to talk about the ending of “Weapons.”

“Weapons,” to get us all grounded again, is about a group of children, from the same elementary school class, who all go missing, in the middle of the night, at the exact same time. They just got out of bed and ran outside, never to be seen again. Or so we think.

Zach Cregger’s film explores the aftermath of this seemingly inexplicable tragedy in several ways, but one of the focal points is Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher whose students went missing. The whole town thinks she’s responsible so they hound her left and right. They even write “WITCH” in giant letters on her car.

Zach Cregger is not being very subtle: This is a witch hunt, which means that Justine is unfairly accused. After all, that’s how witch hunts worked. (Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” wasn’t about a bunch of people who were fairly accused.) When tragedy befalls a community, people look for a way to make sense of it all, and too often that means finding someone to blame, even if they don’t deserve it. And historically, they often don’t.

Justine Gandy doesn’t, that’s for sure. She’s a good teacher who cares about her students, maybe to a fault. And although this might seem unrelated, she also expresses her own sexual agency by seducing her ex-boyfriend. This only makes people hate her more. This town doesn’t like women like Justine Gandy.

For half the film, “Weapons” depicts witch hunts as very bad things, which is a reasonable take on the subject. That’s why it kinda falls apart when it turns out the townsfolk were merely hunting the wrong witch.

I don’t mean that in a metaphoric sense. The culprit is a literal witch: Gladys, played by Amy Madigan. She’s not just evil, she’s physically monstrous. “Weapons” displays her aging, wrinkled, apparently cancer-stricken body as if it’s a terrifying shock. As though nothing could be scarier than [checks notes] an elderly woman. Adding insult to that injury, when Gladys gets dolled up to go outside she wears a clownish red wig and exaggerated makeup. I guess nothing could be scarier than a conventionally unattractive woman either.

The demonization of womanhood is compounded when you consider Cregger’s previous horror movie, “Barbarian.” (Spoilers for “Barbarian” incoming, by the way.) The literal monster in “Barbarian” turned out to be The Mother, a malformed and abused woman, whose body Cregger’s film also considered horrific, in that case a source for gross-out scares. In the exciting climaxes of both “Barbarian” and “Weapons” these women suffer brutal, violent deaths, and although Gladys seems more cartoonishly evil than The Mother, and perhaps karmically deserves a terrible end, the brutality of her demise suggests we’re supposed to take twisted pleasure in watching her body get mutilated. This after evoking the history of witch trials, which persecuted women, leading to their public executions.

I don’t find that satisfying. I find it immature and simplistic, and it’s certainly got sexist overtones, at least. “Weapons” evokes many terrifying, sadly familiar notions, including school shootings and child abuse, but in the end it boils down to a literal witch. We’re being tricked into thinking this is a film about important subjects, only to find out halfway through that it’s an unremarkable monster story, albeit told in a remarkable way.

As I said in my non-spoiler review, pieces of “Weapons” are phenomenal. I have nothing but praise for the performances, the cinematography, the music and the editing. But that’s not all a movie is. You can get John Williams to score a film that’s just one long shot of man taking a dump, but it’s still a scat movie and at some point you’ll have to reckon with that, no matter how epic the score is. Roger Ebert famously argued that it’s not what a film is about, it’s how it is about it. But it’s still gotta be about something and if that something doesn’t work, it’s fair game to criticize it.

There are other elements in “Weapons” that almost mitigate this issue, but upon scrutiny, they don’t seem to work either. One could argue that the witch is a metaphor for an abusive relative, and yeah, no kidding, that’s exactly what she is. But how does that connect with the rest of the class? “Weapons” shows that Alex (Cary Christopher), Gladys’ nephew, after watching Gladys torture his parents, helps her abduct his fellow students. This film evokes the horrors of a school shooting, and without Alex that tragedy couldn’t have been possible, which suggests that Alex is the analogue for the school shooter. But don’t worry, it turns out witches were really to blame? Question mark?

I’m not convinced. Even if Cregger is arguing that we should be more attentive to children who show signs of being mistreated — a message we can (hopefully) all agree on — turning that horrifying experience into a straight-up monster movie, after treating the message more seriously for half the film, undermines that theme. There don’t seem to be many bad parents in “Weapons,” at least not until their kids go missing. It’s an interloper that’s to blame, and again, I’m not convinced that’s as meaningful as this movie thinks it is.

“Weapons” demonizes the other, and in this case the other is unattractive elderly women, which I guess is supposed to freak us out. As though none of us know any old people. And although there’s a lot of excitement at the end of “Weapons,” including a laughably over the top demise for that interloping woman, the fact that all this build-up led to, essentially, Zach Cregger pointing and yelling “WIIIITCH!” didn’t work for me as much as it seemed to for practically everybody else.

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Thankfully, the first four episodes of the much-anticipated second season step up to the plate. It may not reach the heights of “Stranger Things,” but with Tim Burton returning to direct two of the four episodes, it’s a consistently entertaining watch. Jenna Ortega continues to be the show’s secret ingredient, embodying the iconic character with a steely deadpan and hilarious, sardonic one-liners.

What works particularly well in this new season was promised by Ortega herself many full moons ago, when she admitted that Wednesday’s love triangle in the first season made “no sense.” Breaking up the dynamic in this new season is certainly convenient — Percy Hynes White, who played Xavier Thorpe, is no longer part of the cast after sexual assault allegations. The triangle’s third, Hunter Doohan, does reprise his role in these new episodes as the now-unveiled Hyde monster, Tyler Galpin, but not in a romantic capacity.

There are actually no love interests for Wednesday in this first batch of episodes… well, unless you ship Wednesday and her roommate Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers), who’s in a love triangle of her own. But gay yearning aside, avoiding that particular trope rampant on high school dramas allows “Wednesday” to lean into its sprawling ensemble while going for bolder and darker storylines, all with a morbid, humorous wink. It’s still a little silly — the third episode takes place at a camping retreat where the bulk of the action is a capture-the-flag game against a group of normies who had double-booked the camping site. But it feels a lot less YA than its first season, with more time to spend with the rest of the Addams family and strong supporting characters like siren Bianca Barclay (Joy Sunday), who gets to flex her psychic manipulation abilities this season.

That being said, there is definitely more gore this time around. You may want to avoid squishy foods while bingeing — particularly anything resembling eyeballs or brains, many of which are plucked from faces and eaten from skulls in Part 1.

Luckily, the show’s soft pivot allows you to sink into the new season with relative ease, without having to wrack your brain too hard for what happened in the first eight episodes. For one, we catch up with Wednesday over the summer before the new school year begins, where she’s spending her time hunting down a serial killer (for fun, of course), and developing her newfound psychic abilities. In one of her visions, Enid is found dead, setting the stakes for Wednesday to solve her to-be murder as quickly as possible when the school year begins.

With Wednesday (and Thing) returning to Nevermore Academy with noteworthy popularity, having saved the school last season, it’s getting harder for the independent investigator to keep a low profile — and one “Pretty Little Liars”-esque stalker is determined to capture Wednesday’s attention. But the central mystery these new episodes set up runs a bit deeper, intertwined with why eyeballs keep getting plucked out by crows around town.

There’s more than teachers in the line of fire this season, though. The show previously kept the rest of the Addams family at arm’s length to allow a distinguished focus on Wednesday herself, but they’re closer than ever this time around. Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) joins her as a new student while he explores his lightning-wielding ability — later playing a role in awakening a monster of his own, in a fun side plot alongside his new school friend, Eugene (Moosa Mostafa, reprising his role).

Now an empty nester in her new chapter, Morticia is approached by Nevermore’s new principal (Steve Buscemi) to chair the yearly Nevermore Gala, which includes the perk of on-campus housing. Having Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, who plays Gomez, more closely intertwined with Wednesday’s story is a welcome addition this season. Uncle Fester (Fred Armison) also returns for a psychiatric hospital heist that hopefully begins setting the stage for his potential spinoff. The Addams family’s dark ways and incredibly strange diet (e.g. bugs and cacti) are so compelling to watch and lends itself well to their increased screen time.

There are a few new characters played by familiar faces, too. Billie Piper plays Nevermore’s new music teacher (who sings a lot) and Thandiwe Newton guest stars as a psychiatrist at Willow Hill Psychiatric Hospital, where Tyler is being held — both performances that are not flashy per se, but exciting to see such veteran actresses join the cast nonetheless. Lady Gaga is set to join in Part 2, streaming on Sept. 3.

By the end of these first four episodes, Wednesday’s investigation of missing eyeballs comes to a head with a major reveal. It is not immediately clear where the show might go for its second half in light of the accelerated pacing. But based on Part 1, “Wednesday” has found its stride and loosened its grip on boxing itself into the mold (or in some cases, coffin) of YA television, with the help of strong performances and more spooky, delectable production design.

“Wednesday” Season 2, Part 1 is now streaming on Netflix.

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