‘Dicks: The Musical’ Review: Megan Mullally, Nathan Lane, Sewer People & A Dream [TIFF]

Gerry Turner’s journey on ABC’s inaugural season of “The Golden Bachelor” kicked off with a memorable limo entrance, as revealed in an exclusive preview video from The Hollywood Reporter.

This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the first Northern Soul all-nighter, an event that defined a generation in the UK and beyond.

A trio of new shows joined Broadway last week to mostly decent box office figures as the fall season begins to take shape.

There haven’t been that many red carpet premieres in Los Angeles over the past few months due to the strikes in Hollywood, but Dicks: The Musical is bringing some star power to the west coast!

Courtney Howard The “PAW Patrol” franchise is now 10 years old — 70 in dog years — and with each installment, children and their parents have been treated to exciting adventures, wholesome characters and cool new merchandise. What began as a preschool TV series in 2013 got the silver-screen treatment in 2021 with the inventively named “PAW Patrol: The Movie,” broadening its scale and reach but sacrificing none of its lesson-learning or toy-slinging.

“Wicked Little Letters” narrates the bizarre tale of several foul-mouthed anonymous letters that began terrorizing the small British town of Littlehampton in the 1920s. Against all odds, what might seem like a contrived, ridiculous story is almost entirely true.

Amy Nicholson “The Royal Hotel,” the setting of Kitty Green’s ulcer-inducing thriller, is a sun-baked bar in a rural Australian mining town surrounded by terrain so monotone that Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) can’t keep their eyes open on the way in. The two young women arrive at their barmaid jobs with a sense palpable disorientation. They’ve quite literally woken up in Oz, and they don’t know the people, the customs, the nicknames for the local ales, or the way out.

When I was in college cinema courses I made a Super 8 film called Movie Girl. It was a Hollywood-set love letter to movies centered on a Musso & Franks waitress who put herself dreamily into the plots of classic films. It won an award there but was the highlight of the directing career I never had. However I have always been partial to filmmakers who put their own early film going experience and passion into their careers now. You may have heard of them. Kenneth Branagh won an Oscar for doing just that in Belfast. Steven Spielberg got several nominations last year for his very personal The Fabelmans . Woody Allen had his own charming take in The Purple Rose Of Cairo. Peter Bogdanovich made a lasting impression with 1971’s The Last Picture Show, as did Giuseppe Tornatore with his Oscar winner, Cinema Paradiso. It is a combination of the latter two especially that might describe the feel of the latest movie about the love of movies, The Movie Teller (La Contadora de Peliculas) which had its World Premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival. And just in sheer numbers of classic film clips incorporated into its near two hour running time, this one sets a record in the little sub-genre. For movie lovers everywhere The Movie Teller is a must see.

Hollywood, by and large, portrays bars as the most fun and chummy places on earth. At “Cheers” and “Coyote Ugly,” everybody knows your name and you can grow into a better person by sexy dancing.Even Moe’s Tavern from “The Simpsons,” with all its seasoned boozehounds, has a base level of respectability and camaraderie.

In this week’s episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo brings back directors Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah to discuss the film “Rebel.” The dramatic musical thriller follows a Muslim Belgian family as they are slowly ripped apart by Islamic extremists through various devious radicalization techniques. The film stars Aboubakr Bensaihi, Lubna Azabal, Tara Abboud, Amir El Arbi, and more.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Casey Likes fully expected to be performing on Broadway this year, but the plan was for him to be riding shotgun with Stillwater instead of sitting behind the wheel of a DeLorean. He’d appeared as teen rock journalist William Miller in an acclaimed run of “Almost Famous: The Musical” at The Old Globe in San Diego and reprised the role when the show transferred in 2022 to Broadway. But New York critics were harsher, and “Almost Famous” struggled to draw crowds.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The first thing to say about Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” is that it’s three-and-a-half hours long. Normally I wouldn’t lead with that daunting fact, especially since the film is mostly marvelous: a documentary that every Paul Simon fan on earth should want to see and experience. But will they? I raise the issue only because “In Restless Dreams” has come into the Toronto Film Festival without a distributor, and let’s just be honest: The 209-minute running time, when you hear about it, doesn’t exactly sound…user-friendly.

Numerous clips have been shared online regarding how self-importantly Aaron Sorkin and company took themselves while they were making “The Newsroom,” a show that practically announced itself as the last stand for human rights and journalistic decency in the world. Holding that impossible standard high in its third season is Apple TV+’s expensive hit “The Morning Show,” a program that makes it feel like if morning news in America falls, then the apocalypse is just around the corner.

Alison Herman TV Critic It’s difficult to top the heights and/or depths of “The Morning Show” Season 2, a borderline camp masterpiece in which Elle Woods sucked face with Alicia Florrick and a disgraced Matt Lauer type drove his car off an Italian bluff. But the Apple TV+ drama is obligated to try, so for its latest premiere, it goes where no fictional daytime infotainment digest has gone before: to outer space.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Lyrics that include the words “dick,” “fuck” and “pussy” are not the typical wholesome, family content the Academy’s Music Branch tends to recognize. But occasionally, they have allowed a couple to slip through. A24’s “Dicks: The Musical,” the opening night Midnight Madness at TIFF, has an onslaught of hilarious and catchy tunes that I wish the Oscars would be brave enough to nominate.

Flesh-eating sewer monsters, genitals with wings, grave robbing, two confused “identical twins” and 90 minutes of sexual innuendo is what you can expect from comedians Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s stage show-turned-movie. Directed by Larry Charles and written by and starring the duo, the film also features Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, Megan Thee Stallion and Bowen Yang. As a viewer, I often wondered how the hell this got turned into the movie because it is so outrageous. Thankfully, it succeeds at being fun and funny because anything less would have amounted to torture. 

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic What are the odds that two openly gay cut-ups doing a raunchy half-hour musical comedy routine in a Gristede’s grocery store would somehow convince “Borat” director Larry Charles to turn their show, “Fucking Identical Twins,” into a feature-length A24 movie? You’d stand a better chance playing the lottery than predicting the path “Dicks: The Musical” took to reach the big screen — which is exactly why this twisted cross between “The Parent Trap” and “Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy” seems destined for cult status. The absurdist brainchild of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, “Dicks” is an unapologetically puerile, hard-R novelty that’s just lo-fi enough to maintain its underground cred.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter A raucous, deliriously madcap midnight premiere of “Dicks: The Musical” closed out the first day of the Toronto Film Festival. A24’s first-ever musical, which leans hard into its R-rating and puts an irreverent, queer spin on “The Parent Trap,” played to laughs, cheers, audible gasps and shrieks and, yes, a few groans from the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

No one can predict if Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s output has finally come to an end, but there’s a solemn finality to “The Boy and the Heron” that suggests he’d be satisfied if that were the case this time. Its contemplation is that of an artist who’s come full circle and is now probing at the very meaning of his extensive oeuvre through a discerning lens.

TELLURIDE – The most intriguing aspect of Kitty Green’s new thriller “The Royal Hotel” is what she doesn’t tell you. Set in a town in the middle of the Australian outback, this is a movie that simmers in culture clashes, dangerous misogyny, and sexual tension.