Review: 'Moonfall' is a brain-twisting, popcorny mega-blast

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn “The Burning Sea,” which is your basic, everyday Norwegian oil-rig disaster thriller, Stian (Henrik Bjelland), a rig worker stationed on a drilling platform that’s about to collapse, must descend into the bowels of the rig to shut down a well that can’t be reached remotely. As the soundtrack fills with one of those flatulent brass musical scores that sounds like it’s heralding the arrival of the devil, a bureaucratically ominous title splashes across the screen: “D Shaft, Gullfaks A, 138 meters under the sea.” 138 meters? That’s pretty far down, though not necessarily deep enough to be, you know, scary.The disaster film started off as a “realistic” genre, one that gradually grew more over-the-top.

NAACP Image Awards has officially been kicked off! As usual, this year's ceremony honoring people of color across television, music, literature and film is preceded by a week-long celebration, with five nights of virtual awards leading up to Saturday's live telecast.Hosted by returning emcee and seven-time NAACP Image Awards winner Anthony Anderson, the ceremony will include Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, LL Cool J, Morgan Freeman, Questlove, Tiffany Haddish, Zendaya and more presenting awards, while Samuel L. Jackson accepts the NAACP Chairman's Award and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project, receives the Social Justice Impact Award.The preceding non-televised nights will be hosted by actor and comedian Affion Crockett, with awards presented by Cory Hardrict, Demetrius Shipp Jr., Khleo Thomas, Lori Harvey, Wendy Raquel Robinson and more.

Naman Ramachandran Amazon Prime Video and Germany’s Leonine Studios are expanding their existing partnership with a multi-year license agreement.Under the deal, Prime Video gets exclusive second window SVOD-rights for a six-month period to upcoming theatrical feature films and home entertainment titles from Leonine’s slate and also includes non-exclusive SVOD rights to titles from Leonine’s content library.Titles include Keanu Reeves’ “John Wick 4” and its spin-off “Ballerina,” starring Ana de Armas; Channing Tatum’s directorial debut “Dog”; Roland Emmerich’s “Moonfall,” starring Halle Berry; Nicolas Cage action-comedy “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”; Guillaume Canet’s “Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom,” with Gilles Lellouche, Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel and soccer star Zlatan Imbrahimović; Jennifer Lopez starrer “Shotgun Wedding”; and Leonine Studios co-production “The School of Magical Animals 2,” the sequel to Germany’s most successful theatrical release of 2021. Leonine Studios CEO Fred Kogel said: “It’s fantastic that we can expand our long-standing partnership with Prime Video by this agreement and achieve another important milestone for our licensing business with premium content.

Mickey Guyton's stunning rendition of the national anthem has her fellow country music stars in awe. Guyton, donning a long-sleeved blue dress, wowed with her performance at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California on Sunday.The stadium is the home of the Los Angeles Rams, who is facing off against the Cincinnati Bengals for the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Guyton made history as the first Black woman to earn a Grammy nomination in a country category and first Black solo woman to host the ACM Awards.

Director Roland Emmerich says it’s a lot harder for filmmakers to develop and release original ideas thanks to the prevalence of Marvel movies and “Star Wars” spin-offs.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterAfter living through a pandemic for nearly two years, Americans, as it turns out, were in desperate need of a laugh.That may explain why Paramount’s go-for-broke action comedy “Jackass Forever” triumphed at the domestic box office while Roland Emmerich’s disaster epic “Moonfall” turned into an epic disaster.“Jackass Forever,” the fourth installment in the ongoing saga of projectiles to the groin, collected $23 million from 3,604 North American locations in its debut, landing on the higher end of expectations. The latest “Jackass,” starring Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Wee Man and other daredevils from MTV days, had been widely expected to win the weekend, but its victory is still surprising and impressive because it has been some time since a pure comedy has claimed the top spot on box office charts.

“Moonfall.” The sci-fi action film stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson (who also starred in Emmerich’s “Midway”) as astronauts who take up the task of saving the Earth from colliding with the moon. “Game of Thrones” alum John Bradley co-stars as K.C. Houseman, a conspiracy theorist and amateur scientist who worms his way into the missions, as well as Carolina Bartczak as the ex-wife of Wilson’s Brian Harper and Michael Peña as her new husband.

“Moonfall.” If the big budget film had been his first acting offer after hanging up Samwell Tarly’s maester’s cloak and chains on “Game of Thrones,” though, the British actor might have said no.“Well, funnily enough, the thing upon leaving ‘Game of Thrones’ all those years ago now, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do at the time, but I just knew that I didn’t want to do anything that was going to be comparable to it in any way really, because as soon as something is successful, a lot of clones of it start to appear. And you see a lot of ‘Game of Thrones’-esque projects starting up,” Bradley told TheWrap during a recent interview.

John Bradley is poised to save the world in “Moonfall.” The epic sci-fi film from Roland Emmerich sees the actor portray an unlikely hero whose contributions prove that anyone can make a difference. For Bradley, its significance goes well beyond a standard popcorn flick.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaWith much of the country bracing for or digging out from a nasty winter storm, two new releases are hoping to provide so much sizzle that moviegoers will brave the ice and snow to hit up their local multiplexes.In one corner: Lionsgate’s “Moonfall,” a disaster epic from Roland Emmerich, one of the most successful purveyors of cinematic destruction. In the other: Paramount’s “Jackass Forever,” the latest entry in the long-running series in which Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O and Wee Man risk life, limb and nether regions in the service of comedy. “Jackass Forever” scored a stronger Thursday previews showing, netting $1.7 million.

Roland Emmerich is known for directing some of cinema’s highest-grossing action and sci-fi epics. From the natural disasters of “The Day After Tomorrow” to the otherworldly invaders of “Independence Day,” the filmmaker’s decades of work have become pop culture phenomena.

the hallmarks of an Emmerich blockbuster — natural disasters, parents separated from children, the total annihilation of Manhattan — but with a twist so baffling, you pinch your arm to make sure you are really awake. No need to reach for your dream journal — it’s all painfully real.The lunar-cy begins during a routine space station mission in outer space with Jocinda (Halle Berry), Brian (Patrick Wilson) and another astronaut.

Over the course of his almost four-decade career, Roland Emmerich is a filmmaker who has become synonymous with big-budget, CG-infused epics whose screenplays often challenge the laws of space and time. Few moviegoers who saw “The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012” or even “White House Down” thought they were anything more than overblown extravaganza and a nice escape from the monotony of the real world.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe joke of Netflix’s recent “Don’t Look Up” is that scientists discover a meteor headed straight for earth, and even with six months to plan, humanity is too skeptical and disorganized to prevent it. Meanwhile, in Roland Emmerich’s latest eye-roller, “Moonfall,” the joke is pretty much flipped: Everybody’s favorite satellite is set to collide with earth in, oh, a day or so, and that’s just enough time for two space jockeys to suit up, shuttle out and set things right.I say “joke” because “Moonfall” is designed to elicit incredulous laughter as its ludicrous plot snowballs from a high-concept hypothetical question (what if the moon suddenly changed course and came crashing toward earth?) to increasingly implausible complications on the theme, all while requiring Halle Berry, as acting director of NASA Jocinda Fowl, to keep a straight face while saying things like, “Everything we thought we knew about the nature of the universe has just gone out the window!” Like gravity, logic and how we define good acting.

this — this insipid, hackneyed, laughable joke of a motion picture — is actually really cool. And the weirdest part of all is, they’re kind of right.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterMaybe you’ve been patiently waiting two years for director Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” sequel. It could be the team-up of Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas in “The Gray Man” that strikes your fancy.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle EditorWelcome to this week’s “Just for Variety.”Actor John Bradley is still defending the controversial “Game of Thrones” series finale against its very harsh critics, even more than two years after the show ended.“It is highly unlikely that we were ever going to please everybody,” the actor, who played Samwell Tarly on the long-running fantasy show, tells me on the latest episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “Chances are we were going to please a fraction of people… We almost couldn’t win.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterWill this be the weekend that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” is dethroned at the box office once and for all?Paramount’s go-for-broke action comedy “Jackass Forever” and director Roland Emmerich’s disaster epic “Moonfall” certainly hope that’s the case. After an excruciatingly slow January at the movies, one that let “Spider-Man” tower over the competition for weeks, the two nationwide releases will try their hand at getting audiences to multiplexes.“Jackass Forever,” the fourth installment in the ongoing saga of projectiles to the groin, appears to have the best shot at taking down “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which has spent six of the last seven weeks at No. 1.

After two weekends without any major studio wide releases amid fears of Omicron, Paramount and Lionsgate will try to lure moviegoers back with respectively Jackass Forever and AGC Studio’s Moonfall.