Ryan Eggold & Isaiah Mustafa Board Amazon’s Alex Cross Series

Motown singer Bertha Barbee McNeal has died at the age of 82.

Bertha Barbee McNeal, whose Motown group The Velvelettes had hits with“Needle in a Haystack” and “(He Was) Really Saying Something,” died Thursday in hospice in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was 82 and had colon cancer.

Premiering earlier this year at the 2022 Venice Film Festival was Emanuele Crialese‘s celebrated “L’Immensità,” a family drama starring Penélope Cruz. The film is about the story of love between Clara (Cruz) and her children, set in Rome in the ’70s.

Jen Shah is skipping The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 3 reunion as the sentencing in the fraud case she pled guilty to looms.

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is heading to the Alaskan wilderness in its latest competition series.

Rian Johnson has a cinematic sensation on his hands with his “Knives Out” movie series. Both critics and audiences love the whodunit films and Daniel Craig‘s detective at their center, Benoit Blanc.

Audiences didn’t take to Luca Guadagnino‘s “Bones And All,” likely due to its grim subject matter. But pay no mind to the film’s scant $11 million gross at the box office: critics loved the movie, and they love Guada, undeniably one of the best filmmakers working today.

Luca Guadagnino has been looking to mount a feature take of the William S. Burroughs novel Queer with Daniel Craig in the lead, and it is his next project. The Call Me By Your Name Oscar nominee is the process of raising financing on this.

EXCLUSIVE: Peabody and Emmy-winning actor, writer, producer, director and comedian Craig Ferguson has signed with CAA for representation in Comedy Touring.

EXCLUSIVE: Alona Tal (SWAT Team), Johnny Ray Gill (Underground), and Eloise Mumford (50 Shades of Grey) have joined the cast of Amazon’s Cross in series regular roles. They will star opposite Aldis Hodge, who brings to life the titular Alex Cross.

EXCLUSIVE: New cast have been added for the second season of MGM+ and Sky’s ancient Rome drama Domina, with David Avery (The Night Manager), Benjamin Issac (Holmes & Watson) and Joelle (Dune) now aboard.

Brad William Henke, a former NFL player who segued to acting and appeared in TV series including Orange Is the New Black, Justified and Lost and such films as Pacific Rim and World Trade Center, has died. He was 56. His family said Henke died in his sleep November 28, but no cause was given.

EXCLUSIVE: Studiocanal will back a live-action series adaptation of the Hugo Pratt Corto Maltese graphic novel series, with Sin City’s Frank Miller to be its creator, writer and executive producer. In conjunction with Canal+, Studiocanal will develop six hourlong episodes.

Tom McCarthy is a very clever writer who has succeeded in drawing audiences to a difficult genre: thrillers about newspapers. He won an Original Screenplay Oscar for Spotlight, made in 2015, was a riveting movie about how the Boston Globe exposed a cover-up involving a defrocked priest. His new ABC series Alaska Daily focuses on a hot New York journalist (Hilary Swank) who is exiled into covering crime in Anchorage.

EXCLUSIVE: In a matter of days, one first-year ABC drama series has surpassed the other for the title of strongest series debut in two years among both the 18-49 demographic and total viewers.

Let’s start with The Beatles. At the end of 1968 the Fab Four released The White Album, which would become tabloid-notorious within a year because some hippie cult leader named Charles Manson sent his followers on a killing spree under the guise of the hidden meanings he’d uncovered in their songs. What no one really remembers nowadays, though, is that there was already a track on that album aimed squarely at the kind of weirdos who looked for hidden meanings in Beatles songs.

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon’s Alex Cross series has found its opening director.