‘School Spirits’ Is a Charming Teenage Ghost Story: TV Review

Lisa Kennedy During his early years of theater and indie film acting, Luiz Guzmán did a spell as a youth counselor in New York City. The actor with a grizzled countenance and a world-weary voice appears to have tapped into those memories for drama “Story Ave.” The actor brings an anchoring warmth to his portrayal of the MTA conductor who is held up by the unsure and anguished, but also infuriating, protagonist in Aristotle Torres’ affecting debut feature (co-written with Bonsu Thompson). Asante Blackk — of “This Is Us” and “When They See Us” — is Kadir, a high-schooler and aspiring artist whose younger brother has just died. A post-funeral reception makes clear that he and his mother (along with her boyfriend) are not a comfort to each other in this time of grief. Kadir is bedeviled by vivid nightmares that seem to damn him for not having done something to save his brother, who had cerebral palsy. His notebook brims with sketches of his beloved younger sibling.

In today’s episode of Bingeworthy, our TV and streaming podcast, host Mike DeAngelo laughs and cries all over again for Apple TV+’s new dramedy, “Shrinking.” Created by Bill Lawrence (“Scrubs,” “Ted Lasso”), Brett Goldstein (“Ted Lasso,” “Thor: Love and Thunder”), and Jason Segel (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “How I Met Your Mother”), the show follows Jimmy (Segel), a therapist who has gone off the deep end after the death of his wife.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor As a director, Ben Affleck has proven himself to be a versatile, compelling talent, moving seamlessly from the morally complex “Gone Baby Gone” to the stark crime drama “The Town” to the tense and thrilling best picture winner “Argo.” Even Affleck’s one directorial misstep, the critically panned box office bomb “Live by Night,” has an intriguing gloss and conviction. That’s why it’s so difficult for many viewers to answer: “Which Affleck-directed joint is your favorite?” Well, that decision may get even harder with the arrival of “Air,” Affleck’s latest feature which premiered as the Closing Night film at the South by Southwest Film Festival earlier this month. 

Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos reflected on how they kept their marriage together despite being separated during the COVID-19 pandemic. During a recent episode of her "Let's Talk Off Camera" podcast, the 52-year-old "Hope & Faith" alum recalled that she and Consuelos, 51 stayed connected through "rituals" when they were working on projects in different cities.  "We had sexual rituals that were so ludicrous over FaceTime," Ripa said in the episode, in which she was joined by Consuelos and their marriage counselor Dr.

A dream Harley Quinn! While Lady Gaga’s role in the upcoming Joker sequel, Folie a Deux, had been kept quiet, she’s shared the first peek at her costume.

Oh boy, oh boy, Jimmy’s closet has caught the attention of Shrinking audiences — and are contacting costume designer Allyson Fanger for details.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic It’s an interesting, telling choice that “Up Here,” Hulu’s new musical sitcom starring Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdes, is set in 1999. Not merely is the turn of the century, according to the roughly 20-year nostalgia cycle, currently in vogue, but the particular sort of moment the Y2K era was lends texture and meaning to the story “Up Here” tells. Assaying a time just before the social web allowed loners to find one another, “Up Here” presents a winning and lovely pair of oddballs singing their hearts out, in disbelief at having found one another. Here, Whitman plays Lindsay, who was lectured in childhood to shield her spiky and odd side from peers in order to be liked. “You show people the nice parts, because believe me, that’s all that people want to see,” her mother (Katie Finneran) tells her; grown up, she’s terrified to show vulnerability at all.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Hong Chau — the Oscar-nominated actor, who’s appeared in “The Whale,” “The Menu,” and “Downsizing” — is an interesting element on Netflix’s new series “The Night Agent,” and a revealing one. To cast Chau, a gifted and hardworking performer who’s been elevating projects for years, is to announce a certain ambition. Here, she’s playing the determined White House Chief of Staff, a figure close to the heart of various intrigues on a political thriller with schlock in its DNA. And yet she does it so elegantly, so excellently that she elevates the whole thing. So it is with “The Night Agent,” created by Shawn Ryan of “The Shield,” and based on a novel by Matthew Quirk. Here, Gabriel Basso (who played the future U.S. Senator J.D. Vance in the film “Hillbilly Elegy”) stars as Peter Sutherland, whose employment at the FBI is at such a low level that an offer to stand by and monitor a rarely used emergency hotline on the night shift comes to feel attractive. Wouldn’t you know it — one evening, that phone rings, and the caller is a tech founder who has found herself drawn into a drama she barely understands when her aunt and uncle were killed. Peter and Rose (Luciane Buchanan), his unlucky protectee, must piece together what happened on the fly, as they attempt to keep her safe and, just maybe, redeem Peter’s unfortunate family history of perfidy.

BreAnna Bell Fans of Matthew Quirk’s novel “The Night Agent” might be surprised to see a few creative changes in Shawn Ryan’s series adaptation on Netflix. For instance, not only is there the addition of several new players — including Eve Harlow, who portrays Ellen, an opposing cutthroat spy — but Ryan, who serves as showrunner and executive producer, said Rose (Lucianne Buchanan) and Peter’s (Gabriel Basso) love story will be deeply explored throughout the political thriller’s 10 episodes. The series follows FBI agent Peter Sutherland, who while working in the basement of the White House monitoring an emergency line that rarely rings, answers a call that plunges him into a deadly conspiracy involving a mole in America’s executive mansion.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Miss Havisham is one of the most indelible characters in the English-language literary canon. Written by Charles Dickens to be outfitted, each day, in the wedding finery that serves as a decaying reminder that she was spurned at the altar, she’s a bundle of resentments tied together in white lace. And, as played by Olivia Colman, she’s the action of the new “Great Expectations” limited series — so much so that much of the rest of the densely plotty story seems like biding time between her appearances. Written by Steven Knight and co-produced by the BBC and FX, this “Great Expectations” is dimly lit and grimly violent, with the chaos and sudden bursts of enmity of Dickensian England brought to the fore. But only Miss Havisham pops off the screen, making this an adaptation lacking in a certain balance.

Ready to roll with the homies again. Stacey Dash would totally be down for a Clueless sequel — as long as director Amy Heckerling was involved.

Cheryl’s fans were left devastated last night, Sunday 20 March, to learn that she wasn’t taking part in her usual 2:22 A Ghost Story performance.The singer has been starring in the hit West End play since January, but took the night off yesterday – the same day as Mother’s Day. Cheryl’s night off also comes a couple of days before son Bear's birthday on 22 March. Gemma Yates is believed to have filled the Girls Aloud star’s spot for the performance, which appears to have been advertised on A Ghost Story’s website for some time.

Naming a young Black man’s story after a transport stop gives off strong Fruitvale vibes, but Aristotle Torres’ feature debut reaches back further to the hip-hop morality tales of the early ’90s, like Boaz Yakin’s Fresh or Ernest Dickerson’s Juice — the wave that immediately followed John Singleton’s influential Boyz n the Hood. Surprisingly, given Torres’ history of videos for the likes of Ludacris and Nas, the soundtrack is light on rap, using unexpected needle drops like Pavarotti’s version of “La Donna e Mobile” to score scenes of spray-can anarchy on the New York subway.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Climate change is the defining problem of our time, not merely for the threat it poses to the stability of our civilization but for how sticky and hard to pin down it is, in conversation or in art. By definition, it’s all around us — the climate is what we’re soaking in, no matter where we are. Its pervasiveness makes it somewhat unimaginable: What would it be like for everything to change? The mind reels; the problem gets put away. This is one of the challenges facing “Extrapolations,” a new quasi-anthology series that skips forward in time to tell the story of how we might continue to live on a warming Earth. Very few of the series’ characters appear in more than one episode, and very few have more than a flat and easily described motivation — the show works a bit like a breezy and brisk collection of linked short stories, constantly moving forward, continually showing new consequences of our own inaction. Keeping the characters flat and underserved, though, makes the lavishly depicted world they inhabit feel less like a matter of concern. What does it matter if we’re all going to die, if “we” aren’t first recognizable as rounded, full people?

It’s almost a cliche for a supernatural ghost film to include characters with a “haunted” past.

EXCLUSIVE: Writer, producer and director Florian Sigl, the filmmaker behind the recent movie version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, has signed with CAA for representation.

The Rolling Stones are facing a copyright lawsuit over their 2020 track, ‘Living In A Ghost Town’.In the suit, a little-known songwriter called songwriter Sergio Garcia Fernandez, who performs under the name Angelslang, claims that the legendary band’s recent track “misappropriated many of the recognisable and key protected elements” from two of his songs, 2006’s ‘So Sorry’ and the following year’s ‘Seed Of God’.Fernandez claims that he gave a CD of music to an “immediate family member” of Mick Jagger, with elements of the two tracks then allegedly used in the band’s 2020 song.In a statement (via Billboard), Fernandez’s lawyers said: “The immediate family member … confirmed receipt … to the plaintiff via e-mail, and expressed that the musical works of the plaintiff and its style was a sound The Rolling Stones would be interested in using.”It goes on to allege that ‘Living In A Ghost Town’ lifted “vocal melodies, the chord progressions, the drum beat patterns, the harmonica parts, the electric bass line parts, the tempos, and other key signatures” from ‘So Sorry’, and the “harmonic and chord progression and melody” from ‘Seed Of God’.Representatives for The Rolling Stones did not respond to a request for comment from Billboard.Elsewhere, The Rolling Stones are reportedly collaborating with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr on their new album.According to Variety, multiple sources have confirmed that two surviving The Beatles band members have contributed to an as-yet unannounced Stones album, which is said to be produced by Andrew Watt.

The Rolling Stones have been sued over allegations that their 2020 track ‘Living In A Ghost Town’ rips off not one but two earlier songs. The artist behind those earlier works alleges that the band got hold of his music via a member of Mick Jagger’s family.When released in April 2020, ‘Living In A Ghost Town’ was the first new music from the Stones in four years, and their first original song since 2012.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The story of Kim Philby is perhaps too good to make up. The British spy, a double agent for Moscow, operated at the highest levels of the intelligence community; his ability to disseminate information to the Soviet Union, to which he eventually defected, is proof, perhaps, of the power of personal charm and erudition to cover over what’s lying in plain sight. That’s the powerfully told story of “A Spy Among Friends,” which streamed on ITVX in the United Kingdom last year and which now arrives on nascent streamer MGM+. Guy Pearce plays Philby, who has at the series’ outset been a valued Soviet source for many years; likely his closest friend in tradecraft, Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis), must get a confession from him. We see the pair’s relationship over time in layered flashbacks, adding context and understanding to Elliott’s failure to nail down Philby.

Called out! Amid filming for Selling Sunset season 6, star Chrishell Stause has publicly called out the production team’s tricks.