Talking Bear ‘Ted’ Makes Unwelcome Return as a Half-Hearted Spin on the Family Sitcom: TV Review

Marta Balaga Ahead of its 41st edition, International Film Festival Rotterdam’s industry event CineMart isn’t interested in uniformity. “The trend is diversity,” says head of IFFR Pro Alessia Acone.

Lil Nas X opened up about his family, sexuality, public image and more in his new documentary Long Live Montero.

Filmmaker Asmae El Moudir, making her feature directorial drama, starts her non-fiction film “The Mother Of All Lies” as a modest family chronicle—an elevated home video of sorts. It is soon clear, though, that she has much more on her mind because the actual subject of her inquiry is the collective amnesia around a seminal event that changed Morocco forever, the 1981 Casablanca bread riots.

Halle Berry‘s movie The Mothership is sadly not going to see the light of day!

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos took a victory lap on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call about the company’s acquisition of exclusive rights to Monday Night Raw and other WWE programming.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic We look at famous actors as role models, tending to see their personal lives as soap opera, as projection, as aspiration. But the story of Christopher Reeve is different. His life became a parable.

“Ted” star Max Burkholder’s association with series creator Seth MacFarlane dates back to Burkholder’s childhood.“I did voiceover work for [MacFarlane’s series] ‘Family Guy,’ ‘American Dad,’ ‘The Cleveland Show,’ so in a weird way I’ve been working with Seth in some capacity for 20 years,” Burkholder, 25, told The Post.“And just because I was a little kid hanging around the ‘Family Guy’ offices, when it came time for the table read for the first ‘”Ted” movie, they needed someone to play the creepy little kid character — and so I did that when I was probably around 10.” “Ted,” streaming on Peacock, is a prequel to the 2012 and 2015 movies (“Ted” and “Ted 2“) in which a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear, Ted (MacFarlane), is brought to life by his pal, 30-year-old John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg in both movies) — and eventually interferes with John’s love life.Burkholder plays 16-year-old John in the TV adaptation, set in 1993 in Framingham, Mass., as John adapts to high school — helped (or hindered) by Ted (voiced by MacFarlane and brought to life via sophisticated computer animation).Scott Grimes and Alanna Ubach play John’s Archie Bunker-type father, Matty, and good-natured mother, Susan; his older, liberal cousin, Blaire (Giorgia Whigam), attends Emerson College and lives with the family due to a sketchy situation with her parents.Burkholder said he was very conscientious about nailing John’s Boston accent.“I worked very hard on that,” he said.

Carlos Aguilar Elevated by its consistent visual inventiveness, Chinese writer-director Jianjie Lin’s suspenseful drama “Brief History of a Family” could appear, at first glance, as a clear-cut case of a cunning infiltrator wreaking havoc in an unsuspecting household. Yet the closer we observe, the more it reveals itself as a tale of wish fulfillment for everyone involved.No doubt comparisons to “Saltburn,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley” will abound, but what Lin conceived is far more subcutaneous, with a sobering tone and disinterested in building up to a grand plot twist — though the resolution is unexpected.

Todd Gilchrist editor Although it isn’t structured any differently from dozens of other cradle-to-grave documentaries about artistic luminaries, “Luther: Never Too Much” sheds light on much more than just the life and career of R&B singer Luther Vandross. Drawn largely from interview and performance footage of Vandross over his almost 40 years in entertainment, and bolstered and contextualized by retrospective talks will collaborators and confidantes, director Dawn Porter’s film exposes some uneasy truths about the music industry and the media we may now know, but whose seeming ubiquitousness at the time he was alive may be difficult to fully comprehend.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In “Union,” documentary filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing follow the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a group of current and former Amazon workers as they attempt to unionize Amazon employees working at a facility in Staten Island, N.Y. The directing duo chronicles just how excruciatingly hard it is to form a workers’ union in America — especially at Amazon.

Manchester United supporters have been left with mixed emotions after unearthing past tweets of incoming chief executive officer Omar Berrada appearing to mock the club.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Presence,” a ghost story directed by Steven Soderbergh, is set entirely inside a lovely, renovated, 100-year-old suburban home, and before the characters even have a chance to move in, the place is already occupied. The camera literally seems to be peering at things, staring out the second-floor windows, then coming down the stairs to witness the arrival of a harried real-estate agent, then the family of four she’s about to sell the house to. Darting from room to room in an unbroken wide-angle-lens shot, the camera gives us an impromptu tour of the house, letting us drink in the crisp mint-green walls, the vintage wood that lines everything (windows, doors, stairway, fireplace), the ancient smoke-glass mirror and polished oak-board floors and elegant sprawling kitchen.

The thriller premiered its first season in December 2022 and was renewed for another season in early 2023.

“I’m just so grateful on what I got to infuse in the franchise, and that’s something I’ll be proud of forever,” Melissa Barrera told Deadline at Sundance tonight, indicating no bad blood after being severed from the Scream series by Spyglass Media last month.

Amid the renewed interest in Vanderpump Rules following “Scandoval,” Bravo has announced the cast for the spinoff reality series The Valley. Kristen Doute, Jax Taylor and Brittany Cartwright are set to star in the series premiering this Spring 2024.

EXCLUSIVE: BET+ has ordered a New Orleans-set spinoff of Carl Weber‘s The Family Business, with Brandon T. Jackson set to star.

Alaqua Cox is dishing on her potential future in the MCU!

The Family Stallone is accepting guests again into their home. All 10 episodes of the second season of the docuseries featuring Sylvester Stallone, Jennifer Flavin Stallone and their daughters Sophia, Sistine and Scarlet will premiere February 21 on the streamer.

Gladiators came back with a bang to British TV screens on Saturday, making light work of ITV‘s The Masked Singer.

A film panned by critics when it debuted ten years ago has suddenly become one of Netflix's most-watched.