As Donald Trump returns to a New York courtroom for another day of his hush money trial, another team of his lawyers will be arguing before the Supreme Court in a case that is of utmost consequence to his fate.
06.04.2024 - 03:37 / variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem” is a documentary about 4Chan, the popular imageboard website that became the Petri dish in which QAnon — the mother of all crackpot conspiracy theories — came into being. The story of 4Chan makes for a fascinating chapter in the evolution of Internet culture.
But chances are we wouldn’t be seeing a documentary about it that drops today on Netflix if the 4Chan saga hadn’t culminated in the arrival of QAnon. Given the significance of QAnon (i.e., the fact that half the country now thinks batshit psychotic fantasy scenarios are the essence of reality), you’d think that when the movie arrived at its creation, it would feel like you were entering the last circle of the heart of darkness.
But no. Ironically, the genesis of QAnon is the lightest and most amusing part of “The Antisocial Network.” That’s not because QAnon itself has been anything less than disastrous in the wreckage it has caused this country.
Of all the things that account for the stubborn popularity of Donald Trump, the fact that so many of his supporters are QAnon heads, believers in the idea that they’re fighting a Satanic cult of pedophiles who have the support and protection of the Democratic Party, is no minor factor. There have been good documentaries that trace the QAnon phenomenon (like “After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” in which we got to see dash-cam footage of Edgar Maddison Welch, the assault-rifle-toting Pizzagate “avenger,” on the way to his mission), and the baroque paranoid beliefs of QAnon followers have been amply chronicled.
But “The Antisocial Network” takes us back to before all that, to what QAnon actually was: a goof. Nothing more, nothing
.As Donald Trump returns to a New York courtroom for another day of his hush money trial, another team of his lawyers will be arguing before the Supreme Court in a case that is of utmost consequence to his fate.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Any photographer who shoots what’s happening in the gleaming, raw, people-packed carnival of New York City — the stores and walls and towers and alleyways, the celebrities, the endless cross-section of humanity — already has an artistic leg up. But the other leg is what he or she does with it. Weegee shot the violent night world of sin and crime.
Jon Stewart led Monday’s episode of The Daily Show with Donald Trump’s hush money trial and dinged news networks for how they cover it.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic What do you call world-building when it’s built entirely out of worlds that have already been built? I wouldn’t call it cinema; it might be closer to Lego with attitude. Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver,” like his “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire,” is a sci-fi action fantasy so familiar and generic, so borrowed from and inspired by other things — it’s the 1977 “Star Wars” meets “Seven Samurai” meets “The Lord of the Guardians of the Rings of the Galaxy” — that it’s already the theme-park version of itself.
The Oscars took place more than a month ago, but former President Donald Trump continues to grouse about its host, Jimmy Kimmel.
Zack Sharf Digital News Director Donald Trump is keeping his Oscars feud with Jimmy Kimmel alive with a new post on Truth Social in which the former president once again slammed Kimmel for being a “horrendous” Academy Awards host. Trump then mixed up Kimmel with this year’s best picture presenter, Al Pacino.
Delivering a keynote address at the Human Rights Campaign’s Equality in Action event Friday, First lady Jill Biden warned former President Donald Trump is “a bully” who is “dangerous to the LGBTQ community.”
Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov returns to Cannes once again this year with Limonov: The Ballad starring Ben Whishaw, for which we can share a first-look image from above.
The 2024 Cannes Film Festival was unveiled this morning, meaning there will be many first looks at some of the year’s most anticipated films. The most notable of the day is a first-look image of Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as his legal enforcer Roy Cohn in Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice.” Screening in competition at Cannes, “The Apprentice,” is a dive into the underbelly of the American empire.
Immediately off the back of its inclusion in the Cannes competition line-up, Ali Abbasi‘s The Apprentice has dropped a first look of Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn.
Among those looking to experience the magic of the solar system were celebrities, who happily took to social media to share their experiences.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The People’s Joker,” a scandalous IP-on-acid coming-out comic-book psychodrama, is a movie that has all the earmarks of an underground/ midnight/guerrilla-cinema sensation. Vera Drew, who directed and co-wrote it, plays the title character, a mentally fractured aspiring stand-up comedian who bills herself as Joker the Harlequin.
streaming on Netflix, exposing the racy, sexed-up exploits of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda to a new generation — many of whom weren’t even born when the series premiered in 1998 or when it ended in 2004.And I’m not sure all of my fellow Zoomers are ready to time-travel back to an age when seemingly no one batted an eye at cultural appropriation or gay jokes. Let alone a character casually admiring Donald Trump.But the future president is name-dropped right in the series premiere, as Samanthadescribes Carrie’s main love interest, Mr.
Fire away.Before Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States, he was the host of a little show called “The Apprentice.”The NBC business-competition show ran for 15 seasons, with the entrepreneur helming the round table from 2004 until 2017.Trump left the show in 2015 so he could focus on his presidential campaign — a race he won a year later. In author Ramin Setoodeh’s forthcoming book, “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass,” Trump reveals that he wanted his daughter Ivanka Trump to sub in for him on the show.
promoting his Prime Video show “American Rust: Broken Justice,” in which he stars as a small town cop. “I remember when – I think it was the start of Season 3 – we started with the Boston Marathon,” he said. “We were shooting that in November.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s War on Democracy” is the scariest film I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a documentary that explores the rise of Christian Nationalism, and much of what it shows you, about the mutation of the Christian Right into a movement that has openly abandoned any loyalty to democracy, has been covered in the mass media in recent years.
Jon Stewart started off The Daily Show by calling out news networks for their reaction to the video Donald Trump shared that showed an A.I. image of Joe Biden tied up.
2 Live Crew rapper Luther Campbell is planning to run for Congress to rep his home state of Florida — accompanied by a flashy documentary film to chronicle his challenge to the Washington establishment, The Post can confirm.Campbell, 63, the frontman of the hip-hop legends whose 1989 album “As Nasty As They Wanna Be” was the center of a landmark obscenity case, told Page Six last week that he was plotting a run for federal office.“I’m gonna make an announcement in a couple of weeks,” he said. “I think I have a great chance of winning.”Campbell, also known as “Uncle Luke,” officially launched a political committee in January to explore unseating incumbent Rep.
Brent Lang Executive Editor “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is looking mighty as it heads into its opening weekend, earning an impressive $10 million in Thursday previews. The muscular results come despite the fact that the film suffered meh reviews — critics faulted the latest clash of the primordial beasts for hectic pacing and overstuffed plotting. Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, for instance, dismissed the film as “overly busy boilerplate” (though he liked the finale).
Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Magnolia Pictures has released a trailer ahead of the May 3 release of “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg,” about the legendary muse to the Rolling Stones. Scarlett Johansson provides the voice for Pallenberg, based on the words of her unpublished memoir.