‘The Graduates’ Review: School Shooting Drama Lacks Depth

Lisa Kennedy Fashionista Jenna Jones (Gabrielle Union) took quite the tumble from her position in New York’s world of style. In “The Perfect Find” — Netflix’s visually vibrant, cinema-loving, if not quite perfect, rom-com — her professional and romantic plummet is documented in opening credits that cleverly use an animated collage to relate her story. So, when we meet Jenna in person ,she’s without a job, and her man (D.B. Woodside) of 10 years has moved on … or so it seems. The 40-year-old is sporting baggy sweats, and not because she’s headed to the gym. She’s been living in her parents’ home licking her wounds, for a year, when her mother calls her out on it. The scene between mother (Janet Hubert) and grown-ass daughter is amusing and promising. As are the musical and visual choices director Numa Perrier makes that evoke Old Hollywood in a film with characters decidedly not Old Hollywood.

David Benedict “What was I thinking when I made this deal?” So sings Holly Martins (Sam Underwood) towards the end of the new musical adaptation of “The Third Man.” Indeed. As it turns out, the mystery at the heart of the show is not the expected “Whatever happened to Harry Lime?” – the man of the title – but what possessed a creative team as distinguished as director Trevor Nunn and bookwriter Christopher Hampton to imagine that what Carol Reed’s still-astonishing classic film needed was to be taken offscreen and planted onstage with added songs. The dismaying production provides no answer. The opening is ominous in completely the wrong way. Yes, we’re still in Vienna in 1947 but it feels like a failure to resort to a voice-over to explain necessary information about how, in the wake of the war, the city has been divided up into sectors under the control of warring nations. The storytelling, it’s clear, is going to be bald.

Kelly Clarkson thinks every relationship is a “blessing” even it does turn “sour.”

Alison Herman TV Critic “You can spend all the time in the world in here,” a chef tells his eager protegé as they work in a temple of haute cuisine. “But if you don’t spend enough time out there…” There’s no need for him to finish the sentence. The mentor’s meaning is clear enough: To achieve greatness, you need to expand your horizons. This piece of advice comes close to the halfway point of the second season of “The Bear,” long after the FX half-hour has applied the insight to itself. Last year, the tale of a family-owed Chicago sandwich shop taken over by a prodigal son became a surprise summer hit by staying tightly focused on its central location. Each of its eight episodes unfolded like a stage play, as the staff of the Original Beef of Chicagoland careened through the cramped kitchen, confronting their latest crisis. This M.O. reached its apotheosis in the widely acclaimed penultimate episode, a 20-minute tracking shot that began with the Beef opening itself to online orders and ended with relationships strained to their breaking point.

What better way to come to know a public figure than to discover them in their own words, or, better yet, their own singing voice? Filmmaker Allison Ellwood seems drawn to that notion because she let it guide her as she crafted the smart and sentimental “Let The Canary Sing.” The new documentary is a colorful force of nature underscored by the fierce soundtrack of life, embodying the best parts of its subject in the name of nostalgic exploration. After all, music can tell beautiful stories, and this journey is no exception.“Let The Canary Sing” chronicles the rise of legendary 1980s rock star Cyndi Lauper and the complications that came for her career along the way.

Murtada Elfadl Taking on an expansive topic, the contribution of Black astronauts to the American space program, Lisa Cortés and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s “The Space Race” derives its strength from the specific and detailed stories of its subjects. Spanning almost 60 years of historical narrative and concentrating on a handful of scientists who broke barriers, the National Geographic doc is the type that makes the audience question how they have never heard of these people before. Cortés and de Mendoza interweave archival footage with the testimony of the astronauts in a fast-paced and informative way. Rapidly unraveling the fascinating story, they demand the audience’s attention and reward it. Blink or look away for a second and an interesting factoid might be missed. But their greatest asset proves to be the astronauts themselves. Their recollections are emotional and humorous, going a long way to paint such a captivating narrative. The astronauts talk of the weight of being an example and the challenges of having to navigate both white and Black spaces in order to succeed. Yet most movingly, they talk of the camaraderie born of being together in these hallowed and mostly white spaces.

Jessica Kiang Over the course of his first three features — “Ilo Ilo,” “Wet Season” and this year’s “Drift” — Singaporean director Anthony Chen has developed a signature style. It is a graceful, lucid classicism, a mode that in its straightforward sincerity is not fashionable in our abrasive moment, but can yield significant satisfactions. That is certainly true of his second film of 2023, “The Breaking Ice,” which describes, in a trio of perfectly judged  performances, the burgeoning, momentous and yet fleeting connection between three differently lonely people — a love triangle with rounded, snowdrift corners. Yu Jing-Pin’s lovely photography contrasts wintry wides and warm close-ups, as writer-director Chen carves out three characters against the frozen landscapes of Yanji, a small Chinese town in shouting distance of the North Korean border. This is the current home of Nana (Zhou Dongyu, “Better Days”) an unfulfilled bus-tour guide who switches on her ready smile for her passengers — and switches it off just as quickly when she turns away to massage her cold, cramping feet.

Celebrity. Watch it above.Celebrity, an upcoming Netflix original K-drama series, will follow Seo A-ri (played by Sweet Home‘s Park Gyu-young) as she enters the world of celebrities and the dark side of fame.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you see a documentary about a game-changing pop star, you assume you’re going to get the story of the music, and also a good look at the life, and that there’ll be enough (on both counts) to go around. I was eager to see “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary portrait of Cyndi Lauper, because it’s directed by Alison Ellwood, who made “The Go-Go’s” a few years back, and that movie had everything: the drama, the trauma, the saga of a total pop-music reset, as we watched the Go-Go’s bust down doors that had been too tightly shut for too long. Cyndi Lauper was no less revolutionary a figure, arriving in the early ’80s, along with Madonna, to announce that we were in the midst of a seismic new definition of what it meant to be a female pop star. The definition was: a star who could rule — and change — the world.

Ezra Miller’s erratic behavior that landed the star in court in Hawaii and Vermont in 2022, to the Warner Bros. shakeup in October 2022 that led to James Gunn and Peter Safran taking over the limping DC Studios.Running time: 144 minutes.

Sometimes it feels as though A.I. is already here, given the number of films resembling Garden State that pop up on the festival circuit every year. Robert Schwartzman’s The Good Half is only the latest, and his attempt to out-emo Zach Braff’s legacy film falls disappointingly short, given that his last Tribeca appearance was with the surreal and underrated comedy The Argument (2020), which channeled Charlie Kaufman in the story of a couple whose obsession with a petty fight spirals into absurdity. The Good Half, however, mostly serves as a decent vehicle for Nick Jonas, who seems to making a play to be the new Adam Driver, which is not as far-fetched as it might sound.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Combat veterans, famously, don’t tend to talk much, if at all, about their experiences of war. At least not to civilians, and maybe not even to their closest relatives. Knowing this, those of us who aren’t veterans tend to have ideas about the things they aren’t discussing. Things like violence and fear and the chaos and insanity of battle. That’s surely a part of it, but in a way it’s also the heightened cinematic version, the one we’ve all gotten from war movies. What it leaves out are the torn-up emotions of soldiers, the lifelong imprint left upon them not just by the cataclysm of war but by their relationship with their fellow soldiers — the loyalty and love, the complex code of liberation and guilt at having survived.   

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Big-budget period action film “The Sand Murmurs” is set to start production in China’s remote region of Xinjiang later this month. The film is the tale of a soldier and an enemy nobleman brought together after a once-in-a-century sandstorm. After braving a near-death experience together, the pair find common purpose despite their differences. They also need to work together to find their way out across 800km of desert. The picture is directed by Wu Youyin as an adaptation of his novel of the same title. Wu previously wrote and directed “Till The End of the World,” which released in 2018.

, but if there's one product I'm always down to experiment with, it has to be . Cleansing is my top priority—as someone who has struggled with acne from a young age, I take as many preventative steps as possible to keep my skin clear.

Much of the drama on “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” Season 13 reunion, currently airing on Bravo, has been centered around Luis Ruelas, Teresa Giudice’s new husband. Ruelas bragged that he hired a private investigator, Bo Dietl, to dig up dirt on the other housewives and their husbands.

season 2 will begin to unravel this summer, when creators and Oscar winners Chris Miller and Phil Lord's hit series finally returns to Apple TV+ with new episodes. Following photos released earlier this year, which gave fans the first official look at the new ensemble led by returning stars Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson and Zoë Chao, the streaming platform released a new trailer, offering a closer look at the new murder, the surrounding mystery and lineup of suspects.   «There's a wedding and someone is murdered,» Chao previously told ET about the new installment, teasing that there's «a whole new cast and you get to meet some of my family.» Not only that, but series newcomer Ken Jeong «plays my dad in season 2,» she revealed, adding that with both of them starring on and, «It's very cool that we both got to be in two really cool shows.»As teased in the new footage, season 2 sees Det. Danner (Haddish) helping Aniq (Richardson) and Zoë (Chao) solve another whodunnit after a groom is murdered during a wedding.

McKinley Franklin editor Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson and Zoë Chao are gearing up to solve another murder mystery in the trailer for Season 2 of “The Afterparty” on Apple TV+. After showcasing a refreshing, genre-blending format in Season 1, “The Afterparty” is back for a second season and — you guessed it — someone dies, again. The first season was highly acclaimed, with standout characters like Haddish’s Detective Danner and Richardson’s Aniq quickly catching audiences’ attention.  Season 2 will premiere on Wednesday, June 12, with two brand new episodes, followed by one weekly episode every Wednesday through Sept. 6.

Youth, a K-drama series set in the BTS Universe, has been released.South Korean production company Chorokbaem Media has released the first trailer for its upcoming K-drama series Youth, which was produced in collaboration with BTS’ label HYBE Corporation.The series is set in the BTS Universe, which was first introduced in the boyband’s music videos for their 2015 ‘The Most Beautiful Moment in Life’ albums, and further developed in several later music videos and the 2016 Naver webtoon series Save Me.Youth revolves around a group of seven friends tied together by fate, each with their own secrets and struggles. The characters’ personalities are loosely based upon the members of BTS and their friendship, though their backgrounds and the plot of the series are fictional.The new trailer showcases the friendship between the seven, who live in a cramped apartment, but are content together.

Will Sam Levinson have another HBO success on his hands with The Idol?

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (★★★☆☆).Diehard fans of Spidey comics, games, cartoons, and movies will have a field day trying to spot every iteration of Spider being, gathered from various storylines and product lines, some dating back decades, who pop up here. But there are far too many for our hero, Miles Morales, the bright Brooklyn teen introduced as the new Spider-Man in the 2018 animated Oscar-winner Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, to fully grasp.Miles (Shameik Moore) is still stuck on Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), a fabulous Spider-Woman from another dimension, who teamed with him and a loosely assembled squad of Spider-friends in the first film to defeat Kingpin and Doctor Octopus, and destroy the villains’ black hole-spawning collider.A masterpiece of style and storytelling, Into the Spider-Verse ended with the sound of Gwen’s voice ringing out from her dimension to contact Miles relaxing in his room.