‘The Lazarus Project’ TV Review: Joe Barton’s Clever Sci-Fi Import Puts A New Spin On An Old Concept

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Some people only get one chance to run CNN. Amy Entelis is about to embark on her second. The veteran news executive was one of three who took the reins at the Warner Bros. Discovery news outlet when Jeff Zucker, the previous chief, was forced out in February of last year after acknowledging a romantic relationship with Allison Gollust, once CNN’s chief marketing officer. Now Entelis will be part of a new trio leading the news giant after the Wednesday departure of former CEO Chris Licht. The challenges facing CNN have not diminished. Entelis will guide CNN’s news operations along with Virginia Moseley, recently named to oversee editorial operations, and Eric Sherling, recently appointed head of U.S. programming. David Leavy, a longtime Zaslav lieutenant who was named chief operating officer at CNN last week, will oversee business activities. The entire group must keep CNN moving forward as the 2024 presidential election cycle draws near, even as the outlet’s ratings have fallen and its staff has been buffeted by job cuts, programming changes and a seemingly endless cycle of senior executives coming and going.

Fixer To Fabulous is going global!

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’ve ever wondered when it was that Michel Gondry, the gifted French director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” became the world’s most annoying filmmaker, you might say the answer is, “He always was.” Yet no one, including me, quite thinks of him that way. That’s because the few works of his that have come to prominence possess a special combination of facility and charm. I adore “Eternal Sunshine,” a virtuoso movie that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time. You might simply choose to characterize it as the masterpiece of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, but the truth is that Gondry directed it ­— the leaps in time, the emotionally convulsive performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet — with a masterful sense of play and gravitational control.

“I May Destroy You,” takes the time-traveling route in “The Lazarus Project” on TNT.Essiedu plays George, who wakes up one morning to find that he’s seemingly repeating a day that happened six months ago yet nobody else seems to notice. He thinks he’s losing his grip on reality until he learns about a top-secret international organization called The Lazarus Project that uses time travel to stop mass-extinction events. (He’s told that the world has already ended several times, including once in the ’60s when Russia and America launched nuclear warheads at each other — but The Lazarus Project was able to undo it). Essiedu, 32, said he enjoys series in which time travel plays a main role.“I loved ‘Russian Doll.’ I haven’t watched the second [season] yet but I thought the first one was brilliant,” he told The Post. “‘Back to the Future’ is a classic.

Dierks Bentley!The country music superstar — who is gearing up to hit the road for his tour — tells ET that he's been asked if he wants to cross over into the world of acting on TV or reality competition, but decided that he's cool with staying in his lane.«I don't think I'd be good enough to doing those things,» the «Drunk on a Plane» singer tells ET's Rachel Smith. «It requires, like, more time away from home and I just, I don't want to. I had a chance to audition for Larry David and I decided not to do it.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “It’s been about 25 years since I stood on this stage,” since Shania Twain, not long after the kickoff to her set Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl. She had that figured about right — the calendar shows she last played America’s most favored amphitheater on May 6, 1999. That was a few weeks shy of the moment that her signature song among all signature songs, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” peaked on the charts. When she pulled it out as her inevitable final encore number Saturday, it still felt like it was cresting. It’s a song that may never have truly peaked until all the generations represented at the Bowl this Memorial Day weekend have passed away and/or the day the prerogative to have a little fun has been codified into the criminal as a felony. For as long as there are women, and gay men, and straight men relaxed with themselves enough to buy “Let’s go, girls” T-shirt and diode-blinking pink cowboy hats, Twain will own rights to the ultimate ladies’ night anthem, just as surely as she owns the federal trademark on exclamation points. (She does, doesn’t she?)

The Ultimatum: Queer Love (★★★★☆) is the latest in Netflix’s line of reality dating shows. This one is not hosted by Nick Lachey, but JoAnna Garcia Swisher, who is immediately clocked for being straight, and truthfully isn’t around that much.

Bicep and Moderat.The two acts will play at Repercussion on Saturday September 16, where Bicep will present their audiovisual DJ set ‘Chroma’. They and Moderat will be joined on that bill by an additional 44 acts including Jon Hopkins, Kerri Chandler, TSHA, Joy Orbison and Eliza Rose.Meanwhile, Hybrid Minds and Wilkinson will co-headline a collaborative event put on by Metropolis and Worried About Henry.

Midnights—might have hinted at the reasons behind her split from Joe Alwyn, Us Weekly reports. Swift and Alwyn broke up last month after six years together, and Swift has seemingly already moved on with fellow singer Matty Healy.

As an accomplished songwriter and artist, Taylor Swift looks to her life for inspiration sometimes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that she’s sung about her relationship with Joe Alwyn.

Dennis Harvey Film Critic Released to theaters in the theatrical dog days of mid-2020, Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion’s “Becky” became a home-formats hit, its gleefully tasteless home-invasion thrills a guilty-pleasure tonic for COVID captives going a bit stir-crazy. Now Lulu Wilson is back as that title character, more or less the sole survivor of her prior screen outing. You can be sure in “The Wrath of Becky” that age hasn’t dulled her pissed-off homicidal verve, and that fate will surely provide another crop of ne’er-do-wells to tempt its exercise.  However, a different writing-directing duo is in charge this time, Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote. Their efforts generate rewards that are somewhat diminished, if still diverting. Quiver is releases this SXSW-premiered sequel to U.S. theaters, with home-formats dates as yet unannounced. 

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about cooking as a form of care, an idea intrinsically linked to the feminist revaluation of the work usually performed by women, which is most often unremunerated yet essential to day-to-day living.

Guy Lodge Film Critic All of life, including death, is in the lengthy, unbroken shot that opens Thien An Pham’s bewitching debut feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” We begin on the sidelines of a local soccer match in Saigon’s city center, observing the play from a cool distance before following a shuffling mascot, dressed in a wolf suit, to the adjoining bar. There, crowds watch a 2018 World Cup fixture while a group of young men, turned from the TV, drink and discuss matters of faith, existence and ennui. Thien (Le Phong Vu) is quiet and morose, only half-invested in a conversation already beset with distractions: the sales pitch of a bubbly beer rep, the burst of a sudden summer thunderstorm, a metallic screech and grim thump as the camera again drifts serenely over to reveal the aftermath of a fatal motorcycle crash. In the ensuing rhubarb of bystander concern, Thien stays put.

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers from the series finale of The CW’s The Flash.

Cordon bleu is the warmest color in Tràn Anh Hùng’s long but surprisingly light soufflé of a movie, a highly watchable Aga saga that’s so artful, charming and non-boat-rockingly old-school that it might make you wonder, even in a non-ironic way, what Lasse Hallström has been up to lately. In Cannes film festivals gone by, it could arguably have provoked the bidding war of the fortnight, given the track record of such foodie faves as Le Grand Bouffe, Babette’s Feast and Eat Drink Man Woman, which also debuted on the Croisette. But that’s faint praise for a story that, although it’s almost all about fillings, trimmings and toppings, doesn’t seem to have that much content or, more importantly, depth.

#TheFlashMovie pic.twitter.com/Eadn1lVYcQAlfred Pennyworth is played by English actor Jeremy Irons, who previously played the character in the films “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Justice League.” Irons brought his own spin to the iconic character, portraying Alfred as a hero with a small “h.” “Alfred’s not a superhero, but in some small, retiring way, I think he could be regarded with a small ‘h’ as a bit of a hero,” Irons previously told Screenrant. “I think he’s a good calming influence, he’s a good advisor.

Michel Gondry’s new film “The Book of Solutions,” playing in Directors’ Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on the torturous life of being a creative filmmaker and begins at the heart of the matter: Marcc(Pierre Niney) is in a meeting with the producers of his new film, and they are unhappy with what he has delivered them. They’re ending the shoot, putting a new editor in charge to salvage what is already there, and his producing partner of many years finally turns his back on him.

Catherine Bray A Jewish thirtysomething, Ann (Joanna Arnow) has never been in a conventional relationship. She engages in submissive sexual relationships with “sexfriends” and seems dimly uneasy that the most longstanding of these, with Allen (Scott Cohen), is now clocking in at around a decade, with neither one of them knowing very much about the other. She asks him about himself; it turns out he’s a Zionist. She rolls away from him. The anthropologist David Graeber has analyzed the harm caused to society and individuals by the existence of meaningless so-called “bullshit jobs.” Ann is employed in a classic example of one of these: the objectives are hazy, the prospects limited; she is given an award for having worked in her office for one year and has to tell them it’s actually been over three years — and perhaps even worse, she has to go to meetings and listen to Boomers say things like, “the iPhone was invented.”

The title of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest refers to how the Germans labeled the 40-square-kilometer area that surrounded the Auschwitz concentration camp on the outskirts of Oświęcim, Poland. This is where the writer-director has set this unique Holocaust film with a perspective and focus on what was on the other side of a wall separating the most horrific mass murder and terror in human history, and the daily, almost bucolic lives of those who caused it or were in complete denial of it. Yes, Holocaust movies are virtually a genre of their own, but I can safely say I have never seen one, sans any visuals of violence and suffering, that still manages to be just as harrowing and frightening, maybe even more. The Zone of Interest takes its place among the great films made on the Holocaust and will probably haunt you long after seeing it.

first reactions on social media were more positive. Per usual for Cannes premieres it did receive ovations, but they were reserved for Harrison Ford himself rather than the James Mangold-directed film.