‘The Swimmers’ Review: Hope Floats in This Mostly True Story of Refugee Sisters From Syria

we pay a flippin’ fortune to be stuck inside a dingy remake of “Death Wish” that’s actually far freakier than most of the camp antics “AHS” creator Ryan Murphy has ever dreamt up.Jessica Lange as a mental patient singing “The Name Game”; Kathy Bates chewing scenery as the severed head of a New Orleans witch; Sarah Paulson shrieking on election night 2016 as she watches the news — cute, fun, silly.Compared to previous seasons “Asylum” and “Coven,” New York is a hellhole — five boroughs in the nine circles where major crime has soared 36% and one rotting onion costs $2 while an ever-present haze of pot smoke hovers like graveyard fog on “Scooby Doo.” Our city is awash in actual, palpable dread and tourists are afraid to come here. We should change the famous lyric to “Start spreading the mace!” Indeed, there’s enough material in our foul city for an entire “AHS” spin-off series. Random subway shovings have become so common that the city is planning to install plastic dividers on some platforms, and the uptick in underground incidents has spurred Gov.

Jeffrey Dahmer is a hit for Netflix and for Ryan Murphy.

There are lots of rumors floating around about the 11th season of American Horror Story and it appears as if we now have a potential title, premiere date, and better idea of the cast involved!

Sarah Paulson is set to play Gwen Shamblin, the founder of a diet program Weigh Down Workshop and Remnant Fellowship, in a scripted version of the investigative docuseries, The Way Down.

Kate Aurthur editor Sarah Paulson is no stranger to playing real people: Among other roles, she won an Emmy award for her portrayal of Marcia Clark in 2016’s “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” and was recently nominated for an Emmy for “Impeachment: American Crime Story” for playing Linda Tripp. Now, Paulson is attached to star and executive produce the scripted adaptation of “The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin,”  which HBO Max is developing from its own five-part docuseries. Michelle Dean, who was the co-creator of the 2019 Hulu limited series “The Act,” is the showrunner of the scripted adaptation. HBO Max dropped the first three episodes of Marina Zenovich’s investigative docuseries “The Way Down” on Sept. 30 of last year. It detailed Gwen Shamblin Lara’s rise from being a diet guru with her Weigh Down Workshop (launched in 1986) to the founding of her Tennessee church, Remnant Fellowship, in 1999. According to ex-congregants and diet followers featured in “The Way Down,” Shamblin Lara exerted unwelcome, cult-leader-like control over their lives.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The story of Alexis Haines’ entanglement with a circle of Los Angeles-area home invaders has been told multiple times over: In the reporting of Nancy Jo Sales, who profiled her for Vanity Fair in 2010; on her own reality show, “Pretty Wild,” which aired on E! in 2010; and in Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring,” based on Sales’ work. Now, Haines (formerly Alexis Neiers), along with former associate Nick Norgo (formerly Nick Prugo), attempts to set the record straight in the Netflix documentary series “The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist.” The three-episode series sheds little light, and bulks out its running time with idle musings on fame that feel warmed over from the early 2010s. It’s not that Haines’ and Norgo’s stories, told with both respective parties’ permission in this doc, don’t have inherent interest: Both of them became entranced by the concept of celebrity and, as part of the “bling ring” cabal, stole cash and belongings from the homes of famous people, including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom. (One of their victims, “The Hills” personality Audrina Patridge, speaks to the camera for “The Real Bling Ring.”)

Evan Peters has played many characters on American Horror Story. From a ghost in a murder house to a murderous spirit in a hotel to a frat boy zombie, he has had his fair share of scary and disturbing characters. But his latest project ,Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, may provide his scariest role yet.

Former Geordie Shore star Aaron Chalmers has revealed his heartbreak as his baby son, Oakley, is back in hospital. His son has suffered with difficulties since his birth last month and Aaron, 35, has been open about his baby boy's condition on Instagram.

EXCLUSIVE: Foundation Media Partners has secured exclusive book, film and documentary rights to the life story of Terry Watanabe, the notorious gambling addict who made history as Las Vegas’ biggest ever whale, losing over $200 million in a single year after gambling an unprecedented $825 million.

Richard Kuipers Romantic comedies have never gone away, but mainstream examples with A-list stars have been pretty thin on the ground since the glory days of the ’90s and early 2000s, when “Pretty Woman,” “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” ruled at the box office. Bucking the trend is “Ticket to Paradise,” a glossy piece of fluff starring Hollywood royalty Julia Roberts and George Clooney as a divorced couple whose passion reignites in Bali during their hare-brained attempt to prevent their daughter from marrying a guy she’s only just met. While far from a classic of its kind, this is likely to be just the “Ticket” for general viewers relishing the chance to watch Roberts and Clooney trade poisonous barbs, before being struck by Cupid’s arrow all over again.  

Sarah Paulson gets support from Holland Taylor on the red carpet at the 2022 Emmy Awards on Monday night (September 12) at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.

Some Bravolebrities branch out while looking for sparring partners! Jennifer Lawrence, Sofia Vergara and 50 Cent are among the stars who have found themselves in public fights with Bravo stars over the years.

EXCLUSIVE: Five days before filmmaker Sally El Hosaini (My Brother the Devil) was ready to declare “Action, background action” on the set of The Swimmers, the film fell apart due to the pandemic. “We just thought it was curtains for the film, which was heartbreaking,” the director recalled. “It just came to a halt, and there could be no promises of anything for anyone.”

Manal Issa and Nathalie Issa, real life sisters who play a pair of Olympic swimming hopefuls, also sisters, said they weren’t at all aquatic when cast in the Sally El Hosaini film ‘The Swimmers’ that opened TIFF last night.

“The Swimmers” is inspired by the true story of teenage Olympic athlete and Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini who, in 2015, along with her sister Sara and two others, dragged a boat full of fellow refugees across the Aegean sea. After the girls made it to Germany, Yusra was selected along with ten others to compete with the Refugee Olympic Team at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.

Netflix has a number of high-profile movies coming to the Toronto  Film Festival, just as it did at Venice and Telluride, but a less heralded title with no instantly recognizable star names was chosen to open the fest tonight, and The Swimmers may turn out to be a surprise winner for the streamer when it debuts this fall. It certainly reverses the curse of some of TIFF’s less successful opening-nighters.

The last decade has seen a plethora of movies about the crisis in Syria, most of them hard-hitting documentaries tracking the brutal effects of the war and the plight of those who’ve left and those who’ve stayed. At the same time, there’s never been a shortage of inspirational sports films where plucky athletes overcome obstacles to realize their dreams.But “The Swimmers,” which opened the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday, is a rare mixture of the two: It’s an inspirational sports movie about a pair of Syrian swimmers, sisters Yusra and Sara Mardini, who fled from their home in Damascus during the Syrian civil war in 2015 to Europe, where they might have a chance to advance their athletic careers and swim in the 2016 Olympic Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.TIFF has opened with sports movies in the past, though you might be forgiven for forgetting about the festival’s 2010 opener, “Score: A Hockey Musical,” or 2017’s “Borg/McEnroe,” with Shia LaBeouf perhaps typecast as the petulant John McEnroe. At any rate, “The Swimmers” is more substantial than either of those films.

It’s a tale almost too astonishing to believe: two sisters flee their war-torn country and save sixteen other people’s lives through their champion swimming skills. But it’s the true story of Olympic swimmer Yusra Mardini and her sister Sara and the basis for “The Swimmers,” set for its world premiere as the opening film at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.

Lily Moayeri About six weeks ago, locals and visitors to the famed intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street saw one of the bare walls in the area begin to show some shapes and colors. Over on Instagram, posing at the same spot, Los Angeles urban pop artist Tristan Eaton wrote on July 17, “My dream wall is finally happening!” On Aug. 25, the six-story mural, which adorns the south-facing side of the Aster club and hotel, had its official reveal in a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The mural was created with spray paint and executed in Eaton’s signature collage style, which mixes pop art and traditional techniques. It’s a salute to Hollywood groundbreakers such as Judy Garland and Sidney Poitier, whose likenesses are the largest figurative elements of the work. Garland’s daughter, Lorna Luft, and granddaughter, Vanessa Richards, were among the guests who attended the ribbon-cutting.