‘The Wrath of Becky’ Review: Teenage Rage Finds a Far-Right Target in a Serviceable Sequel

Jordan Moreau SPOILER ALERT: This contains major spoilers about the ending of “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” now playing in theaters. Is this the beginning of the Hasbro Cinematic Universe? After rumors of a crossover between the “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe” franchises circulated online in recent months, it seems like the ultimate ’80s action-toy mash-up is officially happening. The ending of “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” has a direct callout to the Joes, and director Steven Caple Jr. and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura spoke to Variety at the film’s premiere about what to expect next from the series.

Murtada Elfadl How people perceive gender and react to it lies at the heart of “Transition,” Monica Villamizar and Jordan Bryon’s documentary premiering in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film follows Bryon, an Australian journalist, transitioning at the same time that he’s reporting from within Afghanistan as the country falls back under Taliban rule in 2021. His dilemma intensifies as he’s ensconced with a group of hardline Taliban fighters. They only know him as a man, so he’s able to have the access and security he needs to perform his job even as others in the country are losing their rights because of their gender. With that framework, the film feels like a documentation of a timebomb situation. At any moment things might change drastically for Bryon.

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.

The live action Moana adaptation has found its director! – Just Jared Jr Prince William is “trying to woo” the people of Wales – Celebitchy These are the best gifts to get your Little Mermaid obsessed friend – Popsugar Watch the new trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem now! – Just Jared Jr

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.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor In “The Old Oak,” which played in Competition in Cannes, Ken Loach portrays a village in the North-East of England where the indigenous white community comes into conflict with Syrian refugees – a conflict fuelled by the despair, deprivation and decline of the rust-belt region. Such conditions can be a seed-bed for far right groups, the director tells Variety. Such issues have not been explored sufficiently in film and television, Loach says, and he draws a parallel with the portrayal of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the mass media. “We have endless programs about the Second World War, about the horrors of Nazism and fascism, about the racism, about the Holocaust. Quite properly, we have endless programs about that, but what they refuse to point out is that that arose from alienation, anger, feeling cheated, and finding scapegoats. And that’s how we ended up with Hitler, and that’s the ground in which the far right flourishes. One of the points of the film is to say: This is the cause of fascism. This is where it comes from. This is its seed-bed, and it comes as an inevitable consequence of our economic system. Because if the neoliberal agenda was an essential development for capitalism, to use the old-fashioned word, then that’s where fascism comes from. Implicit in that is that the far right will rise because that’s how people will be heading. And they know that and yet the mass media, the press, just turn their backs on that. They’ll tell us all about the horrors of Hitler. Sure. But they won’t tell us how he came to power. And that’s the huge lesson. And we see it in essence now all the time.”

Lulu Wilson is back as the title character in the new movie The Wrath of Becky and we caught up with her amid the film’s release!

Already a big enough hit in the U.K. to earn a second season, anyone who has watched even a few minutes of the NBA Playoffs on TNT has seen the ubiquitous ads for “The Lazarus Project,” premiering June 4th, and probably wondered what the heck is going on.

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.

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.

 is the narrative space where a landed gent and the woman in his employ can exist as equals even for all the love (and occasional nights) they share. We are in France of the 1880s, remember.For all that, “The Pot au Feu” is no tale of forbidden or even unconsummated love, nor is it remotely melodramatic.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the rose-gray light of dawn, Juliette Binoche strides through a verdant kitchen garden, wearing a straw hat as wide and undulating as an ocean wave. She plucks a majestically large, gnarled celeriac from the earth and sniffs it deeply and fondly, as if inhaling mythical ambrosia, and takes it back to the house. This is how Tràn Anh Hùng’s “The Pot au Feu” opens, which is to say on a note of sensory reverence and a hint of kitsch, in knowing thrall to one of the less pretty vegetables in nature’s cornucopia. There are people — this critic included — who will watch this scene and immediately sense with a hungry tingle that the film to come has been made expressly for their palate, and there is everyone else. “The Pot au Feu” is not for everyone else, and that’s just fine.

#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.

Jonathan Glazer’s first directed title in 10 years, The Zone of Interest, shows an aspect of the Holocaust never seen, that from the POV of the Nazis who lived outside the Auschwitz camp, building dream lives of their own.

CANNES – If anyone tells you the world doesn’t need any more films about the holocaust or the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in 2023, we’d suggest you politely correct them. Despite over eighty years of cinema on the subject, there continue to be new stories waiting to be told (and some re-told).

Cannes Film Festival on Friday, Glazer’s disquieting essay-film takes place almost entirely in and around the comfortable, middle-class home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, tackling both the banality and quiet domesticity of evil with eerie formal rigor.Viewed from afar, Rodolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) live an idyllic and unexceptional life. They’re happily married, upwardly mobile strivers, with faith in their government and hope for the future.

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.