A funny thing happened on the way to the box office for Gods of Egypt, Lionsgate's pricey fantasy about epic discord among ancient deities. A full three months ahead of release, both the studio and director Alex Proyas stood up and essentially apologized in advance for what audiences were going to see once the film opened. The motive for their mea culpa? Despite being set in ancient Egypt (which, yes, is in the continent of Africa), it had been cast, damn near top to bottom, with Australian, Swedish, English, and French actors.
John Hillcoat has built a career out of vivisecting archetypal models of masculinity. His films are all spiritual Westerns set just about anywhere other than the sun-scorched American frontier, sweat-stained epics of rough-and-tumble outlaws in dire straits. They radiate a very precise kind of low, rumbling intensity that's occasionally punctuated - and accentuated - by ruthless explosions of ultraviolence so shockingly brutal as to induce whiplash.
Showtime's House of Lies is coming back for a fifth go-round this spring, and ahead of the season's debut in April, the network has unveiled a predictably brisk, fast-talking trailer along with new key art.
Disney has released another TV spot for The Jungle Book, the studio's big-budget take on the Rudyard Kipling classic, playing up the photo-realistic animals and tremendously absorbing sense of place on display in the spring tentpole.
Deadpool, once the little superhero movie that could, has rocketed past all expectations at the box office to become a bona fide juggernaut, and it maintained momentum in its second weekend, pulling in another $55 million to blast its domestic haul past $200 million.
Though The Strangers successfully scared the hell out of audiences (and put director Bryan Bertino on the map), a sequel has yet to materialize, and it seems like every time buzz about one starts to build, it's undercut a little while later.
To say last year's Spectre was a let-down would be a colossal understatement. With its bloated runtime, boring villain, and bizarrely tangled mythology, it was James Bond repurposed for the Marvel age, a film that wanted to honor its heritage while scribbling haphazardly over it. Viewers cried foul, and rightly so - the film inexplicably missed everything appealing about the Bond character.
Another Hollywood A-lister is making the jump to the small screen, with word today that Amy Adams has signed on to star in a TV adaptation of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects.
BBC America often functions as a catch-all for any and all British series seeking U.S. distribution, but that's rarely as apparent as it is with the arrival of Prey, a wholly derivative but solidly delivered slice of serialized storytelling that's not a six-part thriller so much as two three-part seasons jammed together for broadcast purposes.
In what can only be described as a great bit of news for cinephiles, famed composer Ennio Morricone, who contributed a phenomenal (and Oscar-nominated) score to Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, is already planning to reteam with the director on his next feature.
