After the commendable detour that was 2011's The Descendants, Nebraska finds Alexander Payne getting back to the bittersweet road movies he does best. It's been almost a decade since Sideways, and it's fascinating to see how he's evolved as a director. Nebraska is certainly one of the director's finest works to date, and that's in large part because it feels like one of his most personal. Gone are the stylistic flourishes and nutty humorous interludes; instead, Nebraska expertly balances comedy and drama to tell a simple but incredibly potent story of fatherhood, life, death and time's cruel passage. It's sweet, sad and completely indelible.
Today, premium cable channel Showtime announced that it will be ordering additional seasons of its half-hour comedies Shameless and House of Lies. Each show has received a standard 12-episode pick-up, and both are set to return in 2015, Shameless for its fifth season and House of Lies for its fourth.
Last week, we brought you scoop that Sony's upcoming adaptation of R.L. Stine's classic anthology series Goosebumps had landed its female lead, The Giver actress Odeya Rush, and now the Rob Letterman-directed film has cast another major player. Teen actor Dylan Minnette, known for roles in Prisoners, Labor Day and NBC's Awake, will play the adaptation's male protagonist, who teams up with Rush and Jack Black to take on all types of freaky monsters.
Documentaries sometimes get a bad rap from cinephiles, and it's not hard to see why. Everyone remembers the dreadfully dull docs they were forced to sit through in high school, and many of the titles out there today aren't much better. An unfortunate amount are one-sided, deceitful, manipulative and just plain bad. Besides, no one really wants to go out to a theater and get lectured about this or that for an hour and a half. That's not fun, and very few people do it intentionally. However, they aren't all bad. Documentaries done right can be better than your average action thriller. I'd even take the stand that a movie capable of both educating and entertaining its audience is one of the best (and hardest to master) forms of cinema.
Though the Netflix drama on everyone's mind right now is House of Cards, which premiered all thirteen episodes of its second season last Friday to positive reviews, another award-winning show from the streaming giant is already waiting in the wings for its chance in the spotlight. At the end of the final episode of Cards' second season, Netflix teased and revealed the season two premiere date for prison-set dramedy Orange is the New Black, which broke ratings records for Netflix and earned four Writers Guild of America nominations for its first season.
In news that fans of the 2012 musical comedy Pitch Perfect can only describe as aca-awesome, we recently got scoop on the upcoming sequel about both a major cast member who is now confirmed to return and an intriguing plot detail that will definitely shake things up for the Barden Bellas in the second film.
Teen-targeted drama Pretty Little Liars remains a huge ratings success for ABC Family, and it's still one of the most buzzed-about shows on social media four seasons in, but lightning evidently didn't strike twice for the network. After one low-rated season, Pretty Little Liars spinoff Ravenswood has been cancelled.
We've seen competing friends-with-benefits rom-coms (No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits), competing Snow White reimaginings (Mirror Mirror and Snow White & the Huntsman), competing White House-centric action flicks (Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down) and will endure two Hercules movies this year (The Legend of Hercules and Hercules), but the next set of suspiciously similar blockbusters on the docket are even more closely linked than any of those.
One of the most consistently bankable stars in Hollywood, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has dabbled in everything from high-octane action (the Fast & Furious franchise) to family fare (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) to reality television (TNT's The Hero). Now, premium cable channel HBO is getting in on the action by ordering a half-hour comedy called Ballers, which Johnson will both star in and executive-produce.
After impressing audiences and critics alike with supporting performances in The Odd Life of Timothy Green and We Are What We Are, teen actress Odeya Rush has booked Sony's upcoming adaptation of the massively popular R.L. Stine book series Goosebumps.
