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This past weekend saw the much-anticipated release of Jordan Peele’s third film, the tantalizingly named UFO thriller “Nope.” Billed by IndieWire’s chief film critic David Ehrlich as a “thoroughly modern popcorn movie for and about viewers who’ve been inundated with — and addicted to — 21st century visions of real-life terror,” the film follows the Haywood siblings (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) and assorted friends and associates as they deal with the appearance of one very big, very bad extraterrestrial threat....

After winning the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2020, Zendaya landed a second Emmy nomination this year for her turn as Rue in the Sam Levinson-helmed hit HBO series “Euphoria.” Zendaya is the youngest two-time Emmy acting nominee at age 25. She previously was the youngest winner in 2020. The 2022 Emmy Awards will be broadcast live September 12 on NBC while also streaming live on Peacock....

The Western Frontier narrative is one that can’t be told without including the Native American experience, yet it’s a perspective from which these particular stories are rarely expressed, especially in the mainstream. Even the official synopsis for “1883” uses the phrase “the last bastion of untamed America” to describe this final destination. But what does “untamed” mean for the civilization that populated those lands for centuries? It is this lack of consideration that almost singlehandedly renders “1883” disappointing....

“American Horror Stories” is a weekly anthology series that will feature a different horror story each episode. The cast for the spin-off includes Kevin McHale (“Glee”), Dyllón Burnside (“Pose”), Charles Melton (“Riverdale”), and Nico Greetham (“The Prom”). Deadline reported on June 3 that Danny Trejo had also been cast in the series. The show is executive produced by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, Alexis Martin Woodall, John J. Gray, and Manny Coto and is produced by 20th Television....

Jenny Popplewell’s slickly made “American Murder: The Family Next Door” only spends a few minutes analyzing those awful days when people and pundits took to TV and the internet to announce that Shan’ann deserved to be killed, but her true-crime documentary also hinges on the same information so many used against her. An impeccably produced look at a heinous crime, Popplewell’s documentary meticulously weaves together a wealth of information — including body-camera footage from the first cop on the scene, claustrophobic interrogation room setups, and the social-media messages so many armchair sleuths pored over to discredit Shan’ann — that it almost feels too readymade for the film treatment....

Check out this roundup of scenes left out of the movie directed by Jason Woliner, and starring and produced by Sacha Baron Cohen, who reprises his role as the titular Kazakh journalist to rile up all sorts of shenanigans throughout America. Over the years, Sacha Baron Cohen and his collaborators have developed a specific process that involves convincing the film’s subjects to appear on camera. In some cases, participants believe they are actually taking part in a true documentary with Borat at its center; in others, they have no idea they’re in a movie....

Upcoming Netflix action-comedy “Day Shift” stars Foxx as Bud Jablonski, a father trying to navigate the rising cost of living in Los Angeles by taking on a job as a vampire exterminator. Dogg plays Bud’s friend Big John Elliott who is trying to lure Army vet Bud back to the slayers union. Megan Good and Zion Boadnax also star as Bud’s wife and daughter. Karla Souza plays a powerful bloodsucker known as Audrey San Fernando, the valley’s most powerful real estate agent who is pushing the surrounding communities to gentrify aka become home to vampires only....

Blackhurst came to the project knowing little more than Gacy’s name. “[I had] kind of a cursory knowledge of what had transpired in the ’70s. The fact that I knew anything at all came from pop culture, listening to music in the mid-’90s and having seen the way John Gacy[‘s] name had been co-opted by the musician, Marilyn Manson,” he said. When Blackhurst was offered the documentary, he found himself immediately captivated by the work done over nearly a decade by independent journalists Alison True and Tracy Ullman which asserted how Gacy’s crimes had been allowed to continue due to his close relationships with Chicago area bigwigs....

And that’s just it: “Dexter” may have risen to prominence under the auspices of TV’s (second) golden age, but what it leaned on far more than its thematic dissection of man vs. monster, nature vs. nurture, was shocking brutality. The early days of antiheroes coalesced with the medium’s embrace of mature content; on premium cable (then on basic cable and soon enough via streaming), there were curse words, sex scenes, and lots of violence, all of which had been previously reserved for the movies....

Here’s the official synopsis: “A lifetime of making documentaries has convinced award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson of the power of the real. But now she’s ready to use every escapist movie-making trick in the book — staging inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die while hoping that cinema might help her bend time, laugh at pain and keep her father alive forever. The darkly funny and wildly imaginative ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ is a love letter from a daughter to a father, creatively blending fact and fiction to create a celebratory exploration of how movies give us the tools to grapple with life’s profundity....

“When I am enjoying a film I just don’t see editing,” Walker said. “I find over-cutting is just the curse of what I see on television, in particular on streaming shows. It’s just reactions shoehorned in everywhere and fast cutting for no reason. I feel like somebody is dragging me. I feel like I’m being manipulated and I reject that. That’s the worst mistake [in editing], for me.” Walker said over-cutting was also apparent in a recent Academy Award winner for Best Film Editing, adding, “I won’t say who, but there is a film that won an Oscar very recently that had this ridiculous amount of cutting just to show someone sitting down at the table....

Season 2 of “Euphoria” is at odds with itself. Few sections work together. Fewer still stand up on their own. Sam Levinson’s follow-up to his Emmy-winning HBO series can be not-so-cleanly broken down into three components: There’s the harrowing parts, which cover pretty much everything with Rue (Zendaya), from bone-chilling peril (like narrowly escaping a life in the sex trade) to soul-shattering despair (her relapse). Then there’s the soapy stuff, including Nate (Jacob Elordi) and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Maddie (Alexa Demie), who are stuck in a “love” triangle, as well as Jules (Hunter Schafer) and Elliot (Dominic Fike), who are new friends holding damning secrets....

The film begins in JFK airport, as Walter reunites with wife Esther and daughter Sylvia, who’ve made it to the U.S. after long-awaiting their visas in Tanzania. After an awkward reunion where Walter’s now-grown daughter is clearly a stranger to him, he takes them to his cramped one-bedroom New York City apartment, where Sylvia is relegated to the living room. In the years apart, Esther has emerged a pious Christian, following on orders from her pastor to reconnect with her husband in “flesh and spirit....

Romances tend to not last too long in slasher films. There is, after all, a reason why the most consistent survival trope in horror films is “the final girl,” not “the final couple.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. Filmmaker Leigh Janiak gets that, and while her ambitious, time-spanning “Fear Street” trilogy giddily unpacks and twists all manner of horror ideas, finding a new way into a central love story is perhaps its most subversive concept....

An awards contender in multiple categories this season, the film benefits from the synergy between the artistic choices and the thematic substance of the story. Below, key members of the creative team at Sun Creature Studio — animation director Kenneth Ladekjær, art director Jess Nicholls, and character designer Mikkel Sommer — share details on the making of this one-of-a-kind blending of mediums. Designing Anonymity To design the animated iterations of Amin and his family, Sommer and Ladekjær had access to photos of them, but their task entailed balancing faithfulness to their likeness while preserving their anonymity and creating an Afghan family “that feels connected to Amin,” as Ladekjær puts it....

His latest original vision, “Freaky,” isn’t quite up to the charms of “Happy Death,” but it’s still entertaining and smart where it counts. A blood-spattered twist on the “Freaky Friday” mythos that dares ask, “Hey, what if you were a nice high school kid who ended up switching bodies with a psychotic serial killer who looks like Vince Vaughn?,” the film is bolstered by go-for-broke performances from Vaughn and Kathryn Newton, as well as Landon’s sharp humor (and sharper kills)....

“Respectful and compelling” accurately describe the entire documentary, which follows Lee’s tragic life through many iterations. A tremendous miscarriage of justice led to him being incarcerated in 1973 for a murder he did not commit, and that story alone could support its own film. However, Ha and Yi also delve into Lee’s upbringing (the child of a Korean mother and American father, he spent his his early childhood in Korea with extended family before being brought to America by a seemingly unfit father), the myriad ways systems let him down (from schools to assorted detention facilities), and his desire to find a place in the world as a confused young man....

Shot on location in Colombo, Sri Lanka, “Funny Boy” centers on the “awakening of sexual identity by a young boy named Arjie. As political tensions escalate to a boiling point between the minority Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, a young boy comes of age in a society and family that doesn’t embrace difference outside of societal norms. The film chronicles Arjie’s struggle to find balance and self-love despite the absence of empathy and understanding....

In “Gaslit,” as explained by G. Gordon Liddy (a wild-eyed, deeply fragile, yet powerfully mustachioed Shea Whigham), Malum in se is a Latin phrase that means “an act of evil in and of itself” — something easily recognized as wrong, no matter the framework. It works in opposition to “Malum prohibitum,” which speaks to an act that violates the laws of man. Maybe it’s not obviously illegal, but society still deems it as such....

The first trailer for Starz drama series “Gaslit” shows Julia Roberts transformed into Arkansas socialite Martha Mitchell, who publicly accused President Richard Nixon of being behind the Watergate break-in. Martha’s determination to uncover the Watergate conspiracy jeopardizes the career of her husband, Attorney General John Mitchell, played by an unrecognizable Sean Penn. Accused of being “paranoid” as a “woman of a certain age,” the gaslighting only works to light a fire underneath her even more… Premiering April 24 on Starz, “Gaslit” is based on the “insane but shockingly true story” that was featured in a first season episode of Slate’s award-winning podcast “Slow Burn....