Playboy Entertainment – Spoken Edition

Arriving in theaters on a crest of post-SXSW Film Festival love, A Quiet Place is a tense, jangly new monster movie directed by John Krasinski that has plenty going for it–just not quite as much as some hyperventilating festival types might lead one to expect.

“It’s so sexy, the work you do,” diplomat Claude Lambert (Guy Burnet) leers at bad-guy, black-clad super-spy Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons) in episode 3 of the sci-fi spy series Counterpart. Lambert’s comment is half lascivious, half ironic, but it’s also true. Lambert envies and desires Howard Silk because everyone envies and desires spies.

The fall of the Soviet Union in the early ‘90s had unexpected consequences. One of them was a surplus of ex-military supplies, weapons and vehicles suddenly flushing the black market. In other words, there was a potential gold mine to be had in Russia, if you were brave enough to go there and get it. This idea occurred to two Miami wannabe criminal masterminds. One was Tarzan (real name: Ludwig Fainberg), a flamboyant, husky Russian who’d lived in the U.S.

Director Guillermo del Toro was way off his mark with Pacific Rim, a moderate hit in the U.S. but a monster hit throughout Asia. So, like it or not, we’re now stuck with Pacific Rim Uprising, an earthlings-vs.-monster/robots sequel produced by del Toro but directed by Steven S. DeKnight (Netflix’s Daredevil).

If the carefully made, earnest, well-acted and politically charged drama The Post exemplified the grown-up Steven Spielberg, then his new science-fiction action flick, Ready Player One, released just months after, is the jazzy, flashy, tripped-out, super-caffeinated kid version of the director many of us grew up loving, and many subsequent directors grew of aping.

RuPaul’s Drag Race, a televised competition that started in 2009, gained a devoted cult following and is having its season 10 premiere tonight, is arguably the best reality show that straight men aren’t watching yet. For those unfamiliar, the show follows (usually) 11 nationally renowned drag queens in pursuit of the title of next drag superstar, crowned by none other than drag royalty and routine pun-abuser RuPaul.

A $17 million opening weekend is chump change in the Marvelverse, but it’s big bucks for an unheralded movie with a budget under half that amount. Even Variety seemed caught off guard when I Can Only Imagine was outdone in this weekend’s ticket sales only by Black Panther and Tomb Raider, with a per-screen average much higher than either Wakanda’s ongoing bid to monopolize America’s moviegoing attention forever or Lara Croft’s return to the multiplex hunger games.

In season 2 of Jessica Jones, the main “villain” is Jessica’s mom, Alisa (Janet McTeer), who is somewhat stronger than the superpowered Jessica, and has anger-management issues. In other words, the central conflict of the 13-episode Netflix series would evaporate if Jessica (Krysten Ritter) just pulled out her cell phone and called crosstown to Luke Cage for some invulnerable superpowered backup. (This story contains spoilers for season 2.

Alfred Hitchcock once mused, “If the dead were to come back, what on earth would we do with them?” We could always call them Tomb Raider. Seventeen years ago, Angelina Jolie starred as sharp, sexy, pistol-packing tomb raider (and boobalicious gamer sex icon) Lara Croft in a movie version of the video game franchise. That PG-13 epic–aside from its famous, utterly gratuitous Jolie shower scene—wasn’t up to much. But these days, everything old is new again.

A whole generation of Americans has been born and grown to adulthood since O.J. Simpson’s arrest on a murder rap in 1994. But even so, when President Trump’s former flunky Sam Nunberg had his famous cable-news meltdown last week, D.C.’s media wags could call Nunberg’s whack-a-mole act “the Bronco chase” and be sure most people would get the joke.

Barring an envelope snafu so unholy it makes last year’s Moonlight/La La Land mix-up look rehearsed, we already know which highly praised and very popular big-screen lollapalooza of 2017 won’t win the Best Picture Oscar. The director who helmed it won’t take home a statuette on Sunday night, either. That’s because neither the movie nor its director are even in contention.

No one ever said it was going to be easy making a movie out of Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved, idea-crammed and visionary 1962 Newbery Medal-winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Adapting such rich material—equal parts science-fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, political/religious tract, parable of good vs. evil, and coming-of-age story—clearly proved to be, in the language of L’Engle’s novel, dark and stormy.

Patrick Heusinger is a 37-year-old actor who spent a decade in New York and the last decade in Hollywood, not becoming a household name. He has an IMDb page full of one-episode guest spots on 30 Rock and Bones. He was on four episodes of Gossip Girl that aired when George W. Bush was president. He’s played a robot in a failed pilot—twice. He’s like hundreds of actors who bounce from TV jobs to indie films to plays like balls on a roulette wheel, hoping something will hit.

Scottish actress Pollyanna McIntosh plays Jadis as a strange, enigmatic presence on The Walking Dead. She speaks in Yoda-like haikus, wears a Rhythm Nation-style getup and paints in her spare time. On Sunday night, she came more fully into her own in “The Lost and the Plunders,” the most Jadis-centric episode to date. (Major spoilers ahead.

Pro tip: For maximum enjoyment, watch Red Sparrow for the movie it is, instead of the movie you wanted it to be. The new spy thriller based on the first entry from former CIA operative Jason Matthews’ best-selling trilogy of dark, sexually charged novels, stars Jennifer Lawrence as Dominika, a Russian ex-Bolshoi ballerina with an ailing mother (Jolie Richardson) in need of medical care.

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Netflix’s half-hour dramedy Everything Sucks! is woke nostalgia. The series overlays post-millennial sensibilities about race, sexuality and storytelling onto a 1990s world of rotary phones and mail-order CDs. It’s goofy enough to name a kid Scott Pocket, and earnest enough to stage an impromptu death-by-corn dog performance of Uncle Vanya in the cafeteria. The result is a warm, thoughtful take on coming of age in the ’90s.

The famous East Coast-West Coast hip-hop beef in the ‘90s had been going on a while, but it entered the public stratosphere in 1995 at the Source Awards when Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight famously took a very public dig at Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, during his televised acceptance speech for the Above the Rim soundtrack. The jab was met with a room full of boos from the New York crowd.

Annihilation should really be called Assimilation. First of all, the mysterious, alien Area X, located somewhere in the United States, isn’t bent on killing all Earth life as it expands. Instead, it absorbs and changes alligators, plants, humans, making everything into its own image. Area X isn’t a Death Star—it’s a vast, weird, DNA-warping melting pot. Beyond that, though, the film should be known as Assimilation because it engages in whitewashing.

Game Night is one of those comedies that have been cast with terrific, fast-on-their-feet actors who seem a good 10 years older and smarter than the pop culture-obsessed, weirdly developmentally stunted characters they’re playing. In other words, this movie—from Vacation directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein—sits squarely in the tradition of sitcoms past and present that include Friends, How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory.

Otherworldly beauty and stomach-knotting horror walk hand-in-hand in Annihilation, the stunning, nerve-jangling, ambitious and nightmarish science-fiction thriller, one of the best and most ambitious genre movies to come along since Ex Machina. Both of those films were written and directed by Alex Garland, who hereby establishes himself as one our era’s great and most provocative filmmakers.

Berlin in the 1920s was the seed of every sexual revolution that’s rocked our world since then, from the mainstreaming of uncloseted gay life to badass women acting out a newly liberated, free-spirit autonomy. Even 90 years later, fashion designers, nightlife impresarios, boho arts buffs and erotic extremists of every variety still mimic its style.

Those of us allergic to pre-release hype know that the publicity machine is strong with Marvel’s Black Panther. For a solid year now, the buzz has now verged on deafening, and the movie’s record-smashing pre-ticket sales keep cranking up the anticipation. We all know that we’ve been here before and let down, though.

As Super Bowl Sunday dawned, America woke up to dire news: Pink had the flu. “I’ve arrived at another one of my dreams which is slowly becoming a sort of nightmare,” everybody’s favorite coiffed diva posted on Instagram. Rehearsals for her rendition of the National Anthem at U.S. Bank Stadium had apparently ended up mainly celebrating the land of the Vicks and the home of the Sudafed.

How about a break from superheroes, franchises, gunplay and things that are instantly forgettable? A Fantastic Woman—from the fine Chilean director Sebastian Lelio (Gloria) and a nominee for the best foreign film Oscar—is very, very good. In fact, it’s … well … fantastic.

There’s genuine beauty, complexity and power on display in the melancholic new Western epic Hostiles, starring Christian Bale. It’s scripted and directed by Scott Cooper, who earlier made Out of the Furnace with Bale and Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges. Deadly serious and earnest, set in the American West in 1892 and adapted from an unpublished manuscript by screenwriter Donald E.

In an era of unlimited TV, the new TNT crime drama The Alienist understands it has limited time to get your attention. Within the first minute of the series, a title card explains that an alienist was a 19th-century expert who studied mental illness, a police officer discovers a severed hand in the street, and a drop of blood lands on the officer’s face from above. The alienist in The Alienist is Dr.

It’s January, and that means the pickings at the local multiplex are among the leanest and least ambitious of the year. Enter—loud, blustery, rousing, paper-thin—12 Strong. Excitingly directed by newcomer Nicolai Fuglsig (Exfil) and based on Doug Stanton’s harrowing non-fiction bestseller 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers, the movie version is a yay-us (or yay-U.S.), Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, post-9/11 rabble-rouser and flag-waver.

This story appears in the January/February 2018 issue of Playboy. Subscribe “People don’t want to be in a cult; they want to be in a movement,” says Aaron Paul, star of the Hulu original series The Path. Paul plays Eddie Lane, a charismatic everyman who just may be extraordinary.

The three B-grade action flicks churned out in the past few years by star Liam Neeson and crafty, highly efficient Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra hum along with a weirdly likable, slick, machine-tooled efficiency. The duo’s newest is pretty much more of the same, only it’s sillier, less impactful and altogether worse for its lack of aspiration. The utterly unconvincing action thriller The Commuter could just as well have been called Unknown, Non-Stop or Run All Night.