Brutally

Forget the actual Oscars. Increasingly, the highlight of awards season is the sudden influx of Anonymous Oscar Ballots, in which actual Oscar voters scurry away to various industry publications to explain why they voted the way they did.To be clear, the fun of these pieces isn’t getting to hear film-making veterans, who intrinsically have more insight into the production of feature films than a member of the public, laud the work that most impressed them this year. No, the fun of it is that these people are cartoonishly…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeA Hollywood star has revealed they are “heartbroken” after being cut from Dune: Part 2.The acclaimed new film from Denis Villeneuve has been released, after months of delay due to the SAG-AFTRA strikes, but one actor who might have expected to see themselves on the screen has been left disappointed.Villeneuve, whose films include Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, was forced to cut the…

You have to go pretty far down the cast list for Fast X before you get to Alan Ritchson’s name. The towering action star stacks up against the likes of John Cena, Jason Momoa and franchise Godfather, Vin Diesel. But unlike on the hit show Reacher – available now with a subscription to Amazon Prime Video – Ritchson isn’t the top dog. Though in his mind, there is one place where he’d triumph over the rest of his Fast X crew. Anyone who has seen the first two seasons of Reacher knows that Alan Ritchson isn’t someone to be…

‘It reflects the ignorance of a less tolerant era and the lingering emotional damage this continues to inflict’Peter TatchellIf you are looking for a sweet, affirmative, feelgood gay movie, All of Us Strangers is probably not for you. It’s a dark, gut-wrenching love story, with a plotline that blurs reality and fantasy.Adam is an isolated, emotionally damaged gay man. He’s struggling to come to terms with the death of his parents when he was 12, and to overcome the sense of outsider otherness he feels on account of his…

After a quarter of a century, a return to the big screen now further magnifies the brutal unsubtlety of Brian de Palma's 1983 gangster movie, itself a reworking of Howard Hawks's 1932 film. De Palma and screenwriter Oliver Stone cleverly transpose the action to Fidel Castro's "Mariel" expulsion of jailbirds from Cuba in 1980. Among the dodgy flotsam winding up in Miami is Tony "Scarface" Montana, ferociously played by cock-of-the-walk Al Pacino, shrilly insisting on his anti-communist political status, but thirsting for…

Kelly Clarkson‘s entering a new chapter of her music career as she continues to process her split from ex-husband Brandon Blackstock. The “Since U Been Gone” singer and daytime talk-show host opened up about channeling heartbreak into new music during a 40-minute interview with radio DJ Zane Lowe for Apple Music. Clarkson releases her 10th album, “Chemistry,” on Thursday at midnight. “ is intoxicating, it’s fun, it’s wonderful,” Clarkson said, explaining the title of her album. “It’s a high that you will never experience…

via Warner Bros. There are quite a few people out there who believe Ezra Miller‘s off-camera antics have contributed to The Flash cratering at the box office in alarmingly rapid time for a $200 million blockbuster, but one box office pundit isn’t buying it for a second, and even referred to the actor by the wrong pronouns while doing so. Whether it was intentional or not, the unnamed box office analyst who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter didn’t believe that the DCU’s longtime Barry Allen – who uses they/them…

On Sunday night, Bebe Rexha performes her 13th concert at Pier 17 in New York City. Numerous people have attended her performances, but in the midst of all of this, she was the victim of an accident in which she suffered serious injuries. Rexha was hit by a phone that was thrown towards the stage by a member of the audience while she was singing. On Sunday, June 18, Bebe Rexha was performing in New York when she was struck by a phone. According to a statement from the New York Police Department, she was on stage when…

via Warner Bros. The post-Gladiator boom saw the historical epic spend a brief stint in the spotlight as one of the industry’s most popular genres, in terms of quantity at least. An alarming number of them failed to catch fire with either critics or paying customers, which has left The Last Samurai on the outside looking in to a certain extent. Of course, Tom Cruise’s foray into the past ended up as the third highest-grossing release of the Golden Age – with only the aforementioned Gladiator and Troy earning…

via Warner Bros. As a multiversal comic book adaptation, The Flash was always going to be packed full of old and new DC faces alike, with the guest stars ranging from recurring favorites to returning veterans, via a jaw-dropping cameo or two. One of the most high-profile was Michael Shannon’s General Zod, who makes his franchise comeback 10 years after Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, but it doesn’t sound as though he enjoyed himself as much the second time around. While he was fully on board with director Andy…