Howards

“I’ve been staying open, you don’t wanna grow,” Brittany Howard sings on the title track from her second solo record. The song is a hard-funk failing-relationship jeremiad that might leave the “you” in question reduced to a puddle on the floor by the time it’s done. But whoever she’s singing to should’ve known better. Staying relentlessly open has been Howard’s guiding principle going all the way back to her breakout moment fronting Athens, Alabama garage-rockers Alabama Shakes in the early 2010s. She’s a master…

The Elder Scrolls 6 could be the last game Todd Howard makes, as the veteran developer has explained that “speed isn’t the goal” at Bethesda Games Studios. During an interview with IGN the 52-year-old Bethesda boss admitted that The Elder Scrolls 6 may be the last game he works on due to Bethesda’s slow turnaround with games. “As we look to an Elder Scrolls 6, that is one where… I probably shouldn’t say this. But if I do the math, I’m not getting any younger,” he said. “How long do people play Elder Scrolls for? That may…

Ron Howard is an expert in making survival dramas. Anybody who has watched Apollo 13 would remember how beautifully and terrifyingly he captured the hopelessness and claustrophobia of the situation. Well, believe it or not, in Thirteen Lives, he does it again and I feel does it better this time. The vacuum of space is replaced by the ferocity of water but the tension, thrill and nerve-wracking anxiety are all here. The veteran filmmaker proves emphatically that one doesn’t need huge budgets, VFX, or superheroes to make a…

In 2018, 12 soccer players and their coach ventured into the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in Thailand and became trapped when the cave flooded. The search-and-rescue operation made international headlines for weeks, as rescuers from around the world came together to try to save them. Director Ron Howard has proven his ability to adapt real-life stories for the drama of the big screen, and he is now exploring the Tham Luang cave rescue in the upcoming film Thirteen Lives. Critics have screened the film, so let’s see what they…

Here is Ron Howard’s decent retelling of an amazing true-life story: the Tham Luang cave rescue in northern Thailand in 2018, when international volunteers and Thai Navy Seals battled to rescue 12 teenage boys and their football coach trapped in a flooded cave. Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson have the tricky job of following last year’s excellent documentary on this subject, The Rescue, by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.Just as with Howard’s other near-disaster-movie Apollo 13, we have the unlucky…

One day, retired firefighter Rick Stanton got a phone call at his home in Coventry. It was Ron Howard. He had good news. He had cast someone who had been in Lord of the Rings to play Stanton in his new movie, Thirteen Lives. Stanton’s mind raced. Ian McKellen? Andy Serkis? Probably not Cate Blanchett. “When I found out it was Viggo Mortensen, I was very pleased,” says Stanton, eyes glinting. “ I’d never really thought who would play me in a film, but he’d be up there.”Stanton was one of five cavers (“I call myself a caver…