In its downtown incarnation, the script included a joke about the “Titanic” set being ripped off from some third-rate production of “Anything Goes.” At the St. James, that joke has been cut because the musical’s boat deck, designed by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and Grace Laubacher, looks high-tech and very first-class lux. As a result, this 90-minute musical takes way too much time to kick into high gear despite the inspired humble-brag performance of Marla Mindelle, the show’s Céline Dion narrator.

Also, there’s now a new skit near the top of the show that parodies the musical “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).” It’s an odd choice because, week after week, “Two Strangers” clocks in the lowest box office receipts of any musical on Broadway. I’m probably one of the few theatergoers sitting in the St. James who had actually seen “Two Strangers” and I didn’t get the joke.

Back in 2022, I wrote a rave review for the Off Broadway version of “Titaníque.” Had I gotten it completely wrong?

Whew! Despite a slow start, “Titaníque” retains its status as the “Oh, Mary!” of musicals. Director Tye Blue keeps most of the best bits, as well as the tackiest of props. When Jake (Constantine Rousouli) and Rose (Melissa Barrera) make love in a limo, they steam up a little piece of Plexiglas. When it’s revealed that there are only two – count ’em two — lifeboats, a contest is waged to decide who’s being saved and who’s drowning. Alejo Vietti’s costumes define “Auf Wiedersehen” as spoken on “Project Runway.” As for the iceberg itself, that villain is portrayed by the furious Layton Williams, who convincingly mimics a guest star whose identity will not be revealed here. This extended showstopper, choreographed by Ellenore Scott, is far wilder, funnier and gender-bending than anything in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”

“Titaníque,” like “Oh, Mary!,” is an equal-opportunity offender. In the world of camp, heterosexuality has always been the biggest joke of all. These two new shows eschew that rule to ridicule their LGBTQ characters with equal relish. In recent musical theater, lavender characters too often serve as objects to be beatified (think “Jagged Little Pill,” “Some Like It Hot” and “& Juliet”). “Titaníque” takes no such pathetic prisoners.

The best running joke in this “Titanic” parody is how everyone tries to save Rose from ending up with her rich in-the-closet fiancé, Cal (John Riddle in great singing voice). In fact, it is Rousouli’s hot stud Jack who, from the get-go, unloads far more helium into his loafers.

The show’s book by Mindelle, Rousouli and Blue delivers lots of great skits. Many of the one-liners, however, are merely smile-worthy. What makes them laugh-out-loud funny is the cast’s gifted delivery. When Barrera’s Rose says her favorite color is “burnt sienna,” Rousouli’s silent reaction deserves a Tony. In fact, that award’s nominators for best featured actor in a musical can round out that entire category with not only Rousouli but Riddle, Williams and Frankie Grande, who delivers a devastating impersonation of Victor Garber that I wouldn’t wish on the Orange President.

Which leaves one more Tony slot open. Jim Parsons joins this distinctly downtown cast, and his drag take on Rose’s money-grubbing mother sets back transvestites to a pre-Dame Edna era. Parsons makes no attempt to appear female, scoring major comic points with his baritone and often butch delivery. He’s so awesomely ugly, complete with two white doves above his receding hairline, that his character screams for a big solo entrance. It’s a major missed comic opportunity that Parsons enters the stage as simply part of the ensemble.

The post ‘Titanique’ Broadway Review: Jim Parsons Jumps Aboard the Sinking-Ship Musical appeared first on TheWrap.

But even though it doesn’t hit target metrics as a tech industry satire, it’s still fairly effective as a more general “rich people are messed up” character-driven dramedy.

“The Audacity” is the first series created by Jonathan Glatzer, an Emmy-winning writer who previously worked on “Succession” and “Better Call Saul.” “Succession” is an obvious influence on “The Audacity,” which goes heavy on witty insults and mockery of corporate-ese (“Our position has always been ‘human life is valuable, full stop’”). The show primarily follows Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the unstable CEO of Silicon Valley data-mining company Hypergnosis, and his wealth-envious therapist JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg). Duncan is trying to juice his company — and its stock price — by any means necessary, and JoAnne is insider trading on confidential information her rich clients tell her during their sessions. When Duncan finds out what JoAnne is doing, he tries to leverage her into sharing what she knows. Their ongoing dance, a sort of will-they/won’t-they with white collar crime, is the show’s most entertaining and fleshed-out plot thread — though it moves more slowly than it should, because the show has too many other characters to service.

In addition to Duncan and JoAnne, characters with arcs include Anushka Bhattachera-Phister (Meaghan Rath), Hypergnosis board member and idealistic Chief Ethicist at Apple-esque tech company Cupertino; Martin Phister (Simon Helberg, playing a very different type of nerd than the one he played on “The Big Bang Theory”), Anushka’s mopey husband who is developing an AI chatbot; Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), a cantankerous billionaire who’s one of JoAnne’s clients and becomes Duncan’s frenemy; Lili Park-Hoffsteader (Lucy Punch), Duncan’s status-obsessed wife who’s on the board of their daughter’s elite private school; Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), a harried and bemused Department of Veterans Affairs deputy trying to hire a company to help him modernize the VA’s systems; and four other characters this paragraph is getting too long to name.

The show is overstuffed with drama, and would have been better served by a more judicious character development schedule — maybe some of these plotlines could have been saved for the second season already in the works, and stress-tested for coherence a bit better (some late-season choices made regarding Galifianakis and Corddy’s characters are baffling). None of the other stories are as compelling as Duncan and JoAnne’s, and you may find yourself itching to get back to them whenever they’re not onscreen.

That being said, the other characters and plotlines are plenty enjoyable, thanks to punchy dialogue and strong performances. Glatzer has smart insights into the minds of the hyper-wealthy — Galifianakis’ character says that at some point, every person as rich as him has to decide whether they want “humanitarian legacy or planetary reach? Do we want to save the world or control it? Heal or conquer? Both have their charms, but I will tell you this: most of us go Dr. Evil” — and the talented cast elevates the well-written but inconsistent material. Rath is a standout as a well-meaning but complacent idealist caught between her genuine desire to help people and the cold power of the almighty dollar, and it’s great to see Galifianakis do his comically volatile thing again.

Leads Magnussen and Goldberg, meanwhile, are truly terrific. Magnussen shows off tremendous range as Duncan moves from brash to pathetic to competent to sociopathic. And when it comes to making viewers empathize with deeply unsympathetic characters, “Barry” veteran Goldberg is one of the finest actors working today.

But for all its positive qualities, “The Audacity” has a serious problem with its satire. That’s partially beyond its control, due to how quickly the tech world has changed since it was ordered to series in 2024, and partially a failure to recognize and anticipate that its satirical targets would feel stale by the time the show came out. All of the energy in the tech sector has shifted into AI. The ways that AI will/already are disrupting everything — and how companies will survive and profit from it — is the only thing the tech industry is talking about. That conversation is happening in San Francisco, not down the Peninsula in Silicon Valley, and the people having it are much younger and scrappier than the tech titans of “The Audacity.” It’s not that AI isn’t part of “The Audacity” — Martin’s chatbot is like a self-aware ChatGPT with a mouth that talks — but the show is out of touch with how important AI has become. It would be like “The Studio” trying to satirize contemporary Hollywood while talking about Netflix as if it were still a DVD rental company.

Part of what made “Silicon Valley” so successful was its verisimilitude. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was a consultant. The product the Pied Piper guys were making was realistic for their resources and technical ability. “The Audacity” doesn’t have that same handle on the material. Duncan’s CTO Harper (Jess McLeod) singlehandedly develops a surveillance algorithm that’s so powerful, it would put Palantir out of business if it were real. Martin’s chatbot is unrealistic in its degree of sophistication and the design of its user interface. Duncan drives an electric Hummer, an unpopular vehicle, and not a Cybertruck, the preferred mode of transport for tech douches. (Maybe that’s an intentional choice showing that Duncan is out-of-step with what a modern tech CEO is supposed to be, or maybe it isn’t.)

Taken individually, these seem like nitpicking gripes, but all together they build to a sense that the writers don’t understand the world they’re satirizing. They didn’t have a Dick Costolo. They were focused on character to the detriment of other things. The show they ultimately made is funny and well-acted and observant about the ways people inflict pain on each other, but doesn’t meet the moment in which it exists.

“The Audacity” premieres Sunday, April 12 on AMC and AMC+. The premiere also airs at 9.m. ET/PT on Samsung TV Network.

The post ‘The Audacity’ Review: Billy Magnussen Boosts AMC’s Flawed Tech Industry Satire appeared first on TheWrap.

“ChaO” tells a tale of how this world came into being, and although legend says it happened long ago, the major developments were in the last couple decades. Humans and mermen have an uneasy co-existence, inflamed by the dangers of shipping, where innocent aquatic animals are inadvertently sucked into boat propellers on a daily basis. (We also do a lot of, you know, fishing. You’d think the mermen would be angrier about that, but they eat fish too so I guess we get a pass on that one.)

Our hapless hero — they’re always hapless, aren’t they — has invented a new propulsion system that wouldn’t hurt the mermen. But it’s also slower and more expensive, so his boss demotes him from the research and development department to his deckhand. It’s a rough day for poor Stefan (Ōji Suzuka), and that’s before the King Neptunus (Kenta Miyake) hits his boss’s boat with a giant destructive wave, and the king’s daughter ChaO (Anna Yamada) drags him under the waves.

Now, all of a sudden everyone’s Stefan’s best friend, because at some point while he was unconscious he got engaged to ChaO. He doesn’t know her, he doesn’t love her, and he isn’t attracted to fish people, but the marriage will finally forge a union between the surface-dwellers and the fish folk, so he’s forced to along with it. 

ChaO usually presents as a great big fish, adorable and childlike, but when merpeople trust a human, they let that human see them as they really are. So as Stefan gets to know her, and gradually falls in love with her, he sees the gorgeous, blue-haired, slightly more anatomically compatible mermaiden for who she really is. It’s a visual metaphor that’s always fraught — and summons unpleasant memories of “Shallow Hal” — but “ChaO’s” insistence that Stefan only sees the half-human version of his wife when she trusts him, and not when he’s being superficial, takes the edge off what could have been a painful, hacky trope.

The love story between Stefan and ChaO is amusingly contrived, like an early Ernst Lubitsch rom-com about marrying royalty and figuring out the emotional connection later. Ironically, since Stefan’s the one way outside of his comfort zone, it’s ChaO who has to move into his humble human abode, innocently preparing him live electric eels for breakfast and accidentally setting fireworks off in their house. Yes, she really is a fish out of water. I’d pause for laughter but it barely qualifies as a joke. It’s just what’s actually happening.

Yasuhiro Aoki’s film could have stayed grounded (sigh) but “ChaO” is set in such an outlandish world that it’s easy to stay dazzled. Stefan doesn’t have much family but he does live with a robotics expert who makes alarm clocks that slap you in the face until you wake up, and also afterwards. Eventually a mermaid will rock a giant mech suit, and no matter how odd the rest of the movie was beforehand, it’s still a wild image. 

There’s so much visual ingenuity on display that “ChaO” quickly overwhelms its own, relatively simple story. It doesn’t help that Hanasaki Kino’s screenplay does all the heavy lifting with Stefan and ChaO’s relationship in the final act, so for a long time Stefan mostly flounders, making a total (b)ass of himself. It’s hard for “ChaO” to win us back over, to the point that we actually want them to stay together at the end, but the filmmakers make it work. If nothing else, there’s so much manic energy in the climax that we don’t have time to put up our defenses.

Whether the love story completely works or not, “ChaO” is such a visual wonder that it hardly matters. It’s a lush and emotional and, despite the sugar-addled intensity Yasuhiro Aoki crams into every scene, oddly inviting. It’s a pretty wonderful world. And granted, the seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake, but it’s easy to dream about wandering around there. That’s not a big mistake. Just look at the world around now, on land and the ocean floor. Such wonderful things abound in “ChaO.”

What more are you looking for?

“ChaO” is now playing in select theaters.

The post ‘ChaO’ Review: Human-Mermaid Love Story Is a Lush Wonder appeared first on TheWrap.

In a movie, of course, the director is God. They manipulate the events of the story for reasons that hopefully make sense, if only to them. Writer/director Tommy Wirkola is the God of the killer shark movie “Thrash” and he’s a trickster if ever I saw one. There are really bad hurricanes in the world, that much is true, and they seem to be getting worse every year, but that’s where the realism ends. It takes multiple acts of god to make this fish story look even remotely possible. Not “plausible,” that adjective waved “bye-bye” a long time ago. Just possible enough to make a silly movie out of it.

“Thrash” tells the story of Annieville, South Carolina, which is getting hit by a Category 5 hurricane so large that someone suggests they should invent a “Category 6” just to describe it. (Great, now Nigel Tufnel works for the Weather Channel.) Everyone with an ounce of common sense and self-preservation is fleeing the town, or left already, so instead we focus on all those other people.

There’s Dakota (Whitney Peak), a young woman who became agoraphobic after her mother died. There’s also Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a pregnant meat plant employee who was ordered to work in a hurricane because something-something-something capitalism sucks. There’s also Dee (Alyla Browne), Ron (Stacy Clausen) and Will (Dante Ubaldi), three foster siblings whose “parents” refuse to leave town because they’re cartoonishly evil. And just for variety, there’s also Dale (Djimon Hounsou), Dakota’s uncle, who is coincidentally a shark expert, and who travels into the hurricane on purpose just to save his niece.

There are two movies fighting for dominance in “Thrash” and both refuse to back down. Lisa’s car gets swept away by a tidal wave and crashes into a tree outside Dakota’s house, forcing Dakota to conquer her fears and venture outside to save this stranger from killer sharks — and of course Lisa immediately goes into labor. Meanwhile, the three kids are trapped on a table in their house, trying to figure out how to survive after the sharks attack their wicked foster parents. Fortunately they’ve got dynamite. Like you do.

You might think, since these two stories are about the responsibilities of parenthood and the relationships between parents and their children, that they would actually intersect at some point. You would be wrong. The plots in “Thrash” are connected by killer sharks. That there’s a theme seems to be a total coincidence. If anything it looks like Wirkola wrote a whole movie about Dakota and Lisa, realized there wasn’t enough material to make it feature-length, then wrote a second short movie and duct taped them together to meet his quota at the last minute.

Normally, if logic had anything to do with it, that would mean “Thrash” was a bad movie. But logic has no place in these soggy halls. “Thrash” may be arbitrary but it’s too energetic to be bad. The cast is talented enough to make us care about these people — at least, to the point where we don’t want them dead — and Wirkola’s snappy direction makes their plight palpable. There’s a scene in this movie where Lisa is about to give birth on a bed that’s floating so high in a house that the ceiling is about to crush her, while Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” plays on her cell phone, and she played that on purpose. If you can’t get invested in that, not only do I not have a bridge to sell you, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t convince you to open a savings account.

Ever since “Jaws” came out, Hollywood has been convinced that sharks are the perfect boogeyman. There aren’t a lot of natural predators that humans are scared of, and even though you’re more likely to get killed by a hippopotamus than a shark — a fact that “Thrash,” to its credit, is actually aware of — scary shark movies usually seem to work. “Thrash” isn’t even the first decent genre flick about getting trapped in a flooded building with man-eaters after a tidal wave. (If you want to see the better version, check out the 2012 thriller “Bait 3D,” about sharks in a supermarket.)

The point is, you can get away with a lot in the killer shark subgenre, and Wirkola practically gets away with murder. “Thrash” is a Netflix exclusive and for whatever it’s worth, Netflix is probably where it belongs. It’s too expensive for a cheap straight-to-video B-movie but not nearly ambitious enough to demand a theatrical release.

It’s just wacky and weird enough to keep the folks at home from looking down at their phones. It’s not a great movie but it’s a heck of a lot more exciting than today’s Wordle, even if the answer to today’s Worldle is “S-H-A-R-K.”

The post ‘Thrash’ Review: Not a Great Killer Shark Movie, but You Could Netflix and Gill appeared first on TheWrap.

The reference to that famous 1950s family sitcom applies here because, boy, are the performances big, broad and occasionally very funny. Led by Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, the ensemble in this Joe Mantello-directed production acts up a storm of category 6 proportions. There’s more acting going on at the Winter Garden than the rest of Broadway combined, and that includes “Oh, Mary!”

That very vivid approach to performance makes sense for Nathan Lane, who plays Willy Loman, the King Lear of the American theater. It’s an assignment that left the indefatigable Lee J. Cobb, who created the role, physically and emotionally exhausted, by his own admission. What immediately becomes apparent in this “Salesman” is that many of the other actors deliver performances just as big, if not even bigger, than Lane’s.

Scott Rudin, the show’s lead producer, gave us a “King Lear” starring Glenda Jackson. Watching Laurie Metcalf play Linda Loman, it’s apparent that she could play Willy — and probably wants to. Arthur Miller’s female roles tend to be reactive, and none is more reactive than Willy Loman’s wife. There’s almost nothing reactive or backseat about Metcalf. When Willy runs into trouble making sales, it’s surprising that this Mrs. Loman doesn’t take over his accounts and hit the road herself. Metcalf even gives herself a Lady Macbeth moment when Uncle Ben (Jonathan Cake, being one of the few reserved actors on stage) offers his brother a great job in Alaska. Metcalf drips venom to talk Willy out of a gig that could have averted his tragedy.

In the play’s epilogue, at Willy’s gravesite, Linda Loman tells us she “can’t cry.” Which is a shocker because Metcalf has had a hankie to her nose for the last 15 minutes.

She’s not the only one in competition with Lane. Playing Biff Loman, the much-favored son, Christopher Abbott delivers an 11th-hour sobbing meltdown that screams, “Please, give me a Tony nomination!” He might very well win the Tony, since those awards always favor the most acting over the best acting.

Abbott can’t deliver a sentence – no, make that a word — without puncturing it with a major hand gesture. His arms never stop waving. He’s reaching for Al Pacino but ends up being Sylvester Stallone.

What happens when Linda and Biff are bigger blowhards and glad-handers than Willy? Metcalf and Abbott’s performances are so over the top they rob Lane’s of any tragedy. Listening to this trio go after each other for nearly three hours, you just want them to shut up.

One of the creakier aspects of this Miller classic is the role of Happy Loman. Poor Happy. When he says he’s getting married, his parents tell him to go to bed. (Lane and Metcalf milk their back-to-back zingers to receive gales of laughter for their great comic timing.) The name Biff is repeated dozens of time, while Happy gets his mentioned only twice. This younger brother also calls himself Howard and Hap, both of which are huge improvements on Happy. Is that why Willy and Linda so aggressively ignore their second son? They don’t like his nickname? In a truly bizarre bit of casting, Ben Ahlers plays the shunted, stepped over, disregarded and totally unacknowledged Happy despite this actor looking like the lead singer for the world’s hottest new boy band. Ahlers manages to take inappropriate focus in other ways: He walks around bare-chested for the play’s first half-hour. It’s easy to tell who’s getting the most selfie requests at the Winter Garden stage door.

We’re told the Lomans are a family, but Lane & Co. don’t create one on stage. They’re physically unalike to the extreme. And why do Abbott and Ahlers speak with thick Brooklyn accents, and Lane and Metcalf do not?

In a recent New York Times interview, Joe Mantello discusses his major directorial flourish of having young doppelgängers for the characters Biff (Joaquin Consuelos), Happy (Jake Termine) and their friend Bernard (Karl Green and Michael Benjamin Washington). Both Mantello and the Times reporter treat this double-casting as a novel masterstroke, perhaps unaware that no fewer than three new productions of opera warhorses (“I Puritani,” “La Sonnambula” and “Tristan und Isolde”) at the old fuddy-duddy Met Opera feature doppelgängers for the lead singers. It is this theater season’s big cliché, just as video-cam operators on stage was last season’s (and a few seasons before that) most overworked gimmick.

The double-casting does work to provide a surreal fluidity to the proceedings, greatly enhanced by Chloe Lamford’s stark scenic design (dominated by Willy’s much-beloved car) and Jack Knowles’ truly dramatic lighting. As with his direction of the actors, however, Mantello likes to pour it on gooey. Each act is introduced with Caroline Shaw’s overly somber music, reaching for but failing to achieve Philip Glass profundity. The fog machine never stops. The overkill begins even before you enter the Winter Garden. Black-and-white photos by Thea Traff (doing her Brigitte Lacombe best) feature the lead actors in stiff poses, trying hard to look terribly serious and appearing really ridiculous.

The post ‘Death of a Salesman’ Broadway Review: Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf Beg Us to Pay Attention appeared first on TheWrap.

“Exit 8” is the feature film version of The Exit 8, a 2023 video game about walking through a repeating corridor. You’re searching for anomalies, and if you notice anything unusual — the eyes on one of the posters are following you, or there’s an ominous noise emerging from a storage locker — you have to go back the way you came. If there’s nothing out of the ordinary you move forward, towards the exit. But if you missed something you have to start all over again, and possibly stay stuck forever.

Kazunari Ninomiya stars as the Lost Man, a mild-mannered nobody who gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend, explaining she’s pregnant. She asks him to make a life-altering decision, out of the blue, and that’s not the kind of thing he does. He can’t even tell an angry man on the subway to stop being a jerk to a poor woman and her child. There are men of action and then there’s this guy.

As he trudges from his train back to the surface, into a life he wasn’t expecting, he finds himself passing through the same hallway, in a constant loop. He’s looking for Exit 8 but he can’t get past the sign that says Exit 1. He’s trapped in a state of non-existence, of almost living, of almost controlling his life. Fortunately for him, and the audience, there’s a poster that explains the rules: Search for anomalies, go back if you find them, move forward if you don’t, and take Exit 8 to leave.

It was very polite of the universe to spell it out so clearly, even if it does make you wonder who’s in charge of this little experiment. What this Lost Man experiences is terrifying but also a metaphor for his inability to accept change and move on with his life, so presumably there’s a supernatural force that’s rooting for him to solve the puzzle and figure his baggage out. Imagine the angel from “It’s a Wonderful Life” if he just threw George Bailey into The Backrooms and you’ve got a sense of how “Exit 8” works. (I’d say that’s one messed up angel but what George actually went through was messed up to begin with.)

There’s not a lot to director and co-writer Genki Kawamura’s adaptation, and there doesn’t need to be. “Exit 8” is a brisk 95 minutes long and even that stretches the premise a little. Still, like the game, the film has an absorbing mechanic. The Lost Man has to search this one, short hallway for any inconsistencies, most of which are scary as hell once you figure them out, and the photography keeps that whole hallway in view so the audience can search along with him. It’s like “Blue’s Clues” if the clues were hairless rats with human eyeballs growing on their backs. Or “Highlights” magazine if Goofus got stuck in the “Spot the Difference” game and experienced pure existential dread.

We obviously don’t interact with the Lost Man and help him on his journey but Keisuke Imamura’s deceptively complex cinematography inspires that glorious urge that only the most absorbing horror movies can offer: We want to yell at the screen. Not to make fun of “Exit 8,” but to stop the hero before he makes a mistake. “Look above you! The light fixtures! The light fixtures are all @$%ed!!!”

“Exit 8” isn’t just one of the best video game adaptations. It might actually be the best so far. Hollywood has a tendency to adapt games which were already obvious riffs on classic movies — “Uncharted” and “Indiana Jones,” “Mortal Kombat” and “Enter the Dragon,” “Silent Hill” and “Jacob’s Ladder” — so when you translate those games back into films, their stories aren’t just derivative. They’re diminished, faded, tired. The premise of “Exit 8” hasn’t been done to death in the motion picture milieu. It takes most of its inspiration from “The Backrooms,” and the feature film version of that online phenomenon isn’t even out yet.

Kawamura has brought something relatively fresh into cinema. That’s great on its own, but what’s more, he’s successfully adapted the game’s premise to tell an effective, albeit simple, cinematic tale about one man’s personal journey. Or, if he never finds his way out of that subway (it is a horror movie after all), a story about his tragic failure to get anywhere in life.

And that right there is the biggest anomaly. “Exit 8” is a video game adaptation that never feels like it’s just cashing in on an intellectual property. It has a story to tell, it tells it well, it’s scary as hell — and it doesn’t smell.

The post ‘Exit 8’ Review: A Freakily Liminal Horror Movie That Gives Video Game Adaptations a Good Name appeared first on TheWrap.

When the original series debuted on Fox in 2000, it set the tone for future comedies like “Modern Family,” “Scrubs” and “The Office” with its single-camera style. There were fast transitions, a character that broke the fourth wall, and chaotic risks that paid off in big laughs. Bryan Cranston as father-figure Hal was game for anything, from having his wife shave him naked in that memorable opening breakfast scene, to covering himself in bees.

Brothers Malcolm, Reese (Justin Berfield), Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan) and Francis (Christopher Masterson) realistically depicted sibling relationships and antics that, although heightened for comedy, were relatable for working-class families. Add in a strict and overworked mom, Lois (Jane Kaczmarek), and a genius son who often felt like his clan didn’t understand him, and there was something for everyone. It was ideal 2000s family viewing.

Fast forward to 2026, almost 20 years to the day that the series finale aired, and the family is back on Hulu for one last hurrah. The series picks up with Malcolm and his teen daughter Leah (Keeley Karsten) living their lives apart from the rest of the family. Leah has no idea they exist, while Malcolm has decided he is calmer without them. But when Hal and Lois celebrate their 40th anniversary and Malcolm dodges their calls, they decide enough is enough.

It’s a smart, passing-of-the-baton premise, in which Leah joins Malcolm in breaking the fourth wall, giving voice to a new generation of this family. Leah is very much like Malcolm, only a girl, which leads to all kinds of problems at school and with friendships. She’s just as if not more socially awkward than her father, even when she’s trying hard to fit in or do the right thing.

Karsten is perfectly cast in the role, bringing an innocent earnestness to the gig while easily selling the fast dialogue and awkward facial expressions that kid-Muniz brought all those years ago. Their duo is completed with the addition of Malcolm’s new girlfriend, Tristan (Kiana Madeira), his perfect match.

Back at the core family home, things have improved slightly. The house is cleaner and better cared for, the boys have grown up and begun their own lives, and while Reese, Francis and his wife Piama (Emy Coligado) still haunt the house, they also contribute in new ways. Dewey, now played by Sullivan look-alike Caleb Ellsworth-Clark, appears largely via Zoom as he’s now a famous travelling musician. Jamie, now played by Anthony Timpano, is serving in the military.

In their places at home is the sixth child, Kelly, a character that was hinted at in the original finale. Here, they’re played by non-binary actor Vaughan Murrae, who is a delightful addition to the cast. If Malcolm and Dewey were the geniuses, Kelly brings the street smarts in a way that elevates the stories even further.

While both families spend much of the revival apart, the premise allows each character to follow their own journeys. Hal, in particular, becomes an anchor point through a series of events that would spoil the story to reveal. However, Cranston fans can look forward to a memorable scene in which Hal faces off against Evil Hal, reminding everyone of the actor’s brilliant range.

When the families inevitably come together, it’s like catching up with an old friend you haven’t seen in forever, yet no time has passed. Creator Linwood Boomer found ways to bring in almost every recurring character from the original series, while paying homage to actors like Cloris Leachman and Daniel von Bargen who have passed away in the years since the show ended.

It’s a sweet, short and nostalgic trip down memory lane with plenty of Easter eggs for those who watched “Malcolm in the Middle” two decades ago, but it also feels fresh thanks to the balance of new faces. Were the series to carry on it would need to center on Leah and Kelly, which would work so long as a good chunk of the original cast returned in a significant capacity. That’s the key to modernizing this for current audiences while recapturing the viewers who once spent every week with these characters in their living rooms.

For now, “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” is an intentional special that catches you up on this family in all the right ways. It’s absurd, funny and at times unexpected, and it does what they say to always do in showbiz: leave them wanting more.

“Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” premieres Friday on Hulu and Disney+.

The post ‘Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair’ Review: Nostalgic Revival Ends Too Soon appeared first on TheWrap.

A subject as slippery as “cancellation” needs a firm grip, and Hill, who came in for his own public criticism a few years ago, seems to have little worth saying on the matter other than celebrities are as imperfect as anyone else. The lack of specificity makes “Outcome” painfully broad both thematically and comically where it seems more like a collection of half-sketched ideas of Hollywood life rather than anything substantive about the unique social relationships formed by fame.

Reef Hawk (Reeves), a two-time Oscar-winning actor and lead of three major franchises, is about to mount a comeback after a five-year absence where he was secretly dealing with heroin addiction. But before he can even start the ball rolling on his resurgence, word of an incriminating video tape reaches Reef’s manager Ira (Hill). Reef, trying to get ahead of the damage, starts going back through his life and wondering who’s looking for payback. As he reconnects with old relationships, he sees he’s hurt a lot of people, and yet that leads more to an understanding of his loneliness rather than getting any closer to the identity of his blackmailer.

Hill and co-writer Ezra Woods seem to want to tell two stories here. One is about the private lives of mega movie stars, something akin to last year’s “Jay Kelly.” But whereas Noah Baumbach’s movie was willing to interrogate the selfishness and isolation that a life of stardom provides, Reef feels like a stranger in his own life. He comes off as politely oblivious, knowing that he’s hurt people, but without the actions to give these scenes much depth. The film gets into a pattern of Reef going to talk to someone from earlier in his life, they explain how he hurt them, and that’s about it. On the one hand, you may get a nice scene like Martin Scorsese playing Reef’s childhood manager, but it doesn’t do much to illuminate or change Reef, who plays like a quiet cipher for most of the movie.

For a character who was supposedly loathsome to countless people in his life and whose drug addiction was painful to his lifelong friends Kyle (Cameron Diaz) and Xander (Matt Bomer), Reef largely comes off as passive and subdued. If Reeves was looking to skewer his nice-guy image, he already did that in “Always Be My Maybe,” and seems reluctant to provide a more dramatic take on the obnoxious star. If Reef was ever a monster (and we’re told that he was), we don’t get to see it. Instead, he’s a character being told about his life rather than allowing the audience to witness that behavior. Perhaps the writers intended to mirror how scandal is often heard but rarely seen, but the approach still renders their protagonist as largely inert.

The other story from Hill and Woods is about cancel culture, where the jokes largely come from Ira and a team of crisis PR flacks he assembles. But everything here is so pointed and insular that it fails to get much of a laugh. Is it hard to be a celebrity in the age of social media? Sure, but celebrity crisis has always been an element of Hollywood. The fact that publicists and managers are now in conflict with individuals rather than outlets doesn’t change how fame remains fickle.

“Outcome” isn’t necessarily wrong that what’s deemed offensive sometimes seems arbitrary and that there are no rules for why one “canceled” performer is allowed to return while another must live in ignominy, but it’s tough to care about celebrity egos even in the best of times.

To the film’s credit, its larger vision is about Reef’s renewal, but ultimately, whether famous people remain famous is just far too narrow a conceit unless it’s fodder for wicked satire. Sadly, Hill’s bite here (despite his characters’ massive fake chompers) is far too tame to poke fun at celebrity anxieties.

Although there’s a meta-aspect of both Hill and Reeves making a movie about public perceptions, “Outcome” restates what’s been said countless times about Hollywood and said far better.

Hill has assembled an impressive cast, but with a few minor exceptions (the aforementioned Scorsese, Susan Lucci playing Reef’s mother), no one gets a chance to shine or challenge the audience to think differently about celebrity. Hill and Reeves have well-established star personas, and yet “Outcome,” has so little to say that it appears destined to be one of their most forgettable features.

The post ‘Outcome’ Review: Jonah Hill’s Celebrity Satire Is More Pedantic Than Insightful appeared first on TheWrap.

“Big Mistakes” turns out to be a mixed bag, but one that’s extremely entertaining and watchable. Levy stars as Nicky, a pastor at Glenview Community Church who dates his boyfriend Tareq (Jacob Gutierrez) in secret to avoid alienating his congregation (he’s out as gay but the church prefers him “non-practicing”). His sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) is still processing having moved back to the fictional town of Glenview — a 30-minute train ride from New York City — after failing to get her acting career off the ground in the Big Apple. She’s a public school teacher now and more or less annoyed to be back together with her nagging high school sweetheart Max (Jack Innanen).

The family comes together around the death of their grandmother, which is how the pilot kicks off. The boisterous divorced matriarch Linda (Laurie Metcalf) is trying to make the last days of her mother’s life in hospice as comfortable as possible, so she requests that the siblings pick up a cheap jewelry store necklace to dress her up. After taking her least breaths, grandmother ends up buried in a necklace that Morgan actually stole from a nearby shop after Yusef (Boran Kuzum), the cranky shopkeeper, refused to sell it to her.

Unbeknownst to them, Yusef is involved in organized crime, and that necklace is a lot more important than Morgan and Nicky realized when they swiped it. Thus, the titular big mistake that spirals the siblings into a series of misadventures as they get embroiled deeper into the crime world of upstate New York.

It’s a bit of a flimsy premise to kick things off, and it doesn’t help that the organized crime aspects of the show feel somewhat stereotypical. The attempts for the siblings to extricate and return the necklace all feel extremely contrived; not the most realistic way to establish the show’s stakes. A small mistake might be more accurate, before things get more exciting in the second half of the season.

As they get more entangled in the organized crime of it all, it’s unclear what the motivation these characters have not to get themselves out of the situation immediately. At first, they seem to be blackmailed into this “work,” only for a later reveal that suggests they are being paid. Perhaps the show wants us to think beyond money, although both siblings definitely have an incentive to leave behind the circumstances that are holding them back.

As their tasks get increasingly complex, Morgan and Nicky begin to derive a sense of pleasure from it all despite the stress, and the opportunity ends up being an unexpected way to propel their personal growth. Morgan realizes she’s capable of more than her currently mundane life as a public school teacher, and Nicky begins to accumulate the confidence to live in his truth. But you can’t help but feel they should be able to step away from this dangerous situation more easily (especially when you find out their father is a retired policeman).

Regardless, the absolute best part of the show is watching the two siblings spar in various chaotic contexts; their banter and chemistry is on-screen gold, and the way they grow closer becomes unexpectedly heartwarming. Levy is right at home as skittish Pastor Nicky, and Ortega is a definite stand-out as a character who absolutely would have been played by Sennott if she wasn’t wrapped up in other projects. At times, Nicky and Morgan’s dynamic is even reminiscent of David and Alexis Rose, if they found themselves answering burner phones for criminals. Ew, David!

Things start to get messier when their side gig implicates the rest of the family. Linda has decided to look beyond her career as the owner of a hardware store and run for Glenview mayor with the help of her third child Natalie (Abby Quinn), who’s taken on the role of campaign manager. Metcalf’s somewhat over-the-top performance resonates as something between Jamie Lee Curtis in “The Bear” and Louise Brealey in “Such Brave Girls” — breathlessly shouting every line and speaking over everyone in a way that can be grating early on in the season, before the depth of her love for her family becomes clearer later in the season. Elizabeth Perkins is also always a delight as Max’s mother Annette, who is very invested in his courtship with Morgan.

What holds “Big Mistakes” together when the plot isn’t always the most logical is pure belly laugh-inducing entertainment, including some extremely witty dialogue crafted by Levy, Sennott and their writing team. At eight, zippy half-hour episodes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome in a landscape of 50-minute crime dramas that too often drag their feet. “Big Mistakes” also makes the smart move to ease us into this world; it doesn’t get that dark until it does, but just like Nicky and Morgan, you’ll realize you’re in too deep to go back now. Along the way, “Big Mistakes” reveals gentler layers about existentialism in elder millennials, what truly bonds families and what it means to be living an authentic life.

To be clear: “Big Mistakes” isn’t the kind of show you’ll be cuddling up to for a cozy heartwarming journey (we can just rewatch “Schitt’s Creek” for that), but it absolutely makes for a deliciously funny binge with a few twists up its sleeve that are sure to keep you on your toes.

“Big Mistakes” premieres Thursday, Apr. 9, on Netflix.

The post ‘Big Mistakes’ Review: Dan Levy Returns With Chaotically Fun Netflix Comedy appeared first on TheWrap.

This faded mimeograph of rom-coms past expects us to care that directionless Anna (Halle Bailey), who gave up on a career as a chef when her mom died, lies her way into a Tuscan family’s good graces, then has difficulty extracting herself from the situation because, you know, feelings. Anna almost has a one-night stand with Italian guy Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) in a New York hotel; while he’s sleeping, she grabs pictures from his phone of the Tuscan villa his ultra-rich family gave him, but which he doesn’t use because he ran away to pursue his dream of not doing what they wanted. Yes, that’s creepy and even despicable of her, stealing data from her dozing one-nighter, but in the world of the movie, it’s cool. Right?

Despite having $500 to her name, Anna uses an old ticket her mom got her to fulfill their dream of flying to Tuscany to garner inspiration for the restaurant they’d hoped to open. Out of luck, she squats in Matteo’s supposedly abandoned villa, tries on an engagement ring she finds in a drawer (as one does) and is discovered by his family. Let the cascade of lies rain down!

Along the way, she meet-cutes the handsomest delivery guy in Italy, who turns out to be Matteo’s cousin/adoptive brother Michael (Regé-Jean Page), and not a delivery guy, but the lonely, soulful owner of a vineyard and the family’s good son. Most of the movie’s VFX budget apparently went to painting out his halo. This is, indeed, another good-hearted peasant girl-rescued-by-handsome prince fairy tale.

You already know the rest. You’ll recognize the cannibalized chunks from so many other rom-coms, some referenced directly. Think “French Kiss,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (Nia Vardalos has a cameo), “Under the Tuscan Sun,” “Doc Hollywood,” even “When Harry Met Sally.”

So what does belong to “Tuscany,” which was written by Ryan Engle and directed by “Marry Me” filmmaker Kat Coiro? Well, they know they’ve got a hottie in Page. Thus, a thirst-trap shot of water pouring on him, shirtless – in slow-motion, no less. And there are a few laughs, in volume about the equivalent of the freshly grated parmesan sprinkled atop a crisp arugula salad with pine nuts. OK, maybe I should have eaten before the movie.

Formulaic rom-coms demand certain structure, premises and character archetypes, and “Tuscany” diligently provides. The script so plays down to its presumed audience that it opens with unnecessary expository narration, of which every factoid is reiterated soon after in even clumsier dialogue. The protagonist’s journey is repeatedly spelled out, as we’re told by multiple characters she lives other people’s lives and needs to start living her own. As her lies compound, her cabbie friend says, “Maybe by living a fake life, you’ll find truth in your own.”

Yes, it’s one of those rom-coms, in which the protagonist’s deceptions would be unforgivable IRL, but in the fanciful world of big-screen, beautiful love, it’s all somehow OK. Anna hasn’t been thought through enough, and emotional truth is anathema to the whole exercise, so despite her opportunism and fecklessness, we’re to believe this whole, close-knit family falls head over heels for her. Heck, when dreamy winery guy is explaining that Leonardo da Vinci designed the airlocks on their wine barrels, she cuts him off!

For someone whose passion is cooking, we don’t get nearly enough of it from her – there’s gorgeous food, but we don’t see her doing much beyond some light chopping. Even if we’re not meant to fully witness her culinary artistry until late, we never sense the love of it that we get from, say, “Big Night,” “The Taste of Things,” “Chef,” “The Bear,” or so many others.

The thumbnail-sketched locals are cutely depicted in a “This is what small-town Italians are like, right?” way. There’s no rooster on the villa grounds, but each day is broken by an opera-singing worker. The life-feasting sister-in-law is having an affair with the plumber – no, he’s not named Mario, that would be ridiculous. He’s Luigi.

Stella Pecollo as sister-in-law Francesca and Marco Calvani as cabbie friend Lorenzo score comic points. As patriarch Vincenzo and matriarch Gabriella, respectively, Paolo Sassanelli and Isabella Ferrari win us over – which works against the film’s need to paper over Anna’s terrible behavior. We don’t want to see these people hurt, to have their hopes dashed. But luckily, emotional truth isn’t in the recipe.

“You, Me & Tuscany” delivers the rom-com meat and potatoes: The beats, the scenery, and the great-looking people consumers expect. But it’s strictly fast food, when the sun-kissed Tuscan countryside, with its porcini, pecorino and Cinta Senese pork was there to savor with a nice chianti.

The post ‘You, Me & Tuscany’ Review: Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page Fall in Love in Wish Fulfillment Overload appeared first on TheWrap.