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I'm writing this review in a hurry because every hour I wait makes it harder to remember "Pacific Rim Uprising." 

On a craft level, this sequel to Guillermo del Toro's monsters-versus-biomechanical warriors saga " Pacific Rim " isn't terrible. At the very least, it doesn't stint on images of huge things crashing into other huge things, as well as collateral damage in the form of cratering streets, collapsing buildings, and panicked civilians (who are shown racing away from the mayhem but rarely being hurt or killed). Set ten years later, the movie showcases giant gundam , or jägers, fighting a new kind of kaiju (I won't go into details because it would spoil one of the film's only surprises) and, for variety, jägers battling other jägers. Younger kids might like it, and it's probably a safer bet for that age group than the " Transformers " films, which are strangely filled with racist and sexist images as well as a needlessly sleazy undertone.

And the cast is filled with actors doing everything they can to make their characters as memorable as possible even when the script (credited to four people) isn't lending them the support they deserve. John Boyega , in particular, saves long stretches of the movie just by being his appealing self. Ever since "The Force Awakens," he's been honing a screen persona that owes a lot to the late James Garner —a funny, cynical survivor who makes a point of avoiding unnecessary fights and keeping one eye on the exit at all times, but who also has a buried streak of righteous honor that surfaces during dire moments. He's operating in that mode here, playing Jake Pentecost, the pilot-turned-scrapper son of the original film's inspirational warrior-guru Stacker Pentecost ( Idris Elba ). But there are two major problems, and the movie never manages to overcome either of them.

One is that the whole sequel storyline feels like a sad afterthought to the original, which saw various two-person crews of misfit eccentrics overcoming their animosities and neuroses to become one mind, operate their machines, and bash, smash and burn giant beasts who'd slipped through a dimensional portal at the bottom of the sea. To its credit, this sequel from director Steven S. DeKnight (TV's " Spartacus ") doesn't just decide, "Well, the portal that we thought we'd closed is open again, and there are more monsters, so everybody saddle up," because that would've been as lame as the plot of the  " Independence Day " sequel. But what the movie does come up with has been built out in a halfhearted, clumsy manner that underlines the cynical nature of the exercise: a plot involving the rush to deploy jäger drones overseen by the shadowy Shao Corporation, which has been getting a little too close to the kaiju brains that its top secret research depends on.

There are supporting turns by returning characters, including Mako Mori ( Rinko Kikuchi ), the "Pacific Rim" pilot who subsequently became an important world leader, and oddball scientists Hermann Gottlieb ( Burn Gorman ) and Dr. Newt Geiszler ( Charlie Day ). The latter moves to the center of the story thanks to his kaiju mind-meld in the first film. Now he's the co-chief of the Shao Corporation's drone development program alongside Liwen Shao ( Jing Tian of " Kong: Skull Island " and " The Great Wall "). While Day doesn't have the gravitas for what he's been asked to do here, his oddball intensity is a welcome contrast with the earnestness displayed elsewhere (Scott Eastwood's snarling pilot Nate Lambert being an especially one-note example). An orphaned street urchin turned juvenile pilot named Amara Namani ( Cailee Spaeny ) is also regrettably indistinct—essentially a retread of Mako Mori with a few years knocked off her age, ready-made for big brother-little sister or surrogate father-daughter bonding. It's not the actress' fault that the movie mistakes gritted teeth and cartoon spunk for a personality.

Which brings us to the second problem: no Del Toro . Even at their liveliest, these performers can only do so much without the originator at the helm. The project lacks the purplish intensity and explosions of juvenile poetry that made the original "Pacific Rim" so distinctive, whether you loved or hated it. I loved it. In fact, I like to tell people it's the " Citizen Kane " of movies where robots smash dinosaurs in the face with boats. That film's feverish commitment to every detail of the universe it created was admirable. From the names and powers it bestowed on its machines and creatures to the thought it put into what urban life and popular culture would look like in a world besieged by kaiju attacks, there was no doubt that it meant something to the people who made it. It was the work of true believers with childlike enthusiasm for the absurd. Del Toro even believed in the themes of personal redemption and collective effort that were baked into the details of the jäger's mechanics. He got high on his own supply, and not only was that forgivable, it was exactly what a filmmaker was supposed to do in that kind of circumstance.

Here, with a few brief exceptions, it feels as if the studio and the filmmakers just held onto a lot of the CGI programs they'd used to create the effects in the original film and decided to give them one more lap around the track for box office's sake, while making a point of pandering to the Chinese market that made the original film an international success after it did disappointing business elsewhere. (There's nothing wrong with that last part, of course—I only mention it because, once you've seen the movie, it seems like a far better explanation for why "Uprising" exists than anything supplied by the script.) The fate of the world has rarely been decided in as rote a manner as it is here, although I'll confess that the final act—a battle climaxing on the crest of Mt. Fuji, site of many a showdown in a golden era Japanese monster flick—has a flair for melodrama and grandiose imagery that the rest of the project sorely lacks.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Pacific Rim Uprising (2018)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and some language.

111 minutes

John Boyega as Jake Pentecost

Scott Eastwood as Nate Lambert

Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori

Charlie Day as Dr. Newton Geiszler

Burn Gorman as Dr. Hermann Gottlieb

Max Martini as Herc Hansen

Karan Brar as Suresh

Jing Tian as Liwen Shao

Cailee Spaeny as Amara

Levi Meaden as Ilya

• Steven S. DeKnight

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Travis Beacham
• Emily Carmichael
• Kira Snyder
• T.S. Nowlin

Cinematographer

• Dylan Highsmith
• Josh Schaeffer
• Zach Staenberg
• Lorne Balfe

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Take a Man’s Horses, Expect a Reckoning

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By Nicolas Rapold

• May 29, 2014

Brooding and intransigent, “Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas” undertakes a brave and foolhardy act, not unlike the prideful horse merchant of the title. Its striking story of rebellion in an age of aristocracy is set in 16th-century France, adapted from a 19th-century novella by Heinrich von Kleist, a text ripe for reappraisal. But the severely beautiful film is painted in a dauntingly austere manner, as if lost in a war against itself, with confrontations underplayed and the rural landscapes making more of an impression than the detoured drama.

The redoubtable Dane Mads Mikkelsen embodies Michael Kohlhaas as a strapping, bronzed specimen whose very lovemaking is accompanied by extravagant compliments from his wife. But then a bratty young baron (Swann Arlaud) confiscates two of his horses and quashes his attempts at legal redress, which are made with the help of a cowed lawyer played by Jacques Nolot. (The cast also includes Bruno Ganz, Sergi López, Amira Casar and, as a priestly interloper, Denis Lavant.) With the violence hitting close to home, Kohlhaas and his team invade the baron’s castle on a stealthy assassination mission resembling a modern military covert op, crossbows wielded like assault rifles.

Revenge is a dish served rather coolly, however, by the director, Arnaud des Pallières (who previously adapted a John Cheever story with his 2008 film, “Parc” ). At every other turn where the film might flesh out or complicate its themes, it seems to purposely look astray, weighed down by gloom and an oddly slack performance by Mr. Mikkelsen (perhaps by direction). But alongside these problems are nice little tweaks on horse-and-tunic period dramas: the galling youth of the slight-looking baron and a princess (Roxane Duran) who figures later, and the ambiguous position of class occupied by Kohlhaas as a trader.

The story could have been played up for heroic martyrdom, but Mr. des Pallières takes his dour film in another direction. Although he makes enervating choices (of focus, of adaptation) that undercut the curiosity of the film’s portrait of failure, he has managed to leave an impact by underlining the smallness of resistance in the face of entrenched power.

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Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas – review

Mads Mikkelsen finds himself installed like a figurehead at the prow of Arnaud des Pallières's surging historical romp, gazing resolutely towards the far horizon, his eyes alive with both sadness and strength. Age of Uprising tells the tale of Michael Kohlhaas, an unbending horse trader in feudal 16th-century France, wronged by the baron and demanding redress. His subsequent adventures are played out on blasted heaths, beneath lowering skies, to the squealing of pigs.

Des Pallières's picture is stern and impressive, although its endless, one-note hammer blows soon start to grow tiresome. I could have done with a little more of Denis Lavant (so good as a crumpled priest who upbraids Kohlhaas for his arrogance) and Roxane Duran (as the capricious princess of Angoulême) and a little less of the lowering skies, the clattering swords and the squealing of pigs.

Towards the end I even started to weary of Mikkelsen himself, a fine, charismatic actor who here is forced to endure all manner of hardships with the same fixed and brooding expression. "I have principles," declares Kohlhaas as he rides into battle. The peasants are behind him but the film's losing speed. Des Pallières pilots it, clumsily, right on to the rocks.

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• Age Of Uprising: The Legend Of Michael Kohlhaas

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An employee at a weapons factory discovers that an energy drink turns his co-workers into zombies. An employee at a weapons factory discovers that an energy drink turns his co-workers into zombies. An employee at a weapons factory discovers that an energy drink turns his co-workers into zombies.

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‘pacific rim uprising’: film review.

Giant robots battle other giant robots and giant lizards in 'Pacific Rim Uprising,' a sequel to the 2013 hit directed by Guillermo del Toro.

By Frank Scheck

Frank Scheck

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Designed to appeal to adolescents of all ages, Pacific Rim Uprising is a film for anyone whose mental development peaked when they were playing Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. This sequel to the 2013 hit directed by Guillermo del Toro brings nothing new to the franchise except repetition. Considering that the mania for the similar Transformer films seems to be thankfully abating, it’s hard to imagine that audiences are clamoring for yet more clashes between giant CGI robots. Even if the Pacific Rim movies throw in giant lizards to boot.

There’s something inherently silly about watching grown men and women running in place, leaping into the air and miming throwing punches while wearing form-fitting spandex suits. But that’s exactly what comprises much of the action in this series, in which pilots dubbed “Cadets” control their robot avatars, or “ Jaegars ,” to combat giant lizards, known as “ Kaiju .”

Release date: Mar 23, 2018

The vocabulary proves far more interesting than the storyline, which takes place 10 years after the events of the first film. John Boyega (who apparently isn’t satisfied with starring in just one sci-fi franchise) plays Jake, the son of the first film’s hero, played by Idris Elba. Having abandoned his military service to pursue a more lucrative career scavenging Jaegar parts, Jake is summoned back into action by his sister Mako Mori ( Rinko Kikuchi ). Rejoining the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, or PPDC (I hope you’re taking notes; there’ll be a quiz later), Jake is soon fighting alongside Lambert (Scott Eastwood), his friend and rival pilot; Jules ( Adria Arjona ), whose romantic affections both men vie for; and Amara ( Cailee Spaeny ), a spunky teenage hacker who’s built her own Jaeger from parts left over from the last cataclysmic battle.

A major plot element involves a Chinese company developing a new breed of unmanned Jaegar corps (Trump must have gotten an advance copy of the script before instituting his tariffs) — a business plan that, needless to say, doesn’t sit well with the pilots. The Cadets are soon forced into apocalyptic combat with both the rogue Jaegars and the newly returned Kaiju . Anyone planning on visiting Sydney, Australia, one of several locales devastated in the carnage, should rethink their travel plans.

Among the characters returning for this installment are scientists Dr. Hermann Gottlieb and Dr. Newt Geiszler , played by Burn Gorman and Charlie Day, respectively, as a pair of tag-team vaudevillians.

Lacking the stylistic flair provided by del Toro in the original, this sequel, directed by Steven S. DeKnight (TV’s Daredevil and Spartacus ), becomes increasingly tiresome in its cliched plotting and characterizations, hackneyed dialogue and numbingly repetitive, visually incoherent action sequences. There were no less than three editors on the project, and you get the feeling that they weren’t on speaking terms. The sequel is an improvement on its predecessor in at least one respect: Its running time is 20 minutes shorter. Not that you feel it.

It’s disappointing to see Boyega , so impressive in Detroit , not taking advantage of his recently acquired star power to look for more challenging material. Eastwood certainly fulfills the physical demands of his heroic role effectively, but he now looks so much like his father that it’s as if we’re watching the computer-generated version of a young Clint Eastwood that will soon be starring in new Dirty Harry movies. The film’s best performance comes from Spaeny , making her feature debut with an entertainingly feisty turn.

The screenplay, written by DeKnight and three others (it takes a committee to craft a script this generic), does feature one winking, self-knowing line. It’s delivered by Day, who it’s easy to believe might have improvised it if a behemoth production like this one allowed for such things. “We’re going with giant robots again?” his scientist character asks in an aggrieved tone. “Real original! I am not impressed!”

Not that I want to talk my way out of a job, but who needs critics when a movie is gracious enough to review itself?

Production companies: Legendary Pictures, DDY Distributor: Universal Pictures Cast: John Boyega , Scott Eastwood, Jing Tian , Cailee Spaeny , Rinko Kikuchi , Burn Gorman, Adriana Arjona , Max Zhang, Charlie Day Director: Steven S. DeKnight Screenwriters: Steven S. DeKnight , Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, T.S. Nowlin Producers: Mary Parent, Cale Boyter , Guillermo del Toro, John Boyega , Femi Oguns , Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni Executive producer: Eric McLeod Director of photography: Dan Mindel Production designer: Stefan Dechant Editors: Zach Staenberg , Dylan Highsmith , Josh Schaeffer Composer: Lorne Balfe Costume designer: Lizz Wolf Casting: Sarah Finn, Kirsty McGregor

Rated PG-13, 111 minutes

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Pacific rim: uprising, common sense media reviewers.

Surprisingly fun (but violent) monsters vs. robots sequel.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Strong, rewarding teamwork is central to the story

One of the main characters is a young woman who ca

Strong fantasy violence, mostly between giant robo

Flirting. Two men both seem to like the same woman

Fairly infrequent use of words including "s--t," "

Oreo cookies shown. Giant robots and monsters seem

At a party, a main character pours a bottle of alc

Parents need to know that Pacific Rim: Uprising is the sequel to 2013's Pacific Rim . Like the first movie, it has tons of explosive, large-scale action/fantasy violence. The giants shoot and beat one another up with fists and various weapons, leading to massive destruction and offscreen deaths. There…

Positive Messages

Strong, rewarding teamwork is central to the story; loners and outcasts learn to work well with others and even form what's described as a "family."

Positive Role Models

One of the main characters is a young woman who can build her own robot and wants to become a pilot; she gets her chance. Another character changes from being a black-market dealer to becoming a pilot and inspiring hero. Characters are a diverse group of men and women.

Violence & Scariness

Strong fantasy violence, mostly between giant robots and giant monsters. Guns, electric swords/whips, and other weapons used. Massive amounts of large-scale destruction. Minor characters die. A bloody hand is shown. Acid drips onto an arm. Creepy alien-related imagery. Minor wounds. A young girl is in peril during a flashback sequence. Humans punch and shove each other.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Flirting. Two men both seem to like the same woman, and she kisses each of them on the cheek.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Fairly infrequent use of words including "s--t," "son of a bitch," "ass," "goddamn," "bastard," "boobs," "butt," and "screw that," plus middle-finger gestures.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Oreo cookies shown. Giant robots and monsters seem primed to sell toys and action figures.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

At a party, a main character pours a bottle of alcohol on the ground; empty bottles are littered in pool the next morning. Main character later sips a beer.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Pacific Rim: Uprising is the sequel to 2013's Pacific Rim . Like the first movie, it has tons of explosive, large-scale action/fantasy violence. The giants shoot and beat one another up with fists and various weapons, leading to massive destruction and offscreen deaths. There's also some creepy, alien-related imagery, a little blood, and fighting/punching. Two men have a crush on the same woman; she kisses them both on the cheek, but nothing more comes of it. Language includes a smattering of words like "s--t," "ass," "bastard," "bitch," etc. An adult character drinks a couple of times. Guillermo Del Toro didn't direct this one as he did the original (he was a producer this time around), but it's still surprisingly fun, with some very likable and fairly positive, diverse characters who work together well as a team. John Boyega and Scott Eastwood co-star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (15)
• Kids say (22)

Based on 15 parent reviews

first film is much better, please write this one out of the canon, it's terrible

I am not your toy, what's the story.

In PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING, 10 years have passed since the big battle between the invading giant monsters (the "Kaiju") and the human-made giant robots (the "Jaegers"). Jake Pentecost ( John Boyega ), son of fallen hero General Pentecost, now passes his time stealing and selling items on the black market. While trying to nab a valuable power source, he loses it to another thief, a young girl named Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), who's building her own mini-Jaeger. They're caught and sent to the Jaeger base, where Amara trains to become a cadet and Jake to take his place as a ranger. Before long, a rogue Jaeger attacks, and Jake and his fellow ranger, Nate Lambert ( Scott Eastwood ), underestimate it and lose. But when they follow a clue and discover who (or what) is piloting it, it leads to a long-gestating plot: The Kaiju will rise again.

Is It Any Good?

This monsters vs. robots sequel is, surprisingly, much more than a dashed-off afterthought; it's speedy, nimble, fun, and -- best of all -- it doesn't take itself too seriously. Guillermo Del Toro , who directed the original Pacific Rim (2013), opted not to hold the reins for Pacific Rim: Uprising , instead taking a back seat as producer and handing the project over to Steven S. DeKnight, a TV director and producer who makes his feature directing debut here. He turns in a shorter, leaner movie, spending less time on exposition in favor of quick, potent, and often funny interactions.

In addition to creating likable characters, the band of screenwriters actually came up with a decent reason for a second movie, digging into the first one and coming up with believable roots for a new attack. Meanwhile, the battle scenes are as effective as ever: huge, colorful, and with a genuine sense of weight, scale, and height. The clever idea allows for cutting to the fighters inside the robots, guiding their actions and adding a human element to the fights. All in all, that's what viewers of this kind of movie actually want to see: an awesome, massive, roller coaster-sized spectacle. Pacific Rim: Uprising has it.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Pacific Rim: Uprising 's violence . Does it have the same kind of impact as more realistic fighting and destruction? Could the movie have succeeded with less violence?

Is Amara a positive role model ? How does she change over the course of the movie? Is she admirable? What about the other characters?

How did teamwork help the characters achieve their goal? If you'd been on the team, which character(s) would you have wanted to work with? Why?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 23, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : June 19, 2018
• Cast : Cailee Spaeny , John Boyega , Scott Eastwood
• Director : Steven S. DeKnight
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires , Robots
• Character Strengths : Teamwork
• Run time : 111 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and some language
• Last updated : February 9, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Netflix Vampire Thriller ‘Uprising’: What We Know So Far

Netflix and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps are teaming up once again for the Vampire action thriller Uprising,  an adaption of Raymond Villareal’s novel A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising. 21 Laps are responsible for creating such major hits as Stranger Things , Shadow & Bone and more.

Netflix tapped Bumblebee and Kubo and the Two Strings director, Travis Knight , to helm Uprising . Jeremy Slater , better known for his work on Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy , penned the latest draft, with previous drafts by Jay Basu and JD Payne & Patrick McKay, who are now moved on to writing and showrunning Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings .

Director Travis Knight

Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen are producing for 21 Laps as part of their overall deal with Netflix which was recently expanded. Here’s everything else we know about Netflix’s Uprising :

What’s the plot of Uprising ?

As described above, Uprising is a live-action adaptation of Raymond Villareal’s 2018 novel A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising . Here is a brief description of the movie from Deadline :

The film is set after a global viral outbreak turns people into vampires and follows CIA agent Lauren Webb, who works against the clock to uncover the truth behind a growing uprising that threatens to wipe out humanity.

Here is the official plot description for the novel itself as found in Production Weekly :

This panoramic fictional oral history begins with one small mystery: the body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town, presumed to be an illegal immigrant, disappears from the town morgue. To the young CDC investigator called in to consult with the local police, it’s an impossibility that threatens her understanding of medicine. Then, more bodies, dead from an inexplicable disease that solidified their blood, are brought to the morgue, only to also vanish. Soon, the US government – and eventually biomedical researchers, disgruntled lawmakers, and even an insurgent faction of the Catholic Church – must come to terms with what they’re too late to stop: an epidemic of vampirism that will sweep first the United States, and then the world. With heightened strength and beauty and a steady diet of fresh blood, these changed people, or “Gloamings”, rapidly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society. Soon people are beginning to be “re-created”, willingly accepting the risk of death if their bodies can’t handle the transformation. As new communities of Gloamings arise, society is divided, and popular Gloaming sites come under threat from a secret terrorist organization. But when a charismatic and wealthy businessman, recently turned, runs for political office – well, all hell breaks loose. Told from the perspective of key players, including a cynical FBI agent, an audacious campaign manager, and a war veteran turned nurse turned secret operative.

Who is cast in Uprising ?

As of June 2021, no cast have been announced for Netflix’s Uprising .

What’s the production status of Uprising ?

Netflix’s Uprising is currently in active development at the streamer with cast and production dates to be revealed soon.

What’s the release date of Uprising ?

Netflix hasn’t set any release dates for Uprising as of yet.

Tigran is our resident previews writer. He works on collecting everything known about upcoming Netflix Original projects and also is editor-in-chief of Redanian Intelligence. Resides in France.

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‘Shirley’ review: Now on Netflix, the story of the first Black congresswoman on the ’72 campaign trail

Two hours: Is it enough for even a part of any person’s real life, dramatized?

The biopic form practically demands failure, or at least a series of narrative compromises made under pressure from so many factions: the real-life subject, or keepers of the now-deceased subject’s estate, nervous about an unsympathetic truth or two; the streamer or studio backing the project; and the filmmakers themselves, trying to do right by the person featured in the title, while finding a shape — and the ideal performer — to make the thing work.

“Shirley,” now streaming on Netflix, constitutes the latest frustrating, two-hour example of all that pressure. You don’t, however, detect any of it in the carefully detailed performance of Regina King as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black female member of the U.S. Congress, who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.

Watching King in scenes with the late, great Lance Reddick (as Chisholm adviser Wesley “Mac” Holder), or Terrence Howard (Arthur Hardwick, her second husband; they met as New York state legislators in 1966), or André Holland (as Chisholm’s rival presidential hopeful Walter Fauntroy), you can relish the skill sets of these performers — their sleight-of-hand ease with even the horsiest loads of exposition. This, too, can scarcely be avoided in any biopic: those moments when two characters are meant to be talking like they know each other well, and are well-acquainted with the background or context of whatever they’re discussing. Problem is, the audience isn’t. So the dialogue starts sounding like they’re speaking directly to the viewer, in bullet points.

“Shirley” struggles with many such moments. Writer-director John Ridley, who also produced, focuses the two hours he has on a few months in ’72, when Chisholm took on the political challenge of her life, seeking 1,500 delegates amid a pale male sea of skepticism. Nixon was set to go for a second Republican term pre-Watergate; in those days, scandalous and/or illegal presidential activity was enough for a vast majority of the party in power to ditch the man in charge. McGovern, the way-out-ahead Democratic front-runner, felt inevitable though he got creamed by Nixon in the end.

Did Chisholm and her better-known, better-funded competitors, from Humphrey to Muskie to Lindsay, have a chance? No, and yes. Campaigns turn on a series of dimes, and coin tosses with fate. In America, we’re besotted with underdog stories because they typically involve long-shots who end up winning. “Shirley” can’t work that way, although Chisholm proved an seriously inspirational political figure. She had her eye on the future, whether she would run the country in that future or not.

I wish the movie dramatized those harried campaign months more persuasively, without quite so many speech-y bits even when no one’s making any speeches. Five minutes into “Shirley” in a brief scene from Chisholm’s first congressional year, there’s a confrontation with a bigoted white Southern pol, fussed about this interloping Black woman from Brooklyn earning the same $42,500 annual salary he does. Does the scene work? Only as crude shorthand. It feels more like a biopic straining for hit-and-run impact, rather than a telling fragment in a real-life story.

The actors do all they can, all the time. Lucas Hedges portrays young, green law student Robert Gottlieb, who at 21 became Chisholm’s national student organizer; Christina Jackson, astutely delineating campaign worker and future U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee’s conflicted feelings about politics, adds welcome doses of subtlety. Along with Reddick and company, these two buoy a script gradually taking on more and more water.

King’s in charge, of course. Her real-life sister Reina King plays Chisholm’s sister Muriel, resentful of Shirley’s favored-daughter status. In their scenes, and in every scene elsewhere, the top-billed Oscar winner (King won for her work in “If Beale Street Could Talk”) works low-keyed wonders in selling what’s overstated in an understated, humanizing way. Chisholm came from Guyanese and Bajan (Barbadian) descent, and while King foregoes some vocal particulars (the sibilant “s,” mainly) she evokes Chisholm’s public persona and refreshing candor extremely well.

Writer-director Ridley, who won his own Oscar for adapting “12 Years a Slave,” has done solid work (the recent Apple miniseries “Five Days at Memorial”) and at least one directorial documentary project, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising documentary (“Let It Fall”), that is very close to great. With “Shirley” we’re close to almost-not-quite territory, and visually, Ridley sticks with conventional shot sequences of characters in frame, alone, either speaking or reacting. This makes fluidity and interpersonal flow pretty difficult. The political particulars of Chisholm’s presidential bid, and the question of why so many other candidate’s delegates got funneled into McGovern’s losing campaign, never risk much complication. Time is too short.

At one point King, as Chisholm, resists the advisers’ pleas to simplify her “messaging” (was that word in circulation 52 years ago?) by saying: “I am not leaving out the nuance!” In “Shirley,” the top-shelf actors aren’t, either. Even if their material does.

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for profanity including racial slurs, brief violence and some smoking)

Running time: 1:57

How to watch: Netflix

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‘The Who’s Tommy’ Broadway Review: Still A Sensation

By Greg Evans

NY & Broadway Editor

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Certainly one definition of great music might include an ability to meet the present – and the future – head-on and come out unbruised, even triumphant. By that standard and many more, The Who’s Tommy , opening tonight on Broadway , is thrilling proof that the premiere concept album of 1969 is great music indeed.

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With a superb cast headed by Broadway newcomer Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy, the “deaf, dumb and blind kid” – most of whatever language less-than-acceptable by today’s standards has been retained – and Alison Luff as his mom Mrs. Walker, Tommy feels less like a stick-to-what-works revival than a top-to-bottom reimagining. Nearly all of it works beautifully.

Neither the music – from “I’m Free,” “See Me, Feel Me,” “Sensation” and “Pinball Wizard” to “Acid Queen,” “Christmas” and “Tommy, Can You Hear Me?” – nor the plot has changed much in the last 55 years since the former first grabbed FM radio listeners and the latter baffled stoned hippies hoping to make sense of it (the album didn’t come with instructions).

So, the plot: In a brief preamble set in 1941, British officer Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs) meets and marries the soon-to-be Mrs. Walker (Luff). He returns to battle – chillingly depicted with archival projections and goose-stepping silhouettes of marching Nazis – where he’s captured and sent to a camp while she gives birth to their son Tommy. Presuming her husband dead, Mrs. Walker takes up with a new man (Nathan Lucrezio), only to be shocked when the Captain returns home. A fight leaves the lover dead, and Tommy, who saw it all, traumatized.

The first act of the musical portrays Tommy at ages 4 and 10 – as well as, less frequently, Bourzgui’s adult Tommy, interacting with them – through various, well, adventures would be a polite way to put it. He’s prayed over (“Christmas”), medically examined (“Sparks”), taken to various drugs & sex dens of iniquity (“Eyesight to the Blind” and “Acid Queen”), tormented by a sadistic cousin (“Cousin Kevin”) and, in “Fiddle About,” left alone with his sexually abusive Uncle Ernie (John Ambrosino) – no laughing matter in this telling, unlike Ken Russell’s grotesque 1975 film version.

It’s Cousin Kevin – terrifically played by Bobby Conte – who inadvertently spurs Tommy’s breakthrough, and leads the musical to its show-stopping Act I finale: After some at-home cruelty, he takes his young charge to a local youth community center, where Tommy is mysteriously drawn to a pinball machine. The rest, as they might say, is rock and roll history, as Tommy stuns the hall full of teens with an inexplicable mastery of the electric machine.

Much, of course, is expected of “Pinball Wizard,” one of the most loved songs in The Who catalogue, and in Lorin Latarro’s exuberant, best-of-show choreography, all expectations are met. The teens all but explode in an feverish dance of elation and slack-jawed wonderment.

The second half of the show follows Tommy’s ascendance from local hero to national celebrity – one of Townshend’s better conceits was always the substitution of pinball wizardry for rock stardom – including his emotional breakthrough (“Smash The Mirror,” “I’m Free”) when his sight, hearing and speech returns. The “Miracle Cure” sends him to the heights of stardom (“Sensation”) and to its depths (“Sally Simpson”).

At this point in the show, the musical veers from both the album and the film by eliminating the song “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” in which loathsome old Uncle Ernie (played for laughs in the film by The Who’s Keith Moon) is back in Tommy’s good graces and running a Tommy-themed retreat for fans. No such blanket forgiveness here: When last we see the alcoholic, dejected pedophile, he remains standing apart from the rest of the Walker family. Even Cousin Kevin has found his way back to the fold, putting his nasty skills to use (unbeknownst to Tommy) as the family’s authoritarian security guard, complete with a longcoat that lands somewhere between Communist China and 1984 .

The Acid Queen (Christina Sajous), like Cousin Kevin, is given a bit of, if not exoneration, then some understanding: The unrepentant sex worker-drug pusher of Tina Turner’s film portrayal, tasked with effecting some sort of cure by corrupting the child Tommy, is shown here to be a victim herself, with a pimp or two supplying the heroin that keeps her in line.

In any case, “Tommy’s Holiday Camp” isn’t missed, with the much lovelier “Welcome” serving the same function of conveying Tommy’s attempt to connect with his followers while rejecting their messianic expectations. It doesn’t go well, as evidenced by the greatest anthem of mob uprising and defiance in rock (here performed by the the production’s excellent chorus, with the word “break” subbing for “rape,” an odious sentiment even in ’69).

From there, it’s all over but the barnburner finale, a full-cast reprise of “See Me, Feel Me”/”Listening To You” that had the audience at the reviewed performance on its feet and roaring, a reception that had been teased out not only by an faultless cast and rousing score (the orchestra and orchestrations fully meet the occasion) but by two-plus hours of visual magic. Set designer David Korins ( Hamilton ) has devised a deceptively minimalist foundation, with large open spaces, scrims and furnishings that can seem mere suggestion – the pinball machine is little more than a frame. Splashing this cavernous canvas with extraordinary displays of light (courtesy of designer Amanda Zieve) and Peter Nigrini’s state-of-the-art projections, the world of Tommy is less the pinball machine buzzers and bells of yore than a 3-D mash-up of Tron -style laser show and you-are-there Virtual Reality. There’s even some Ivo van Hove-ish mixed media tossed in for good measure.

Matching Nigrini’s time-jumping projections from Blitz to V.R. every step of the way are Sarafina Bush’s wildly inventive costumes, capturing each era’s essence without falling victim to that musical theater bogeyman of Halloween costume replication. Post-war drab gives way to Teddy Boy flash, which segues to leather-era early Beatles and, inevitably, the dystopian future-retro-fascist grays that Orwell himself might have imagined. At every epoch, Bush sends in black sleek-helmeted soldier-droog-robot toadies to make any amount of mischief.

Keeping everything jumping, very literally, is Latarro’s exhilarating choreography, never better than in the ’50s-’60s-era mad celebrations of teenage abandon, whether the West Side Story ruffianism of “Tommy, Can You Hear Me” or that wonderful arcade dance of “Pinball Wizard.” Watch for the details: At one point as the young Tommy is dazzling the crowd with his Bally Table wizardry, the enthusiastic lads and lasses lift the boy’s feet so high that the kid’s body is at a 2 o’clock angle, tethered only to the machine by his crazy flipper fingers. Can this be anything other than an homage to the iconic photo of a young Elton John kicking his legs behind him while bashing his piano keys, Townshend’s pinball wizard-rock star metaphor made clear in one joyous moment of theater?

Of course, none of this razzle-dazzle would work without a cast to justify it, and McAnuff, an exemplary director who has really never been better, has assembled a very worthy group. Bourzgui, his wild mop of curly black hair crowning a handsome face dominated by big, dark Bette Davis eyes that remain wide and vacant until they’re not, is one of this season’s true finds. With eccentric, angular movements that stop just short of robotic, Bourzgui careens from the stilted expressions of a man trapped in his body to the fluid, soulful gestures of his adult self guiding his lost-to-themselves younger iterations. The rock-star moves that eventually arrive seem entirely inevitable, his voice throughout finding the sweet spot between Roger Daltrey howl and the musical theater control.

No weak links in the rest of the cast either. Conte, so good in Broadway’s most recent Company , is no less a bright spot here, finding both the humor and the menace in the pin-sticking Cousin Kevin, “the school bully, the classroom cheat, the nastiest playfriend you ever could meet.” Conte is handed perhaps the most underrated song of the score (“Cousin Kevin,” written by The Who’s bassist John Entwistle), and runs with it.

Luff, as Tommy’s long-suffering, occasionally misguided but ever-devoted mom, is a wonder, reaching a show zenith with the Act II raver “Smash The Mirror.” (She’s equally impressive with the quieter husband-wife duet-ballad “I Believe My Own Eyes” with Jacobs, though that number, added by Townshend long after the original rock album, remains the stage musical’s sore thumb.)

Notable among the very large ensemble is Sheldon Henry as the Hawker pimp who introduces the Acid Queen with “Eyesight To The Blind” (a menacing bluesy number heavily indebted, to put it mildly, to the great Sonny Boy Williamson). Sajous, as the Acid Queen, doesn’t have the shriek-of-nature vocal power of the film’s Tina Turner – who does? – but gives the character and the sultry song a wounded depth that feels thoroughly of the moment.

When Townshend wrote the album’s central question – “Can you hear me?” – back in ’69, he might have directed the lyric at his fictional alter-ego Tommy, but perceptive listeners recognized the plea for a larger connection, whether spiritual or communal or familial or even self. All these years later, the question remains at the heart of The Who’s Tommy , and we can answer, with great pleasure, loud and clear.

Title: The Who’s Tommy Venue: Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre Director: Des McAnuff Book: Pete Townshend and Des McAnuff Music and Lyrics: Pete Townshend Choreography: Lorin Latarro Cast: Ali Louis Bourzgui, Alison Luff, Adam Jacobs, John Ambrosino, Bobby Conte, Christina Sajous, with Haley Gustafson, Jeremiah Alsop, Ronnie S. Bowman Jr., Mike Cannon, Tyler James Eisenreich, Sheldon Henry, Afra Hines, Aliah James, David Paul Kidder, Tassy Kirbas, Lily Kren, Quinten Kusheba, Reese Levine, Brett Michael Lockley, Nathan Lucrezio, Alexandra Matteo, Mark Mitrano, Reagan Pender, Cecilia Ann Popp, Daniel Quadrino, Olive Ross-Kline, Jenna Nicole Schoen, Dee Tomasetta, and Andrew Tufano. Running time: 2 hr 10 min (including intermission)

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Godzilla x Kong is an underwhelming brawl that nobody wins

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Directed by Adam Wingard

Written by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater

Starring Rebecca Hall, Kaylee Hottle, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens

Classification PG; 115 minutes

Opens in theatres March 29

There was a time when a movie like Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire could have gotten by just on its atomic fumes and a pulverizing CGI aesthetic. That was just three years ago, actually, when Godzilla vs. Kong could count on an audience satisfied with the lowest common denominator in mind-numbing entertainment, like a well-timed right hook from one cinematic giant to another. We lived in a world where we didn’t expect much more from a movie about a title match between high-rise-sized monsters generated by computer.

But then a Godzilla movie won an Oscar! Toho, the Japanese company that created Godzilla 70 years ago, released Godzilla Minus One last fall, expanding on the same postwar anxiety and so much of the monster’s mystique from the 1954 original.

Toho’s granular-looking period piece pushed the humanity of the storytelling forward and squeezed Godzilla far enough into the periphery that every sight of him was genuinely breathtaking. For that the company won the Oscar for visual effects. And it pulled that off on a US$15-million budget, which is a tenth of what Hollywood is pouring into its cheap-looking installments in the MonsterVerse (Warner and Legendary‘s attempts at making a Marvel-like franchise out of Godzilla and Kong). Toho proved that sometimes tinier is better, even when it comes to Godzilla.

And so, director Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire , a slow and visually hideous crawl to an underwhelming brawl, is arriving, weeks after the Oscar win, like a whimper. (It can at least count on the audience too lazy to read subtitles to have skipped Godzilla Minus One , and perhaps still appreciate the low bar this movie barely clears.)

Godzilla and Kong face off in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures

Wingard’s sequel to Godzilla vs. Kong even feels built with a sense of self-defeat, an acknowledgment that the overstuffed material that’s put on screen is like aggressive make-work. The creators are throwing a bunch of evolutionary lore and stakes rendered on Houdini software, which no one involved (or in the audience) feels particularly invested in, at a scheduled theatrical release date. They’re leaning on actors to speak of kaiju and their historic beefs with a sense of awe that – five movies into the MonsterVerse – has never felt earned.

There’s a whole section in which the characters in this movie discover an ancient Indigenous tribe that invented a complex irrigation system and found ways to manipulate gravity from the centre of the Earth, which, in the movie’s world, could explain how the pyramids were built. But all that comes across not with genuine curiosity or wonder – or the awe that poor actor Rebecca Hall tries valiantly to communicate with her eyes – but as busy bits of business to set up Kong smash.

Even the title, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire , sounds like words awkwardly lumped together as if designed only to satisfy best practices in search engine optimization. Like, are we supposed to say the “x?”

The movie doesn’t feel like a total failure from the start. We catch up with King Kong in his habitat in the Earth’s core, which, for those who haven’t been keeping up, is a hidden world with even more hidden crevices.

There, pterodactyls still fly, giant plants can be cannibals, and the wolves have slithery tongues and warthog teeth. The prologue has Kong annihilating a wolf pack and taking a carcass home for dinner. He showers their guts from his fur under a waterfall before chowing down, only to discover a toothache. These tiny human-like routines, as when Godzilla, after taking down a giant snow crab in Rome, curls up for a nap in the Coliseum, are the best the movie has to offer. The slightly organic quality of monsters having downtime breaks up all the franchise’s imposing artificiality.

The calm doesn’t last. Kong, Godzilla and Jia, the young mute Indigenous child played by Kaylee Hottle, are rattled by a threat they can all sense. Jia, the child once protected by Kong on Skull Island, is now discovering telepathic powers. She’s become an antenna for scattered images and electric patterns, which signal danger.

Rebecca Hall, left, as Dr. Ilene Andrews and Brian Tyree Henry in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. dan mcfadden/Warner Bros. Pictures

At the same time, Godzilla begins attacking and consuming atomic power sources, charging up for the duel he knows is a few dozen pages down in the screenplay. And Kong resurfaces from the Earth’s core so that the scientists can give him some dental care, because (well, that toothache is a nag, but also) he too is readying for what’s next, a Planet of the Apes-style uprising from the Earth’s core.

For all the buildup toward a slugfest between Godzilla, Kong (outfitted with a new mecha-arm), some surprise allies and an army raised from the Earth’s core, this one is egregiously dull. It’s just a bunch of cartoonish limbs flailing, with bursts of fireballs and beams, lacking any of the graceful or exhilarating movements that a little human choreography could have helped with.

A whole section during the climactic bout takes place in the Earth’s core, without gravity, which doubles as a metaphor for the movie as a whole. It’s weightless.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)

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New on Hulu in April 2024 — all the new shows and movies to watch

All the Hulu shows and movies you should check out this month

• Everything new on Hulu
• Leaving Hulu

April is a packed month on Hulu, including the season premieres of two popular FX series; new reality shows featuring a cannabis dispensary, Armie Hammer’s ex-wife, and one of the Real Housewives; and new documentaries about political hip-hop, horse racing and a legendary rock band.

Other new Hulu originals this month include the romantic comedy feature film “The Greatest Hits,” starring Lucy Boynton as a woman who can travel back in time via her favorite songs; “Vanderpump Villa,” the latest installment in Bravolebrity Lisa Vanderpump’s multi-pronged business empire; and British comedy “Dinosaur,” about two sisters whose close relationship is challenged when one of them suddenly gets engaged. 

Wrexham A.F.C., Bon Jovi, Elisabeth Moss and more round out this month’s new on Hulu highlights.

New on Hulu in April 2024: Top picks

'american horror story: delicate' part 2.

Ryan Murphy’s horror anthology series has now lasted long enough for him to leave its production company 20th Television for a deal at Netflix, and then return to 20th Television. Murphy has been involved with “American Horror Story” the entire time, crafting its blend of campiness and terror, across 12 seasons that present standalone stories with occasional minor connections.

The show’s 12th season is the first to be based on outside source material, adapting Danielle Valentine’s novel “Delicate Condition.” Kim Kardashian stars in her first major acting role, playing an actress who seems to be facing sinister forces that want to stop her from getting pregnant. The cast also includes “American Horror Story” regulars like Emma Roberts and Denis O’Hare. After the first half of the season premiered this past September, the final four episodes debut beginning this month.

Premieres April 4 on Hulu

'Under the Bridge'

For her first project since her Oscar nomination for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Lily Gladstone co-stars in this true-crime drama based on a murder that took place in Canada in the 1990s. Gladstone plays Cam Bentland, a police officer in the town of Saanich on Vancouver Island. She joins with author Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough) to investigate the death of a teenage girl that occurred at a gathering of teens under a local bridge.

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“Under the Bridge” is based on the real-life Godfrey’s book of the same name, chronicling a case that made national news in Canada. The cast also includes Archie Panjabi (“The Good Wife”) as the victim’s mother, in a story that explores issues of class, race and religion within an insular community.

Premieres April 17 on Hulu

'Welcome to Wrexham' season 3

The third season of this unlikely hit continues to chronicle the equally unlikely rise of the football (or “soccer,” for uncouth Americans) team from the Welsh city of Wrexham, following its purchase by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. It’s a feel-good docu-series about a pair of celebrities who do more than just lend their names to an investment property. They’re directly involved in building up the team and raising its status within the English football leagues.

That effort has paid off, and the third season finds the team in a new position in the National League, with the challenges of more intense, high-level competition. This season will also focus on Wrexham’s women’s football team, expanding the scope of a popular series that combines the self-deprecating humor of its Hollywood stars with the excitement of athletic achievement.

Premieres April 19 on Hulu

'Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story'

Although the term “hair metal” now sounds amusingly quaint, there was a time when bands like Bon Jovi, with their hook-laden pop-rock, teased hairdos and tight outfits, were considered the enemies of “real” hard rock music. Decades later, Jon Bon Jovi and his bandmates have come out ahead, with a career of enduring hits, a place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and now this retrospective documentary.

The four-part series looks back at four decades of the band’s career, starting in small New Jersey clubs and extending through hits like “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Livin’ on a Prayer.” It also catches up with the band in the present, as they continue making music and look toward the next phase of a prosperous career that has silenced all the doubters.

Premieres April 26 on Hulu

‘The Veil’

Elisabeth Moss starred in Hulu’s first major hit original series, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and she returns to Hulu (via FX) this month for a globe-trotting espionage thriller created by Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders”). In this six-episode limited series, Moss plays Mi6 agent Imogen Salter, who’s been undercover so many times that she may be losing her grip on her own identity. 

Imogen’s latest assignment sends her to a refugee camp in Turkey, where she’s tasked with escorting Adilah (Yumna Marwan), a woman who may have information about a terrorist plot to kill half a million people. Of course, neither Adilah nor Imogen’s bosses (including Josh Charles as a CIA agent) can be trusted, leading to plenty of double-crosses and shoot-outs as Imogen searches for the truth about her mission and attempts to avert disaster.

Premieres April 30 on Hulu

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• Copycat, 1995
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, 2012
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• The Grudge 2, 2006
• Hellboy, 2004
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• Jack The Giant Slayer, 2013
• The Karate Kid, 2010
• Letters to Juliet, 2010
• Made in America, 1993
• The Next Karate Kid, 1994
• Ocean's Eleven, 2001
• Ocean's Twelve, 2004
• Ocean's Thirteen, 2007
• Pacific Rim, 2013
• Runaway Jury, 2003
• Seven Years in Tibet, 1997
• Shazam!, 2019
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• Take Shelter, 2011
• Wonder Woman, 2017
• You Don't Mess With The Zohan, 2008
• X2: X-Men United, 2003
• 50 First Dates, 2004
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• Jumanji: The Next Level, 2019
• UFO Factory: Complete Season 1
• American Horror Story: Delicate: Part 2 Premiere
• American Pickers: Complete Season 24B
• Best in Chow: Complete Season 1
• Dark Marvels: Complete Season 1
• Mountain Men: Ultimate Marksman: Complete Season 1B
• Lord of Misrule, 2023
• Dinosaur: Complete Season 1
• She Came to Me, 2023
• The Fable: Series Premiere
• GO! GO! Loser Ranger!: Series Premiere
• Mission: Yozakura Family: Series Premiere (Subbed)
• Ishura: Complete Season 1 (Dubbed)
• The Grudge, 2020
• Teen Titans Go! To The Movies, 2018
• Blood Free: Two-Episode Series Premiere
• Grand Cayman: Secrets in Paradise: Series Premiere
• The Incredible Dr. Pol: Season 24 Premiere
• Sand Land: The Series: Two Episode Premiere (Dubbed)
• Curtain Call: Complete Season 1
• Kusama: Infinity, 2018
• Cold Case Files: The Rifkin Murders: Complete Season 1
• Scraps: Complete Season 1
• #TextMeWhenYouGetHome: Complete Season 2
• Immediate Family, 2022
• Trapped in the Farmhouse, 2023
• The Channel, 2023
• The Greatest Hits, 2024
• Alone, 2020

 April  15

• A Kind Of Murder, 2016
• The Stranger, 2020
• See You in Another Life: Complete Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Series Premiere
• Drain the Oceans: Season 6 Premiere
• Dr. Oakley, Yukon Vet: Season 12 Premiere
• All You Can Eat: Complete Season 1
• Secrets of Miss America: Complete Season 1
• 60 Days In: Complete Season 8
• Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story, 2023
• Blacklight, 2022
• Welcome to Wrexham: Season 3 Premiere
• Tattoo Fixers: Complete Seasons 1-4
• High Hopes: Complete Season 1
• The Marijuana Revolution: Complete Season 1
• Hip-Hop and The White House: Documentary
• Secrets of the Octopus: Special Premiere
• Little Women, 2019
• Yes, God, Yes, 2019
• The Meg, 2018
• Wonderful World: Complete Season 1
• Talking Sabor: Complete Season 1
• Booked: First Day In: Complete Season 1
• Mountain Men: Complete Season 11
• Wahlburgers: Complete Season 7
• Barber, 2023
• Boy in the Walls, 2023
• Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story: Complete Docuseries
• The New York Times Presents: Broken Horses: Special Premiere
• American Woman, 2018
• Isn't It Romantic, 2019
• Stars at Noon, 2022
• Welcome to Smelliville, 2021
• The Veil: Limited Series Premiere

Leaving Hulu in April 2024

April 1 Savage Salvation, 2022

April 2 The Menu, 2022

April 4 Monster Family 2: Nobody's Perfect, 2021

April 5 Son of Bigfoot, 2017

April 6 Beast of Burden, 2018 Mr. Right, 2015 The Program, 2015

April 8 The War With Grandpa, 2020

April 14 Black Death, 2010 Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, 2015 The Two Faces Of January, 2014

April 15 Benediction, 2021

April 27 Banana Split, 2018

April 28 Permanent, 2017

April 29 Escape from Pretoria, 2020 April 30 Billionaire Boys Club, 2018 Blade Runner 2049, 2017 Downhill, 2020 Failure to Launch, 2006 Ghostbusters II, 1989 Ghostbusters, 1984 Goosebumps, 2015 The Last Duel, 2021 Ong-Bak 3, 2010 Ong-Bak 2, 2008 Ong Bak, 2003 Pacific Rim, 2013 Pacific Rim: Uprising, 2018 The Personal History Of David Copperfield, 2020 Shazam!, 2019 Shazam! Fury of the Gods, 2023 Sisters, 2015 Stand by Me, 1986 Take This Waltz, 2011 Wonder Woman, 2017

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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He's the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and has written about movies and TV for Vulture, Inverse, CBR, Crooked Marquee and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.

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Pacific Rim Uprising Reviews

...it’s tough to embrace it as anything more than forgettable blockbuster fluff.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 24, 2022

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re here mainly to watch robots faceoff against monsters, you’ll likely leave fairly satisfied. Pacific Rim Uprising disappointingly settles for simply being passable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | May 19, 2022

The whole thing has a forgettable quality that almost deletes itself from your memory in the minutes and hours after seeing it.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 14, 2022

Seems content to make everything feel like a toy commercial.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 24, 2021

No matter how hard they try, they just couldn't make the bad dialogue sound good.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10 | Aug 14, 2021

It's as if they didn't trust the audience to have an attention span of more than two minutes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5 / 5 | Jun 24, 2021

[Uprising] is an aggressively commercial bore-fest...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 18, 2021

Filled with more of the same, expected elements, as if biding its time for a single, cataclysmic climax.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 7, 2020

[H]yperactive and inconsistent even in the quietest of scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jul 24, 2020

Uprising rarely dives below the original plot's surface, failing to rise up above anything more than a movie about robots and monsters.

Full Review | Jul 7, 2020

It has more clarity than the first Pacific Rim and so exposes more dumb things about the entire premise[.]

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

It's like Del Toro left his toys out for others to play with, but these new filmmakers grabbed the brightest, shiniest ones and left the far more interesting monsters on the ground.

Full Review | Jun 2, 2020

This unnecessary sequel, lacking the original's assets, plays like a vapid Transformers knockoff.

Full Review | Mar 20, 2020

Plays out like the wayward cousin of the original, induced on a diet of sugar and lacking the basic skills to pay attention.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 15, 2020

Its tone is more of a Transformers film, (loud, crunchy, whip-lash filming, somewhat teen-centered) and wait, let's not forget those continued earsplitting explosions.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 30, 2020

Pacific Rim: Uprising is big and dumb, but at least it's having fun.

Full Review | Jan 17, 2020

Pacific Rim: Uprising is a fun genre movie that will be enjoyable for anime fans and has the potential to be a really good franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 10, 2020

Not exactly my bag but it might be yours.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 13, 2019

The humor feels forced and thrives on the overwhelming amount of lameness found crammed into a bunch of dad jokes strung together as the film practically jabs you with its metaphorical elbow as it waggles its eyebrows and asks if you get it or not.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 1, 2019

It's simply an atrocious movie with barely coherent plot lines.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2019

Sheyi Cole Talks Netflix’s ‘The Beautiful Game’ and Breaking Through With Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ (EXCLUSIVE)

By Naman Ramachandran

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• Sheyi Cole Talks Netflix’s ‘The Beautiful Game’ and Breaking Through With Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ (EXCLUSIVE) 2 hours ago
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British actor Sheyi Cole has a prominent role in Thea Sharrock’s Netflix original film “ The Beautiful Game .”

The film revolves around the Homeless World Cup, an annual soccer tournament bringing together displaced or dispossessed players from nearly 50 countries, playing not merely for a trophy but for a second shot at life. Cole plays Jason, a would-be ladies’ man given a sharp #MeToo education when he inappropriately comes onto sparky Mexican-American player Rosita (Cristina Rodio).

“Although he does make these mistakes, I wanted to get the audience to really feel for him. And I really wanted the audience to look at Jason and go ‘Aah, I wish I could just take him under under my wing and gave him some guidance,'” Cole added.

The bulk of the film is set in Rome and the cast underwent a boot camp under the tutelage of soccer choreographer Mike Delaney. “He’s worked with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and all these huge spearheads in the football [soccer] industry. So it almost felt a little bit like I was a professional footballer,” Cole said.

Cole says that Jason’s character’s behavior is informed by a lack of role models, something the actor had plenty in real life. Cole studied at the BRIT School and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His phone background since BRIT School has been Sidney Poitier, holding his Oscar.

In his gap year after the BRIT School, Cole joined several youth theater companies. He also found representation with The Artists Partnership. While studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Cole continued auditioning and that’s when the big break came, playing the title role of Alex Wheatle, a Black British novelist who was sentenced prison after the 1981 Brixton uprising, in a segment of Steve McQueen ‘s acclaimed anthology film “Small Axe” (2020). “Sheyi Cole, who has never been in a movie before, and has a brainy sullen sensuality that could take him far, makes Alex a glowering chameleon,” said the Variety review of the film.

“Steve is a living legend. He’s an icon, and he’s a genius. And when someone of that level reaches out and sees those qualities in you, there is an element of responsibility, an element of pure nerves that run through your body,” Cole said. “Playing Alex Wheatle will always be an honor for me. And it’s something that I will never ever forget. Steve gave me my own space to really walk into this industry and throw myself in the deep end, without any stabilizers. At the time, it was completely nerve wracking, I was full of fear. But when I look back at that moment, in that period of time, I’m extremely grateful. Because I learned so much, I learned how to lead. I learned how to express myself in different ways. Physically, I was able to transport myself back to a time that I wasn’t able to actually live and be in. But due to the research, and due to his help, and the team surrounding me, I was really able to, in a way, take myself there.”

“He’s almost like a dad to me in this industry. I honestly owe him a lot. I wouldn’t be here without him,” Cole added. “When you work with an auteur like Steve McQueen, the whole world wants to tap in and everybody wants to see what what he’s making. So I had a lot of eyes on me very early on my career.” The actor says that “Small Axe” opened the doors to subsequent roles in Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” Steven Soderbergh’s “Full Circle” and romcom film “Boxing Day.”

Next up for Cole are several independent films and he’s also working some music, which he describes as his “first love.”

“The Beautiful Game” is streaming now on Netflix. Cole is represented by The Artists Partnership and WME.

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Review: In Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones,’ an engrossing family drama with the Holocaust as backdrop

My Ukrainian Jewish parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were comfortably ensconced in the Midwest when Hitler began persecuting the Jews; I have no familial connection to the Holocaust. Still, the sight of a swastika gives me shivers, and all the more so given that, in this age of denial and renascent fascism, the symbol has outlived its ironic uses (punk rock, Mel Brooks) and is simply a sign of antisemitism.

You can’t make a movie about that time without showing it, of course, and it’s necessary that such movies are made, as the Holocaust passes out of living memory. But it’s never an easy watch, nor should it be. Anything else would be a failure.

Big numbers become abstract; they can lose their meaning. A title card that introduces the new limited series “We Were the Lucky Ones,” adapted by Erica Lipez (“ The Morning Show “) from Georgia Hunter’s 2017 novel, which was based on the experiences of her family, tells us that by the end of the Holocaust 90% of Poland’s 3 million Jews had been annihilated: an incomprehensible fact. What makes “We Are the Lucky Ones,” which premiered Thursday on Hulu, work as well as it does is that it’s first and foremost a family drama; it never leaves its characters’ sides to take in the bigger picture. The Warsaw ghetto uprising is shown only as noise and smoke across a wall, glimpsed from afar.

The title suggests that this might not be the most depressing of Holocaust films, which is true; but there’s an encyclopedia of horrors that phrase might include. “You say I’m lucky,” one character will observe, “but maybe luck is relative.”

It’s 1938, and the Kurcs, an upper-middle-class family in Radom, Poland — mother and father, five adult children and their significant others — have gathered for Passover. Father Sol (Lior Ashkenazi) and mother Nechuma ( Robin Weigert ) deal in textiles and dressmaking. Dapper Addy (Logan Lerman) is visiting from Paris, where he works as an electrical engineer and aspiring songwriter. Jacob (Amit Rahav), long engaged to Bella (Eva Feiler), is in law school but prefers taking photographs; and Genec (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a lawyer, has a new girlfriend, Herta (Moran Rosenblatt), who is still a secret.

Older sister Mila (Hadas Yaron), married to Selim (Michael Aloni), a doctor, is pregnant when we meet her, but soon struggling with motherhood. Headstrong Halina ( Joey King ), the baby of the family and the series’ center of energy, favors a bright shade of lipstick and is not thinking too seriously about her future, but she’s also ready to make a leap. Adam (Sam Woolf), the lodger, is an architect on whom Halina has set her eye.

It’s a convincing family portrait, filled out with food and music and gossip. Between them, the Kurcs offer a range of opinions on what might or might not be coming, and what should be done. Even after the Nazis invade Poland, halfway through the opening episode, things advance by degrees, so that the next worst thing can’t quite be imagined, and once imagined really believed. Decisions are put off, disagreements turn into arguments, and fate jumps in.

They’ll follow, or be impelled to follow, different paths through the war — paths that sometimes meet again with Dickensian coincidence — surviving through lucky breaks, daring escapes, the kindness of strangers, bribes, charm or cleverness, hiding or hiding in plain sight.

“The truth is they have no idea what a Jew looks like; that’s why they make us wear the star,” says Adam, who has become Poland’s most trusted producer of fake IDs.

“You can’t look scared,” Halina instructs Mila about passing for gentile, at which she’s something of an expert. “You need to make your posture normal; and you need to laugh more when Germans tell jokes.”

“I laugh,” says Mila, the Kurc least likely to. “Maybe the jokes should be funny.”

“And no Jewish eyes. If we look as sad as we feel, we may as well just announce ourselves.”

Each episode is titled for a location — Radom, Warsaw and Siberia, but also Casablanca, Monte Cassino and Rio de Janeiro. The variety of locations, the alternation of tone and predicaments as the series skips between threads, keeps it from becoming too emotionally, too existentially wearing. (They do want you to last until the end.) There are moments of respite, occasions for humor and even romance. The death camps are spoken of, but they’re elsewhere. Violence takes place mostly offscreen, and when it does hit close to home, it’s all the more disturbing.

Even the moderately well-informed viewer is bound to learn a few things, but “We Were the Lucky Ones” isn’t a history lesson. It’s a human story, of husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and lovers — a motion picture, to be sure, with a score in an Eastern European key, and montages, and one of those shots where the camera circles a kissing couple. Its purpose, as television, is to make you feel, for the characters and by extension for a people — to experience, such as might be possible, the stress of privation, the threat of discovery, and the tragedy of having to deny one’s identity in order to live. It’s a dark journey, but light comes in at the end. What’s lost may be found.

Salmon and farmers are on the same side

In the hottest year ever recorded, another wheat harvest is wrapping up.