• Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters this weekend — the first Star Wars film in nearly seven years
• Pedro Pascal leads the film alongside Jeremy Allen White, Sigourney Weaver, and Martin Scorsese
• Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — Tarantino’s original uncut vision — is now streaming on Peacock for the first time
• Prison drama Wasteman holds a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and is available to rent now
• Horror options include the van-set Passenger in theaters and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy on VOD

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It’s a genuinely stacked weekend at the movies — and at home. The biggest story is obviously Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, Disney’s first theatrical Star Wars release in nearly seven years and its first-ever attempt to adapt one of its Disney+ series into a feature film. But whether or not you’re feeling the Force this weekend, there’s plenty else to work with: a creepy van-horror movie made for packed Friday night crowds, a prison drama with a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, a Quentin Tarantino epic finally available to stream in its original form, and a Mummy reboot that has some genuinely nasty ideas — and some serious tonal problems.

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Here’s everything worth your time (and a few things that aren’t).

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu — In Theaters Now

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The Mandalorian and Grogu is set after the events of Return of the Jedi, with the evil Empire fallen and Imperial warlords still scattered across the galaxy. As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they enlist bounty hunter Din Djarin — played by Pedro Pascal — and his young apprentice Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. The plot involves rescuing Rotta the Hutt, the muscular outcast son of the late Jabba, who is voiced by The Bear star Jeremy Allen White. Sigourney Weaver and Martin Scorsese also co-star, and Iron Man director Jon Favreau is behind the camera.

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On paper, this should feel like an event. In practice, critics are decidedly split — and even the positive reviews aren’t exactly enthusiastic. Slate’s Sam Adams put it bluntly: \”If The Mandalorian and Grogu isn’t the worst Star Wars movie — and it might be — it’s certainly the least: the least essential, the least engaging, the least necessary.\” The Los Angeles Times’ Robert Abele was more generous, writing that \”across its many wordless scenes, it’s at heart a solidly rousing, delightfully icky creature feature, in the vein of a supercharged Ray Harryhausen-meets-Guillermo del Toro joint.\”

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The core criticism keeps coming back to the same thing: this is a feature-length TV episode, not a movie. The onscreen text setting up the story notably skips the iconic opening crawl — that’s reserved for entries with “Episode” in the title — and the film’s structure is repetitive in a way that works fine for binge-watching but doesn’t hold up on a big screen. Jeremy Allen White’s Jabba’s son character apparently gets a scene where he laments, essentially, \”Do you know how hard it is to be Jabba the Hutt’s son?\” — which is either charming or baffling depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing.

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The one genuine bright spot everyone agrees on: composer Ludwig Göransson, a three-time Oscar winner, delivers a score that does heavy lifting the rest of the film doesn’t. When the lead character is masked and Pedro Pascal’s vocal performance is running on limited fuel, Göransson’s music is doing the emotional work.

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The bigger picture here is hard to ignore. The Force Awakens is still the highest-grossing domestic release of all time. That was eleven years ago. Since then, Disney has released dozens of Star Wars shows — the only one that’s broken through culturally in any meaningful way is the Emmy-winning Andor — and a string of planned theatrical films that either fell apart or were quietly shelved, from the Lord & Miller situation on Solo to the abandoned trilogies and Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron. Filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Damon Lindelof have spoken openly about Star Wars projects that didn’t come together. And the franchise’s big theatrical comeback is… a streaming show adaptation whose last season aired over three years ago.

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The Mandalorian and Grogu is rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action, and runs 132 minutes. Get tickets here.

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Passenger — Also in Theaters, and Worth Your Friday Night

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If Star Wars isn’t calling your name, the horror movie Passenger is genuinely fun — the kind of thing that’s best experienced in a full theater with a crowd that’s ready to scream.

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The setup is simple: a young couple (Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio) witnesses a brutal highway accident and soon realizes they didn’t leave the crash scene alone. A demonic presence — think haunted house movie, but the house is a van — follows them into their #VanLife adventure. Melissa Leo also stars. Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal directs, and while he hasn’t topped his debut The Autopsy of Jane Doe, this is his most entertaining work in years. The opening sequence in particular is a blast — casually funny, then suddenly tense, with a cut-to-title that apparently had opening-night crowds screaming with delight.

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The weak spots are real: whenever the film slows down for the couple to have earnest conversations about their relationship and ambitions, it drags. These characters are not deeply written. But the set pieces are well-constructed, the jumps land, and there’s nothing wrong with a movie that knows exactly what it is. IndieWire’s Alison Foreman praised Øvredal for being \”skilled at trapping his audience inside a disorienting, semi-liminal space where anything can happen,\” while The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee felt the film kept its audience at too much of a distance to fully work.

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It’s rated R for strong violent content, some gore, and language. Runs 94 minutes. Best seen with a full room. Tickets here.

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Wasteman — Rent This One Tonight

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The most quietly impressive release of the weekend isn’t in theaters at all. Wasteman is a tense, suffocating British prison drama that currently holds a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes — and earns every bit of it.

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The film is a two-hander: Taylor, newly paroled and hoping for a fresh start, finds his chances threatened when his new cellmate Dee takes him under his wing — and a vicious attack forces Taylor to choose between protecting Dee and protecting his own freedom. It’s a movie about how the prison system corrupts even those genuinely trying to do right within it, and what redemption can possibly look like in that environment.

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David Jonsson — who broke through with scene-stealing work in Alien: Romulus — and Tom Blyth, known from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the Netflix rom-com The People We Meet on Vacation, are both exceptional here. The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Grierson praised both performances, writing that Blyth \”hints at a whole universe inside his character simply by the way he quietly listens and observes.\” The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey added that Jonsson \”feels like he’s on the precipice of something major\” — which, watching this, is easy to believe.

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Wasteman is available to rent or buy now on Apple TV and Prime Video.

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy — On VOD, With Caveats

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The marketing for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has leaned heavily on the director’s name — partly because Blumhouse has been busy on social media reminding everyone that Brendan Fraser is not in this one. (For the record: a fourth Mummy film with Fraser was recently greenlit, which explains the branding gymnastics.) Cronin, who directed Evil Dead Rise, gets top billing here as he attempts to put his own stamp on familiar IP.

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The premise is genuinely unnerving: a journalist’s young daughter vanishes into the desert, and eight years later, when she’s returned to her broken family, the reunion quickly becomes a nightmare as she begins to transform into something horrifying. That setup — particularly the stretch where the family must try to rebuild their lives after a devastating, unsolved disappearance — is harrowing in a way that works. And the film is impressively mean-spirited when it comes to its gore, including some sequences you likely haven’t seen before.

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The problem is tone. The film lurches between genuine trauma and gross-out comedy in ways that keep colliding, and by the time it pivots into familiar possession-movie territory, the tonal whiplash has worn out its welcome. The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee called it \”absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong, tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary,\” while TheWrap’s William Bibbiani was more forgiving, praising Cronin’s \”uncanny knack for human mutilation\” as practically a requirement for the genre.

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At 2 hours and 15 minutes, it tests your patience. But if you’re a horror completist, there’s enough here — particularly in the first act — to make it worth a rental. Available now on Apple TV and Prime Video.

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Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — Stream It on Peacock

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This one’s been a long time coming. Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — Quentin Tarantino’s original, uncut vision of his fourth feature, uniting both volumes into a single nearly four-and-a-half-hour experience — is now streaming on Peacock for the first time, more than two decades after Harvey Weinstein persuaded Tarantino to split it into two films for commercial release.

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The film premiered at Cannes in 2006 and has been a cinephile obsession ever since — it plays regularly at Tarantino’s own Los Angeles theater, complete with French subtitles from that original festival print. This is the first time the full version has been available to a mainstream audience, and it’s everything fans of the film hoped it would be.

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The differences from the two-volume theatrical release are small but meaningful. The transition point between Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 now includes extended dialogue and loses a scene (and a limb). The climactic reveal — originally used as a hook to bring audiences back for the second film — lands where it was always meant to, in the final act. And the legendary \”House of Blue Leaves\” sequence, where the Bride faces the Crazy 88 in the famous black-and-white section, is now in full color and extended, including previously cut moments of maximum carnage. The animated O-Ren Ishii origin sequence has an extra scene, too, and it’s a good one.

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The most striking thing about watching it uninterrupted is Uma Thurman’s performance — commanding, physical, emotionally layered — which was completely overlooked by the Academy during both years the films were eligible. Had they been released as one, it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t have been nominated. The film features one of the most expertly curated soundtracks of Tarantino’s career and some of the most kinetic filmmaking he’s ever done.

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WBUR’s Sean Burns summed it up perfectly: \”Kill Bill is electrifying, frustrating, revealing, impeccably crafted and about as thrillingly, embarrassingly self-indulgent as one might expect from a prodigiously gifted, grown adult man given seemingly limitless resources to make a four-and-a-half-hour movie about a team of sexy female assassins named after poisonous snakes.\”

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It took 22 years. Worth every one of them.

“,
“category”: “Movies

The post Best New Movies This Weekend: Mando, Kill Bill, and More appeared first on Cream.

• Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed takes over Stephen Colbert’s 11:35 p.m. CBS time slot starting Friday, May 22
• Allen is paying CBS for the time slot and handling all ad sales himself, saving the network an estimated $150–$170 million annually
• He specifically chose May 22 to honor his hero Johnny Carson, whose final Tonight Show aired exactly 34 years earlier
• Allen promises zero politics — \”You come, you laugh\” — in a deliberate departure from Colbert’s format
• The deal is part of a sweeping media expansion that also includes a controlling stake in BuzzFeed and ambitions to acquire Starz

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When CBS announced it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Byron Allen didn’t mourn. He picked up the phone.

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\”I said, ‘OK, do you like money?’\” Allen recalled this week. \”They said, ‘Yes!’\”

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Starting Friday, May 22, Allen’s long-running syndicated comedy series Comics Unleashed takes over the 11:35 p.m. ET slot on CBS — one of the most storied windows in American television — with back-to-back half-hour episodes. That’s followed by two more half-hours of his comedy game show Funny You Should Ask, hosted by Jon Kelley, running through 1:37 a.m. Both shows will also be available to Paramount+ Premium subscribers through their local CBS affiliate feed.

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Colbert’s final episode airs Thursday, May 21. By Friday night, the era is over — and Allen’s begins.

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The Deal That Saved CBS $150 Million

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The math behind this arrangement is striking. Under the deal, Allen leases the two-hour block from CBS and sells all the advertising inventory himself. He wouldn’t disclose exactly what he’s paying the network, but he was direct about what CBS is getting out of it: relief from a massive financial burden.

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\”Between the two time periods, they’re saving approximately $150 million-plus per year, just on production and marketing,\” Allen explained. \”And that does not include what I’m paying for the time slot. So it’s a great deal for CBS.\”

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CBS had been spending roughly that amount producing both The Late Show and the show that followed it, Taylor Tomlinson’s After Midnight. When the network decided to cancel both, Allen’s pitch was essentially: don’t replace them with anything. Let me take it off your hands entirely.

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\”I said, ‘Save your money. I will put my show Comics Unleashed on,’\” he told CBS Mornings this week. \”They said, ‘This is a great idea, you’re going to save us $150 to $170 million.’\”

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He put it more colorfully in another interview: \”I am a gift from the money gods and the comedy gods.\”

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The context matters here. Broadcast networks are under serious financial strain — sports rights are expensive, and advertising dollars are migrating fast from linear TV to digital. Allen knows this firsthand. Through Allen Media Group, he has invested roughly a billion dollars acquiring ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates across 11 U.S. markets, plus the Weather Channel and other properties. He’s watched the economics shift in real time. CBS’s late-night costs had become, in his view, an unnecessary burden in a landscape that no longer justified them.

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\”No Politics. You Come, You Laugh.\”

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The tonal shift from Colbert to Allen is going to be significant — and Allen is leaning into it.

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When CBS Mornings co-host Adriana Diaz asked him directly whether Comics Unleashed would get political, Allen didn’t hesitate: \”No, no, no, no politics. That’s it. You come, you laugh.\”

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He added: \”I want to bring people together using comedy. I’m going to appeal to all.\” The show, he said, has featured more than a thousand comedians across twenty years — \”every shape and size, you name it\” — and the format stays squarely focused on funny. \”We’re doing a show with nothing political, racist, sexist or homophobic… just clean comedy,\” he told Variety.

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That’s a pointed contrast to Colbert’s Late Show, which became one of late-night’s most politically charged programs. The show’s cancellation came just days after Colbert publicly criticized CBS parent company Paramount for its $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump — a decision that landed while Paramount was in the middle of a merger with Skydance Media requiring Trump administration approval. CBS called the cancellation \”purely a financial decision,\” but the timing drew intense scrutiny, and figures like David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel were vocal in their criticism of the network.

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Allen has been careful to thread the needle. He and Colbert are friends, and he made that clear. \”I think it was a very unfortunate event,\” he said on CBS Mornings. \”I love Stephen Colbert. I’m a big fan. Once they made the decision, I said, ‘OK, this isn’t show business, this is business show.’ I absolutely love Colbert, and I would do anything — he doesn’t need me — but I would do anything to support him.\”

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In a separate interview, he went further: \”I really like Stephen Colbert. I think he is a magnificent human being. He’s a super talent. I believe he is an American treasure.\”

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Even Letterman, who was critical of CBS’s decision, offered something close to a grudging endorsement of Allen’s format. On The Barbara Gaines Show in April, he said: \”The show is a pretty good idea. It’s all panel. Nobody’s doing any stand-up except they’re seated doing stand-up.\”

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The Night He Watched Johnny Carson and Decided Everything

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Here’s what makes Allen’s May 22 launch date more than just a scheduling choice.

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CBS had originally wanted him to premiere on September 21. Allen said no. He pushed for May 22 specifically because it marks the 34th anniversary of Johnny Carson’s final night hosting The Tonight Show — May 22, 1992.

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\”What people don’t realize is that was my hero Johnny Carson’s last night,\” Allen said. \”Normally, you would premiere in September, but I said, ‘No, no, no, no. That’s when Johnny stepped down. That’s when I’m stepping up.’\”

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That connection to Carson runs deep — and it starts in childhood. Allen’s mother, who had him when she was just 17, worked at NBC and couldn’t afford childcare. So she brought young Byron to the lot in Burbank, where he’d wait for her to finish her shift while watching Carson tape his show.

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\”I’ve said to myself, what a wonderful way to go through life, making people laugh,\” Allen recalled.

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In 1979, the circle started to close. Allen got to perform stand-up on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, becoming the youngest comedian ever to appear on the program. He was a teenager.

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\”I was thinking to myself, in the next five minutes I’m going to change my life and my mother’s life forever,\” he said. \”So I’m going to go out there and have a great time, and after I make these people laugh, we’re never going to worry about a bowl of cereal again.\”

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Now, nearly five decades later, he’s inherited the slot Carson helped define. He said he plans to open that first episode on Friday with a moment of acknowledgment: \”I will take a minute to share some thoughts about late night and what we’re doing.\”

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\”It makes me feel great, because at the end of the day, all I want to do is make my mama proud, no matter how rich I get,\” Allen said. \”I’m just still a little scared little boy hanging on to my mother’s leg.\”

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The Bigger Empire Allen Is Building

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The CBS deal is just one piece of a much larger expansion Allen is engineering right now.

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Last week, he acquired a 52% controlling stake in BuzzFeed — paying $20 million in cash upfront plus $100 million in a promissory note due in five years. When the deal closes, expected by the end of May, Allen becomes BuzzFeed’s chairman and CEO, with co-founder Jonah Peretti moving to a president of BuzzFeed AI role. BuzzFeed, once valued at $1.7 billion, had recently warned investors it had \”substantial doubt\” about its ability to continue as a going concern, posting a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 on revenue of $185.3 million.

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Allen’s plan is to turn BuzzFeed and HuffPost into streaming brands, anchored by his Weather Channel-owned Local Now platform, which ingests roughly 500,000 pieces of video per day and provides hyper-localized news, weather, sports, and traffic content. He wants user-generated content, revenue-sharing with creators, and no paywalls.

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\”We are chasing YouTube,\” he said plainly. \”The two best words in media: ‘free’ and ‘streaming.’ Bring it together and, poof, you’ve got something magical.\”

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He was characteristically blunt about why the BuzzFeed deal made sense: \”It was definitely a distressed sale — without a doubt. They told the world they were about to run out of money! When a company is lying on its back, you can’t fall off the floor.\”

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Then there’s Starz. In March, Allen’s investment arm acquired a 10.7% stake in the premium cable network for $25 million — making him the second-largest stockholder. Starz responded almost immediately by adopting a “poison pill” shareholder rights plan, which allows existing investors to buy shares at a 50% discount if any single investor crosses 17.5% ownership — a move widely understood as a defense against Allen.

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He’s not deterred. \”The poison pill, that was a stupid move. They didn’t need to do that,\” he said. \”When I decide to buy them, I will do a lot more than what they’re doing now — I can make Starz infinitely bigger.\”

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Allen has a history of ambitious media bids that didn’t close — a $30 billion play for Paramount Global, a $3.5 billion offer for BET, a run at TV station operator Tegna, and a reported interest in the NFL’s Washington Commanders. But at 65, with a CBS time slot, a BuzzFeed acquisition, and a Starz stake on the books, he’s building something that looks increasingly like a real empire — one comedy block at a time.

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Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen premieres Friday, May 22, at 11:35 p.m. ET on CBS.

“,
“category”: “TV

The post Byron Allen Takes Colbert’s CBS Slot — And It’s Personal appeared first on Cream.

• Matt Damon is in talks to star in The Daniels’ untitled follow-up to Everything Everywhere All at Once at Universal Pictures.
• Ryan Gosling was originally in line for the role but exited after asking for script changes that couldn’t be accommodated in time.
• The film involves global warming, time travel, and a possible superhero angle, with dual timelines set in the 1980s and present day.
• The project has a November 19, 2027 release date and is set to begin production in Los Angeles this summer.
• Damon is already set to lead Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for Universal, opening July 17.

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Three years after Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the Oscars, The Daniels are finally ready to make their next movie — and they want Matt Damon to anchor it.

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Damon is in talks to star in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s untitled follow-up at Universal Pictures, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which is also breaking the first real plot details on a project that has been shrouded in secrecy since it was set up at the studio in 2024. A deal isn’t finalized yet, but sources say Damon is very much on board.

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The film is described as involving global warming, time travel, and a possible superhero angle. It unfolds across two timelines — one set in the 1980s and one in the present day — with teenagers as the protagonists, at least in the ’80s-set portion. The Daniels have reportedly been casting those teen roles since 2024, pausing production multiple times while they worked through script and budget challenges. One significant factor behind the delays: the story was originally structured around three time periods before being streamlined to two, which required substantial rewrites.

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Now that Damon is close to locking in, the duo can turn their attention to finding the actor who’ll play his son.

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How Damon Got Here — and Why Gosling Didn’t

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The road to Damon was anything but straightforward. Ryan Gosling was the first big name The Daniels pursued, and he initially agreed to come on board. But Gosling’s role — the father of one of the teen protagonists — was supporting in nature, and he felt it should be larger. He asked for script changes, and the filmmakers weren’t necessarily opposed. The problem was time.

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The project had already pushed its schedule more than once, and it had received a California tax credit that required production to begin by the end of summer or early fall. Another round of rewrites simply wasn’t possible within that window. So in the span of a week or two, Gosling was in and then out. Jack Black was briefly considered before The Daniels pivoted to Damon.

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The pivot makes a lot of sense on paper. Damon is already a known quantity at Universal — not just from the Bourne franchise, but as the lead of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the studio’s massive summer tentpole opening July 17. After a grueling six-month shoot on that film, sources say Damon wasn’t in a hurry to jump back into work. He planned to rest, spend time with his family, and take his time reading scripts. But when The Daniels came calling, and after a meeting with the duo, he gave the thumbs up.

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The plan is for Damon to shoot the film in Los Angeles after he wraps his promotional commitments for The Odyssey.

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The Weight of Following Everything Everywhere

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It’s hard to overstate the pressure on this project. Everything Everywhere All at Once didn’t just win seven Oscars in 2023 — it became a cultural phenomenon, the kind of film that people pressed into friends’ hands and rewatched in tears. Following that up, at a bigger studio with a bigger budget, is a genuinely daunting task.

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The Daniels have been working on this project for three years, navigating challenges of budget, script, and now casting. The film has already been dated for November 19, 2027, which gives some sense of Universal’s confidence in it as an event release. The California Film Commission approved it for $20.8 million in tax credits based on $106 million in qualified spending — the most projects ever approved in a single application window for the state’s program.

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Kwan, Scheinert, and producer Jonathan Wang will produce through their Playgrounds banner, which operates under an overall deal with Universal. The trio previously produced The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist for Focus Features. Universal’s Sara Scott and Jacqueline Garell are overseeing the project for the studio.

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When the California tax credit was announced, The Daniels and Wang spoke about what the program meant to them. “We are L.A. filmmakers, with very dear L.A. friends, who happen to be some of the greatest creative talents we’ve worked with,” they said in a joint statement. “On Everything Everywhere All At Once we received the California tax credit, and had we not, it would have been utterly impossible to make that film.”

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For now, the rest of the cast remains to be built. The ensemble is expected to skew younger, with most roles going to actors who will audition — but Damon at the center gives Universal and The Daniels the star power they need to anchor what they’re clearly positioning as their next big swing.

“,
“category”: “Movies

The post Matt Damon in Talks for The Daniels’ Next Film appeared first on Cream.

• Strawberries premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
• The film follows Moroccan women working on a Spanish strawberry farm who face wage theft, sexual assault, and modern-day exploitation.
• Director Laila Marrakchi was inspired by a New York Times article written by a journalist friend, then traveled to Andalusia to meet the real women.
• Lead actress Nisrin Erradi carries the film with a performance critics are calling compellingly fierce and emotionally layered.
• The greenhouses were shot in Morocco after Spanish farms grew wary of cameras following news coverage of labor abuses in Andalusia.

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There’s a moment early in Strawberries that tells you everything you need to know about the world Laila Marrakchi has built. Hasna, freshly arrived from Morocco to pick fruit at a Spanish farm, faces her first task in a greenhouse row: what do you do with the unripe strawberries? Skip them and you look incompetent. Pick them and you’re wasting product. You have seconds to decide, and either answer might cost you the job — and the job is the only thing standing between your family back home and nothing. She guesses wrong. The supervisor moves on. And just like that, the rules of this world are established: there are no good choices here, only less catastrophic ones.

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That scene is something of a skeleton key for the whole film. Strawberries, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this week, is not a simple story of oppressed workers and villainous bosses, even if those elements are very much present. It’s a film about the weight of impossible decisions — and about what happens to a person’s sense of self when every option available to them has already been designed to fail.

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A Story Rooted in Real Lives

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Marrakchi, the Paris-based Casablanca-born director behind Marock and Rock the Casbah — and television work that includes Damien Chazelle’s Netflix series The Eddy and French spy thriller The Bureau — came to this story through a journalist friend who was reporting on Moroccan seasonal workers in Andalusia for The New York Times. Marrakchi went with her to Huelva, spent three days meeting the women, and came home changed.

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“I really discovered another world,” she said. “I was really moved by this woman. That’s why I decided to do this film.”

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The result, co-written with Delphine Agut, is a fictional drama inspired by real cases — a choice Marrakchi made deliberately. “In the end, with my screenwriter, we decided that it was best to take some distance from all that we had seen and read and work on it also with our imagination,” she explained. Real strawberry pickers appear as extras, but the central roles went to professional actresses. The greenhouses themselves were shot in Morocco after Spanish farms, skittish from recent press coverage of labor abuses, refused to cooperate. “People get scared when they see a camera,” Marrakchi noted.

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The film’s original Spanish title, La más dulce — “The Sweetest” — captures the central irony with quiet precision. “I like the idea of playing with these two things,” Marrakchi said. “The thing that is very sweet is also hard at the same time. The dream of having a better life comes with the difficulty of the hard work.”

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What Happens on the Farm

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The opening sequence is a masterclass in economical filmmaking. Close-ups of women’s hands being inspected, shot from above, communicate everything: these workers are interchangeable labor, assessed like produce. They’re promised up to €35 a day — wages that amount to very little in Spain but represent meaningful money for families in Morocco. Tense, driven Hasna (Nisrin Erradi, Everybody Loves Touda) arrives on the crossing with quiet, hijab-wearing Meriem (Hajar Graigaa), and they’re assigned cramped prefab container quarters alongside giggly Zineb (Hind Braik) and older Khadija (Fatima Attif). Pinned above Hasna’s bunk: a newspaper clipping about her winning a taekwondo gold medal, and a photo of a boy. The backstory will come later — and it’s worth the wait.

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The farm, “Fresa del Carmen,” runs on a logic designed entirely to benefit the owners. Paychecks arrive on no discernible schedule. Hours are calculated after the fact, with supervisors guessing how many breaks workers probably took and deducting accordingly. Pay is docked for bathroom breaks. The union rep Antonio (Nando Pérez) speaks no Arabic and appears to function as a management tool. Street vendors outside the camp sell blankets and prepaid phones at exploitative markups, knowing full well that the women have nowhere else to go. Nobody is rounding down.

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The film’s most difficult narrative turn comes early: when owner Iván (Paco Mora) enters the shower room with clear intent toward Meriem, Hasna chooses to leave rather than intervene. It’s a genuinely hard scene to sit with — Marrakchi doesn’t soften it or let Hasna off the hook. We understand the calculus. Using her taekwondo skills on Iván could mean losing everything. But understanding a choice and forgiving it are different things, and the script doesn’t always give us enough of Hasna’s interior life to fully bridge that gap. The revelation of her backstory comes too late to fully recalibrate our feelings about what she did.

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What follows is a cascade of Catch-22s. Meriem ends up working as a cleaner inside Iván’s house, with additional expectations attached. When she becomes pregnant and nearly dies from a miscarriage before being taken to a doctor, the farm owners respond by filing a kidnapping complaint against the aid workers who helped her. Police side with the owners and characterize the women as engaging in prostitution voluntarily. The legal system, as depicted here, isn’t indifferent to these women so much as it’s actively structured against them.

\n\n

The Performance at the Center

\n\n

What keeps Strawberries from collapsing under the weight of its subject matter is Erradi. She is, simply put, extraordinary — and the film knows it, keeping the camera close and trusting her to carry scenes that the script occasionally under-serves. Her Hasna moves through confusion, shame, anger, and something approaching defiance, and every transition feels earned even when the writing doesn’t fully explain it. “She’s powerful,” Marrakchi said of casting her. “She was the character that I wrote.”

\n\n

The supporting ensemble is strong throughout. Graigaa brings a quiet, devastating dignity to Meriem — a character who absorbs trauma largely in silence, which makes her suffering no less visible. The moments of warmth between the women, the laughter and teasing in their cramped quarters, are crucial to the film’s humanity. Marrakchi was insistent about including them. “It’s really important to humanize these women,” she said. “We live in the Western world and sometimes don’t realize that these people can love, can be funny and can be women just like everybody else.”

\n\n

The one significant weak link is Pilar (Itsaso Arana), the young human rights lawyer Hasna eventually approaches through sympathetic local organizer Ali (Mohamed Larbi Ajbar). Pilar’s naïveté about conservative Moroccan society tips from realistic into caricature — a one-dimensional do-gooder in a film that works hard everywhere else to resist easy characterizations.

\n\n

The Look of Exploitation

\n\n

Cinematographer Tristan Galand, whose recent work includes Souleymane’s Story, shoots the farm with a restless, slightly nervous camera that trails along the endless rows of plastic-covered greenhouses and settles alongside the women without ever quite letting them feel at rest. The visual grammar shifts noticeably inside Iván’s house — neutral lighting, fixed frames — and the contrast is exactly right: two worlds separated by a few kilometers and an unbridgeable power gap.

\n\n

Marrakchi also makes pointed use of the strawberries themselves. At first they’re gorgeous, evidence of what the land can produce. As the film progresses, the fruit rots and draws flies. The metaphor isn’t subtle, but it doesn’t need to be.

\n\n

“Speaking out is a privilege,” Marrakchi said, describing the real women whose stories feed the film. “For these Moroccan women, it’s difficult to speak up and speak out, because they can lose everything in Spain and in their home country.”

\n\n

Strawberries has its flaws — the pacing is fragmentary, the lawyer character is a genuine problem, and the script’s reluctance to fully excavate Hasna’s psychology leaves the film’s most ambitious emotional gambit only partially landed. But it’s also a work of real moral seriousness and considerable craft, anchored by a lead performance that commands your attention from the first frame to the last. Marrakchi set out to make an homage to women who are rarely seen. She’s done that, and then some.

\n\n

Strawberries is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

“,
“category”: “Movies

The post Cannes 2026: ‘Strawberries’ Review appeared first on Cream.

• Brittany Cartwright appears on California’s Franchise Tax Board \”Top 500 Delinquencies\” list for an alleged $463,632.12 in unpaid taxes.
• Her CPA says the debt stems from \”phantom income\” mistakenly reported under her name in 2019 tax filings.
• The California Franchise Tax Board has agreed to place a hold on the account while Cartwright submits proof disputing the debt.
• The news comes as Cartwright navigates a public divorce from Jax Taylor, who also faced major tax and mortgage issues during their marriage.

\n\n

Brittany Cartwright is pushing back hard after California tax authorities flagged her for nearly half a million dollars in allegedly unpaid taxes — and her team says the whole thing is a paperwork mistake.

\n\n

The The Valley star’s name has appeared on the California Franchise Tax Board’s semiannual “Top 500 Delinquencies” list, which tracks the state’s largest outstanding personal income tax debts over $100,000. According to documents obtained by TMZ, the listing claims Cartwright owes a staggering $463,632.12.

\n\n

That’s a headline-grabbing number. But Cartwright and her team aren’t running from it — they’re disputing it directly.

\n\n

Her CPA, Christopher Fank, sent a letter to the California Franchise Tax Board laying out exactly what he believes happened. Fank, who says he has handled Cartwright’s taxes for the past five years, confirmed that she has paid all taxes owed during that period. The real problem, he says, traces back to 2019, when \”phantom income and tax\” were mistakenly reported under her name — a clerical error that has apparently snowballed into this very public mess. He’s now working directly with the tax board to correct it, and the agency has agreed to place a hold on the account while Cartwright submits proof that she doesn’t owe the disputed amount.

\n\n

In short: her accountant says she’s not dodging taxes, she’s untangling someone else’s mistake.

\n\n

The Financial Fallout of Her Split From Jax Taylor

\n\n

The timing is rough, to say the least. Cartwright has spent the better part of the past year dealing with a very public separation from estranged husband Jax Taylor — and money has been a central, painful thread throughout all of it.

\n\n

As viewers of The Valley watched unfold, Cartwright found herself shouldering the financial weight of their household largely on her own while Taylor was in rehab. Her fears were real and specific. \”My biggest fear is he’s gonna try just to leave and stick me with that $14,000 a month mortgage, and all of everything is gonna be on my back,\” she said on the show.

\n\n

Those fears weren’t unfounded. Bravo TV reported that Taylor had fallen behind on the mortgage for their Valley Village home for several months. Because both names were on the mortgage, Cartwright had no way to walk away from it. Taylor, meanwhile, had signed a lease on a separate condo and refused to keep paying for a home he no longer wanted to live in.

\n\n

And the mortgage wasn’t the only bill piling up. Taylor had also stopped paying his taxes — for years. His explanation was disarmingly blunt: \”I didn’t have the money to pay it, so I just kind of let it ride.\” That decision had a direct impact on Cartwright. \”My mortgage used to be around 8,000 [dollars a month]. I pay 18,000 [dollars a month] now because of his taxes,\” she explained on The Valley After Show. The unpaid taxes alone had ballooned to around $100,000 before Taylor eventually settled them. He also admitted they had to remortgage their house as a result of his actions — which is how that monthly payment nearly doubled.

\n\n

Taylor has since expressed remorse. \”Putting my son and putting Brittany in such an awkward place, I’ll never forgive myself for that. And it was just an awful thing to do,\” the Vanderpump Rules veteran admitted.

\n\n

Where Things Stand With Co-Parenting Cruz

\n\n

Through all of it, Cartwright has kept her focus on their five-year-old son Cruz, who was recently diagnosed with autism. She’s been open about spending extra money each month specifically to keep a pool in their home — \”I didn’t want to take Cruz away from a swimming pool because that is like his happy place,\” she said — a small but telling detail about the kind of mother she’s determined to be regardless of the chaos around her.

\n\n

The custody agreement the former couple reached earlier this year includes shared responsibility for Cruz’s health, education, and well-being, with Cartwright holding final decision-making authority if they can’t agree. Both parents are also prohibited from being under the influence of marijuana, alcohol, or other substances during their time with Cruz.

\n\n

Taylor, who has spoken publicly about struggling with cocaine addiction since his early twenties, said getting sober was directly tied to wanting to be a better example for his son. He wanted Cruz to one day look back and see the change.

\n\n

As for the tax situation, Cartwright’s CPA appears confident the issue will be resolved. The account is on hold, the paperwork is in motion, and Cartwright is clearly not interested in letting a 2019 filing error define her 2026. Whether the California Franchise Tax Board agrees is the next chapter.

“,
“category”: “Celebrity

The post Brittany Cartwright Fighting Nearly $500K Tax Claim appeared first on Cream.

• Clarissa, a bold reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway set in present-day Lagos, premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight sidebar
• Sophie Okonedo stars as the title character alongside Ayo Edebiri, David Oyelowo, Fortune Nwafor, and India Amarteifio
• The film is directed by twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, who previously made the acclaimed drama Eyimofe
• Okonedo, who has never attended Cannes before, broke down in tears when she learned the film had been accepted
• Shot on 35mm with a nearly all-Nigerian crew, the film is being hailed as one of the most distinctive entries of the festival

\n\n

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway has always felt like a novel that resists being touched. Its stream-of-consciousness interiority, its fragmented time, its insistence on the whole world existing inside a single day — it’s the kind of book that filmmakers have historically approached with caution, or not at all. The 1997 Vanessa Redgrave adaptation stumbled. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, itself inspired by Woolf, came closer by working around the source rather than through it. Stage adaptations have come and gone.

\n\n

Then Nigerian twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri decided to move the whole thing to Lagos. And somehow, that’s exactly where it always belonged.

\n\n

Clarissa, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, is a film of quiet audacity. The Esiris — whose debut feature Eyimofe earned significant critical praise — have transposed Woolf’s 1920s London story to present-day Nigeria, and in doing so have made something that doesn’t just adapt the novel but interrogates it. The result is one of the most striking films at this year’s festival.

\n\n

A New Lagos, a New Clarissa

\n\n

Sophie Okonedo plays Clarissa, now a Nigerian society woman navigating the infamously gridlocked Lagosian traffic, managing her household staff, and drifting through memories of long-ago summers in Abraka, a lush town in Nigeria’s Delta state. The screenplay (written by Chuko, though the film is co-directed by both brothers) opens not with flowers — though those come — but with a young Clarissa, played by India Amarteifio of Netflix’s Queen Charlotte, slipping out of the room of young Peter, played by Industry‘s Toheeb Jimoh. It is 1994. The friends are swimming in lakes, picnicking on beaches, arguing about postcolonial literature and what democracy really means for a newly independent nation still under military rule. Then morning prayers sound, and an older Clarissa wakes up. Lagos is waiting.

\n\n

Okonedo is terrific here — restrained in a way that takes a moment to fully register. She communicates Clarissa’s interior life not through outbursts but through the careful architecture of stillness. Clarissa married Richard (Jude Akuwudike), a respectable man in politics, but she still carries the memory of her former lover Peter, played in the present by David Oyelowo, and the charged intensity of her youthful relationship with Sally.

\n\n

Sally is played as a young woman by Ayo Edebiri, and as an older one by Nikki Amuka-Bird. In the flashbacks, Edebiri’s Sally is magnetic — never far from a cigarette or a book, radiating an effortless countercultural cool that young Clarissa can’t quite shake. The chemistry between Amarteifio and Edebiri is understated and entirely convincing, the kind of attraction that lives in glances and proximity rather than declaration. The film’s most alive scenes are the ones where the young friends gather to argue about literature and politics, the air between them buzzing with ideas and longing. You could spend a whole film in that room. If there’s a complaint to be made about Clarissa, it’s that the filmmakers don’t give us quite enough time there.

\n\n

Fortune Nwafor Is a Revelation

\n\n

Running parallel to Clarissa’s day is Septimus, here reimagined as a Nigerian military officer (Fortune Nwafor) recently returned from fighting Boko Haram in the country’s north. He lives in a cramped apartment with his wife Aisha (Modesinuola Ogundiwin), a Muslim seamstress, and travels the city by danfo — the communal minibuses that pack Lagos’s streets. Where the camera opens up for Clarissa, it closes in on Septimus, visually enacting the claustrophobia of his world.

\n\n

Nwafor, who also appeared in Eyimofe, is extraordinary. His performance lives almost entirely in his eyes, which manage to hold naïveté and devastation at the same time. Just as Woolf used Septimus to expose how Britain discarded its veterans after World War I, the Esiris use him to examine what Nigeria does with the men it sends to fight and then brings home. In Nwafor’s hands, Septimus becomes something almost unbearable — a symbol of a nation’s broken promises.

\n\n

The Craft Behind the Camera

\n\n

The film was shot on 35mm — a bold call on a tight budget, and a meaningful one. Jonathan Bloom’s cinematography finds visual poetry in close-ups: a lip grazing a knee, a kingfisher calling from a branch. Blair McClendon’s editing has an intuitive rhythm that mirrors the splintered logic of memory. Kelsey Lu’s score threads through it all like smoke. The overall register places Clarissa in conversation with a wave of recent films — All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Earth Mama, Nickel Boys, and Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow — that share a commitment to cinema as felt experience rather than plot delivery.

\n\n

There’s also something quietly radical in the Esiris’ relationship to Woolf herself. The novel, for all its brilliance, was written within a colonial framework and carries traces of the racism that entailed. Clarissa doesn’t ignore that history. It turns it over, examines it, and then does something more interesting than simply condemning it — it reclaims the form entirely.

\n\n

Sophie Okonedo on the Journey to Cannes

\n\n

For Okonedo, getting here has been a long road with a lot of near-misses. Her first conversation with the Esiri brothers happened around the time of the pandemic lockdowns. They sent her a link to Eyimofe, she watched it, and immediately agreed to meet. When they pitched the Mrs. Dalloway reimagining set in Lagos, her answer was immediate.

\n\n

“I’m in,” she told them.

\n\n

Then came about a year and a half of silence. Then a script arrived. Then there was no money. Then producer Theresa Park (Bones and All) came on board and helped get it financed. The shoot itself was a logistical challenge — filming on 35mm in Lagos, with a nearly all-Nigerian crew, on a tight budget, in one of the world’s most chaotic cities.

\n\n

“It was so hard to get off the ground,” Okonedo told Deadline. “And tricky to get a film made in Nigeria. Obviously, they’ve got the huge Nollywood industry. But it’s a different type of film to that, and to get a film made on 35mm, and shot with nearly all Nigerian crew, is just extraordinary. There were so many instances of ‘it nearly didn’t happen,’ right up until the wire, really.”

\n\n

When Cannes came calling, she cried.

\n\n

“I’ve never been to Cannes,” she said. “I said, ‘If nothing else happens, this is more than we could ever wanted to happen to this film.'”

\n\n

To prepare, Okonedo reread the novel — finding in it something she’d completely missed the first time around. “I didn’t get it at all, the book,” she admitted. “I read it when I was young. I had no idea what the hell it was going on about. Then I read it at my age now and it knocked my socks off.” She even walked the London route Mrs. Dalloway takes in the novel before flying to Lagos for filming — trying to absorb the wonder of a city she could then carry into a different one.

\n\n

She also stayed with the Esiri brothers’ mother for the duration of the shoot. Having spent little time in Nigeria and not having grown up with her Nigerian family, Okonedo wanted to absorb as much as she could. What she found surprised her.

\n\n

“There’s a part of me that’s totally British, but there’s also a part of me that’s so Nigerian,” she said, “and because I haven’t spent time there, I didn’t understand that part until I went back.”

\n\n

That discovery, she said, made the whole project feel personal in a way she hadn’t anticipated. “This project has been so meaningful to me on a personal level that anything that happens with it afterwards is just extra.”

\n\n

It’s a feeling the film earns. Clarissa is the kind of adaptation that doesn’t ask permission — it takes a canonical text, strips it of its imperial assumptions, and rebuilds it somewhere it never expected to go. The result is something genuinely new: a film about memory and regret and the cost of a life lived properly, set against the noise and heat and impossible energy of Lagos. Woolf, you suspect, would have found it fascinating.

“,
“category”: “Movies

The post Sophie Okonedo and Ayo Edebiri Shine in Cannes’ ‘Clarissa’ appeared first on Cream.

• Kate Beckinsale has replaced Milla Jovovich as the lead in Twilight of the Dead, the final chapter of George A. Romero’s zombie saga
• The Paz Brothers (Doron and Yoav Paz) are also stepping in to direct, replacing Session 9‘s Brad Anderson
• Romero wrote a treatment for the film before his death in 2017 and considered it the true conclusion to his Dead franchise
• Magenta Light Studios has secured North American distribution rights and is committed to a theatrical release
• The project is being launched at Cannes, with the script and concept materials available to international buyers

\n\n

George A. Romero’s final chapter is getting a major reset — and Kate Beckinsale is leading the charge. The Underworld star has officially been cast in Twilight of the Dead, stepping into the lead role that was previously held by Milla Jovovich. Along with the casting change, the project has a new directing duo — the Paz Brothers, Doron and Yoav Paz — replacing Session 9‘s Brad Anderson, for undisclosed reasons. Stunt veteran Ho-Sung Pak, known for his work on Bullet Train, has also come aboard to direct the film’s action sequences.

\n\n

The overhaul is sweeping. New cast, new directors, new financing. But the mission remains the same: honor what Romero started.

\n\n

Romero, who passed away in 2017 after a battle with lung cancer, had developed a treatment for Twilight of the Dead before his death, intending it as the definitive conclusion to the saga he launched in 1968 with the low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead. That film — made for almost nothing and barely mentioning the word “zombie” — effectively defined the genre’s modern template. Nearly six decades later, his widow Suzanne Romero has been working with screenwriters Joe Knetter, Robert L. Lucas, and Paolo Zelati (who co-developed the original treatment with Romero) to bring that vision to the screen.

\n\n

\”I gave [Zelati] my full blessing as long as I could be there every step of the way for it to remain true to George’s vision,\” Suzanne said in a previous statement. \”We had a solid treatment and the beginning of the script. I can 100 percent say that George would be incredibly happy to see this continue. He wanted this to be his final stamp on the zombie genre.\”

\n\n

Where Twilight of the Dead Fits in Romero’s Legacy

\n\n

For those who need a refresher on the timeline: Romero followed Night with Dawn of the Dead (1978), which found survivors sheltering in a shopping mall as the outbreak spread. Day of the Dead (1985) pushed further, with the last remnants of humanity living underground while a scientist attempted to study zombie cognition. Then came Land of the Dead in 2005, the most fully realized apocalyptic vision of the bunch — think Escape from New York meets the undead.

\n\n

Romero later made Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009), but he never considered those found-footage-era entries part of the same continuous narrative. Twilight of the Dead is set to pick up directly after the events of Land, making it the true seventh and final chapter of that core storyline.

\n\n

The plot, as described, is set \”on a decimated earth where the last vestiges of humanity are trapped between warring factions and an evolving undead threat.\” That evolution angle is interesting — and it tracks with where Romero had been taking things, slowly giving the undead more agency and intelligence with each film.

\n\n

Why Beckinsale Makes Sense Here

\n\n

On paper, swapping one genre action star for another might seem like a lateral move. But there’s a logic to it. Beckinsale spent years as Selene in the Underworld franchise — a leather-clad vampire warrior who hunted monsters with cold precision and genuine menace. She brings the kind of physical authority and emotional gravity that a story this weighty demands. Jovovich, of course, brought similar energy to her years battling the undead in the Resident Evil series, and her departure is a real loss. But Beckinsale stepping in signals the production isn’t going softer — if anything, the casting suggests a film that wants to feel both visceral and grounded.

\n\n

Roundtable’s John Baldecchi clearly agrees. \”We’re thrilled to have Kate Beckinsale starring in Twilight of the Dead,\” he said. \”Her extraordinary talent, emotional range, and commanding screen presence make her the perfect actress to lead a final chapter worthy of George’s legacy.\”

\n\n

The Paz Brothers — whose credits include The Golem and Plan A — are also bringing genuine conviction to the project. \”Stepping into Romero’s world is the ultimate privilege for any genre filmmaker,\” they said in a joint statement. \”This is more than a continuation, it’s a responsibility. We are committed to honoring his voice while delivering a visceral, terrifying, impactful experience for today’s audience that resonates beyond the screen.\”

\n\n

The Road to Production Has Been Long

\n\n

Twilight of the Dead first surfaced publicly in 2021, when Roundtable Entertainment came aboard and Brad Anderson signed on to direct. Jovovich was cast, as was Betty Gabriel of Get Out. Then the project hit financial turbulence, stalling out and forcing a rethink.

\n\n

The version moving forward now has fresh financing and a new distribution partner in Bob Yari’s Magenta Light Studios, which has secured North American rights and is committed to bringing the film to theaters across the U.S. and Canada. The Syndicate is handling international sales, with executive producers Jeffrey Giles and Michael Lurie launching the project at Cannes — where buyers can access the screenplay and concept materials.

\n\n

\”George Romero is one of the most successful and influential creatives in the horror and genre space, and his final film deserves to be experienced on the big screen,\” said Yari. \”We’re proud to partner with his estate and the filmmakers to bring Twilight of the Dead to audiences.\”

\n\n

One name that’s been quietly attached throughout the project’s long development: Greg Nicotero, the special effects legend who got his start on Romero’s Day of the Dead and went on to collaborate with the director on Land, Diary, and Survival. He’s on board to handle the FX, and has described the project as a \”full circle\” moment in his career. That kind of continuity with the original films matters — it’s not just a brand extension, it’s a genuine attempt to close the loop.

\n\n

Additional casting is still underway. And while the producers have said they haven’t closed the door on future films if this one performs, right now the focus is singular: giving Romero’s saga the ending he always intended it to have.

“,
“category”: “Movies

The post Kate Beckinsale Replaces Milla Jovovich in Romero’s Twilight of the Dead appeared first on Cream.

• Blumhouse horror film Obsession is now in theaters from Focus Features, which acquired it for $14 million after its TIFF debut
• Director Curry Barker, 26, is a YouTuber-turned-filmmaker whose debut cost $800 — this one cost $750,000
• Inde Navarrette delivers a widely praised star-making performance as Nikki, a woman supernaturally obsessed with her friend
• Michael Johnston co-stars as Bear, the lovelorn music store worker whose reckless wish sets the horror in motion
• Barker already has a Blumhouse follow-up in post-production and an A24 Texas Chainsaw Massacre reworking in the pipeline

\n\n

There’s a moment in Obsession where Bear, the film’s hapless, lovestruck protagonist, looks at the supernatural nightmare he’s created and says quietly, \”This is all I’ve ever wanted.\” It’s funny. It’s heartbreaking. And it tells you everything you need to know about why this movie works.

\n\n

Obsession — written and directed by 26-year-old wunderkind Curry Barker and now in theaters from Focus Features — is the kind of horror film that sneaks up on you. It looks, on the surface, like a simple \”be careful what you wish for\” yarn. And it is. But it’s also a sharp, darkly funny, genuinely unnerving piece of work that has critics calling it one of the best horror films of the year, and introducing the world to a performer who’s been hiding in plain sight on TV for years.

\n\n

That performer is Inde Navarrette, and after this weekend, nobody’s going to forget her name.

\n\n

The Setup: One Wish, Infinite Consequences

\n\n

Bear (Michael Johnston, known from MTV’s Teen Wolf) is a shy, sensitive music store employee — the kind of guy who rehearses his heartfelt confession of love to a random waitress because any woman’s opinion will do. He’s been quietly obsessing over his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Navarrette, previously best known for 13 Reasons Why and The CW’s Superman & Lois) for years, but can’t find the nerve to say so. After fumbling yet another chance to tell her how he feels, he wanders into a new-age crystal shop and picks up a kitschy novelty toy called a One Wish Willow — a flimsy little rod from the 1960s that promises to grant its owner one wish when snapped in half. The cashier warns him that most customers have complained about the results.

\n\n

He snaps it anyway. He wishes that Nikki would love him \”more than anything in the f—ing world.\”

\n\n

You can probably guess what happens next. And that predictability, several critics note, is actually part of the film’s strange power — you know exactly where this is going, and yet Barker makes you squirm the whole way there.

\n\n

Almost immediately, Nikki shows up at Bear’s door. She kisses him. She moves in. She is, to put it plainly, extremely into him — between bouts of vigorous sex and mawkish couple talk. The problem is that this new Nikki occasionally snaps back into her old self and screams in utter terror before the spell reasserts itself. She spends an entire day rooted in one spot so she’s guaranteed to be waiting when Bear gets home from work. She seals the front door with duct tape. She fashions something deeply disturbing out of his dead cat.

\n\n

\”This isn’t anything like how Bear imagined it would be,\” as one reviewer put it. \”Yet he happily sleeps with her anyway.\”

\n\n

Inde Navarrette Is the Reason to See This Movie

\n\n

Every critic who’s seen Obsession agrees on one thing: Navarrette is extraordinary. The role asks her to be funny, terrifying, heartbreaking, and physically unnerving, sometimes within the same scene, and she delivers on every count.

\n\n

Portraying Nikki as genuinely, disturbingly obsessed — without tipping into cartoonish camp — is a tightrope act. Navarrette walks it with precision. One moment she’s sulking so intensely it’s almost funny. The next, she’s unfurling a twisted fairy tale that leaves everyone in disturbed silence. Then she’s dancing while covered in blood, or screaming so hard your throat aches in sympathy. There’s a possession element to her performance — strange physicality, odd facial glitches, muscle spasms — that reviewers compare to something genuinely inhuman, without going full Exorcist contortion.

\n\n

Cinematographer Taylor Clemons frequently keeps Navarrette’s face out of frame, cropped or obscured by shadow. One review calls it \”an odd choice, as the actor’s so skilled you feel like you’re missing something.\” But her physicality transcends the framing. When the real Nikki briefly breaks through the curse — desperate, depleted, scrambling for escape — the performance becomes genuinely heartbreaking. That emotional weight, critics say, is what elevates Obsession beyond a neat genre exercise.

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\”She’s playing both the victim and the tormentor,\” one critic wrote, \”and she navigates both sides of Nikki’s personality.\” Another called her \”scream queen material.\” IndieWire went further, calling it \”one of the more physically and emotionally taxing horror leads to come down the pike in a while.\”

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Johnston holds his own opposite her — effectively conveying Bear’s sweetly moony yearning in the early scenes and his slowly dawning horror as things spiral. In one bedroom scene, he reportedly pulls off the feat of looking entirely thrilled and utterly miserable at the same time. It’s the kind of detail that makes you realize there’s more going on here than your average fright flick.

\n\n

The Bigger Picture: What Barker Is Really Saying

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The film works as a monkey’s paw horror story. It also works as a wickedly sharp dissection of modern male loneliness, the \”nice guy\” myth, and the entitled logic underneath it. Bear isn’t a monster in his own mind — he’s the romantic hero of his own story, a sensitive guy who just wants the girl. What he actually does, as his friends and the film’s camera make increasingly clear, is use a supernatural device like a roofie, then reap the rewards while Nikki is stripped of agency and bodily control.

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\”The most terrifying thing for a young man these days,\” one critic observed after watching young men flinch and gasp at the LA premiere, \”is an emotionally unregulated and unpredictable woman.\” Barker, to his credit, seems to know exactly what he’s doing with that fear — pointing the lens back at the audience and asking the uncomfortable question: how many \”good guys\” in the theater could be tempted to do what Bear did?

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The film is savvy enough not to let Bear fully off the hook. His social circle sees what he’s done. Invitations stop coming. Friends drift away. Several characters explicitly lecture him about his responsibility to Nikki. The horror at the center of Obsession, IndieWire argues, isn’t just the supernatural curse — it’s the very contemporary male fear of being the guy everyone knows took advantage of someone.

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Where some critics push back is in the third act, where the film’s feminist critique gets complicated by its own visual choices. Several reviewers note that the camera lingers on female bodies in ways that feel less like commentary and more like the exploitation it’s supposedly critiquing. \”Barker undercuts the message of anti-misogyny through third-act violence,\” Mashable wrote, pointing to scenes where female characters are brutalized in graphic detail that serves no apparent narrative purpose. It’s a legitimate tension the film never fully resolves.

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The tonal wobbles are real too — some jokey bits, including an inexplicable argument with a shop clerk and a jaunty closing credits song, land awkwardly. And the film is admittedly overlong for a premise this lean, with scenes so dimly lit that Navarrette’s face is sometimes lost entirely.

\n\h2>A Director to Watch — Closely

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What’s remarkable about Obsession is the distance it represents from where Barker started. Less than two years ago, he and collaborator Cooper Tomlinson (who co-stars here as Bear’s loutish best friend Ian) were making horror-comedy shorts for their YouTube channel \”That’s a Bad Idea.\” Their feature debut, Milk & Serial — a found-footage horror sendup of YouTube prank culture — cost a reported $800. It was a clever calling card, if not a fully realized film.

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Obsession cost $750,000 and has the kind of polished confidence that puts major studio efforts to shame. Focus Features — the distributor behind Nosferatu — spent $14 million acquiring it after its buzzy Midnight Madness premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Jason Blum is attached as executive producer. Shooting has already wrapped on Barker’s next Blumhouse feature, Anything but Ghosts, and an A24 reworking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in the offing.

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The film also has a lovely sense of place — Bear and Nikki work at Cassell’s Music, the beloved independent Los Angeles-area music store that appeared in Wayne’s World and recently closed after 78 years. It’s a small touch, but it grounds the film’s wilder flights of fancy in something real and a little bittersweet.

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The supporting cast includes Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless as the girl next door who clearly has feelings for Bear that he’s too distracted to notice, and Andy Richter in a reportedly underused role as the music store owner. The Rotten Tomatoes score has been climbing steadily alongside the film’s word-of-mouth, with box office projections growing as the opening weekend arrives.

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Critics are landing mostly in B to B+ territory — appreciating the craft, the performance, and the sharp social instincts while acknowledging the film’s rough edges. \”A simple story told well is the oldest trick in the book,\” the Boston Herald noted, \”especially when it works this well.\”

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The Obsession that Bear wished for turned out to be nothing like he imagined. The film named after it, though, is exactly what horror fans have been waiting for — a sharp, sick, surprisingly emotional genre movie with a performance at its center that demands to be seen. Navarrette has been working steadily for years. After this weekend, the industry is going to start paying very different attention.

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Obsession is rated R and is in theaters now.

“,
“category”: “Movies

The post ‘Obsession’ Review: Inde Navarrette Makes Her Mark appeared first on Cream.

• Dutton Ranch premieres May 15 on Paramount+ and the Paramount Network, following Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler’s fresh start in South Texas
• The series debuted with an 86% Rotten Tomatoes score — already outpacing the original Yellowstone’s 83% average
• Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser are joined by Ed Harris, Annette Bening, and Finn Little in the new cast
• Critics praised the polished production, ensemble performances, and long-term storytelling potential
• The show has been described by fans as the effective \”Yellowstone Season 6\” — and critics seem to agree it earns that title

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Beth Dutton is back. And this time, she’s in Texas.

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Dutton Ranch, the newest spinoff from Taylor Sheridan’s ever-expanding Yellowstone universe, premiered Friday on Paramount+ — and the early word from critics is that Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser have delivered something worth getting excited about. The show currently holds an 86% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, which puts it ahead of the original Yellowstone‘s 83% average across five seasons. Not bad for a spinoff that started from scratch — literally.

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The series picks up in the aftermath of a wildfire that tears through Dutton land in Montana. Beth and her husband Rip (Hauser) watch their lives burn in the rearview mirror of a pickup truck, then do what Duttons do: they rebuild. Within a month, they’ve relocated to Rio Paloma, South Texas, where the family name carries zero weight and Beth has to practically beg a slaughterhouse to process her few head of cattle. It’s a humbling reset for one of TV’s most ferocious characters — and apparently, it works.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=19I5a1tRt98%3Ffeature%3Doembed
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What Critics Are Saying

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Richard Roeper at RogerEbert.com wrote that the show “sets up a half-dozen storylines with long-term potential,” which is exactly what you want to hear from a franchise that lives and dies by its slow burns. Angie Han at The Hollywood Reporter called it “a tangle of storylines that land ever slightly more often than not.” Michel Ghanem at TheWrap described it as “more polished” with a “promising cast,” while Rebecca Nicholson at the Financial Times simply called it “full-bodied, soapy TV fun.” J. Kelly Nestruck at The Globe and Mail noted “some swell performances.”

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Not everyone is fully on board. John Anderson at the Wall Street Journal landed the sharpest jab, writing that “there’s no one to like on Dutton Ranch” — though fans of the franchise might consider that a feature, not a bug. Beth Dutton has never exactly been easy to love. That’s the whole point.

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When the first five reviews dropped, the show briefly held a perfect 100% score. It’s since settled at 86%, which still puts it in genuinely strong company within the Yellowstone universe. For context: 1923, the Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren prequel, leads the franchise at 94%, while 1883 — the Tim McGraw and Faith Hill origin story — sits at 89%. Dutton Ranch is comfortably ahead of the flagship series that started it all.

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A New World, a Familiar Obsession

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What makes the spinoff feel like a true continuation rather than a cash grab is how faithfully it carries the franchise’s central preoccupation: land. Not just owning it, but being owned by it. “The sky doesn’t stop here,” Beth marvels at one point, staring out over Texas hill country — and it reads less like a line of dialogue than a thesis statement for the entire Sheridan enterprise.

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The show reunites Reilly and Hauser with Yellowstone fan favorite Finn Little, while adding a formidable new supporting cast. Annette Bening plays Beulah Jackson, the powerful owner of a rival Texas ranch who makes it clear the Duttons aren’t welcome. Ed Harris brings his particular brand of weathered gravitas to Everett McKinney, described as a kindhearted veteran who’s supposedly put his violent past behind him. Australian actor Jai Courtney and country singer Morgan Wade round out the ensemble.

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The official synopsis sets the stakes plainly: “Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton gamble everything on a new life in South Texas, but the promise of building a future far from the ghosts of Yellowstone quickly collides with brutal new realities and a rival ranch that will stop at nothing to protect its empire.”

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Sheridan even works in a Teddy Roosevelt reference — because of course he does. The Dutton universe has always been less about cowboys and more about a very specific theory of America: that the land is finite, that someone is always trying to take yours, and that the only answer is to hold on harder. Shady criminals, secret pasts, vigilante justice — it’s all here. But so is that sweeping, almost pornographic sense of space that made the original series appointment television for millions of people who’d never set foot on a ranch in their lives.

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The first two episodes of Dutton Ranch are streaming now on Paramount+, with the series also airing on the Paramount Network at 8 p.m. ET/PT. New episodes drop weekly through July 3rd.

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Beth Dutton in Texas. Critics are in. The land is calling.

“,
“category”: “TV

The post Dutton Ranch Reviews Are In — And It’s Already Beating Yellowstone appeared first on Cream.

• The Michael biopic has driven Jackson’s catalog to 181.6 million U.S. streams in a single week — his personal best by a wide margin
• Thriller has returned to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart for the first time since 1984, now with 38 total weeks at the top
• \”Billie Jean\” has climbed to No. 17 on the Hot 100, 43 years after its original release
• The Essential Michael Jackson hit No. 1 on the U.K. albums chart for the first time since 2009, when it surged following Jackson’s death
• The chart boom arrives alongside renewed legal scrutiny, as the Cascio family’s sexual abuse lawsuit draws fresh attention

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Three weeks into its theatrical run, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael is doing something no marketing campaign could manufacture: it’s making a dead man’s decades-old music feel brand new again. Not just on one chart, not just in one country — everywhere, all at once, in numbers that are genuinely hard to wrap your head around.

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For the tracking week of May 1–7, Jackson’s solo catalog registered 181.6 million official on-demand song streams in the United States alone, according to data platform Luminate. That’s a 32% jump from the prior week’s 137.6 million — which was itself a 146% improvement over his then-record of 55.9 million weekly streams. He’s broken his own personal best three weeks in a row. Early data for the following week already showed 86 million streams logged in just three days (May 8–10), putting a 200-million-stream week within reach.

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\”Billie Jean\” is leading the charge. Originally released on January 2, 1983 as the second single from Thriller, it held the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks and made Jackson the first artist ever to simultaneously top all four of Billboard’s major pop and R&B charts. Now, 43 years later, it’s back — rocketing from No. 38 to No. 17 on the Hot 100, topping newer releases from Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber in the process. The song has also climbed to No. 2 on Spotify’s global chart and currently sits at 2.7 billion total streams on the platform. It is, by every measure, still his biggest song — and it’s proving it all over again.

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\”Beat It,\” \”Human Nature,\” and \”Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough\” have all returned to the Hot 100 as well, with \”Beat It\” and \”Human Nature\” finishing second and third behind \”Billie Jean\” in Jackson’s catalog for the week with 11.4 million and 10.8 million plays respectively.

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Thriller Is Making History — Again

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The album that started it all is back on top. Thriller has reclaimed No. 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart for the first time since 1984, earning 62,000 equivalent album units in the May 1–7 tracking week — a 36% jump from the week before, driven by 50.3 million streams. That brings Thriller’s total weeks at No. 1 on that chart to 38, extending its own record for the most weeks at the top by a male artist. (SZA’s SOS holds the overall record with 46 weeks, having surpassed Thriller’s original 37-week run in June 2025.)

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On the Billboard 200, the numbers are just as striking. Thriller has climbed into the top five. The greatest-hits collection Number Ones has entered the top 10 for the first time ever. The Essential Michael Jackson jumped from No. 158 to No. 88. Off the Wall and Dangerous have both reentered the chart. And on the Top Album Sales chart, Thriller jumped from No. 48 to No. 7 — while also crossing 500 total weeks on that chart, a milestone reached by only three other albums in history: Bob Marley’s Legend, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Chronicle, and Nirvana’s Nevermind.

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This is all happening in the biopic’s third week of release. That’s not a opening-weekend spike. That’s a sustained cultural moment.

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The U.K. Is Feeling It Too

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Across the Atlantic, the effect is equally pronounced. The Essential Michael Jackson has returned to No. 1 on the U.K. albums chart — the first time it’s held that position since 2009, when it spent seven weeks there in the immediate aftermath of Jackson’s death. Thriller has jumped to No. 6 and Bad has climbed back into the top 10 for the first time in 14 years. Jackson has also debuted on the U.K. Official Dance Singles Chart for what Forbes reports is his most active year yet on that tally — not a chart where his music has historically been classified, but apparently one where it belongs.

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Even Janet Is Getting a Boost

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Here’s a detail that says everything about the reach of this moment: Janet Jackson, who doesn’t appear in the biopic and isn’t even mentioned in it, is seeing her own streaming numbers rise. According to sister La Toya, Janet “kindly declined” to be depicted in Michael. But for the week ending May 7, her catalog still amassed over 9.4 million official on-demand U.S. streams — her best weekly total of 2026, up 31% from two weeks earlier. A healthy portion of that comes from \”Scream,\” the duet she recorded with her brother, which pulled in nearly 1.2 million plays on its own. Even stripping that song out, her catalog is still up 20% from the prior period.

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Which raises a question that feels increasingly inevitable: could a Janet biopic be next?

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The Shadow the Biopic Doesn’t Acknowledge

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The chart triumph arrives alongside a legal story that the film itself pointedly ignores. Michael has been widely criticized for sidestepping the abuse allegations that have followed Jackson’s legacy for decades, and a new lawsuit is making that omission harder to overlook.

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In February, four siblings from the Cascio family — who were described as something of a second family to Jackson — filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse spanning more than a decade. The complaint alleges that \”Michael Jackson was a serial child predator who, over the course of more than a decade, drugged, raped, and sexually assaulted each of the Plaintiffs, beginning when some of them were as young as seven or eight.\” The family says Jackson groomed them and manipulated them into silence, and that their years of publicly defending him were a product of that grooming.

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Jackson’s estate has pushed back hard. Attorney Martin Singer called the lawsuit \”a desperate money grab\” and noted that the Cascio family \”staunchly defended Michael Jackson for more than 25 years, attesting to his innocence.\” Singer added: \”These shakedown attempts come more than 15 years after Michael’s death, thus carrying no risk of being sued for defamation. Sadly, in death just as in life, Michael’s talents and success continue to make him a target.\” The estate previously reached a settlement with the family in 2019.

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It’s the tension that sits underneath all of this — a catalog shattering streaming records, a biopic crossing half a billion dollars at the global box office, and a legacy that remains as contested as it is celebrated.

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For now, the numbers keep climbing. And if the early streaming data for week four holds, Michael Jackson may be about to break his own record again.

“,
“category”: “Music

The post Michael Jackson’s Music Is Taking Over the Charts Again appeared first on Cream.