Matt Singer is the editor and critic of the website ScreenCrush.com. For five years, he was the on-air host of IFC News on the Independent Film Channel, hosting coverage of film festivals and red carpets around the world. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, he’s been a frequent contributor to the television shows CBS This Morning Saturday and Ebert Presents At the Movies, and his writing has also appeared in print and online at The Village Voice, The Dissolve, and Indiewire. His first book, Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular, is on sale now.
Matt Singer
‘Groundhog Day’ Is Coming to Broadway (Over and Over and Over and Over…)
We’re big fans of Groundhog Day here at ScreenCrush — I mean, we did just pick it as number one on our list of the 25 Best Comedies of the Last 25 Years — so this news, via The Hollywood Reporter, has us excited: Groundhog Day is coming to Broadway on January 23, 2017. A new version of Groundhog Day! It feels like we’re living the same story over and over and over again! But with, like, music this time.
‘Furious 7’ Review: One Last Ride, and It’s a Good One
Furious 7 almost certainly won’t be the last Fast & Furious movie. But at times it feels like a series finale. There are numerous callbacks and homages to the franchise’s entire 15-year history. The setpieces are bigger and crazier than ever; it’s hard to imagine anyone topping them. And before the chases really get rolling, the mood is often downright mournful. Two different scenes are set in graveyards, and characters talk about taking “one last ride” together.
Helen Mirren Says Her ‘Great Ambition’ is To Be in a ‘Fast & Furious’ Movie
Helen Mirren is an Oscar winner and a multi-time Golden Globe winner. She has a few Best Actress awards from the Cannes Film Festival, and a couple Emmys as well. She’s a Dame of the British Empire. As far as actors go, she is amongst the most respected in the entire world.
25 Incredible Movie-Inspired Tattoos
I don’t have any tattoos. I have trouble committing to a pair of shoes in the morning; committing to something that would stay on my body for the rest of my life would be impossible. Maybe that’s why I’m in awe of movie tattoos, and the lengths some folks go to to show their love of film. Forever! You’ve got to be a pretty big fan of a movie to plaster it across your chest for eternity. What if your tastes change? When I was 14, I was really into Police Academy. Can you imagine if 20 years later my wife woke up every morning to this etched into my back?
Prepare For Binging: A List of All the Netflix Originals Premiere Dates for 2015
Netflix has come a long way from those little red envelopes full of DVDs. Today the movies-by-mail rental company is a full-fledged movie and television studio with an impressive slate of original films, documentaries, mini-series, and cartoons. And they keep adding new content constantly; a week after Season 3 of the acclaimed series House of Cards, they unveiled Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt from Tina Fey; two weeks later they debuted Bloodline starring Friday Night Lights’s Kyle Chandler.
Jason Segel Is Working on a ‘Lego Movie’ Spinoff
The LEGO Movie proved audiences’ appetite for charming, mildly subversive animated movies about talking toys. Now Warner Bros. is testing that appetite with a whole line of LEGO movies. There already announced Ninjago film in 2016, a Lego Batman Movie in 2017, and The Lego Movie 2 in 2018. Per The Hollywood Reporter, that onslaught will also includes a fourth film, a LEGO spinoff titled The Billion Brick Race, which will be co-written and directed by Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets’ Jason Segel.
It’s Judgment Day For a New ‘Terminator Genisys’ Living One-Sheet and Images
It’s a poster! It’s a YouTube teaser! Actually, it’s a “living one-sheet” for the upcoming Terminator Genisys, featuring Mr. T-800 himself, Arnold Schwarzengger with his skin peeling off to reveal his metal endoskeleton. I like this sort of thing! Partly because it involves Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there’s not too many way you can go wrong there, but mostly because it’s different than your typical barrage of posters and one-sheets, along with micro-trailers and whatnot.
‘Maggie’ Trailer: Get Ready For Schwarzenegger Versus Zombies
As one of the biggest Arnold Schwarzenegger nerds on the planet, I might be biased about this (okay I am definitely biased about this) but I think Maggie looks like one of the most interesting movies of the year. It’s a horror drama about a father trying to protect his daughter after she’s infected with some kind of zombie virus. The daughter is Abigail Breslin; the father is Schwarzenegger. Admittedly I don’t see (or hear) much of a family resemblance, but the themes this story touches on — parental responsibilities, broken families, an aging hero fighting against an increasing sense of irrelevance — jive perfectly with the stuff Schwarzenegger continues to explore throughout the latter half of his career.
Broken Lizard Launches ‘Super Troopers 2’ Crowdfunding Campaign
The men of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe — Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske — have been together since 1990, when they met and began performing together at Colgate University. They toured their first film, Puddle Cruiser, around the country (I remember when they came to my school with it in the fall of 1998), and its indie success led to their first breakout hit: Super Troopers, about the misadventures of a bunch of small-town cops. Broken Lizard went on to produce three more features, but none matched the profile and cult status of Super Troopers. Perhaps that’s why they’re now at work on a Super Troopers 2 — and why they’ve taken to crowdfunding the film on the fundraising website Indiegogo.
Vivica A. Fox Will Return For ‘Independence Day 2’
When Bill Pullman dumped that big “We will not go quietly into the night!” speech at the end of Independence Day, he really wasn’t kidding. Even though Will Smith will not return, Independence Day 2 is still moving forward, like an enormous alien spaceship slowly approaching the Golden Gate Bridge. Late last night, Roland Emmerich tweeted the latest original Independence Day cast member to join the film:
‘Deadpool’ Production Begins, Superhero Lineup Officially Confirmed
It’s fitting that Deadpool’s main super-power is his accelerated healing factor; you just can’t kill this guy. For years, they talked about making a Deadpool movie featuring Ryan Reynolds (who played a largely unrecognizable version of the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine). For years, Deadpool languished in development; long enough to kill most projects. But that damn healing factor kept Deadpool alive.
‘Dredd 2’ Definitely Isn’t Happening, According to Writer Alex Garland
Most people who saw 2012’s Dredd, a dark reboot of the classic British comic book anti-hero Judge Dredd, dug it. Almost 20 years after Sylvester Stallone made a thoroughly campy mess of the property in Judge Dredd, director Pete Travis, screenwriter Alex Garland and star Karl Urban produced a far more faithful version of Dredd with a bleak tone, gritty action, and a hero who never takes off his signature helmet.
The Cast and Crew of ‘Goodfellas’ Will Reunite For a 25th Anniversary Screening
Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas won just one Oscar (for supporting actor Joe Pesci) at the 1991 Academy Awards. (The year’s Best Picture winner was Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves.) But the film seems to grow more popular and critically acclaimed every year, to the point where it’s now considered one of Scorsese’s masterpieces, one of the best movies of the 1990s, and perhaps the best gangster film ever made without the word “godfather” in the title. Astonishingly (at least it feels astonishing to an old man like me), it’s been 25 years since Goodfellas made its debut in theaters, an anniversary Scorsese and his cast and crew will celebrate next month with a 25th anniversary screening and reunion at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.
You’re Caught: On The Bombshell Finale of ‘The Jinx’
When I first wrote about the true-crime documentary series The Jinx a couple of weeks ago, I was the only person I knew who was watching it. A few weeks later, it’s all anyone is talking about. It’s been one of the top trending topics on Twitter for three days straight, and my personal feed is clogged with debates about the case and the ethics of the filmmakers’ behavior. As I left my hotel in Austin yesterday morning, pundits were discussing the show on CNN; as I wrote most of this piece at the Austin airport, two men at the table next to me in the food court were talking about it as well. I spent a month recommending the show to people who looked at me like I was crazy (“The Jinx? Like the kid’s game?”). The show went from total obscurity to inescapable pop-cultural phenomenon in a matter of hours.
Disney Officially Announces ‘Frozen 2’; Original Creative Team Set to Return
The news out of Disney’s shareholder meeting keeps on coming. This one isn’t much of a surprise: Disney is making Frozen 2. In a related story, the sky is blue and water is wet (until a princess with freezing powers comes along and turns it into ice).
‘Star Wars: Episode 8’ Gets a New Release Date, Rian Johnson Confirmed to Direct
For months it’s been rumored, now it’s confirmed: Rian Johnson, the writer and director of Brick and Looper is officially the writer and director of Star Wars: Episode VIII. Disney CEO Robert Iger also revealed to company shareholders today that Episode VIII has its official release date: May 26, 2017 — 40 years and a single day after the release of the very first Star Wars back in 1977.
Watch Robert Downey Jr. Present a Bionic Arm to a One-Armed ‘Avengers’ Fan
Robert Downey Jr., presenting a bionic Iron Man arm to an exceedingly well-dressed 7-year-old fan named Alex, who was born with a partially developed right arm. The arm wasn’t built by Tony Stark, but rather by a college student named Albert Manero who makes low-cost 3D-printed bionic limbs for children. But Downey received the honor and pleasure of presenting him with his new arm, and comparing it to one of his own Iron Man suits.
‘Cinderella’ Review: This Old Fairy Tale Still Has Some Magic
The name “Disney” brings to mind images of fair princesses, charming princes, magical fairy tales, and simple happily ever afters. In recent years, though, Disney has begun rethinking their classic properties, and releasing more thematically complex versions of their famous films. Sleeping Beauty became Maleficent, which turned a wicked witch into a sympathetic anti-hero; a whole mess of fairy tales turned into Into the Woods, where happily ever after preceded a whole bunch of death and tragedy. The ranks of Disney Princesses grew to include women like Merida, the bow-slinging heroine of Brave, and Anna and Else from Frozen, who rescued each other from an prince, rather than the other way around. Every value and concept that Disney had established and reinforced through decades of repetition was seemingly up for reconsideration and revision.
Tim Burton Will Direct Disney’s New Live-Action ‘Dumbo’ Movie
With their new Cinderella just days away, Disney is continuing its streak of turning its animated classics into live-action features with the news, via the Wall Street Journal, that Dumbo is ready to make the transition from animated elephant to ... well, still-animated elephant surrounded by live-action actors. If that idea doesn’t get your ears flapping, maybe this will: the Journal says Tim Burton will be the man who’ll direct the new Dumbo.
‘San Andreas’ Trailer: The Rock Is Rocking in This Earthquake Movie
It’s been a while since we had a really good disaster movie. Roland Emmerich was the last guy to really push the genre forward, but after freezing and then destroying the entire planet (in The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, respectively) there’s not really a lot of ground left to cover (and demolish). Next summer’s San Andreas will attempt to revive the disaster movie by juicing up an old favorite: the earthquake. This version, directed by Journey 2: The Mysterious Island’s Brad Peyton, features a tremor so huge it encompasses all of California from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It’s so big, Paul Giamatti gravely intones, it can even be felt on the East Coast. That’s a big quake.