News

Exclusive: “You thought you knew Scrooge,” an ominous voice intones. “You don’t know this Scrooge.” So get acquainted with Estella Scrooge, the upcoming world premiere streaming musical with a heavy-hitting Broadway pedigree.

This first-look trailer (watch it above) features Betsy Wolfe (Waitress) singing the show’s “Never Look Down” as clips and characters from the cleverly filmed production take us through this new musical spin on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. References and storylines from other Dickens classics — including Great Expectations, Little Dorrit and Bleak House — are incorporated into the mix.

Estella Scrooge will premiere Friday, November 27 at EstellaScrooge.com. Tickets go on sale Tuesday for $24.99 at Ticketmaster.com.

As Deadline reported in September, Estella Scrooge utilizes greenscreen technology and virtual sets along with individually recorded performances. Billed as “the first fully-realized musical to be filmed in virtual production,” Estella Scrooge uses hundreds of images, animations and digital environments blended...

Written and directed by Richard Tanne, Chemical Hearts is based on the book Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland. The film sees Lili Reinhart (Riverdale and Hustlers) as Grace Town and Austin Abrams as Henry Page, with Reinhart also serving as an executive producer alongside Sutherland and Jamin O’Brien.

Chemical Hearts is a story about Henry Page, a 17-year-old high school student who has his eye on becoming the next Editor-in chief of his school newspaper. His life seems ‘normal’, mundane and simple. However, he believes he is a hopeless romantic even though he’s never actually been in love before. One day he meets transfer student Grace Town, and from the get go, you know she has a story to tell, with her quietness and the resilience she has for keeping personal information just that – personal. They are automatically drawn to each other with their love and passion for literature,...

"I used to be good at socializing..." Amazon Studios has unveiled acial trailer for a teen romance coming-of-age drama titled Chemical Hearts, adapted from Krystal Sutherland's novel "Our Chemical Hearts". The emotionally honest film is "an unapologetic, coming of age story involving a hopeless romantic and a young woman with a mysterious past." A high school transfer student finds a new passion when she begins to work on the school's newspaper, where she meets seventeen-year-old Henry Page, who has never been in love. Described as "a journey of self-discovery that captures the thrills, disappointments and confusion of being a teenager." Starring Austin Abrams & Lili Reinhart, with Sarah Jones, Kara Young, Coral Peña, C.J. Hoff, Shannon Walsh, Bruce Altman, and Meg Gibson. It looks charming and witty and tough, but it also looks like so many other teen romance films. Hopefully there's something unique about this one. Here's the first...

“The Surrogate” is the kind of movie you’d expect to be based on a stage play, because it is so entirely driven by well-honed dialogue arguing social issues from nicely detailed if schematically conceived character viewpoints — like something by Donald Margulies, Rebecca Gilman or the pseudononymous Jane Martin. That writer-director Jeremy Hersh’s debut feature is a screen original surprises, not because it’s “stagy” (though he has written plays), but because .

This indie drama about a young African American woman who agrees to become pregnant for her gay interracial-couple best friends, and the fallout when that arrangement unravels, touches vividly on numerous hot ethical and identity-politics topics without sermonizing in any direction. It’s an engrossing, very well-acted tale that will need viewer word of mouth to get the audience this “virtual theater” release deserves, given a lack of marquee names behind or before the camera.

Bubbly Brooklynite...

There’s a moment in Jeremy Hersh’s feature directorial debut The Surrogate where a heated argument devoid of any correct answers reaches the inevitable question: “Where do you draw the line?” It’s the corner in which we all find ourselves when forced to confront what Hersh calls “the gap between ideals and practical realities.” Because even if we refuse to create such barriers when thinking about topics in the abstract, we’re often very quick to erect them at the exact moment an issue concerns us personally. Maybe it will reveal the truth of our behind-closed-doors hypocrisy. Maybe it will expose us as a monster. Or, like in the case of Jess (Jasmine Batchelor), it will shine a light upon our righteousness. Humanity’s enduring fallibility will be confirmed either way.

And that’s a good thing. It’s through our imperfections that we remain human. It’s...

Stars: Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Stacy Martin, Jennifer Ehle, Raffey Cassidy, Christopher Abbott, Logan Riley Bruner, Maria Dizzia, Meg Gibson, Daniel London | Written and Directed by Brady Corbet

Vox Lux, directed by Brady Corbet, stars Natalie Portman, Raffey Cassidy and Jude Law in a spiralling meteoric rise of a tragic musician that plays second fiddle to devastating story of innocence lost. Vox Lux is a vastly condensed and emotionally compacted feature swirling from nuanced social commentary to a barrage of unnerving foreboding in the perils of an eerie and unflinching exploration of crucible devolving societal manifestation.

There is so much to unpack here and much to unravel and explore in Corbet’s breakout feature. It is quite frankly daunting to fully comprehend. The layers and depth on offer here are plumptious and outright frantic. The screenplay by Brady Corbet rhymes with unflinching reason and even if your enjoyment is surface...

Her Composition Picturetrain Company Reviewed by: Harvey Karten Director: Stephan Littger Screenwriter: Stephan Littger Cast: Joslyn Jensen, Heather Matarazzo, Lulu Wilson, Christian Campbell, Margot Bingham, Rachel Feinstein, Kevin Breznahan, John Rothman, Meg Gibson Screened at: Amazon Prime, NYC, 7/27/18 Opens: On DVD May 1, 2018. Originally viewed theatrically in 2015 and available now to Amazon […]

The post Her Composition Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

The play is called Women Of A Certain Age, and we critics were invited to see it on the very evening it is set, November 8, 2016: Election Day. Although some of my colleagues were put out when Broadway producer Scott Rudin asked us to attend opening night of The Front Page, none of us has ever complained when asked to do so for the latest installment of Richard Nelson’s series about two unlike families living in the Hudson Valley hamlet of Rhinebeck, New York.

Each of the six plays, of which this was the final, is set in real time on its opening night. Truth to tell, I was nervous about how focused I could be, knowing that the quiet one-act unfolding there in the Public Theater’s third-floor LuEsther Hall would run right up against the first tallies of the voting for President. But these exquisitely intimate plays...

Without so much as an explosion, Rubicon continued to create more mystery and intrigue in Episode 3, “Keep the Ends Out.” While Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson) continues to lament the loss of her husband, Will Travers (James Badge Dale) is slowly learning that curiosity and stubbornness sometimes comes at a price. “Keep the Ends Out” started off with a clandestine man trailing Will. When the man disappeared Will met up with his mother Joan (Meg Gibson). It’s there that we learned more about Will’s relationship to David Hadas (Peter Gerety) – Will’s father-in-law. Will’s team continues to do research on the Popovich photo. Despite promising immediate results to Kale Ingram (Arliss Howard), Will admits to Kale that his team is having a difficult time finding out information. Kale then reveals that the 24-hour deadline was just a test by Spangler, and that Will was supposed to push back...