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Elijah Wood may be having a bit of a moment with "Yellowjackets," but it's far from his only headline-grabbing role. Wood has been steadily working on our screens since the late 1980s, with a varied career that includes acting in TV and movies, doing voice work, producing and writing, and more.

While Wood definitely has become a permanent fixture in pop culture thanks to his role in "The Lord of the Rings," his career is much more eclectic and varied than just the blockbusters. He's the kind of actor who seems to delight in taking unusual and creative projects, with roles ranging from outright comedy and family-friendly hits to thrillers, dark dramas, and everything in between. Let's take a look back at some of his big-screen highlights over the years.

Elijah Wood Movies 1. "Back to the Future Part II"

Did you know that Wood's very first on-screen credit was in...

Ricou Browning, who took to the water as the menacing Gill-Man in the Creature From the Black Lagoon and as the creative force behind the original Flipper movie and TV show, has died. He was 93.

Browning died Monday of natural causes at his home in Southwest Ranches, Florida, his daughter Kim Browning told The Hollywood Reporter. “He had a fabulous career in the film industry, providing wonderful entertainment for past and future generations,” she said.

The Florida native also served as a stuntman on Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), doubled for Jerry Lewis in Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959) and “played all the bad guys in [TV’s] Sea Hunt,” he said in a 2013 interview.

Plus, Browning directed the harpoon-filled fight in Thunderball (1965), another underwater scene in Never Say Never Again (1983) and the hilarious Jaws-inspired candy bar-in-the-pool sequence in Caddyshack (1980).

Browning, who said he could routinely hold his...

Here’s a look at this week’s biggest premieres, parties and openings in Los Angeles and New York, including red carpets for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Fast X and Star Trek: Picard.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania premiere

Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Bill Murray, Katy O’Brian, William Jackson Harper and David Dastmalchian walked the red carpet in Los Angeles on Monday for the world premiere of the latest Ant-Man film.

Kevin Feige, Michael Douglas, Kathryn Newton, Jonathan Majors, Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michelle Pfeiffer, director Peyton Reed, executive vp of production Marvel Studios Victoria Alonso and producer Stephen Broussard Paul Rudd and Bill Murray William Jackson Harper, Jonathan Majors and David Dastmalchian Kevin Feige, Disney Studios content chairman Alan Bergman and Bob Iger

Your Place or Mine special screening

Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher continued their rom-com press tour in...

I’m one of those people who believes that a home is not complete without a pet (I have four cats myself), and love it when a favorite TV character or family has a loyal companion who can add to the adventure or the comedic antics of a show. Some of these adorable animals have become as famous, if not more so, than the human actors of a series.

SEE40 best TV mothers; greatest moms ranked

Animals tend to make a television program more family-friendly, and TV executives have used them to draw in this demographic, despite the fact that working with a non-human actor can be challenging. In the very early days of the medium, American families gathered around their sets to follow the adventures of such noble creatures as “Lassie” and “Flipper,” or to laugh at the ridiculousness of a talking horse in “Mister Ed” or the antics...

I’m one of those people who believes that a home is not complete without a pet (I have four cats myself), and love it when a favorite TV character or family has a loyal companion who can add to the adventure or the comedic antics of a show. Some of these adorable animals have become as famous, if not more so, than the human actors of a series.

Animals tend to make a television program more family-friendly, and TV executives have used them to draw in this demographic, despite the fact that working with a non-human actor can be challenging. In the very early days of the medium, American families gathered around their sets to follow the adventures of such noble creatures as “Lassie” and “Flipper,” or to laugh at the ridiculousness of a talking horse in “Mister Ed” or the antics of the “human” pig Arnold on “Green Acres.

Tom Hanks recounted his Covid-19 odyssey and shared a common-sense plea for wearing a mask during an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show Tuesday.

Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson were famously the first two high-profile American celebrities to contract the virus, testing positive back in March while in Australia, where Hanks was working on a movie. Hanks told Colbert he still has no idea where he might’ve caught the virus and noted his symptoms were significantly different from Wilson’s. Wilson, for instance, lost her sense...

Fontaines D.C. are a band of nice Irish lads with a knack for crisp, cutting guitars that bounce by like a fast-walking drunk guy knocking you off a sidewalk, and an endearingly affirmative view of life: “Dublin in the rain is mine/A pregnant city with a Catholic mind,” singer Grian Chatten offered at the opening of the band’s great 2019 debut LP, Dogrel, an album where dark, moody post-punk blight was buoyed by a distinctly Irish lyricism, working out their own uniquely Joycean take on Joy Division.

The...

Flipper played a shambolic, hypnotic rendition of their anthem “Sex Bomb” earlier this year on their 40th anniversary tour, and they’ve now made it into a music video.

The clip opens with testimonials from the Melvins’ Dale Crover, Minutemen’s Mike Watt and artist Shepard Fairey, and it features clips from throughout the band’s career. Jesus Lizard singer David Yow, who has been touring as the group’s frontman, bellows the song’s chorus over and over again … “Sex bomb, baby!”

The group’s 40th anniversary tour is ongoing,...

This favorite animal film takes a half-step sideways out of the cute animal subgenre: the delightful Mij is no super-otter, just an ordinary playful garden-variety otter, as an Otter oughta be. (cough) Champion mellow English couple Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers have put together a film guaranteed to lower your blood pressure. But see it first before deciding it’s for your kids, as reality is not sugarcoated in its uplifting, but certainly not sentimentalized, view of our place in a world that still has some animals left alive.

Ring of Bright Water

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1969 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 106 min. / Street Date May 21, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Virginia McKenna, Bill Travers, Peter Jeffrey, Jameson Clark, Helena Gloag.

Cinematography: Wolfgang Suschitsky

Film Editor: Reginald Mills

Original Music: Frank Cordell

Written by Jack Couffer and Bill Travers from a book by Gavin Maxwell

Produced by Joseph Strick

Directed by Jack...

L7 first came together about 19 hours south of Seattle, in Los Angeles, in 1985. Although they had no claim to the Emerald City’s grunge explosion, they signed to Sub Pop, toured with Nirvana and shocked audiences more efficiently than their Lollapalooza contemporaries. When Rolling Stone ranked the 50 Greatest Grunge Albums earlier this week, L7 notched two LPs on the list: 1990’s metal-punk hybrid Smell the Magic (its “Shove” could serve as a genre blueprint) and its 1992 follow-up, Bricks Are Heavy, which is home to the hit “Pretend We’re Dead...

Flipper, the noisy punk group that influenced Nirvana and Melvins, will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a run of North American dates this spring and summer. The lineup for the shows will feature founding members guitarist Ted Falconi and drummer Steve DePace with Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow on the mic and Frightwig bassist Rachel Thoele. The group promises to invite more special guests to play with them on the trek.

They will launch the tour on April 12th in Los Angeles and play intermittent dates through July 26th. For the Las Vegas date,...

When Green River hit their groove, they played a vicious mix of snarling punk and gigantic hard-rock riffs. It was a heavy, menacing sound, and in the mid-Eighties, nobody really knew what to call it. “I think we just considered ourselves rock & roll guys who grew up on punk rock,” drummer Alex Shumway says now. “We realized that there was some music that we liked before we became hardcore kids that we were afraid we listened to, but then we admitted we liked it. And we started making music like that.

Three days before Christmas, Chris Isaak’s longtime bass player Rowland Salley headed for Lac+USC Medical Center, where former Isaak guitarist James Calvin Wilsey, the man behind the dreamy sound of Isaak’s multimillion-selling hit, “Wicked Game,” was hospitalized. “I’d driven to the L.A. hospital to see him,” Salley said. “I took my uke, fully expecting to walk into the room, sit down, talk some turkey and catch up. Even play a few songs. Such was not the case.”

Salley found his former bandmate, who had suffered with...

"We Want Our DVD And Blu-ray!" - It always frustrates retro movie lovers when a film becomes unavailable in a home video format. Even "B" movies deserve a better fate. Sometimes this is due to contractual and licensing reasons. Nevertheless, we always want to be on the tip of the spear in lobbying for unavailable movies to be brought back to the home video market. In that regard, we are running our previously published review of "Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion", a minor effort, to be sure, but one that we hope will be available again on DVD or Blu-ray. It is presently available for streaming rental or purchase on Amazon.) 

By Lee Pfeiffer

The Warner Archive has released a number of films made by Ivan Tors' production company during the 1960s. Tors specialized in underwater and animal-themed adventure movies and TV series and he had a number of major successes including Sea Hunt,...