TIFF: Ralph Fiennes carries the engaging and tense "Conclave

by Matt St Clair

Ralph Fiennes in "Conclave" © Focus Features

After taking audiences through the treacherous WWI battlefields in the Oscar-winning epic All Quiet on the Western Front, director Edward Berger crafts a different exercise in tension in the form of a Pope election with Conclave, a high-stakes thriller based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris that is full of high-stakes political intrigue and stellar performances...

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Bless John Lithgow and Hugh Jackman

Two new celeb videos of note today. First, John Lithgow wrote a 'children's' book called "Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown". And he's corralled his famous friends to read the various fables to us: Meryl Streep, Alan Alda, Glenn Close, and The Bening appear in this particular episode! 

Second, Hugh Jackman is the brand ambassador for R.M. Williams and is taking his sponsorship contract quite literally in this cheeky bit of promotion.

Review: Bombshell

by Murtada Elfadl

Bombshell takes a while to show us the crimes of abuse that Roger Ailes committed. But when that moment comes it’s as gross, as unpleasant and as horrifying as we thought it’d be. Instead at the beginning we follow Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) as she is fired from Fox News and decides to sue the network and Ailes for sexual harassment. As that is happening two other narratives begin to formulate. A young producer named Kayla (a composite character played by Margot Robbie) tries to get invited into Ailes’ inner echelon so that she can speed up her rise to a news anchor role. While in another part of the building Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) becomes embroiled in a nationally televised juvenile on air battle with then Candidate Trump. The film - directed by Jay Roach and written by Charles Randolph - starts building a network of misogyny stories within the three narrative threads showing how powerful men completely disregard and exploit women. 

Naturally Carlson needs witnesses to help win her case and this is when the three narrative threads come together hinged on Kelly's decision to testify against Ailes or not...

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"Bombshell" screens shaking up Best Actress

by Eric Blume

Potentially great news just arrived for the undernourished Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress races:  Jay Roach’s Bombshell had its first screening in LA on Sunday night, and the word out of the gate seems overwhelmingly positive.

Reviews for the film are embargoed for another eight weeks or so, but various sources online are saying Charlize Theron’s “transformational” performance as Fox News personality Megyn Kelly is explosive and catapults her into the top of the Best Actress race...

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Stage Door: Hillary and Clinton

We're seeing a lot of theater in the run up to the Tonys. Here's new contributor J.B.

For the last twenty years or so, and probably longer, well-crafted stories about women in politics told on stage or screen have frequently been described with words like “timely” or “vital.”  These stories, in many cases, are ones we haven’t heard before, and to the extent we as a society want our art to imitate life (and indeed, vice versa), they are, now more than ever, ones we need to hear.

It is for this reason that Hillary and Clinton, a well-crafted story about the quintessential woman in American politics now playing at the John Golden Theater in New York, feels like such an anomaly. The play, written by Lucas Hnath and directed by Joe Mantello (his SEVENTH production on Broadway in just the last three years), takes place in a hotel room during the thick of the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary and offers an imagined glimpse into what exactly the titular characters (played by Tony-winners Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow, respectively) may have been thinking, feeling, and communicating to each other at that precise place and time in history...

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